Contrast
is power. The greater the distinction between one position and another,
the stronger its credentials. We have an atavistic impulse toward opposition:
every analysis of a concept or thing
reverts to a sketch of its converse. Since dualism is invariably invoked
as a hermeneutic aid, we don't notice its role in structuring our thoughts,
in shaping and finally constraining our understanding. After thousands
of years of a binary approach to political, philosophical, economic
and sociological problems, we have let our imagination ossify. We are
three-dimensional beings imprisoned within
a two-dimensional perspective.
Banners and slogans are distilled ideas: reductionism is our weakness.
In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, a baldly dualist perspective
changed the terms of debate and made both a peaceful resolution or
a broader coalition force impossible. Protestors around the world
chanted 'No Blood for Oil.' Supporters responded: 'Anti-war Is Pro-terrorism.'
Still others wanted a more finely-tuned discussion about the long-term
effectiveness of inspections backed by the threat of force. Polls
taken in February suggested that such a policy had the support of
pluralities and perhaps majorities in England, America and even Germany,
but it was a position that required elaboration and compromise.[1]
In the event, they never had the chance. Strident voices hijacked
the debate and marched off in opposite directions, bullhorns blaring.
Polarized ranting made real discourse impossible. The war might have
been avoided or more broadly supported -- in either case, a less divisive
and discouraging result, one with better long-term prospects of success.
We shouldn't have been surprised. Dualism is older than organized
religion, as old as philosophy. Plato distinguished between forms
and the world, the ideal and the actual instantiation.[2] The Bible
is an
extended allegory of good and evil, of us (the chosen people, and
then those who follow Christ) against them (Egyptians, Canaanites,
Romans, sinners -- a medley of unbelievers).[3] The Old Testament
chronicles the mostly horrific tribulations of a tribe: its interactions
with other, less durable populations, and its efforts to secure God's
blessing (if not reliably his aid), while diverting his wrath to others.[4]
The New Testament is an extended meditation on saints and sinners
and the paths to heaven and hell.[5]
Gnosticism, which predates church-centered Christianity by several
hundred years, held that the spirit world was ideal and the physical
world contaminated and evil.[6] True knowledge rested in the
spiritual being, base knowledge in mere matter. Reincarnation was
not a blessing but rather a sentence. In this, the Gnostics foreshadowed
Nietzsche's eternal recurrence, in which each action must be repeated
endlessly.[7] Earlier, Zoroaster, who lived in the 6th century B.C.,
believed the world to be a product of the struggle between Ormuzd
and Ahriman, light and wisdom on the one hand, darkness and evil on
the other.[8] The Manicheans, a hybrid of Gnostic and Zoroastran thought,
with a helping of pre-Islamic Persian pantheism, posited a world perfectly
divided between good and evil, the former represented by the spirit
and the latter by the body, the two spheres radically and irrevocably
distinct.[9] Although Catholicism rejected Platonic dualism in favor
of a theistic monism, a God-centered unity, St.Augustine remained
preoccupied with the difference between physical and moral evil,[10]
and Thomas Aquinas and the Scholastics distinguished between spiritual
beings and the bodily matter that the spirit animates.[11]
Descartes, the first modern thinker to provide a systematic analysis
of the dualism between mind and body, held that the mind and body
interact at a single point -- the pineal gland, of all places.[12]
Descartes may have been wrong about the gland, but his focus on the
causal relationship set the terms of the mind-body problem and gave
rise to a new discipline: the philosophy of the mind.[13] Descartes
conflated thought and being, but others were less certain. Spinoza
and Schopenhauer believed that it was impossible to quite distinguish
between body and soul, and for that reason the nature of
consciousness was unknowable.[14] Saxophone players since Lester Young
have tended to agree.
If the mind-body problem no longer occupies a central place in philosophic
inquiry, it is because cognitive science has successfully advanced
the idea that the mind is the body. As Steven Pinker has
demonstrated to great acclaim: "The mind is a system of organs
of computation designed by natural selection to solve the problems
faced by our ancestors in their foraging way of life."[15] There
is no soul
in the machine. Rather, the machine is constituted to create the effect
of a soul; the machine is so finely calibrated that it is conscious
of its existence and its potential for nonexistence.
