Nuance has lost its nuance
How ironic that just like the word ironic, the word nuance has lost its nuance. You literally cannot use the word for its literal meaning anymore.
The day-to-day usage of the word, particularly during political discourse, is more nuanced than its dictionary definition. For one, the subtleness of something, like the size of something, is not absolute. Something can be “red” or “blue,” but nothing is intrinsically “big” or “small.” To call something big or small requires context, the same for calling something nuanced.
When we say something is big or small, we are usually comparing that to the human scale, e.g. a building is big and a mosquito is small. But when we say something is nuanced, the speaker and the listener don’t necessarily share the same reference point. Because of this, “nuance” is often used not to describe an opinion, but as a subjective descriptor used by the speaker to politely call out ignorance in the listener.
E.g. Person A says, “Palestinians are the bad guys.” And person B responds, “I think the situation is more nuanced than that.”
A topic that seems nuanced to one person may not seem nuanced to another. I just think this is an important point to clarify when using the word.
Nuance ≠ too small to matter
This, to me, is the most common and blatant misuse of the word — as a lazy way to shut down an argument. I concede that it can be useful for subtly disarming aggressively misinformed individuals with oversimplified positions on certain issues. But the same tool is also often used by aggressively apathetic individuals to shut down conversations, e.g. “both sides” arguments, as a hand-wavy argument to weasel out of a discussion. It’s the millenial’s version of “let’s just agree to disagree.”
Nuance ≠ too small to be noticeable
Nuance also isn’t about figuring out if something is 51% good and 49% evil, or 49% good and 51% evil. It is very difficult to talk about a social issue without the reductive good-vs-evil mindset and to assume that the goal of any political argument is to reduce something down to this binary absolute. The good-vs-evil mindset is often the antithesis of nuance, and often traps a person in a position where they have to defend not only their opinion on a specific topic, but also their entire framework for morality. Because a good-vs-evil mindset is absolute and objective and cannot tolerate multiple subjective perspectives, it poses as a huge obstacle to empathy. Nuance is not about nitpicking, or to put things under a microscope. It is often about considering other perspectives, and oftentimes the most valuable perspectives are the ones that disagree with your conlusion without disagreeing with your facts.
Nuance ≠ too small anything
Because subtleness is subjective, nuance doesn’t necessarily imply trivialness. Most of the time, when someone says something is too nuanced, they may mean that something is too complex, maybe too complex to be debated to satisfaction. However, to me, this bandaid to conclude an unconclude-able debate is no bandaid at all. It is merely an illusion of a bandaid.
So, if you can’t label a discussion as nuanced and leave it unresolved, and you also can’t say something definitive with the cost of being reductive, what can you say? You can say that you are probably both incredibly wrong, so absolutely far away from being remotely correct. If the assignment is a 3,000 word essay on the Cold War, and one of you only wrote down “USA bad” and the other one wrote “USSR bad,” you have both failed the class.
