I am thinking about “everything is” statements.
Example: “Everything is political.”
You’ve heard this. Person P in a conversation says, uneasily: “I don’t know, that seems really political.” Person N answers, devastatingly: “Everything is political.”
That statement, it seems to me, is self-falsifying. We see this, in the first place, from the speech-act context (that is, the effect of the statement in the conversation).
When Person N decrees that “everything is political,” both N and P are liable to feel that something important has occurred. Indeed, they are liable to feel that a kind of knock-down argument has been presented. “Oh my gosh, N is right,” P may secretly think. “Everything is political, I guess, in a way. How am I to respond, in the face of this universal attribute of things, which simply always applies? Even though, in my gut, it really seems to me that N is full of shit (look, I’m just talking to myself here). We’re planning a kids’ birthday party, and s/he wants the invitation to say it will ‘take place on stolen indigenous territory in the 532rd year of the occupation of Turtle Island’! To me that just seems, well, really political!”
It seems to me that P can respond in exactly the two ways s/he has just adumbrated. That is, first as a matter of logic; and then as a matter of moral intuition.
If everything is political, then it can be of no significance whatsoever to attach “political,” in a statement, to anything—including, perforce, “everything.” (More formally, this is to use “political” in a predicate.) For to say that thing T is political would just be to assert a necessary condition of its being a thing. “Everything is political” would then be like “everything is atoms” or “everything is in the world.” Unless they are both very stoned, neither P nor N is likely to hear such statements as mattering very much.
But the fact is, both P and N, entirely unstoned, hear “everything is political” as mattering quite a lot. They both think that attaching “political” to something (using “political” in a predicate) makes a difference to that something (modifies a subject). Therefore, they don’t actually think it was always-already part of that something. (And this will be the case, I think, for almost any subject—the sole exception being politics itself. “Every campaign is political” is indeed like “everything is atoms.”) Therefore, they don’t actually believe—neither of them does—that everything is political. The very significance of the statement falsifies it.
As for the moral intuition: P feels that N’s idea for the birthday party invitation is inappropriate to the latter. N asserts that the quality P wants to keep out of it—politics—is always-already there. Again, P can extrapolate from the bogus unfalsifiability of N’s position. S/he can say: “‘Everything is political’—well ok, sure, in a way. And yet this really does not prevent us from distinguishing between situations where we would like the political element to be asserted, and situations where we would like it not to be; or even ways in which we would like the political element to be highlighted, and ways in which we would like it not to be. An elementary school social studies class, let’s say, is always-already political. Do you therefore feel, N, that if the teacher starts passing out membership cards for the youth wing of the Conservative Party of Canada, nothing has gone wrong?
Or compare: ‘Everything is sexual’. Probably true, too, and in much the same way. But do you therefore think—
Oh wait—don’t answer that.”
Libber leeber 