I took AP Language and Composition in high school, and I remember it being almost entirely a complete waste of time. The entire affair was such a clown show that it was the place where my rather dour take of the American public education system began to germinate. I honestly wish I could leave it at that, largely because it’d make the experience a stronger piece of anecdotal evidence for my education takes, but of all the mostly worthless spilled ink there was one concept that the class taught me that has proven to be endlessly valuable.
I distinctly remember receiving a yellow printout with Carnegie-Mellon University branding on it that concerned an analytical concept called the ladder of abstraction. I can’t for the life of me locate the original document, but what the paper argued was simple: every idea in every essay, article, or fictional text lies on a spectrum of material to theoretical, and the key to communicating effectively is knowing how best to shift between different places on said spectrum. The idea meshed well with the argumentation styles I was being taught in high school debate at the same time. Propose an idea, describe its material qualities, and then tell us why they matter.
This seemed like the obvious way to construct arguments about anything - but as I aged and was exposed to more and more “grown-up” discourse, I began to realize just how profoundly rare the climbing up and down the ladder throughout the course of an argument actually is. Instead, what I found was that the most common strategy was as follows:
- Start at the top (most abstract) rung of the ladder.
- Stay there.
- ???
- Profit.
This style of argumentation totally baffled me, and it was so ubiquitous among so many respected intellectual institutions that I began to genuinely wonder if I had mis-learned how to think. This gave me a genuinely major crisis of confidence in the strength of my political convictions during college, as I immersed myself in spaces where this top-of-the-ladder approach was not only common but actively enforced by social norms. Trying to anchor abstractions in material reality was met with confusion at best, and interpreted as a personal attack at worst.
As I became more familiar with these intellectual spaces, it became clear why this approach was the most common one. If you refuse to climb down the ladder and force others to do the same, it becomes much harder to scrutinize your ideas. Nobody can cite historical events to disprove you, because your idea isn’t anchored in any events to compare to. Nobody can bring empirical evidence to the table to discredit you, because you can simply claim that your theoretical proposition is different from the ones that have already been tried. And most importantly, when people try to pull you back down the ladder by force, you can simply assert that the reason they are doing so is because your idea is simply too sophisticated and advanced for their feeble minds to understand.
As it is probably already clear, I regard this style of argumentation with a truly nuclear level of contempt. Much of the inspiration for why I write comes from zeal for the things I love, but I would be lying if I said an enormous portion didn’t also come from virulent, spiteful rage at the rampant abuse of the ladder of abstraction. An unbelievable number of the most highly paid and prestigious cultural commentators and political pundits in the Western world have made lucrative careers deploying strategies that wouldn’t be tolerated in high school debate class, and yet these arguments are allowed to stand pretty much unchallenged in most respectable cultural circles.
This blog is many things - a laboratory for ideas, a vent for political frustration, a catalog of my interests - but the through-line through all of it is a commitment to pulling concepts down the ladder of abstraction. That’s not to say that there’s no value in the pursuit of general truths, or that spiritual questions aren’t worth answering, but it is to say that meaning comes from the synthesis of the concrete and the abstract, not by reading mad-libs in your best Žižek impression. I am under no delusion that any one person can have direct sway on the state of Western political discourse, but to the extent that I have a voice in said discourse I want to use it to engage more deeply with the meaning hidden in the material world, rather than retreat deeper up our own asses to continue the intellectual shadowboxing that has so defined the public discourse of the last few years. I want to take ideas and pull them back down the ladder - even if it’s a long way down.