One Way or the Other

The political weather in the contemporary USA is always stormy, but the intensity increases when candidates position themselves seriously for the primaries as they are doing now. I have no intention of commenting directly on them. The airwaves, podcast channels, and blogosphere are crowded with people doing that obsessively. There is no need to add yet one more voice to the din. Besides, I generally vote third-party, which tends to annoy my friends from both mainstream parties. Folks on both sides tell me I’m helping the greater evil win by not supporting the lesser (meaning their candidate). I don’t intend to comment on that argument here either, though in conversation I sometimes do. But it illuminates something on which I do wish to comment, which is the human tendency toward binary thinking. This is by no means confined to politics. It is just more stark in that context.

Numerous books and articles on the subject exist. Most argue, as do Jack Denfield Wood and Gianpiero Petriglieri in their scholarly paper "Transcending Polarization: Beyond Binary Thinking" published in Transactional Analysis Journal, that “individuals, groups, and larger collectivities instinctively frame their predicaments in a binary way – as a polarity encompassing a dimension of choice with two mutually exclusive alternatives” as a consequence of human (or, for that matter, mammal) evolutionary history. In a primordial environment rife with predators (including other humans), identifying something/someone rapidly as “good” or “bad” was a life or death matter: “Evolution has selected and conserved the neural machinery that supports instinctive ‘good or bad’ binary thinking, largely because of its survival value.”
 
We are capable of transcending this natural tendency and viewing the world in a more nuanced way: an oversize cortex would be a bit of a waste if we couldn’t. Not all of our judgments need be split second ones, and if we take the time we can see shades of gray. We even can step back and see colors completely outside the black-white spectrum. However, it takes an effort. More often than not it is worth that effort.
 
Though by now we should know better, it is still easy to be seduced by a binary formulation such as “You’re either with us or against us.” Well, no. Not really. Moral questions cannot always be simplified into Good vs. Evil. (Nietzsche dedicated a whole book to that one: Beyond Good and Evil, though I’m afraid I raised few eyebrows while reading it while waiting in the jury pool at the county courthouse.) A proposal is not necessarily smart or stupid – it can be a bit of both. The same can be said about a person.
 
True, like our ancestors, we still encounter circumstances when binary thought is good for us, e.g. fight or flight. Binary judgment is a quick efficient rough-and-ready way to categorize events, people, and things in our lives. After all we don’t always have the luxury of time to give every matter deeper thought. We might never get around to reacting at all were we to do that. But it behooves us to remain aware that we are oversimplifying – and polarizing. If we have the time and the patience we can do better: assuming, that is, that we want to. There is a certain amount of fun to believing that there is a clear right side and a wrong side and that we are on the right one. In some particular case we might even be correct. But probably not.

 

Benny Goodman – Gotta Be This Or That (1945)