Humans seem to need labels, especially in America.

Our society is often divided into believers or non-believers, red or blue, progressive or conservative, and these labels are often tied to our geographical locations. The media, with its quick and easy labeling, plays a significant role in perpetuating these divisions, a role that existed even before the advent of social media and continues to shape our perceptions.

It’s crucial that we don’t simply accept the beliefs that our labels dictate, but instead engage in critical thinking and open-mindedness.

Cable panels are no longer about teaching the truth; they are simply about blue and red people saying precisely what they should and are expected to speak. Truth and reality have nothing to do with it. Useful and once-valued opinions are not just labels that have suffocated real commentary and honest thought. The loss of original thinkers is harming our country; you can see it online and on cable TV every hour of every day.

Unsurprisingly, we no longer believe each other, no matter what is said. Labels shrink our minds to the size of peas. There is only argument, not thought.

Many people wonder if it matters who wins an election or what color labels are stuck to their foreheads and inside their heads.

I was in a restaurant last week near a couple, listening intensely to the couple talking next to them.

“Did you hear that?” the wife said to her husband, whispering as if she just discovered that Hitler was in the next booth. “A conservative,” said the husband in a disgusted whisper. “Or maybe a Trumpie!” she said in some horror. It could have been worse for someone else.

It could have been a (gasp) “progressive!”

I confess that labeling one another speaks to me of the death of the American mind, once a profound and exciting way of thinking that mesmerized the world. Our universities were considered the best in the world, but now they seem to be turning out all kinds of freaks, narcissists, and crypto-fascists. I wonder who is learning what at Yale?

Now, we are seen as one of two things: the left or the right, the believer or the non-believer, the white or the lack, the brown or the black. We have no reason to listen because we know in advance what the red of the blue or the believer or non-believer must be thinking.

So, we need to learn how to listen all over again.

We no longer know how; once we can label someone, we can forget about listening to them.

This is the path to stupidity and intellectual paralysis in my mind. I learn a ton from my neighbors in this upstate town, not because they are better than me but because they are different from me, and that means I will learn something from every one of them if I listen. I’m doing better at it.

Spirituality is more accessible to me. There are so many ways to be spiritual that the practice defies labels. Most are about doing good to others and yourself.

There is only one way to call yourselves blue or red in my mind, and that is if you want to rot your brain right out of your head. It is a shortcut to intolerance and the most minor kind of thinking.

In my mind, everyone with a label denies the very best part of being human. We are the only ones in the animal world who can think for ourselves if only we would.

Everybody believes in something. There is no such thing as an “unbeliever.” Only thinkers and non-thinkers. Some people think reality is a mirage, and some believe reality is the only way to see the world. Some believe in the God of vengeance and wrath, others in a God of love and compassion. We all can choose whatever we want to believe in.

 

But I believe in what my latest spiritual mentor, Joan Chittister, says: “Underneath all of them is one constant. Whatever we believe at the deepest center of our being determines what we become, even when we believe in something else.”

It’s true; I’ve never taken a step in life without belief. I have drawn from a well of guides, ideas, thinkers, and thoughts that guide me from decision to decision and choice to choice until life, which becomes the total of each sifted one.

Some are borrowed, some are mine, and those that survive have been tested by joy, pain, love, and fire.

Taken together, they are the ones that burn into my soul as life has its way with me, and I become a believer nailed to the wall. Belief, for me, is about understanding the big things in life, from love to God to justice and reason.

I’ve tried all of them on, and they are now one big mush that seems to be carrying me to a good place and a happy life.

I credit one thing for getting there.

I have rejected labels all my life and refuse to accept anyone’s labels of me. I never describe people as blue, red, conservative, or liberal, and I will not accept anyone’s label stuck on me.

As long as I live, I think and use my mind to guide me through life; as many people have learned, I am hyper-sensitive to others telling me what to think, write, or who to be. Lots of people think that makes me rude and ungrateful. I reject those labels, too.

Refusing to put a label in my head is about being able to think for myself, not for what other people tell me to believe because it’s what they think.

The great critic Alan Bloom called this labeling the death of the American Mind. He argued that universities no longer teach original thinking and that the labeling of people is choking American democracy.

Watching the news this morning, he had an excellent point to make. I’ve known several people who attended prestigious universities, and I often walk away from them wondering if they ever learned to think at all.