Cut out the labels

In my undergraduate viva, many years ago, I was asked how useful are the labels that we apply to [classical] music; Baroque, Classical, Romantic etc. I recall giving an excruciatingly poor response, and perhaps because of that, it is a question that has haunted me ever since. It is a question that should be applied to all areas of life, and one that invariably throws up more questions than answers.

In his book “Closure, A story of Everything”, Hilary Lawson explains how all our communication is unavoidably built on artificial closures of language – our verbal communication necessitates everyone agreeing on approximate meanings for words and concepts, but these definitions can only ever, in truth, be provisional or transitory.

A label tricks us into thinking we have captured the true essence of a person, object, place, idea. And yet it rarely, if ever, has. Every person is more than the colour of their skin, their gender, their sexual-orientation. They are more than their job title. In terms of relationships we are equally ephemeral - we are all simultaneously child, parent, friend, sibling, boss, colleague, customer etc. Labels provided by other people are dangerous, because they come loaded with their preconceptions – when the word “boss” is said to you, it will have different connotations than when it is said to me. Each of us brings to that word our own lifetime of experiences of the word “boss” - positive, negative, distant, supportive etc. So what the speaker “says”, is never exactly what the listener “hears”.

It is equally true of ideas – what does “right wing” mean in terms of politics? What is feminism? What is socialism? What is Christianity? It is a profound mistake to write-off any idea on principle, because the over-arching label cannot possibly represent the full reality – reality is a shape-shifter and will be different to different people.

In these troubling political times, we should be very disturbed by the labels that have taken hold. Migrant, Remoaner, Kipper, Elite, Enemy. We should reject them all as too narrow – to use these words is lazy and leads to further and greater division. What is a Kipper? Deriving from a supporter of UKIP, hence UKIPPER, it pretends to tell us something of the subject's politics. But what does it really achieve? It is clearly a derogatory term and stems from a basis of disrespect. Each and every Leave Voter had a different reason and justification for their vote. Some were mendacious but in truth, the vast majority were honest and reaching in good faith for a solution to genuine problems.

One of the nastiest labels in humanity is “enemy”. For who is truly your enemy? Jesus told us to love our enemies and with good reason. When politicians and newspaper editors start telling us who our enemy is, we should get twitchy – it is usually to suit some further agenda. We are told that EU migrants settled in the UK are the enemy of our NHS, or our job-prospects. But can that really be true? What about the EU migrants who staff our NHS? What of the huge tax-contribution from EU workers, which makes them net contributors to the costs of running the NHS? What about the workers who came specifically to fill roles that our own citizens are not interested in – c90% of the little-thought-about vets in abbatoirs in the UK are apparently from the EU. British vets overwhelmingly want to heal animals not oversee their deaths as part of humane practice. Well, if we send them all packing, our country will see an immediate crisis in the food chain. Again and again, my EU friends repeat a similar experience: they would be talking to a British citizen who is anti-immigration, and that person always says “I don't mean you dear, I mean the others”. Well who are these others? They don't exist. We have been given a label to trot out by the rightwing media (you see, it is impossible to communicate without these labels) and so, obligingly, like the well-trained monkeys we are, we repeat it. We even cast our votes on the basis of these labels.

The problem with the word enemy was staggeringly captured by Wilfrid Owen in his poem “Strange Meeting”. “I am the enemy you killed, my friend.” That line is particularly heartbreaking in the context of bringing to a close Britten's War Requiem. It is always the fate of soldiers to fight “the enemy” as defined by others, usually in this day and age, politicians. We should not let the politicians define who our enemies are on civvy street too.

Everyone is seen through the eye of the beholder. There is a fascinating short film circulating at the moment of six photographers being asked to shoot portraits of the same man, only each is given a different biography of the man. The very different personalities that each of their pictures show, reflect the preconceptions of the photographers, not the reality of the man himself. When we label a person as a migrant, we introduce all sorts of assumptions to the matter. If we just call them by their name, they become one of the “oh I don't mean you, dear”s.

Is there an answer? No of course not. We have to communicate and we need language to do so. But we must be aware all of the time of the assumptions that we and others make in our choice of words. We should remember that labels are partially helpful, yet always and irretrievably inadequate. And we must be always on guard against accepting the labels others have created.

Can we resolve the mess that is Brexit? Of course. But not through mud-slinging in either direction. The politicians need to go behind the labels. The population needs to see a wider picture than any one media source can provide. And we must all of us seek for a common ground. Calling each other Remoaners, Kippers, Snowflakes etc will explain nothing and get us nowhere.