The Importance of Name-calling

At lunch during philosophical and political discussion, a co-worker of mine made a point to say that we often call each other names to get somebody to shut up, a sort of “guilt by association” tactic. His point was that the blithe name-calling was an unfortunate part of debates in our country because it dampens real discussion. When somebody says, “Oh, that George Bush, he’s a Nazi!” or something similar, it’s a tactic rather than a point of real discussion.

While “guilt by association” is certainly fallacious when the association is unrelated to the topic of discussion, name-calling can be an important way of describing in a brief discourse the gist of the person’s characteristics, traits, beliefs, or philosophy. Bishop N.T. Wright reminds us that philosophical and theological words are not trite definitions, but are “shorthand stories.” A deeper meaning, sometimes revealing a narrative that is more complex than that which the term originally connotes, is behind the term.

While I have been guilty of blithe name-calling from time to time, when I write in my blog, my desire is to use terms in a meaningful way. Unless I’ve looked into the meanings of the terms I use, I refrain from using them without description or explanation.

Doug

Doug Stuart is a committed follower of Jesus and passionate about building for the Kingdom of God through education and mobilization. He is a regular writer at LibertarianChristians.com as well as the founder of Living Loud.

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http://doxxa.wordpress.com Meade

I don’t usually like the name calling for several reasons:
1. It lumps people into groups which might eliminate their distinctives. It makes it sound like there must be uniformity because they all bear the same name.

2. It’s usually done when people label someone with a name that the person would not agree on themselves. I’m all for names we adopt to describe ourselves but being given a name by our opponent is almost never fair. NT Wright can label himself but I’m sure he wouldn’t want his opponents saying he’s not evangelical when he himself describes himself as such. Nor would he like to be classified as liberal even though others label him such.
http://www.liveloud.net Doug

When used as a tactic to “pinhole” a person into a particular category, as opposed to using it to describe a general philosophy, it is very unhelpful. We only eliminate the distinctiveness of a person when we intend to use the “label” to characterize everything about the person.

“Name-calling” is not a virtue, of course, but it serves as a provocative title to capture what importance can be gained from labels. Labels are not bad. But they can be helpful. They give us a starting point so we can nuance the rest of a person. I’m a liberal. What I mean by that is very nuanced from the common nomenclature.
Shiree

Labels do help us classify. We don’t realize it but we think in labels all the time. It’s how we organize our world. Without labels we’d be overwhelmed by way too many loose-ended details. But I also see that labels lose the nuances of individual differences, and they also can lump people into categories they would rather not be lumped into. I think of my own anabaptist heritage and the questions that I used to get from college friends who wanted to know what it meant to be a Mennonite. I used to laugh and say, “well the term itself means very little. It could mean that you wear cape dresses and refuse to own a car, or it could mean that you’re a radical social activist who promotes gay rights, or many things in between” Labels will never capture the nuances of a person’s comprehensive perspectives, but they are helpful in classifying people according to specific aspects of where they spring from. For example, the Mennonite label is generally useful to describe non-resistant people who value simplicity, stewardship, and community. Labels are generalizations. That’s all. They are helpful, but of course, they are limited in what they communicate. I think that it is when we use them pejoratively that they become problematic–little better than name-calling in the not so great sense of the phrase. It’s funny that you used “name-calling” in your title in a sort of playful, witty, attention-grabbing way. Yet, my conclusion is that when we use them as such, they’re not so hot.

The Importance of Name-calling

Doug

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