* * *
Efforts at synthesis have been unsatisfying. In Buddhist cosmology,
yin and yang are opposing forces, similar to the Manichean concepts
of good and evil, which comprise an overarching whole, the Tao.[16]
Dissatisfaction and ill-health result from an imbalance between these
two forces, and happiness is closely tied to an individual's ability
to get the balance right. Yet the basic organizing principle of Eastern
thought is plainly dualist, for harmony requires a synthesis of yin
and yang.[17]
Nietzsche, taken with Buddhist and Zoroastrian (Zarathustran) thinking,
identified two opposing artistic forms and explored the ways in which
Greek tragedy embodied them. The first, which he called
Apollonian, represented order, reason, clarity and harmony.[18] The
second, the Dionysian, denoted wild creativity, free-spirited and
usually drunken play. Many philosophers interpret Nietzsche's
conception of tragedy to elevate the Dionysian over the sterile Apollonian,
but Nietzsche was a subtler thinker. He was searching for position
beyond dualist structures, just as he demanded an ethics
beyond good and evil. Nietzsche believed that the strong-willed could
balance Apollonian and Dionysian forces.[19] Few would be capable
of such mastery, usually effected through dedication to a particular
art or sport, and then only briefly. At those moments of crystalline
balance, the over-man would gain insight and knowledge.
Nietzsche's conception of the tragedy was an attempt to synthesize
dualist thought, but it wasn't a rigorous, systemic effort. Nearly
all postmodernist theory, including the entirety of linguistics and
deconstruction, is founded on a structuralist theory of language as
a system of binary signs. Each sign is made up of a signifier (the
word itself) and the signified (the concept or meaning). De Saussure
observed that these signs are arbitrary, in that they might plausibly
refer to anything else. The letters s, i, s, t, e and r suggest a
girl or woman who shares the same parents as the referent, but the
idea of this woman is not linked by any inner relationship to the
succession of sounds that serve as its signifier.[20] Deconstruction
at once inverted and advanced structuralist linguistics, but in its
reliance on the relation of sign to signifier, it remained essentially
dualist.[21]
The Marxists, for all their revolutions, were traditionalists in
this respect. Dialectical materialism set religion against science,
capital against labor, elevating in each case the latter as the determining
factor in any inquiry into the structure of society. For the Marxists,
the kind of idealism Plato advocated was useless if not misleading.
Rather, society was better served by an analysis of how material factors,
such as the means of production, determine the social and economic
structure of society.[22]
More than ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, political
theory remains stubbornly dualist, despite the evidence that there
are more than two positions on the political spectrum. If the 20th
century taught us anything, it is that political thought cannot be
divided neatly into left and right. Indeed, the political landscape
is less a continuum than a circle, with the fascist right and the
totalitarian left adjoining each other on the dark side of the political
planet, an unpleasant territory that now includes the
fundamentalist state. Recent adventures in foreign policy are instructive,
since Conservatives and Labour in England, and Republicans and Democrats
in America, don't line up neatly when it comes to foreign politics.
The Bush-Blair alliance is one of a radical conservative and a liberal
with centrist tendencies. So too with Chirac and Schroeder. In the
Middle East, it's the conservative warriors who end their lives striving
for peace (Rabin and Sadat). And yet we persist, in America, England
and elsewhere, to divide the political debate into left and right.
We divide liberty into negative values (the right to be free of
restrictions) and positive ones (the right to food and shelter and
work). Isaiah Berlin, starting with an obscure quote from Auchilochus,
grouped thinkers as either hedgehogs or foxes: hedgehogs know one
big thing, while foxes know many things.[23] Similarly, the protagonist
of John Updike's Rabbit tetralogy divides all humanity into rabbits
and bulls. Rabbits dart about to survive while bulls plod on, unwavering.[24]
There are no Platonic hedgehogs, no thoroughbred rabbits. Except
for the true believers, we are all mutts. Everyone, going about their
daily lives, will be both a taurine rabbit and a twitchy-nosed
bovine. A healthy society will understand that there are no pure positive
and negative liberties, that free speech means little for the starving.
* * *
Even the arts have succumbed. The Matisse-Picasso exhibit that opened
at the Tate Modern before hopping the Channel to the Grand Palais
and then the pond to MoMA Queens, pits the two artists against each
other, reducing masterpieces to a half-century long, hubris-fueled
game of artistic poker.[25] The catalogue is devoted to a "Comparison
with Comments," two pictures on opposite pages with a paragraph
comparing them. It's puerile. Evidently not to be outdone in the race
to the binary bottom, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York organized
"Manet/Velazquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting,"
which -- apart from Met director Philippe de Montebello's obvious
joy in recasting French 19th century painting as an awed response
to Spanish masters -- makes, with the ostentatious resources at the
Met's disposal, the incisive point that artists are influenced by
their predecessors, a process that involves less anxiety thanoutright
mimicry.[26]
Dualism may be hardwired into our genes. The chemical structure of
DNA is helical, two strings of sugar phosphates wound round each other
and connected by supporting trusses of hydrogen, dangerous if detached
or misaligned. Watson and Crick understood that the binary nature
of DNA was its critical trait:
The novel feature of the structure is the manner in which the
two chains are held together by the... bases...[which] are joined
together in pairs, a single base from one chain being hydrogen-bonded
to a single base from the other chain, so that the two lie side
by side... Only specific pairs of bases can bond together. ... [Since]
only specific pairs of bases can be formed, it follows that if the
sequence of bases on one chain is
given, then the sequence on the other chain is automatically determined....
