From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Sat May 17 2003 - 15:01:20 MDT
James writes
> > Just out of curiosity, do you consider Hot and Cold to be
> > reified Things?
>
> Yes, in the sense that they are useful simplifications of reality. The
> Left, like Hot, is not a real thing, but unlike Hot, it isn't useful
> either.
The reason that it seems useful to me (or, at any rate has up
until now) is that by saying "He leans towards the Left", one
has said
he probably favors strict gun control
he is probably supports a minimum wage
he probably is for socialized medicine
he was probably against the Iraq incursion
he is probably not a free market enthusiast
he is probably tolerant of sexual deviancy
he's probably in favor of increased socialism
and so on(!). While perhaps few particular leftists subscribe
to everything I've just written, if a "Leftist" does not subscribe
to at least five of the seven, he's a pretty poor excuse for a
Leftist ;-) and I think that my list could be extended to 20
items without too much work.
So this seems to me to be a brief way to summarize all this knowledge,
namely, by referring to a position on "the" political spectrum.
> In my (lack of) experience, I've found that the particular labels Left
> and Right are used solely as weapons in a fight, not tools in an
> argument.
Yes, so you say. How strange. Normally, among the people I talk to,
even the television programs I see, it's mostly mentioned the way that
hair color or race might be, as a kind of fact of life. IMO, someone
has to have led a kind of sheltered existence to consider the statement
"X is a leftist" to be an insult, or "X is conservative" likewise.
Importantly, "X is a right-winger" is an insult, because few of those
who are self-admittedly on the Right ever use this term to describe
themselves. Perhaps this is true of "left-wing" too.
> Lumping somebody in with, say, The Right, implies they support
> a whole lot more baggage than may be the case, usually in the
> attempted construction of a straw man.
Hmm. As I say, our experiences differ.
Now let's examine a case in which we would agree that a bad sort of
reification has occurred. The one that comes to mind is "Evil".
What does it mean to say "he is evil"?
Unlike the case for the list I made above, I don't really think that
anything is connoted by "he is evil", unless some very religious
people who embrace certain doctrines are talking, for among them,
this may be a perfectly reasonable statement, and be shorthand for
he has allowed Satan into his heart
he has ceased following the way of the Lord
his behavior is anti-social and corrupt
etc. In their case, then, I would say that they know what they
are talking about (at least to each other). Now, what is the
harm? Well, from our point of view, this reification has only
one problem, doesn't it? Namely that we don't think that many
of the references in those sentences have referents in reality.
Lee
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat May 17 2003 - 15:13:31 MDT