People’s viewpoints are complex and multidimensional. Each person comes from a unique set of experiences, and therefore his or her views vary from everyone else’s. Even when people discuss the same topic using the same terms, what each term means varies from person to person.
The delicate subtleties and broad variations in people’s viewpoints are difficult to comprehend. Thus, we label them into categories. People who believe in Christ and his creed are called Christians, opponents of slavery are called abolitionists and proponents of conserving wildlife and the environment are called conservationalists.
Using these labels allows us to deal with like-minded people as a group, addressing the viewpoints they share.
However, these labels and categories are often misused and misapplied. Often, a subgroup is mistaken for the whole group.
Bolsheviks and Maoists are often mistaken to represent the whole of communists, thus a communist is said to be against personal freedoms, the sanctity of life, religion and free thought. In reality, communism as a whole is a cooperative economic system, which makes few-if any-statements against personal freedoms.
Other times, a label is misapplied based upon a person’s appearance. Hippie and preppy seem to be two of the more popular ways of labeling people on their appearance.
If you have long hair and piercings, you’re a hippie. It’s implied that you smoke weed, hug trees and are generally good for nothing. If you dress in overpriced designer-label collared shirts and khakis, then you might be a preppy, caring only about your appearance, your trophy spouse, golf and whether to buy a Beemer or a Benz.
labeling someone based on appearance is making a judgement about them when the labeller is most uninformed and ignorant. Not surprisingly, some of humanity’s greatest crimes-racism, sexism, genocide and terrorism-come from judgements made on the appearance of the victims.
In politics, labels and categories play an important role in indicating where an individual stands on an issue. These labels fail to express either the reasons for an individual’s stance or their particular take on an issue. For instance, two people may be pro-life, but one may view life to begin at conception while the other feels it begins later.
Labels are abused in politics more than in everyday life. People often assume that Democrat or Republican labels have meaning beyond a person’s relationship to the political parties. Most frustrating is corruption of the terms conservative and liberal. To conserve is to resist change, thus a conservative is someone who favors the status quo. Yet the conservative label is regularly applied to people who favor tax reform. Somehow, conservative now describes someone with a certain set of beliefs, usually including opposition to gun control, abortion and social programs.
Liberal is equally abused. Liberal means tolerant, yet liberals are stereotypically intolerant-insisting that people behave by a set of rules defined by political correctness and suppressing any other viewpoints. They’re also supposedly the opposite of a conservative, nevermind that in a tolerant society the liberals are the conservatives.
Conservatives, too, are stereotyped as intolerant, but their label doesn’t mean tolerant. Not surprisingly, the stereotypical liberal is also conservative, in the true sense of the word, and favors the status quo on issues like abortion and welfare.
Labels, especially conservative and liberal, have become so abused that they’re practically meaningless.
Instead of worrying about someone’s label, we should be concerned about who they are as a person and, in the case of politicians, their actual stances on the issues.
Nathan Alday is a senior aerospace engineering major. He can be reached at [email protected].