Last Friday I opened a thread on the subject of classification. The goal was to come up with a mutually agreeable term for referring to those Catholics who prefer to assist in the Novus Ordo Mass, otherwise known as the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite. People like me who assist at the Traditional Latin Mass are often termed ‘Traditional Catholics’ or ‘Latin Mass Catholics’, and it seemed to me necessary to have a corresponding term for those who assist at the Novus Ordo Mass.
I expected that the search for a term might occasion some controversy. I was quite stunned, however, by the actual result. Only one person ventured to assist with the actual project of finding a name. But many more posted to protest the entire project of giving a name to this general group. (Among those, some were equally offended by the idea of giving a name to the Traditional Catholics, while others seem to think that it’s all right to name the one group but not the other.) Some of the protesters were perfectly civil and kind, while others were rude and belligerent, but having read them all, I must admit that I am not convinced. I understand that people are concerned about the likelihood that any terms we choose will be used contemptuously or spitefully by some. That should certainly be discouraged, but not, I think, in this way. Refusing to give names to things is not a sensible solution. The Church will not be unified through a willful misuse of language. Still, given the controversy this seems to have occasioned, I thought I’d better lay out my views on naming and classification at greater length.

A name is typically chosen for a category of things when they fulfill two conditions. First, they must all have something in common. And secondly, that common feature must be somehow relevant or of interest to us. Natural kinds (that is to say, living species) obviously do have something in common that is of interest to us, so we have a name for every species that we know. Particularly within our own species, though, we also classify people according to innumerable other characteristics – age, sex, nationality, profession, marital status, education, physique, and so on and so forth. Again, we generally only “classify” when the commonality within a group is for some reason of interest to us. So, for example, hair color is one of a human being’s more noticeable physical features, and many people have opinions and preferences about which colors are most attractive. Consequently, we have some names for people with particular colors of hair (blondes, brunettes, etc.) Earlobes, on the other hand, are considerably less noticeable. So, although there are two distinct types of earlobe (pendulum and round) that can be observed by anyone who cares to look, we don’t have special names for people according to earlobe type. Nobody really cares. On the other hand, if I were a geneticist, and making a project out of tracking the genes for different earlobes, I would probably want to invent names for each category of people, just to make my speech less cumbersome.

Classification of natural kinds is generally pretty clear-cut, but when we’re talking about categories of people, that quite often is not the case. The list of descriptive terms that we might use when talking about people is almost inexhaustible, and many of them denote general types whose application to particular people might be debated. Terms like ‘nerd’, ‘yuppie’, go-getter’, ’socialite’, ‘mensch’, ‘busybody’, and so forth, have a definite descriptive sense, but no single and clearly diagnosable feature that any given person could be said uncontroversially to have or lack. That doesn’t mean, however, that these terms aren’t useful. Most of the time they aren’t even confusing. Human beings are generally quite adept at considering the world in broad terms, and using general descriptive terms for discussing it.

More importantly for the question at hand, we often have a way of classifying groups of people according to an actually definable feature, but then using this as a jumping-off point for discussing trends that can be seen within that group. There are so many examples of this that I hardly know where to begin, but let’s consider a word like ’suburbanite.’ A suburbanite, by definition, is a person who lives in a particular sort of residential area. Generally speaking, suburbs are pretty easy to identify, so if we take ’suburbanites’ to be the people who live in suburbs, it will generally be possible to say quite definitely whether a given individual is a suburbanite or not.

After making the basic classification, though, all sorts of people – politicos, city planners, advertising agencies, etc. — will begin discussing the preferences and trends that can be seen in this general group of people. “Suburbanites care about parks and schools, and are widely in favor of gun control,” a journalist might write, and we have no trouble with this statement. We know that the terms are being used loosely, and that the statements are generalizations. So while we know that the statement can be disputed, we also understand that pulling together a collection of counter-examples (say, a hundred people who live in suburbs and don’t like parks) wouldn’t disprove it. Nor is anyone in a panic about how to classify the person who lives in urban apartments half the week and then comes back to his suburban home, or about what to make of the one unusual residential zone on the west side that includes some apartment buildings and some streets with regular homes. Everyone understands that terms like ‘urbanite’ and ’suburbanite,’ are very general classifications, and that there will be some oddities that don’t fully fit into either group. Indeed, once we start looking to our discussion of trends, we’ll find that almost nobody fits the profile precisely. None of this, however, nullifies the usefulness of the terms. In fact, the existence of such profiles can even help to identify the oddities. If a movement of anti-park suburbanites began to build in a particular area, the existence of the term ’suburbanite’, together with the stereotypes summoned by that term, would allow a journalist to point out the oddity of what was going on in very few words.

