There’s a lot of difference between “Sufi-run Islamic community center in Manhattan” and “Ground Zero Victory Mosque.” I’ve been thinking about that, and a lot of other words, since listening to this Radiolab episode. Radiolab argues that language doesn’t just give us the ability to communicate complex ideas — it gives us the ability to formulate them in the first place.

In other words, if you couldn’t say to yourself “over the river and through the woods,” you might never make it to Grandmother’s house.

Likewise, it’s hard to recognize, understand, or respond to the complexities of Islamic culture when you don’t have the vocabulary and understanding to distinguish between Sufi, Shia, and Sunni.

The politics of bigotry and fear rely on perpetuating this lack of understanding. The basic strategy is this: take two notions that are similar in some ways and insist there’s very little real difference between them. Conservatives are fascists, liberals are Socialists, Muslims are terrorists. “Theists” are all deluded fundamentalist creationists and “atheists” are all immoral arrogant jerks.

I think we need to be wary of this tendency to boil issues — or cultures — down. We’re not finding an “essence,” we’re building cartoons. And then we’re getting vein-poppingly furious at these cartoons. Worse, we feel we know something when we’re only capable of having the simplest thoughts about it.

Maybe if we embraced complexity, with all its hard vocabulary words and difficult ideas, instead of trying to reduce everything to sound bite all the time, we’d be able to think smarter.