It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have
postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for
the genetic material.[27]
If the influence of DNA on thought structure seems a leap, Richard
Dawkins's work renders it more plausible.[28] Natural selection operates
upon genes, not species, so the evolutionary success of the
genes we cart around with us -- or, more accurately, the genes which
utilize humans as a useful reproductive vessel -- may be attributable
to the kinds of thoughts they determine.[29] Humans may not be walking
and talking dualists, but genes certainly are.
Dualism lies at the heart of life. It should not then be surprising
that given the chance to build the ultimate machine, we based it on
zeros and ones. Just as the DNA structure determines replication and
reproduction -- the laws of life -- computer code controls software
and, more broadly, cyberspace. Larry Lessig has written that just
as constitutions identify and protect values, computer software
preserves certain values at the expense of others. Code, Lessig argues,
is law.[30] And code, at heart, is binary.
* * *
Our genetic and computer codes may be Manichean, but our thinking
must not be. Dualism, which originated as a theory about the structure
of the world, has calcified into an analytical set piece.
We must find another model. We must bring a multivalent tool to bear
on political, sociological, philosophical or economic issues. It would
be rigorously open-minded, continuously recalibrated. It would cast
dichotomies as guideposts rather than fenced-in camps. It would be
vibrantly relational, a cross-pollinating perspective yielding imaginative
solutions rather than deadening, zero-sum compromises.
Efforts to find a 'third way' suggest the desperation that dualism
yields, particularly in the political arena. It is there that a multivalent
tool would be most welcome and useful. As liberal democracies mature,
political voices accrete into two major parties because they are unable
to wield significant influence outside them. Opinions that don't advance
the party's current strategy are shunted. A broad coalition -- a big
tent -- is usually an ineffectual one. In the United States the two-party
system is creaking, with the Republicans bloated with money and power
and the Democrats just emerging from fearful disarray. This is partly
the result of the surprisingly symbiotic relationship between corporations,
with their lavish lobbying purses, and the Christian right, which
votes, writes letters, protests and, well, votes.
Corporations pursue economic interests while the Christian right monitors
social matters, and because they rarely conflict, it turns out to
be relatively easy for the Republican party to address both. The recent
strength of Green parties in Germany and Scandinavia, and the occasional
burst of hateful exuberance by Le Pen's Front National and Austria's
Freedom Party, are exceptions that prove the
rule. Their gains are almost immediately co-opted by one of the entrenched
parties (consider the endearing Mr. Joschka Fischer, Germany's foreign
minister, faithfully serving Schroeder's Social
Democrats).
The loss of effective political diversity emasculates liberal democracy.
It may foster corruption. A new perspective, shorn of dualist tropes,
would create a more dynamic republic -- and it could work in real
life.
Few political issues cleave a group of citizens as neatly and ferociously
in two as environmental problems. A hydroelectric dam is a good enough
example. It produces electricity for the surrounding
community, water for down-valley farmers, a hell of a hurdle for spawning
salmon, stagnation and a slow death by silting for the river and the
riparian ecology, and, in the submergence of often stunning
valleys and waterfalls, a symbol of human arrogance to environmentalists.
A dam has a way of producing a fantastic array of interest groups:
loggers, farmers, environmentalists, fishermen,
outdoorsmen -- who may include backcountry hikers and kayak enthusiasts,
who tend to be philosophic environmentalists, and sport fishermen
and hunters, who may not -- and then there is the electric power company,
its stockholders, and the large and small construction firms with
an eye toward many-zeroed contracts. And somehow, among all these
voices, the dispute is inevitably drawn as narrowly as possible --
YES! or NO! -- as if humans, with our laughter and irony and opposable
thumbs, with our sense of wonder and the capacity to design a thing
as beautiful and functional as a bicycle, could think of nothing more
complex.
All of the interest groups -- with the exception, perhaps, of the
off-the-grid ecotopians and their neighbors, the antigovernment survivalists
-- need the dam, or at least the electricity it will generate. Even
the coldest bean counters can appreciate the value of unspoiled wilderness.
