Labels

We’ve unfortunately become accustomed to labeling and name calling in public discourse.  In the Democratic party, labelling is a business model.  Identity politics makes it mandatory, and part of the lexicon.  Patriarchy, toxic masculinity, Islamophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, transphobic and the like are the words and labels used to summarily dismiss another person.  Those words are used to avoid dealing with another’s point of view and argument but to attempt to render all of their opinions unworthy of consideration.  Donald Trump also is a master labeler.  “Lyin’ Ted Cruz,” “Mini Mike,” “Crooked Hillary,” are monikers crudely designed to brand the opponent and neuter anything that person has to say.   Even Barack Obama did it.  Remember those “bitterly clinging to their guns and religion,” in which he dismissed the concerns and denigrated the culture of middle America?  We have grown to expect this from our politicians. 

But academia and public intellectuals are something different.  They are in the business not of gathering votes but of exploring ideas, and in the course of doing so, must subject them to scrutiny and questioning.  As Nassim Nicholas Taleb asserts:

Mathematicians think in proofs, lawyers in constructs, logicians in operators, dancers in movement, artists in impressions, drummers in rhythms, and idiots in labels.

But our divisions have grown so deep and rancorous now that even public intellectuals have been engaging in this kind of slandering.   And it is concerning to me.  A label is an intellectual condom, a prophylactic that prevents thinking.

First, there is Taleb himself.  Ironically, the one that posted that idiots think in labels is himself a prime offender.  Taleb is a talented writer and an original thinker.  I loved Antifragile and Skin In the Game.  But he savages other public intellectuals.  He vilified Charles Murray, “Charles Murray is considered a Galileo of the reacticists, someone provides scientific truths.  He is just an intellectual fraud.  He has referred to him as a “fake scholar.” Similarly, he tore at Steven Pinker, mocking him for teaching “Pseudo-Empiricism.”  He has skewered Nobel Prize winner Richard Thaler as “nudgeboy” and labeled his theories as a “Mickey Mouse framework.”  Yoval Harari, Taleb says, “is a quack.”  Ironically, many intellectuals are skeptical of the substance behind Taleb.  One Chicago Booth professor confided to me, “Many of my colleagues think his work lacks intellectual rigor but I think he has some interesting things to say.”  Taleb, the anti-labeler, does plenty of it.

In the law, Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe has done much of the same.  Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, a solid liberal and prominent Democrat.  He has taken on high profile, controversial clients, such as O.J. Simpson, Jeffrey Epstein, Harry Reems and Claus von Bulow.   But Laurence Tribe last week labeled Dershowitz a “charlatan”  and said that “ he “shouldn’t be allowed to use bogus legal arguments on impeachment.”  Tribe, whose name now belies the bias in his thinking, would undoubtedly not have the same view had Dershowitz taken on Khalid Sheik Muhammed as a client, but defending Trump is an unforgivable sin.  Dershowitz replied that he made the same legal arguments that he would have made if Hillary Clinton were being impeached on the same grounds. 

Most disappointing was Deirdre McCloskey.  I have great respect for McCloskey as an economic historian and a gifted writer and have had an opportunity to have lunch with her.  I highly recommend her recent book, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All.  Yet, in her book tour, she said, “On the prospect of Bernie Sanders versus Donald Trump, I quote the former Republican consultant who you see on MSNBC a lot who says ‘don’t put up Bernie Sanders because in the United States a sociopath beats a socialist six times a week and twice on Sundays’ and that’s true.”   As much as I like McCloskey’s thinking much of the time, her labeling of Trump as a sociopath is out of bounds.  She calls Sanders a “socialist” which is a person that believes in a certain economic structure.   But by labeling Trump a sociopath, she attacks HIM with a charge that she is supremely unqualified to make.  Sociopath is a diagnosis in the DSM which only a psychiatrist can make.  McCloskey is transgender and of all people that should know better than to sling labels, McCloskey should.  Her recent book contains a well argued critique of Thomas Picketty’s Capital without sliming Picketty, so she knows how to do it.

Labeling can make for winning politics, but it is a lazy person’s game that unnecessarily and gratuitously aggravates the divisions that already exist in our society.  It diminishes the person.  I think less of Tlaib, Tribe and McCloskey when they deploy it as a weapon.  It would be more persuasive for Tribe to say  something like, “Dershowitz has a point, but here’s what I think he gets wrong, and here’s why. ”  

We should expect better from our public intellectuals, especially in this era of trolling and constant spitballing.