how's your "ism"?

I don’t like words that end with “ism.”  The “isms” of the English language are designed to be very general and idealized descriptions of beliefs, ideas, social behaviors, philosophies, political dispositions, theological dispositions and so forth.  As general and idealized types they focus on a majority of people or perhaps even no one person at all that may fit the characteristics of what the “ism” is supposed to mean.  When we talk about a person who fits whatever characteristics of an “ism”, we call them an “ist”. If a person happens to have a lot of money and resources, we call that person a “philanthropist.”  If they happen to think that Jesus is going to come back in the seventh “dispensation” of history, also called in various forms “the end times”, we call that person a “dispensationalist.”  If they describe their self as a “postmodernist”, well, what they might mean by that is debatable. The point here is that as descriptors of very general characteristics of people and ideas, the procession of the “isms” is an inexact and imprecise use of language to describe things.

The problem is when these various “isms” are thrown back to people in ways that demand clarity and precision. An “ism” can become not just a description of some kind of trend or similarity between people and ideas, but can become an ideology.  An ideology is primarily an idea not just about the way things are, but about the way things ought to be in the world.  Rather than describe reality, an “ism” becomes something to reflexively shape reality.  However, the same problem with an “ism” pertains to the very different function of the term.  It is still an imprecise and very general type of something that may or may not exist.  However, when an “ism” becomes an ideology that shapes the ways that people think and behave in order to move people towards ideal frameworks that demand certain kinds of behaviors, it can place unrealistic and often skewed demands on human behavior.  When people feel pushed and pulled in a society to fit within such boundaries in order to feel socially connected, psychologically healthy, well fit within a vocation, etc. the reliance of such terms to shape behavior not only propels people to view themselves as unrealistically different than those who share different ideologies, but can distort the sense of reality that people share as the human drama unfolds.  People can become beholden to make sure they persist in their fitness with an ideology rather than feel empowered to claim their own stake in the world apart from such categories of thinking and behavior.

This is why I don’t like words that end with “ism.”  In general, when these terms function as categories to divide human communities and so, divide human individuals based on ideal and unrealistic categories that demand consent for full participation in a given social identity, a skewed version of reality becomes reinforced by communities that reinforce and perpetuate them.  Skewed ideas reinforced as ideologies in human communities literally skew these communities apart from each other and distance people from each other – all rooted in false pretense of things that are only shadows on a wall.

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