The Perils of Abstraction
By Christy Wampole Nov. 12, 2019
“Show me what winning looks like.”
This was how Senator Elizabeth Warren, in September’s Democratic presidential debate, described the appeal she has made “every time one of the generals come through” as she sought to understand by what measure our military intervention in Afghanistan could be considered a success. In place of an abstraction — “success” — she wanted something concrete. Ms. Warren’s plea, startling in its simplicity, highlights the perilous nature of abstraction and invites us to study the various ways in which it may be deployed to control, cancel or kill people.
In the social and political realms, an abstraction is an idea — love, liberty, Leninism — that has no palpable form. When we speak about something in the abstract, we take concrete instances and average them into generalized — and necessarily reductive — concepts. Through this process, things, events and people lose their visibility and density. The world becomes a series of signs and numbers standing in for things themselves.
Among the thinkers of the past century, the French philosopher Simone Weil stands out as a powerful analyst of the many ways in which abstraction could damage our politics and our soul.
In a 1936 essay, originally titled “Let Us Not Start Another Trojan War” but better known by the title of its English translation, “The Power of Words,” Weil drew a relationship between the increasing abstraction of words and the pretexts used for war. “In every sphere, we seem to have lost the very elements of intelligence: the ideas of limit, measure, degree, proportion, relation, comparison, contingency, interdependence, interrelation of means and ends,” she wrote. “Our political universe is peopled exclusively by myths and monsters; all it contains is absolutes and abstract entities.”
Weil saw in her historical moment a loss of a sense of scale, a creeping ineptitude in judgment and communication and, ultimately, a forfeiture of rational thought. She observed how political platforms being built upon words like “roots” or “homeland” could use more abstractions — like “the foreigner,” “the immigrant,” “the minority” and “the refugee” — to turn flesh-and-blood individuals into targets. Finally, she understood how central abstractions were in legitimizing unwarranted authority, in pitting people against one another, and in justifying indefensible wars, discrimination and other forms of brutality.
While Weil was describing Europe on the verge of catastrophic war, this insight can also help us understand the demoralizing reality of contemporary American politics.
There is no doubt that driven by the explosion of new and more accessible technologies, our world has become more and more abstract: from the advent and expansion of cyberwarfare, through demographic research and online banking and trading, to algorithmic commerce and the move toward cashless societies. The tendency toward abstraction, though, is not merely restricted to the realm of technology. It extends to our social, intellectual and political lives — including the various isms (feminism, racism, colonialism, nationalism and so on) that we use to sum up human systems and behaviors.
Abstractions often arise when there is too much to know and too little time in which to know it. Submerged in a superabundance of information, abstractions — in the guise of statistics or stereotypes — seem to act as valuable timesavers. But what we save in time, we lose in nuance and exactitude. And there is a greater danger: When the world grows more complex, as it has in our age of global technocracy, specialists begin to monopolize information and use it as a tool of control.
Weil described this dynamic well in a 1934 essay, “Analysis of Oppression,” in a passage about the origins of religious thought. She argued that when the religious rites meant to help humans gain favor from the gods grow “too numerous and complicated to be known by all,” these rites become “the secret and consequently the monopoly of a few priests.” And, she concluded, “Nothing essential is changed when the monopoly is no longer made up of rites but of scientific processes, and when those in possession of it are called scientists and technicians instead of priests.”
When politicians like Elizabeth Warren speak of “the generals” you can be sure they refer only partly to real people and much more to archetypes — the Generals — that have accumulated lifetimes of semantic and cultural baggage. This can also be true of other groups like the Women, the Students, the African-Americans, the Russians and so on. We know other such powerful words: Government, Corporation, Faith, Civilization, Culture, Nation. “When empty words are given capital letters, then, on the slightest pretext, men will begin shedding blood for them and piling up ruin in their name without effectively grasping anything to which they refer,” Weil wrote, “for the simple reason that they mean nothing.”
This is why she was against all political parties. She believed they require fealty to vague ideas without an understanding of the facts, material contingencies and concrete realities necessary for effective governance. Political parties are generators of abstractions, churned out endlessly for one purpose only — so that the Party can survive and grow. In one economical sentence, Weil summed up why political cooperation requires us all to get out of our heads and dispense with abstractions, if only for a little while: “The number 2 thought of by one man cannot be added to the number 2 thought of by another man so as to make up the number 4.”
It would serve each of us well to make a collective effort to inventory our beliefs, assess how much they rely on abstractions, and consider how a move away from the abstract and toward the concrete might bring us all closer to understanding what winning looks like.
Christy Wampole is an associate professor of French literature and thought at Princeton University and the author, most recently, of “Rootedness: The Ramifications of a Metaphor.”
Now in print: “Modern Ethics in 77 Arguments,” and “The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments,” with essays from the series, edited by Peter Catapano and Simon Critchley, published by Liveright Books.
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