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Why liberals reject categories
In an exchange at FrontPage Magazine between David Horowitz and history professor Timothy Burke, the latter complains that Horowitz’s DiscoverTheNetwork data bank unfairly categorizes various people as leftists without sufficient definitions and evidence, ignoring the many differences among different people. Horowitz retorts, first, that leftists don’t hesitate to lump together all conservatives as right-wingers despite the many mutual differences among conservatives; second, that it is perfectly reasonable to classify people politically according to their general associations and loyalties; and, third, that leftists simply can’t stand being identified and exposed as what they are. Apart from their understandable desire not to be pinned down, however, it seems to me that there is a larger issue at work here, which is that liberals and leftists hate categories and classifications as such. Why? For one thing, if classifications are real, then it is not possible to re-engineer men and society into any shape. For another thing, as has often been argued at VFR, leftists and liberals feel that any larger classification inhibits individual freedom. If categories such as “father,” “mother,” “child,” and “citizen” have certain natural and/or established social meanings, then any particular father, mother, child, or citizen is not totally free to be and do whatever he wants. His true freedom, as it were, is found within an order larger than himself, not simply in the fulfilment of his desires. Beyond these explanations, I think that liberals and leftists have a further motive for rejecting categories. If we belong to some naturally or socially defined category, as man or woman, or as Jew or Catholic, or as housewife or soldier, then, insofar as we belong to that category, our purpose, our telos, is to fulfill the potentiality and meaning of that category. While this limits our freedom, as already pointed out, it does something more. It creates a distance between ourselves as we are and ourselves as we ought to be. It establishes a standard, according to which we are not perfect. It even says that we are inherently imperfect and cannot be perfected, since our full nature represents an ideal, a set of potentialities, which as individuals we can never entirely fulfil but can only strive toward and approximate. For most normal people, this imperfection is simply a fact of life and does not represent any special problem. But for liberals and leftists it is unacceptable, because they believe in human perfectibility and refuse to accept the idea that people are not perfect or readily perfectible. Of course, there are exceptions to the left’s rejection of larger categories. The left insists on larger categories when it invokes the collective guilt of the white race or demands collective preferences for women or racial minorities. However, it posits such categories, not because they represent the real truth of nature and society, but because those categories give the leftists weapons with which to overturn the standards derived from nature and society. The above is not to say that non-liberals are happy with, or must automatically subscribe to, all socially and naturally defined roles. As Western human beings, we always experience a certain tension between the promptings of our individual selves and society’s expectations of us, and there is no final set boundary between the two. As individuals, non-liberals may fail, sometimes disastrously, in fulfilling the potentialities of the various classifications to which they may belong. What distinguishes people on the left, however, is their radical rejection of the very idea of larger natural or social classifications.
For a useful discussion related to this issue, see Jim Kalb’s 1999 article, “Vindicating Stereotypes and Discrimination.” Email entry |