The Wisdom In The Middle: Resisting Our Age Of Binary Thinking
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(OPINION) Supposedly it was the literary icon F. Scott Fitzgerald who first observed, in a 1936 Esquire magazine essay, that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”
But the idea itself goes back way before Fitzgerald. It might surprise casual students of religion, and critics of religion as well, that the Bible makes exactly the same point. The scriptures offer fewer black-and-white answers than we imagine. Ancient scribes frequently were way more about grays, questions and the middle ground.
To wit, consider this passage from Ecclesiastes which — in the midst of the holy writ, remember — warns us that being too good is just as dangerous as being too wicked. The key is to find a healthy balance:
“Do not be excessively righteous, and do not be overly wise,” the writer says. “Why should you ruin yourself? Do not be excessively wicked, and do not be foolish. … It is good that you grasp one thing while not letting go of the other; for one who fears God comes out with both of them.”
I bring this up because we’re living in an age filled with binary, black-and-white thinkers.
Maybe all ages have been like this, I can’t say. I didn’t live during, say, the French Revolution or the run-up to the American Civil War or the troubled 1920s and 1930s, when the rise of competing totalitarian ideologies paved the way for World War II. Surely there was a lot of binary thinking going on then, too.
It’s possible the inclination to see every situation and everybody as starkly right or wrong, good or bad, is a leftover evolutionary impulse from humanity’s earliest ages, when people were fighting wooly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers and needed to make snap judgments several times a day to keep from being eaten alive. They didn’t have much leisure to consider the tigers’ point of view.
Wherever it came from, this is for sure: Binary thinking remains a powerful force.
As one example among a thousand, consider the ongoing conflicts over illegal immigration in the United States, as played out in cities such as Minneapolis.
We’ve got two narrow, binary “realities” at work.
The right portrays immigrants, including legal immigrants, as existential threats to the nation, as thugs and apparently as subhumans undeserving of even minimally humane treatment. It feels justified in sending in armed-to-the-teeth, anonymous, Constitutionally untutored federal agents to bully, assault and imprison whomever they choose, including five-year-olds.
In the cases of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, these agents gunned down U.S citizens, for the (now) capital crime of protesting. Their deaths echoed Kent State, 1970.
Still, the most strident of the protestors themselves, the folks from the left, strike me as about as constricted in their thinking as the right, although they possess less firepower.
To them, it appears, all government law enforcement officers are jackboots, folks who favor restrictions on immigration are de facto racists and undocumented immigrants are innocent victims. Some on the left exude a sense of their own righteousness that strains credulity.
Each side says what binary thinking always says in its various costumes: we’re good, you’re evil. We’re right, you’re dangerously wrong. We’re smart, you’re too stupid to speak.
But real life is more complicated.
Illegal immigration is a genuine problem. You can’t just throw open your borders to everyone who wants to come, because immigrants will overwhelm the system. You must have restrictions and enforce them.
At the same time immigrants, documented or not, are humans made in God’s image. Often they’re fleeing horrible situations in their native countries. As God’s children, they must be treated with compassion, even if they must be sent back. It’s a biblical commandment.
And in the United States, citizens have a right to protest the government that’s guaranteed in our Constitution. It especially applies to people the government considers obnoxious.
So if there’s a workable answer to this immigration mess, it won’t ever be found in constipated, binary thinking. As Ecclesiastes says, you’ve got to be able to hold onto one set of facts without letting go of the other. The solution lies between the extremes.
Again, I use this only as one example of myriad.
Religious sects, which should know better, often engage in binary thinking. We’ve got the truth, they say, so your so-called truth is a lie. We’re going to heaven, so you’re bound for hell.
Couples do the same. As a minister, I’ve listened to a lot of people’s marital woes. It’s fascinating. You talk to the husband, and he’ll give you 10 reasons why their problems are his wife’s fault. Then you talk to the wife, and she assures you it’s all his fault. She’s got a list in her purse that proves it.
Only by putting their lists together and talking them through honestly and humbly can the parties begin to see a fuller picture of what’s rubbing them the wrong way.
Binary thinking always flattens things. It turns human beings into caricatures. It ends curiosity. You don’t have to listen because you’ve already decided the verdict and denounced the guilty. There’s no space for redemption.
Resisting binary thinking doesn’t mean abandoning our values. But it requires us to accept that much of life exists in a messy, contradictory, unfinished middle. We have to make peace with not having all the answers. We have to be willing to learn.
Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a regular column about faith and religion for the Herald-Leader, where this column first appeared. Prather’s written four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.