ReasonForOurHope

Thursday, August 8, 2019

The Frustration of Indefinable Words

For the life of me I couldn't figure out why everyone on social media was going on about feral hogs.  For those who don't know, someone asked about what to do about 30-50 feral hogs that come on to his property.  The Internet came back with many wild responses.

It is a such a strange meme that I don't think anyone will understand in a few years.  But when I dug a little further, I found that the origin of the meme was a response to someone who wrote "If you’re on here arguing the definition of 'assault weapon' today you are part of the problem. You know what an assault weapon is, and you know you don’t need one."



I am much less interested in the meme about hogs than I am about the hostility towards definitions.  And I think this is actually very dangerous.

I run my school's Socratic Club, which is our philosophy and debate society.  We don't have formalized forensics that compete.  Instead, we engage in debate the way Socrates did.  And one of the most important thing we do is define our terms.

Socrates went out into the world to find someone who was truly wise.  He would find people who claimed to have wisdom and he would ask them about what they were wise.  They would say they were wise about "justice," or "piety," or "poetry," etc.  But he would always be disappointed because when pressed, they couldn't give a good definition for any of those things.  How can you be wise about something that you cannot define?

In our club, I impress upon the students that often we argue simply because we don't understand how the other person defines their terms.  Take a something like "Gun Control."  People are very passionate about this issue.  The problem is that I don't know that we are always talking about the same thing.  To some, "Gun Control" means the abridgment of my 2nd Amendment rights and confiscation of my weapons.  To others, "Gun Control" means more in-depth background checks to see if anyone has a disqualifying issue.  Very often I've found that most people are not for unrestricted access to all weapons and many people are not for the confiscation of all privately held guns (though I have met more than a few people of this belief).  The problem is that when we talk about "Gun Control," we assume that we all have the same definition in mind before we even begin to debate.

Socrates would not do this.  He would ask the person for the definition.  Afterwards, he would restate this definition in his own words until his opponent was satisfied that Socrates completely understood what was meant.  It was only after this he would begin to attack his opponents position.  Too often we make straw man arguments by using our own definition and not our opponent's.  But there are those who do not want to define terms because it shows immediate problems with their beliefs.

We once had a debate on "gay marriage" where we actually never got around to the question of if homosexuals should be allowed to marry.  We spent the entire time trying to find a definition of marriage itself.  Those who were for changing the traditional definition of marriage to include same-sex couples found that they had a problem: if they changed the definition of marriage to be whatever they wanted, why couldn't they include other types of marriages like polygamy and incest?  And if marriage is anything that we say it is, then it is really nothing.  That is because if it doesn't have a definition, then we don't have any thing in mind.

I understand that there may be things that go beyond definition like "God" and "Being."  But for most of the ideas we encounter, definitions matter.  

For example, I honestly do not know what the word "feminist" means.  I know what "Christian" means very clearly because it is defined by adherence to a specific set of beliefs.  I know what "Marxist" means because it is defined by acceptance of certain political and philosophical points.  But I have never found a commonly accepted definition of feminism.  Perhaps this is an impossible task since it seems to belong to a genre of thought rather than a disciplined ideology.  But this also makes it incredibly difficult to talk about.

If the definition of feminism is "Belief that men and women are equal in dignity and should be treated as such," then I am a feminist.  I was once in a college class and made the point that if this definition is true then Pope John Paul II was a feminist.  My professors balked at this statement.  Their response was to point out that women cannot become priests.  Their definition of feminism was "Belief that men and women are equal, that is, should be treated exactly the same."  But most of my female classmate rejected this idea because they understood that the difference between men and women are real and deep.  However, the problem of the indefinable goes beyond the classroom.

A few years ago there was a nation-wide student walk-out after another school shooting.  One student decided not to walk out.  A class mate became angry and asked why not.

"Because I don't support gun control," he said.

"That's not what this is about.  It's about showing support for the victims," the classmate responded.

"The organizers said it was about gun control," he returned.

"But that's not why I'm doing it.  How can you not support the victims?"

And it went on like this.  Notice, this was a massive nation-wide event and there was no consensus as to what the defined purpose was.  I find this dangerous because in this confusion, someone could claim massive support for a political position that many did not intend to support.  The intent for the March for Life is very clear: ending abortion.  But in the above case, confusion reigned.  But I think the problem is even more malicious than this.

A few years ago I got into a debate with someone on a message board.  I was naive enough to think that this medium would be a place of fruitful discussion.  A person on there kept calling Catholic evil and belief in God as bad.  So, I asked a question: "Catholics define what is good by it's relationship to God and the Natural Law.  How do you define the good?"  His response was, "If you don't know what is good already, then I cannot tell you."

I truly wish to be charitable since I cannot read this person's thoughts.  But if I were to hazard a guess (about which I could be wrong), I would say that he did not have any definition of goodness.  Knowing that this would completely undercut his objection that his objection that Catholicism was not "good."  I once heard Alan Dershowitz say in a debate that no one knows what is right and wrong.  He then later on criticized the morality of his opponent's position saying, "That's wrong!"  It struck me that he painted himself into a corner and he had no moral ground to stand on.  It goes back to this idea that if things mean anything you want, then they mean nothing.

This brings us back to tweet about assault rifles.  Please, I am not wading into a debate about guns.  My point is philosophical.  I am incredibly uncomfortable when people attack an opponent for wanting a definition.  Rational discourse becomes displaced by bullying.  Rather than give a simple definition of "assault weapon," there is an explosion of anger.  Maybe you define "assault weapon" as an automatic machine gun.  Or you may define "assault weapon" as simply any gun.  These are radically different things and we cannot find any common ground discussion, let alone agreement, until we define our terms.  This is especially true in the area of legislation where our laws have to be precise in their language.  But that will never happen if we explode at each other over definitions.

Socrates ran into this problem all the time. He left in his wake a series humiliated and embarrassed men, whose arrogance and foolishness were put on full display by Socrates' questions.  Ultimately, Socrates was killed for being the trouble-maker that he was.

But his legacy is not in vain if we follow his example.  Let us find common definitions together.  We may not always agree on what to do.  But if we can at least see what the other person sees, maybe there will be a little less conflict in this world.

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