It is a truth universally acknowledged — by the despairing few who are still capable of observation — that the man who claims to love humanity most sincerely is often the very man least capable of tolerating its members. This apparent paradox has, with dreary repetition, occasioned much surprise among those of a speculative bent, though to any mere observer of dinner parties and legislative bodies, it is no paradox at all but a banal truism. The lover of mankind, like the lover of justice or of liberty, prefers his affections untethered from the burden of actual people. Humanity, after all, never interrupts you when you speak. It does not smell foul, or vote for the wrong candidate, or shout obscenities from across the street. It is an ideal — smooth, shapeless, pliable — utterly unencumbered by the grim specificity of persons.
This love of abstraction and hatred of instance has, I am told, a long and respectable ancestry. The philosophers of old, in their wisdom and customary pedantry, battled endlessly over it. Realism for the party of generalities, nominalism for the faction of particularities. The former believed that concepts — such as man, woman, virtue, sin, and the eternally malleable truth — possessed some independent and enduring reality. The latter, less enchanted, maintained that such categories were but convenient fictions, verbal shortcuts to avoid the intolerable work of noticing things as they really are, in all of their indefinable multiplicity and contingency. The realist saw the world as a library of neatly labeled drawers; the nominalist, as a heap of unlabeled receipts. The reader may judge which metaphor better describes the present state of our society.
One finds, upon even a casual scan of our current disputes, that this ancient quarrel has survived the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the Scrollocene — our present geologic period, defined by the unceasing sediment of social media strata and eroded attention spans — with its basic structure quite intact. Consider the matter of gender, where one party affirms, with theological solemnity, that there are two and only two kinds of persons, properly ordained and immutable, while another party declares that each soul is a singular flower, not to be confused with any other bloom nor subject to horticultural classification. In the matter of immigration, some speak as though immigrants were a sort of invasive weed, requiring containment or extermination, while others insist upon their moral duty to interrogate each root, leaf, and branch in turn, lest they be guilty of failing to admire the individuality of every daisy and dandelion.
The realist devotion to the forest over the trees — nay, to the concept of forest independent of any inconvenient trunks — is at the root of nearly every modern prejudice. Racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and the rest of our inventory of sociopolitical diseases are not merely vices of cruelty, but failures of perception. They are metaphysical laziness masquerading as principle. It is far easier to denounce a group than to speak to a person. The former allows the comfort of certainty; the latter demands time, and often unpleasant self-reflection. Thus, we generalize, we categorize, we stereotype — because it is more efficient to be wrong en masse than to be right in detail.
But if the realist errs by worshipping the concept of forest, the nominalist risks denying that trees ever grow together at all. The insistence that every individual is wholly singular — untouched by history, culture, or kinship — can become its own sort of blindness. It is a failure not of perception but of memory: a refusal to see that patterns do exist, that power often emerges within groups, and that the wounds of one are rarely wholly disconnected from the woe of many. To insist on nothing but particularity is to pretend that suffering is always private, and injustice always accidental. Thus, we strip away every shared name until the world is populated by atomized enigmas, each incomprehensible to the next, and wonder aloud why solidarity proves so elusive. In our quest to see no categories, we sometimes lose the ability to see structure at all.
Now, it must be confessed that very few of our contemporaries identify themselves publicly as metaphysicians or epistemologues. One is unlikely to find a fellow declaring over cocktails that he has resolved to be a nominalist in matters of policy but a realist in the bedroom. Yet the philosophical commitments persist, hidden in the folds of preference and posture. Some prefer systems; others prefer narratives. Some want their world sorted; others want it merely seen.
In this light, one recalls the ever-reasonable Stephen Fry, who, with characteristic offhand clarity admits that he is an empiricist, not a rationalist. He trusts the observable, not the merely reasonable. And in support of this, he notes that many of the freest, fairest nations on earth are constitutional monarchies — countries whose systems, judged by Enlightenment standards, should by all rights be oppressive, ridiculous, or at the very least obsolete. Yet there they are well-fed, well-governed, and mostly free of fanatics. By contrast, many of the most theoretically admirable republics are, in practice, feebly embarrassing or actively cruel. A system that looks impeccable on paper may perform disastrously in life; another that appears medieval and outdated may stumble, by long habit and accident, into a form of moderation we couldn’t hope to engineer.
A similar irony attends the matter of religion. Reason dictates that the separation of church and state should diminish extremism and cultivate tolerance. And yet the countries with established state churches — those of the aforementioned nations still presided over by ancien regimes — are among the least prone to ideological extremism. One begins to suspect that theory, however elegant, is a poor predictor of human behavior. We do not live in syllogisms; we live in societies — and societies are made up of multitudes.
Nor should we overvalue the purity of reason. Religion, though often ridiculous in its premises and tyrannical in its authorities, is at least irrational in an honest way. Its devotees pray, which is to say they beg for help — for hope, for love. A rationalist, by contrast, believes himself immune to superstition even as he bows to systems as arbitrary and unprovable as any revelation. Worse, the rationalist tyrant has no saints to imitate and no mercy to offer. His logic is fastidious, and his cruelty efficient.
We must not forget that many of the worst horrors in modern history were committed not by theocrats or mystics, but by those who believed they had reason — and therefore right — on their side. The gulag and the gas chamber were not results of compliance to a faith; they were achievements of scientific certainty. And this should worry anyone whose primary concern is getting the categories right.
Here I turn, with a sigh of relief, to that peculiarly American saint, William James. James, in his Varieties of Religious Experience, dared to ask not whether a belief was provable, but whether it was helpful — an escape from both authoritarian metaphysics and sterilized rationalism. A belief may be true not in the abstract but in its cash-value — that is, in the difference it makes in one’s life. If belief in angels helps a man avoid drink and keep his promises, then for all practical purposes, angels exist. If a man is tortured unceasingly in his mind, he may as well be truly beset by the demons he imagines.
James is no metaphysical anarchist, he merely reminds us that a truth which makes no practical difference is indistinguishable from a lie. It matters less whether something is essentially or descriptively true, but whether it gives courage to the despairing, sobriety to the dissolute, or peace to the tormented. If a thing works — if it shapes and steadies a life — it is truth enough.
This pragmatic view does not flatter our vanity. It suggests that our identities, too, are not eternal forms but provisional constructs: not what we are in some divine registry, but what we can live with, through, and by. A man may call himself American, catholic, gender-fluid, or a fan of Manchester United; the important question is not whether his declaration aligns with some essentialist taxonomy, but whether he can get through the week without collapsing under the weight of his own description. That, and whether he can be of some use to others.
James suggests that our thinking is of a mixed quality and can never be rightly separated from our impulses and needs. This is less a concession than a confession: we are muddled beings, living among other muddled beings, inventing coherence as we go. Better a doctrine that admits this confusion than one that punishes others for failing to pretend it away.
Indeed, if there is any wisdom left in the wreckage of our categories, it is this: truth, or at least truth enough, is patient. The world will not conform to our abstractions, however elegantly they are written. It resists our diagrams, wiggles free from our taxonomies, and bleeds through our slogans. Whether we call ourselves realists, nominalists, or pragmatists, the only thing we may trust is the stubborn refusal of people to remain within the lines we draw for them. And in that refusal, there may be the faint outline of a better world — one drawn not with ideas but through lives.