Now suppose that some social planners decided that we had too much class differentiation within our society, and that we needed to try to equalize. They do some sociological studies, and then announce that we need to fix things by ceasing to use potentially divisive terms like ’suburbanite.’ “We are all one America!” they might point out. “This talk of urbanites and suburbanites is just tearing us apart! When I talk about a fellow citizen, I just call him American and nothing else!”

This would obviously be silly. In the first place, it isn’t clear that there’s a problem at all. The existence of a certain amount of diversity among Americans needn’t necessarily destroy the kind of unity that really matters. But even if we did decide that the disparity of lifestyles was a bad thing, we wouldn’t fix the problem by refusing to talk about it. The only way to change anything (assuming we did want to) would be by working with the city planners, economists, politicians etc. to change the situation on the ground, so that there was no longer a great disparity between living situations. Words just reflect the reality of the situation; they don’t create it.

Now, I’m not about to dive into your mother’s favorite expression about sticks and stones being the only things that hurt. Though it can be good advice for children, it’s not really true, and certainly hurtful words can serve to exacerbate a bad situation. This is why, for example, we consciously (and rightly) work to remove ethnic slurs from our language. Having been coined for a hateful purpose, they really can’t be used in a positive way, and we’re better off without them. However, insofar as a hateful word refers to a real group of people about whom we might need to speak, it’s important that there be other terms for the same group that can be used without the insulting connotations. In my childhood in Boulder this sometimes became a bit of a problem, since the Boulder liberals, in their eagerness to expunge racial hatred, were continually cycling through different terms in an effort to find one sufficiently positive, and we schoolchildren were left feeling that it must be vaguely shameful ever to make reference to anyone’s ethnicity. (Just think how nervous we would have been if we had ever needed, say, to describe a criminal suspect to the police.) I would never deny, of course, that racial hatred is a very bad thing, that it is and has been a problem in many times and places, and that use of inappropriate names has sometimes contributed to the problem. But by sabotaging language to prevent even people of good will from expressing themselves clearly, we really don’t fix the underlying attitudinal problems; rather, we tie the hands of those who would smooth tensions, and give additional tools to those who would stir up bad blood.

And now, one more point should perhaps be made. We generally don’t coin descriptive terms unless there is some implicit or possible contrast. For example, we don’t have a special word to designate air-breathing people or people who require food and water to live. We have no special word for ‘Earth-dwellers.’ There doesn’t seem to be any need for such terms. When a trait is shared by everyone around, there isn’t much occasion to name it.

The need can quickly arise, however, when even a small group of outsiders makes an appearance, in fact or even in imagination. Consider, for example, the term ‘muggle,’ coined by JK Rowling to denote people who lack inborn magical powers. Obviously in our actual world, this term includes… everybody. Nonetheless, we can easily understand why the “magical community” of the story would require such a term, and even more amusingly, we can speculate about what “Muggle Studies”, the class offered for magicians wanting to study the culture of non-magical peoples, might include. Obviously a tremendous variety of people – all people currently alive, in fact! — fit under that heading. And yet, great differences notwithstanding, we can reflect on how this aspect of our shared existence – the restrictions that we work under in our efforts to build a society for ourselves – affect us. We can imagine how our society would be different from that of a magical people, if such a population were to exist. In a similar vein, we do have a term for people who are going to die someday: mortal. Of course, every person on the planet is mortal, so in some ways it seems a silly word to have. Still, because we have immortal souls, and because we can (and do) imagine people who are never going to die, the term ‘mortal’ is meaningful to us. The fact that an enormous number of people fit under this heading doesn’t keep us from speculating about how that aspect of our existence affects us.

Descending from that, there are many other large groups of people that we denote with particular terms. Men and women. Adults and children. Asians, Europeans and Americans. Again, these groups are very large and diverse, so you won’t know a huge amount about a person merely on the basis of one such label. Still, there are many tendencies and commonalities that can be seen among all or most of the people in each set. If we want to give a more complete description of a particular person, we’ll often throw out several of these terms in a row, from which a listener will be able to mentally build a kind of “profile” of the person being described. Most of the time the profile isn’t completely on target, and sometimes it’s dramatically off, but without the ability to do this sort of thing, we would hardly be able to function within a diverse society like the one that we have.

After that long discourse on language, let’s turn back to the controversial topic of giving a name to Catholics who assist at the Novus Ordo Mass. To the many who have huffily repeated that the only appropriate term for a Catholic