Election Special!

Like many people (specifically the kinds of people who also do this), I spend a lot of my time shoehorning other members of the species into neat little boxes. I’m not in any way proud of this, but when I’m interacting with people I don’t know very well I often find myself sizing them up, cataloging and indexing them for easier future reference. It comes out of insecurity I suppose, as if I need to make sure that their existence won’t shatter my preconceived notions of the world, that I can go on thinking the way I do about society and culture despite the addition of a new and unmeasured variable.

For the sake of efficiency I would really like to know just how many boxes there actually are, and I devote altogether too much mental bandwidth on this specifically fruitless pursuit. In many ways my mythology acts as a kind of workbook for this process, and I have the unfortunate tendency of burdening my characters with entire fundamental philosophies just so I can put them in a room together and watch them hash it out. Unless you’re George Orwell (and you’re probably not), that’s probably one of the surest ways to ring a subject completely dry of any potential nuance or depth.

My favorite classification system is the two-box model, always expressed as a fully contained absolute, as in: “There are two kinds of people in the world: the haves and the have-nots; those who have read Dostoevsky and those who haven’t; people who wash their hands after they pee, and people who don’t pee on their hands, etc.” I enjoy the audacity of these statements, the unapologetic finality of their formulation. There’s something invariably compelling in believing that a two-box declaration could be true, even if it does demean its subject by suggesting that an issue can be neatly divided into two mutually exclusive and polar opposite properties. I believe this is why so many of our foundational institutions are based on the premise of a two-box declaration - liberal or conservative, rich or poor, saved or damned, us or them - because they’re fundamentally easy to grasp.

My two-box-set of choice comes from Borges, who claimed that everyone is born either a Platonist or an Aristotelian. I often pull this out when I reach an impasse in a debate, because I really do think it encapsulates an insurmountable difference in world view. And if I just can't agree with someone, I content myself with the admission that they're probably just a member of the other group (I'll leave you to guess which party I subscribe to, though I will say that Aristotle strikes me as a bit of a prick). The nuances of the distinction could make a blog entry (or a series of books) on their own, but it basically comes down to this: an Aristotelian believes that meaning and truth are found only in front of the eyes, and a Platonist believes they’re found behind them. Either the world exists on its own, and we’re here to observe it with our limited senses and do our best to describe our findings, or we’re the ones creating and experiencing the meaning all along, and we simply project our creations out onto the world. This is often recast as science vs. faith, or rationalism vs. empiricism (if you're a philosophy dork). Either way, I'm a fan.

In the past couple weeks, however, I’ve stumbled across what may be a new favorite. It’s a fairly basic formulation, but I think it neatly summarizes the national divide that dutifully rears itself every four years (much more often for most people) as Americans again decide whether it’s the Republicans or Democrats who will save/destroy the way of life that they’ve come to enjoy and rely on. Of course, many people are too mature to be goaded into this debate; they’ll tell you that all politicians regardless of title are liars and shameless opportunists, and these people are obviously correct. But for me that makes national politics just another interesting component of the American mythology, be it one that has further reaching implications (arguably) than what’s currently happening on Lost.

And no, my revelation is not that all people are either liberal or conservative. That’s flagrantly obvious and not even true on its face - very few people are explicitly either, though they may back one side or the other when up against the fence. No, I’ll let you guess the parameters of my new divide, as it occurred to me during the first official McCain/Obama debate a few weeks ago, hosted by Saddleback Church’s Rick Warren. When asked at what point a human fetus becomes a human life (which is an ever-so-slightly more nuanced way of rephrasing the pro-choice/pro-life debate), Obama answered,

“Well, I think that whether you’re looking at it from a theological perspective or a scientific perspective, answering that question with specificity, you know, is above my pay grade. But let me just speak more generally about the issue of abortion because this is something I — obviously, the country wrestles with. One thing that I’m absolutely convinced of is that there is a moral and ethical element to this issue. And so I think anybody who tries to deny the moral difficulties and gravity of the abortion issue, I think, is not paying attention. So that would be point number one. But point number two: I am — I am pro-choice. I believe in Roe v. Wade. And I come to that conclusion not because I’m pro-abortion but because, ultimately, I don’t think women make these decisions casually. I think they wrestle with these things in profound ways, in consultation with their pastors, or their spouses, or their doctors [and] their family members. And, so for me, the goal right now should be — and this is where I think we can find common ground — and by the way, I’ve now inserted this into the Democratic Party platform — is: how do we reduce the number of abortions? Because the fact is is that, although we’ve had a President who is opposed to abortion over the last eight years, abortions have not gone down. And that, I think, is something that we have to ...”

And then McCain, for his part, answered:

“At the moment of conception.”

This was basically the tone of the entire debate. And it was useful to me, because it revealed a fundamental difference between the two candidates that I wasn’t expecting to see. That distinction has blossomed in a couple conversations I’ve had since then, to the point where I’m now willing to embrace it (until I’m forced to move on) as probably mostly true, and it goes like this: there are two kinds of people in the world (or at least in this election cycle) - those who believe the world is black and white, and those who believe it’s shades of grey.

Discuss.

I was going to expound on this further, but I think I’ve reached a logical word limit, so I’ll write more in a followup post.