The Pressing Issue of Distinction Overload

We live in a time of distinction overload, namely a proliferation of distinctions that are employed in all aspects of contemporary political, economic, and social life. Distinction Overload—let's name it—is overwhelming citizens who pay attention to workplace dynamics, politics, and family life. Distinction Overload is a relative of information overload, associated with the Information Age itself, which is a descendant of the information explosion that occurred during the Renaissance after Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press.

You can’t really talk or write, let alone think, without making distinctions, and the process of human development itself is very much about learning useful distinctions—me and you, left and right, good and evil, night and day, yes and no, mother and father, humans, fish and animals, and so on. Some distinctions reflect opposition; others divide reality or ethics into three or four or more categories.

Regarding distinguishing ourselves from others, the French philosopher René Descartes' famous cogito, ergo sum, “I think therefore I am,” is known as proof that we exist. The fact that I am something that exists separately from other people (as thinking things) or indeed material objects is a related matter.

Our information technology (IT) connected world presents us with a Niagara Falls of distinctions. Yet, unlike the firehose effect, one can feel "too much information" from the internet and social media as well as cable television and streaming. Distinction Overload causes the subject to be jolted back and forth with opposition distinctions and overwhelmed with the need to see nuances between different aspects of things.

In our culture, new distinctions have made their way into our lives but not everyone has the same understanding of what these distinctions mean or whether we should be using them. For example, some people make a distinction between males, females, and people who do not identify as male or female. This is frequently regarded as a gender identity issue. There is also the distinction in the area of sexual preference between those who are heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual. Then there is the distinction between those who identify as male, those who identify as female, and those who have been identified as male or female but they themselves have come to determine that they have been misidentified. This group is the transgender class.

The American legal system, a massive institution, is distinctions on steroids. Just watch MSNBC or Fox News if you disagree.

The proliferation of distinctions, it is critical to understand, is not all bad. On the contrary, distinctions appear when innovation creates new ways to build products and provide services. We have been able to build medical devices and tools, for example, by learning from physicists about nanometers and subatomic particles. The MRI machine could not have been created out of classical mechanics; it needed quantum mechanics and an entirely new language with new distinctions to help scientists discover how to build machines that could take pictures of the human body that X-ray machines could not.

A strong democracy requires clear thinking and clear thinking requires good distinctions as well as good arguments, good public policies, good social movements, and good speeches. Clear thinking itself is frequently animated by clear distinctions or arguments against distinctions that stand in the way of justice and peace.

Many leading philosophers built their theories of knowledge and theories of justice based on distinctions that illuminated fields of inquiry. The German Philosopher Immanuel Kant, a key figure of the Enlightenment, built his theory of knowledge on two distinctions, namely the distinction between analytic judgments (which are true or false in terms of their meaning) and synthetic judgments (statements that are true or false in terms of their connection to the world) and the distinction between a priori (prior to experience) and a posteriori (after experience) judgments. The American pragmatist Philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine built his theories of language and knowledge by collapsing the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments.

Kant, like John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, built theories of just societies that were animated by distinctions between natural rights and rights determined by governments, autonomy and community, and justice and injustice. Robert Nozick and John Rawls continued the battle between libertarian and progressive theories of justice in the twentieth century.

Distinction Overload, like Information Overload, exists. Citizens and leaders alike who seek to advance democratic norms must sift their way through the abundance of distinctions to arrive at the clear thinking a strong democracy needs. Good distinctions, in many ways, are the fabric of good democracies.