People are able to discuss some topics rationally. But shift the conversation to other topics, and pretty much everybody seems incapable of holding a meaningful discussion.
Let’s take two examples: “intelligence” and “racism”. When we discuss the general topic of intelligence, we don’t reduce the conversation to “this person is smart and that person is stupid.”
We all know full well that intelligence is on a continuum, and most people are at least somewhat aware that it is multi-dimensional. You can be a straight A student and yet be lacking in emotional intelligence.
You can be a genius at musical composition, yet terrible at analytic reasoning, or vice versa. A great writer may be a terrible conversationalist.
Nobody thinks any of this is strange or contradictory. After all, we spend much of our day parsing the varying categories of intelligence of the many people we meet, work alongside or happen to be related to.
Yet when you say the word “racism”, people seem to lose all ability to make such fine distinctions. People simply classify other people into the bin “racist” or “non-racist”.
In reality, there is no bright red line separating “racist” from “non-racist”. There are, in fact, many different kinds of racism, and everybody’s racism is on a multi-dimensional spectrum.
But that’s not how we talk about it. In fact, we don’t even seem to have the language for talking about those many subtle distinctions.
In the case of racism, I find this to be quite discouraging. After all, how can we work on the corrosive and pernicious problem of racism if we don’t even have meaningful language by which to discuss it?