383. Silly simplicity

Many concepts that play an important role in public debate are ambiguous: they have a variety of meanings, and often it is not clear which is at issue. Think of God, democracy, justice, power, liberalism, identity, trust, love, truth, meaning, good and bad, culture, beauty, art, causality, change, freedom, and more. Discussants bash each other in disagreement, thinking they are talking about the same thing while they are not. These are slips of simplification, of reducing many-sided concepts to simple, reductive caricatures.

Take atheism, for example. That depends on what meaning you assign to God. Some people say Spinoza was not an atheist because he was passionate in recognizing God as the primary principle from which all else flows, the top axiom of the mathematical system of his Ethics, written, as Spinoza said, ‘more geometrico’, in the manner of geometry, with axioms from which successive theorems are derived. He protested against being seen as an atheist, and being punished for it. Yet he was an atheist in not recognizing a personal, providential, loving, caring God, and that was the operative meaning of God to Spinoza’s contemporaries.

Take liberalism. I am a liberal in being in favour, for want of something better, of a liberal parliamentary democracy with freedoms of expression, religion, association, and election, and the separation of powers. I am not a liberal in favouring laissez faire markets. I do not adopt the utility ethics of liberalism. And then, arguing the shortcomings of markets I run the risk of being called illiberal.

Take democracy. Authoritarian leaders call their states democracies because the leaders were chosen in elections that were free, more or less. But democracy requires more: the features of liberal constitutional democracy specified above. But those are never perfect. How democratic is it if leaders can only be elected at great cost, for which they need sponsorship from business, whose interests they then have to protect? Currently there is spreading complaint in European democracies, in populist movements, that ruling elites have distanced themselves from the lives and interests of the people. The claim next is that representative democracy has outlived itself, and forms of more direct democracy should be used, such as a referendum, where the will of the majority is imposed without debate on the rights of minorities.

Take power. People complain about ‘people in power’ in a democracy and at the same time cry out for more effective leaders who have the power to make decisions where inept democracies are caught in indecision. Behind this lies the confusion between negative power, limiting or restraining choice, and positive power, offering new options and more room for choice. The authoritarian leader projects himself as offering the second while falling back on the first, in his imperfection, which yields mistakes that with his power he can hide.      

Take trust. Some see it as control, constraining opportunities or incentives for doing harm, while others see it precisely as something going beyond control, motivating people to do right not because they have no alternative or need the reward, but because they want to, on the basis of ethical or moral conviction, social customs and connections, or friendship.  

As I argue elsewhere (in item 29 of this blog), this wrong-headed perspective on universals is part of what I call the ‘object bias’ in human thought: universals are treated as if they were specific particulars, like objects moving in time and space, with a well-defined identity across contexts. In fact, they are objects of a different kind, with meanings depending on time and place.