The War on Nuance

The reactions to the Chauvin verdict and the Columbus shooting show we’ve lost our ability to make distinctions.

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Nothing is more vital to serious thinking than the ability to make distinctions between superficially similar things. The gas pedal and the brake pedal look awfully similar, but if you can’t distinguish between them, good luck getting out of the driveway safely. 

Distinctions don’t just matter among similar-but-different things. They’re just as crucial when discussing degrees of a single thing. I think there’s more wisdom contained in the phrase (usually attributed to the Swiss philosopher-scientist Paracelsus) “The dose makes the poison” than in most books. It’s a bedrock rule of toxicology: Everything is toxic if taken to an extreme. A little alcohol, aspirin or water is good, and sometimes essential, but too much can kill you. 

The wisdom extends beyond the medical. A healthy interest in something—sex, sports, politics, whatever—is usually fine or even desirable. But obsessions are dangerous. I’ve long argued that nationalism is like salt. A pinch brings out the flavors in a dish and helps combine them. Too much ruins the meal. Way too much is literally lethal. A little nationalism binds citizens to their country in healthy ways. Too much sets citizens against each other and crowds out other priorities such as individual rights, economic freedom and cultural diversity. Way too much can lead to horrible wars and oppression.

It seems to me that many of our worst problems today stem from the inability to make meaningful distinctions of both kinds—i.e., between different things and degrees of the same thing. 

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  1. Kurt von Fuchs

    Thank you Jonah. The following two sentences are why I really appreciate dispatch.

    Reasonable people can debate whether the shooting was justified. From what we know now, it seems to me that it was. But even if new facts emerge, shooting someone who’s poised to stab someone is profoundly different than choking the life out of a handcuffed unconscious man.

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    Adicesa14

    Nuance is word that seems to have come into common usage in the last few decades. It is sort of a one-word replacement for “penumbras, formed by emanations.” Nonetheless, it would be a refined addition to one’s vocabulary, except for … it was oft used to describe John Kerry during the 2004 Presidential election. That ruined the word for me.

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  3. dicentra

    Social media did it.

    Social media permits us to attack other people from the safety of our keyboards while gathering in conclaves with like-minded people, who are also attacking people, and our in-groups get more and more extreme and radicalized as we seek to be different from Those People.

    Nuke social media from orbit, just to be sure, and it will all calm back down again.

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    Victor Clairmont

    This culture war elevates the stupidest takes over the nuanced ones.

    It is the death of truth.

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  5. Ben W

    I'd raise a glass of Booker's finest brown Kentucky spirit to this article, but you've shown yourself to be a globalist shill for Scotland. Tis a shame.

    Bravo regardless.

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    Will Bates

    I have known far too many police officers than act in good faith, for the benefit of all.

    I have known a select few awful officers, whose actions I attribute to an overall lack of a check on their percieved authority.

    But when life and death are on the line, the select few are nonetheless terribly important. And the ‘blue line’ mentality has been absolutely ruinous to the cause of the 95% good officers.

    This is a change that should be affected from the inside. But policevunions make it impossible, so we are left with trying to affect change from without.

    Unfortunately, that kind of change (feom the outside) is always a sledgehammer, whereas the inside is more like a scalpel.

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  7. Jackson

    People will disagree which "side" is more guilty in perpetuating our inability to apply nuance to incidents that share superficial similarities. I have my opinions, and I don't think I'll be able to change the mind of people who disagree with me. Frankly, both sides have enough responsibility in it to be worth a hefty dose of criticism, and at this point I mostly don't care who does it more. I'm just getting more and more tired of seeing it, wherever it comes from. And as much as I try to be consistent on principles with things, I'm sure I'm guilty of it too sometimes. But as long as we keep doing this, we'll continue to misdiagnose the actual causes behind the problems our society is experiencing we'll never be able to address them in a way that actually helps. And we all suffer for that, and I have no idea how we get out of this pattern.

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    Will Bates

    I have been thinking this for years. But very well-put, in blog form, Jonah.

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    rlritt

    I agree. The hyperbole that the media uses serves only to divide people more. We need nonpartisan media that states the facts. I do appreciate that The Dispatch offers reasonable opinions and arguments.

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    DougAz

    "But this necessary concession to reality doesn’t make such rhetoric any less untethered from reality."

    This reads as an insincere understanding of truths. Necessary? Concession?

    Rather condescending to the reality it seems to my reading.

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