The solution to the dam dilemma will lie in the broadest balance of
power generation, harvesting and extraction of
resources, and wilderness preservation. This dam must be linked to
the last dam, to the next gas-fired plant, to the roadless national
monument across the state. Some environmentalists, for example, are
working to connect wildlands across continents rather than focusing
on gemlike islands of wilderness slowly losing their viability to
encroaching development. It turns out that the earliest preserves
in
Europe, North America and Africa were sustainable because the surrounding
territory was largely uninhabited. Now that tract housing has reached
the Yellowstone gates, the ecological health of these
areas are foundering. Connected wildlands both strengthen the ecology
of more strictly cordoned areas and permit development elsewhere.
The nature of the project compels compromise with the broadest range
of constituencies rather than the one-off toe-to-toe battles with
the snowmobile lobby in one region, the logging industry in another,
ranchers on the plains and developers on the outskirts of town. A
multivalent compromise based on relational thinking will create a
coherent framework for incremental issues.
In the future, all politics will be global. Before then, we must
strive to draw political issues as broadly as possible. In the short
term, this will make solutions more difficult by increasing the complexity
of any acceptable compromise. It's always easier to cut a side deal;
remember the popularity of the smoke-filled antechamber. But the plans
and compromises brokered there don't long outlast the cigars.
Even the conflict in the Middle East has been perverted by dualist
thought. Cast as a dispute between Israelis and Palestinians, any
incremental gain by one must represent a loss by the other. When the
focus is real estate, solutions tend to be zero sum, but even where
the land at issue includes holy sites of three major religions, a
broader, relational perspective would advance the peace process. A
solution is not likely to be reached by drawing lines in the sand.
Rather, every directly and indirectly interested party will have to
contribute, compromise, and fold down its aggressions. Syria will
have to cede its control of Lebanon in return for part of the Golan,
a recognition of Israel, and a demilitarized zone along the Heights.
Egypt will have to warm a cold peace with free trade, while it and
Jordan grant amnesty and citizenship to Palestinians living there.
Israel will have to allow a relatively small but symbolically
substantial number of Palestinian refugees the right to return to
and live peacefully within the Israeli state. The wealthy Gulf states
will have to generously fund a new Palestinian state and end support
for terrorist organizations. Iraq must be rebuilt with the assistance
of the United Nations. Palestinians will have to police themselves
and quash terrorism, or Israel will have the right to defend itself
against the fledgling state. And Israel will have to withdraw from
Gaza and all but a short security zone along the Green Line -- one
that excludes the settlements. Then the region may slowly recover
from this thousand-year thrashing.
* * *
It would be easy enough to dismiss any call for a new way of thinking
as starry-eyed idealism, but an important piece of the foundation
has already been laid. Few believe that the technological revolution
will bring peace, love and understanding, but it has already yielded
a freer, more open society, one in which more people have access to
more information, possessed of the tools necessary to both contribute
to the community and succeed within it. The internet may not change
the world -- the millennium and the millennial market seems a long
way behind us now -- but technology and globalization will make broad,
relational thinking increasingly easy to understand, even necessary.
During the Clinton years, the White House famously employed a technique
misleadingly termed triangulation to control the political agenda.[31]
But it was less about finding a third way than about
splitting the difference, finding a defensible middle ground between
extreme views. It worked well enough for a while, but it was finally
ineffective. When the bubble burst, America found that it had not
come very far at all, and indeed may have taken a few steps back --
a desperately imbalanced society with extremes of wealth and poverty
that has mislaid its sense of civic purpose. Its hypocrisies have
not
gone unnoticed. Much of the rest of the planet either resents or in
many places loathes American exceptionalism, its sense of entitlement,
even its professed ideals. In the decade following September 11th,
the U.S. and its allies must accomplish a great deal more than it
did in the decade preceding it. The terrain will be much less forgiving.
The need for a more imaginative mindset is pressing, even urgent.
There is no life at the poles, or at least not much of it. The action
is south of the Arctic and north of the Southern Ocean. We live there;
we must think there as well. Just as the beauty of black & white
photography lies less in pure blacks and perfect whites than in the
11-tone gray scale, we must learn to think across a continuum.
The power of an Ansel Adams print is less in the intrinsic majesty
of Half Dome, which is photographed thousands of times each day, than
in Adams' mastery of the zone system, a rigorously calibrated method
of controlling exposure, development and printing to maximize range
and density. The zone system is famously difficult. Adams used it
to locate as many as 25 gray tones, but most photographers have happily
abandoned the zone system in favor of the tinkering pleasures of Photoshop.
