In the best essay ever written, George Orwell observes that the attempt to love humanity as a whole “marks the point at which the humanistic and the religious attitude cease to be reconcilable. To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.” This closely echoes an Aristotelian adage that a friend to all is a friend to none.
The point is not limited to friendship or love. It’s a linguistic issue. If we must include everything in a statement, if we are unwilling to pick out special targets of our intentions and words in a totalizing effort at inclusion, then we cease to say anything meaningful at all.
Consider “STEAM education.” After the STEM movement for “science, technology, engineering, and mathematics” education started in 2001 and picked up with the Obama administration, based on the idea of pushing some educational subjects in particular (and, yes, not pushing others), aggrieved groups with more humanities-focused hopes for education began to complain about the exclusion of A for arts. And so I now walk by, three blocks from my house, a big, proud, cartoonish banner declaring the school to be a center of something called STEAM learning. Now that it’s simply an exhaustive list of things schools teach, the term is of course completely meaningless or at least vestigial.
Here’s another example of an exhaustive, indiscriminate list that has no purpose in existing: “traditionally persecuted peoples, including African-Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders and other people of color, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, the LGBTQ community, immigrants.”
This, if you weren’t tracking it, is a section that was added to a House resolution initially intended to condemn anti-Semitism in particular. The bill couldn’t get a vote until this list made it into the language, because an act of friendship for just Jews didn’t have the votes that a completely indiscriminate act of condemnation for anything that might be worth condemning gets. And, sure, the things on this list are all worth condemning! Just as the arts are surely worth teaching. But to neglect to mention one item is not to erase, contra the implication of a popular rhetorical tactic. And as Orwell and Aristotle and the advocates of teaching engineering know, allyship for all is allyship for none.
