It Doesn't Matter if You're Black or White (Unless You're Into That Sort of Thing)

In my last entry I made the brief (but oh so compelling) argument that I'd found the true difference between liberals and conservatives, the atomic philosophical point that fuels the perpetually antagonistic stalemate of partisan politics and compels the twenty-four hour news channels into unyielding fervor. It is not about gun control, or abortion, or varying emphases on the term "freedom," nor any other conveniently superficial issue. No, it's simply a preference of expression - whether you believe that the 'answers' to the world's 'problems' should be expressed in terms of absolutes or thoughtful relativity, black and white or shades of grey. I'm going to write more about this now (and this time we'll see if I'm familiar with English words other than 'nuance' and 'distinction').

Even if you buy my first premise, you might be asking why I insist on linking the monochrome/greyvie population with the two major political parties. Won't such cavalier oversimplifications of people's hard-fought worldviews satisfy none and alienate all? Maybe. Actually, ironically, I bet that only the monochromes will feel put-off. The grey-vies will probably be pretty into it. Let's continue.

Black and White means Good and Evil, the basic proposition of traditional Judeo-Christian morality. Sure, everyone makes both good and bad decisions throughout their life, but at the end of the day you end up in one of two places: perpetual bliss or eternal damnation. There's no middle ground in finality, despite the middle ground of most people's decision-making career. Perhaps it's a matter of weighting percentages, as in you just need to shoot for 51% good to make the cut, but that seems a little arbitrary. For many it's a matter of having been saved by belief, so that their less-than-perfect track record on Earth is given a dramatic (and some would say unfair) boost in the final tally.

Eastern religion is usually attributed with the 'grey' slant on good and evil - there's no judgment here, both bad and good are necessary aspects of life, caught in an eternal dance where one never surpasses the other and neither ever disappear. This is the ying and yang, Shiva as Creator and Destroyer, and a whole rainbow of reincarnation options when it's all said and done. If you're kind of good, maybe you'll get to be a lion. If you're kind of less good, maybe you'll be a gazelle instead. There's no angst here as to whether the morality switch has been flipped on or off, because it's really more of a dimmer. The mood lighting of the soul. Am I saying that all liberals are Hindu at heart? Well, yes, but that's not very American, so no. I'd go with "kind of Christian," but...forget it, let's just call it Anglican and move on, shall we?

(I do think there is middle ground here, especially if you bring Emanuel Swedenborg into the discussion. Here we have a view of spirituality and the afterlife that seems compatible with both worldviews - DT Suzuki hailed Swedenborg the Buddha of the North for this very reason. This casting of heaven and hell still presents a basic dichotomy: Heaven is Good, and Hell is Bad. But, and here's the rub, there are infinite degrees within heaven and hell. Some people live "on the outskirts of heaven," others in the lower earth, or the desert, or to the north. There's a whole other heaven for polygymast Muslims who had the other nine commandments down. It's a varied place, with many shades.)

So this gets back to the political thing. I don't really care if you or I are grey or monochramtic in how we consider the minutiae of our lives, because we'll work with whatever we've got, but what kind of leader do you want? That's the question that I think most election rhetoric is really trying to get to. Do you want someone who will take a hard line on anything and everything, or someone who will thoughtfully muse on the possible repercussions of a given subject? Warrior chief or a philosopher king?

And I know you think I'm overstating the point, I hear your complaints, but in this case you're wrong. There are such thing as thoughtful conservatives, true. But when a grey-vie is reflecting on a situation, he knows there's no ideal outcome, and has already resigned himself to a compromise based on the various mitigating factors. The final decision is probably something like "okay, the best we could have done under the circumstances." A monochromatic worldview still allows for moral ambiguity, but only in the short term. The goal isn't to reach a compromise, but to make a decision - everything considered, is this good, or is it bad? And 'bad,' in this case, is an all-or-nothing proposition. Once the discussion's over, that thing, whatever it is, is not with us. Therefore, it is most likely against us (if you're unconvinced, just think Freedom Fries). And there's a good reason why most black-or-white decisions fall mostly onto the conservative platform. There are certain concepts that seem *obviously* good, like having babies. When you make the subject more complex, it becomes ambiguous, and there's no obvious good on the other end of the spectrum (not having babies?). If we're just shooting for 51%, this will fall back on the simplest good nine times out of ten. And there's nothing wrong with that.

Now, the next obvious question: aren't there hard-nosed liberals in the world, who make black-or-white statements about those very same ambiguous outcomes? Yes, there are athiests who get together in groups just so they can all not worship a god together. Yes, of course, and these people really are the worst human beings on the planet.

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.