from Dr. V on Substack

An excerpt from a recent Substack essay by Dr. V:

Contemporary liberals, whose love of political correctness gets the better of their intellects, typically object to the phrase 'illegal alien.' But why? Are these people not in our country illegally, as the result of breaking laws?  And are they not aliens, people from another country? 

"But you are labeling them!"  Yes, of course.  Label we must if we are not to lose our minds entirely. 'Feral cat' is a label.  Do you propose that we not distinguish between feral and non-feral cats?  Do you distinguish between the positive and the negative terminals on your car battery?  You'd better!  But 'positive terminal' and 'negative terminal' are labels.   

 

Label we must.  There is no getting around it if we are to think at all.  There is a political outfit that calls itself "No Labels."  But that too is a label.  Those who eschew all labels label themselves 'idiots.' 

 

Related to this is the injunction, 'Never generalize!' which is itself a generalization. Label we must and generalize we must.  Making distinctions and labeling them, and constructing sound generalizations on their basis are activities essential to, though not exhaustive of, the life of the mind.

Never generalize! (the rejection of totalizing metanarratives) and Don't use labels! (the rejection of essentialization) come straight out of postmodernist academe, emanating from the campuses and polluting the minds of the general populace. For more on the history of this pernicious way of thinking, read my posts here and here.