There’s too many lumpers out there

A meta-ironic call for more specificity and less generalization

I had a philosophy professor whose advice for how to succeed in the philosophy game was, “When in doubt, draw a distinction.”

In journalism, I think this is often bad advice if you want a lot of people to read your articles. The goal generally is to build a larger rather than a smaller audience, and distinction-drawing can be divisive. But more broadly, people like big ideas. The most successful articles typically have a “lumping” quality, where the author takes a few distinct things that are happening in the world (ideally three) and identifies a theme that unites them. This gives readers a fresh way to talk about stuff that they already know is happening, and it can make slightly dry technical disputes feel high stakes and exciting.

As a journalist myself, I try to write articles that people read, so I’ll admit to a fair amount of lumping. In articles like the “Common Sense Democrat Manifesto” or “One Billion Americans,” I basically took a bunch of things that I believe and lumped them together into an agenda.

In fussy splitter mode, though, the manifesto is really about two different things — blue state reform and red state electability — that have common threads but also points of tension. Conceptually, you could certainly separate them. Nonetheless, I think there is virtue in doing some lumping here, because I think the common threads are real and, more importantly, because I think these planks share some common enemies and I want the people who believe strongly in at least one of them to learn to collaborate.

That being said, in terms of clarity of thought, my allegiances are often with the splitters.

I believe that a lot of the specific claims associated with the “smartphone theory of everything” are true, and a lot of the specific claims associated with the “housing theory of everything” are also true. But in a literal sense, if the rise of smartphones explains “everything,” then increased housing scarcity can’t explain anything and vice versa. So to the extent that you care about boring things like accuracy rather than vitality, I think the correct thing to say is that neither theory of everything is correct. The rise of the smartphone and growing housing scarcity are two different social trends, and both of them are important. A third trend that I think also plays a key role in explaining recent sociological and political phenomena is the declining relative earnings of men (especially working-class men). But that’s not explained by smartphones or housing! And the question of why Americans have shorter lifespans than the French or Italians also seems pretty important, and it’s not explained by any of those things.

“Life is complicated and there are many important trends happening simultaneously” is a terrible headline, but it’s probably a better approximation of the truth than most that you’ll read.

If you want to understand the world, you need to chop things down to size. And yet, here I was with a few splitter-type article ideas that I was afraid nobody would read. So I’m lumping them together into a broad article about the dangers of lumping.

An abundance of what?

I think Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s “Abundance” book makes a ton of great points. I had a great time at the Abundance conference, and I think the general intervention that the abundance community wants to make in American politics — reorienting dialogue around positive-sum economic solutions rather than zero-sum MAGA or regrowth eco-socialism — is an excellent idea.

As I wrote last week, I would love to see the half-drawn horse be fleshed out with a stronger health-abundance plank, among other things.

But one can push this too far.