Tales Of Our Times: Labels Relegate Ideas To The Trash Heap

Tales of Our Times
By JOHN BARTLIT
New Mexico Citizens
for Clean Air & Water

Labels Relegate Ideas To The Trash Heap

If our democracy is a person, it has fallen into a bad habit. I speak of the standard by which ideas are judged. An old standard was to judge what is right and what is wrong. Or what will work and what won’t.

Times change. Arguers today zero in on who is right and who is wrong. We hear details of who, rarely what or how. “Who” means a person or group, with colored tags attached. The labels say who is honest, smart, or neither. We hear yeas and nays about team hats. An idea itself is given little thought apart from who likes it.

To clarify, imagine your first big exam in ag school has an essay question worth ten points on your final grade. The question is: Discuss three ways to optimize the production of winter wheat. You write down: “Mr. Johnson, who is sincere”. Or you write down: “Not Mr. Johnson, who is a jerk”. Or perhaps, “The University of Nebraska”. Maybe you say, “General Mills” or “Not General Mills”. You might even say, “The Democrats, who are smart” or “Not the Democrats, who are wrong”. How many points credit would any of these answers be worth?

The foolery is easy to see in the ag exam. The same thing happens in debating public issues, but the habit is so common it slips right past. The next time you hear an issue discussed, notice how much time is spent dealing with who, not what. That is, see how much energy goes into portraying traits of persons and groups. By contrast, see how little effort is spent sorting out good and bad aspects of the idea in question.

In the warring, an idea’s usefulness gets equated to where it comes from. We hear stories, mainly tags, that portray what is wrong with the persons who started and support an idea. Maybe some of them had a poor idea four years ago. Or maybe they stood with someone who said the wrong thing.

Alas, ideas are tossed in the trash without looking at their utility. Ideas are too valuable to scrap so haphazardly. Too many tough problems need help. And help starts with a new idea.

My dad had a way of seeing a good idea from a natural oaf. He would say: “Now and again even a blind pig stumbles on an acorn.” An acorn, the seed of a mighty oak, counts for more than a pig’s flaws. Yet all the talk is about who is a blind pig. The acorns of ideas per se do not figure in the public debate.

Why the bad habit and why is it so often on display? A good guess would be the spread of trial-think. In trials, the stories of people and groups, not ideas, dominate thinking. We see it in the names of cases: Brown v. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade. The outcome of a trial depends on who is judged to be honest, smart, or neither. Lawyers for each side strive mightily to stick their preferred labels on each witness. Even in verdicts on the constitution, labeling judges has become the public mode of discussing the issue.

Is it possible to grapple with new ideas and never put a label on anyone? Of course, it is. An idea works no differently if Mr. Johnson has a more or less nasty label stuck on him. Ideas are ideas. Mr. Johnson is Mr. Johnson. Wheat harvest is wheat harvest.

Without labels, an idea proposed for a problem can be seen plainly enough to judge its helping. With labels as the coin of thought, the first thing lost is the idea of helping.

Until we are plumb out of problems, our country needs to do better with ideas. We have ways. A good beginning is not to discard an idea at the merest glimpse of its name tag.

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