From
The May 2003 St John's Eagle
“Just
Slap a Label on It!" - By John Harcourt
Back in
my years of teaching English Renaissance literature, I became aware
of how remarkably few words ending in "ist" or "ism"
that I encountered. The only one I recall in Shakespeare is statist
( = statesman, politician). Yet just a few centuries later, such words
are almost beyond counting. Scores are added every day, and some become
permanent additions to our language.
Most of
these words are put downs: sexist, elitist, syncretism, etc. They form
part of an even larger class those words that reduce the other"
to something less than full humanity. For one of my closest friends,
Protestants are always "Prots," Episcopalians "Piskies,"
Presbyterians "Presbies"; the bishop is always "the bish,"
a rector “the (w)reck." Historically, words like Shaker and
Quaker began as terms of derision. Nationalities and races invite such
treatment. Some of them reveal a truly malignant hostility. Words are
not passive instruments of communication: they can project our own deepest
fears and insecurities. Putting down the other guys is a pathetic attempt
to shore up a shaky sense of self.
Perhaps
the identifying characteristic of labeling is the blurring of the almost
infinite variety of actual existence into a cartoon like exaggeration
of one particular quality. Thus, the reality can be pushed into the
background, and we can occupy without external checks our inner world
of dreams and, too often, of nightmares. Unsure of ourselves, we must
be better than all those other guys!
One would
imagine that a parish like St. John's is a relatively homogeneous group.
But, in fact, that is far from the truth of the matter. Even the 8:00
congregation has always been something of a mixed bag. I once met there
a woman who was virtually indistinguishable from any pre Vatican 11
Roman Catholic papal authority, transubstantiation and all the rest.
Another woman told me that she believed in the Real Absence, that the
8:00 hour was a fine and quiet time to plan the week's menus. Some fellow-worshippers
have been dismissed as "spiky-high," others written off as
"lower than the rug on the floor." Whatever we hear, we itch
to find a label for it: this is relativism pantheism, sexism, patriarchalism,
— doset-something Krypto-something else, pseudo-yet another thing.
Once at a conference at Trinity College, the speaker introduced Paul
Tillich's terms heteronomy (finding one's law in other people), autonomy
(finding one's law in one's self) and theonomy (finding one's law in
God). One participant pounced upon heteronomy uttering it again and
again with snarling inflections and much rolling of eyes.
Curiously,
in the past there has been vigorous opposition to pejorative epithets.
People fought to the death to prove that it was the other persons who
were the real heretics: "Orthodoxy is my doxy, heterodoxy is your
doxy." But in more recent times, values have shifted considerably.
"Of course I know that I am a heretic" we say, smilingly,
expecting warm congratulations for our freedom from any vulgar conformity.
Long ago,
the semanticists insisted that the only valid approach to a real person
was to shut one's mouth and just point. Reality is ultimately irreducible,
for all our efforts to find labels to bend it to our purposes.
How dreadful
to be deprived of such a strategy for bolstering the claims of the self
over all others! Imagine the blessed waves of silence that might wash
over us — especially on Sunday morning.
Perhaps
it is a supreme grace not just to accept but also to celebrate the varieties
of human kind. Sometimes the First Amendment seems to be a lonely —
and fragile — guarantee of that existential joy.
Professor
Harourt is the Charles A. Dana Professor of
English English Emeritus at Ithaca College.
