One of the themes I think about a lot at this newsletter is the distance between the way we describe or frame an idea and what that idea actually is, shorn of any sort of attempt to frame/sell/target it. I’m curious about how the same underlying idea can be described in such divergent ways that it takes real analytical effort to even determine that the underlying idea is the same. I think of the hashing out of this as analogous to ecumenical dialogue in religion. There are some fascinating cases from these dialogues where the two sides basically come to understand that they actually believe the same thing. And that was basically impossible for either side to perceive, due to the divergent overlays of culture, custom, wording, attitude, assumption, etc.

Now, I’ve recently dealt with the question of whether you can sever an idea from its trappings, and I think sometimes maybe you can’t. (There’s a jurisprudence idea known as “severability,” which deals with the question of whether different elements of a statute irreducibly work together, or whether those individual elements can be “severed” without upholding or striking down the entire law. This was actually the key issue in one of the Supreme Court’s Obamacare/ACA rulings.)

I think you can apply a similar sort of test in evaluating whether, say, a crazy person can really be said to have “a few good ideas,” or whether those ideas are just not severable from the rest of the ugly package. I thought through some of this here and here recently. That’s relevant but a bit tangential to today’s newsletter.

Today’s bit is inspired by a conversation I was having with my friend in New Jersey, when we were walking around our hometown and just chatting about life and small towns and exploring places. My friend said something like “We should be a lot more like Europe.” But he’s kind of a conservative, so he didn’t mean that in the lefty social democracy way that, like, a Bernie Sanders guy would mean it. He clarified, “What I mean is I want to be able to walk.”

I thought that was interesting: that “European” is this kind of catch-all adjective in America that can mean anything from “walkable cities” to “cheaper healthcare” to “parliamentary democracy” to “socialism,” depending on who’s using it and how. In other words, without my friend’s clarification, you’d have no idea what he actually meant or what his particular interest or priority was.

A lot of our discussions are probably like this, aren’t they? Using imprecise or broad words that don’t clearly pin down what we’re even talking about. And these terms then end up sort of being the discussion. Suddenly we’re bristling over whether America should be like Europe and what that means instead of discussing how to make a small town friendlier for pedestrians.

It’s sort of like when you open a long point with some kind of analogy or setup and the other person takes issue with some minor element of your setup, and suddenly you’re arguing before you’ve even gotten to the point, and before your interlocutor even knows what the point is.

The tricky part is agreeing which terms encourage this and should be minimized or shorn from productive discussion. For example, a right-winger would probably consider “social justice” to be one of these misdirecting buzzwords, while a progressive would probably feel that social justice is a foundation value that shouldn’t be jettisoned for expediency.

But is “social justice” the lowest level? Or can we pinpoint precisely what we mean by that and then discuss those things? And, if they’re crucial, refuse to concede them then? Frankly, I bet a lot of us are not even sure what is meant by that term. We argue over the words. Etc., etc.

If “European” means “I want to walk,” then how many other common formulations of ideas cause more heat than light, and actually prevent us from even getting to the ideas stage of discussions or policy debates?

Give me your examples!

Related Reading:

Becoming What They Were By Becoming Something New

See What You’re Looking At

What’s a City To You?

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