As citizens, however, we don't have that luxury. We must think broadly
on an open plane. That will require courage and, like the great basketball
player, a sense of where we are. We don't think that way, but we should.
Notes:
------
[1] See, for example, Patrick Tyler and Janet Elder,
"Polls Finds Most in U.S. Support Delaying a War," ~New York
Times~, February 14, 2003, A 1; John Allen Paulos, "Polls, a Proverb
and the Price: Gauging War Sentiment in the U.S. and Elsewhere,"
ABCNEWS.com, March 2, 2003 Available online at: http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scitech/WhosCounting/whoscounting030302.html;
Warren Hoge, "Parliament Backs Blair on Iraq, but Vote Bares Rift
in Labor Party," ~New York Times~, February 27, 2003, A 12.; Richard
Bernstein, "Continental Reaction: Speech Praised by Europe's Politicians,
but Public Is Still Unpersuaded,"
~New York Times~, February 6, 2003, Sect. A, p. 21.
[2] Plato, _Phaedo_, in _Plato, The Collected Dialogues_,
Hugh Tredennick, trans., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999,
pp.40-84.
[3] See, for example, Judges 3; Exodus 1:1; Habbakkuk
1; Psalm 9:17; Daniel 12:2.
[4] See, for example, anything in Exodus, but particularly
Exodus 12; Psalm 136:10-16.
[5] See, for example, Matthew 25:46; Luke 16:19-31.
[6] Elaine Pagels, _The Gnostic Gospels_, New York:
Vintage, 1989, pp. 122-27.
[7] Friedrich Nietzsche, _The Gay Science_, Walter
Kaufmann, trans., New York: Random House, 1974, sections 285, 341.
[8] Thomas Bulfinch, _Mythology_, Modern Library,
1998, ChapterXXXVII.
[9] John Bowler, _Oxford Book of World Religions_,
Oxford: OxfordUniv. Press, 2000, p. 565.
[10] St. Augustine, "On the Nature of Good,"
in _The Essential Augustine_, Vernon J. Burke, ed., Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1974, sections 1-25.
[11] F.C. Copleston, _Aquinas_, London: Penguin,
1991, pp. 156-172.
[12] G.J.C. Lokhorst & Timo T. Kaitaro. "The
originality of Descartes' theory about the pineal gland," _Journal
for the History of the Neurosciences_, 10, No 1 (2001): pp. 6-18.
[13] Descartes, "Meditations on the First Philosophy,"
in _ADiscourse on Method, Meditations and Principles_, John Veitch,
trans., New York: Everyman, pp. 79-88.
[14] Spinoza, _The Ethics and Other Works_, ed. and
trans. Edward Curley, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994,
pp. 48-55; Schopenhauer, _The World as Will and Representation_, E.F.S.
Payne trans., New York: Dover, 1966, pp. 153-165.
[15] Steven Pinker, _How the Mind Works_, New York:
Norton, 2003, p.21.
[16] Alan Watts, _The Way of Zen_, New York: Vintage,
1989, p. 175.
[17] Lao Tse, _Tao te Ching_, Stephen Mitchell, ed.
and trans., New York: HarperCollins, 1988, section 2 ("Being
and non-being create each other / Difficult and easy support each
other / Long and short define each other / High and low depend on
each other / Before and after follow each other").
[18] Nietzsche, _The Birth of Tragedy_, Walter Kaufmann,
trans., New York: Random House, 1967, ch. 1-5.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Ferdinand de Saussure, _Course in General Linguistics_,
Wade Baskins, trans., New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965, pp. 12-14.
[21] Jonathan Culler, _On Deconstruction: Theory
and Criticism after Structuralism_, Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1983, pp 227-280; Terry Eagleton, _Literary Theory_, Minneapolis:
Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1996, pp. 110-131.
[22] Terry Eagleton, _Literary Theory_, Minneapolis:
Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1996, pp. 169- 188; Terry Eagleton, "Towards
a Science of the Text," (1976) in _Marxist Literary Theory_,
Terry Eagleton and Drew Milne, eds., Oxford: Blackwell, 2002.
[23] Isaiah Berlin, "The Hedgehog and the Fox"
in _The Russian Thinkers_, London: Penguin, 1994, pp. 22-81.
[24] John Updike, _The Rabbit Novels_, v. 1 &
2, New York: Ballentine, 2003.
[25] "Matisse Picasso," Museum of Modern
Art, New York: February 13-May 19, 2003; Henri Matisse, Isabelle Monod-Fontaine,
John Golding, John Elderfield, Anne Baldassari, Pablo Picasso, Kirk
Varnadoe, Elizabeth Cowling (contributors), _Matisse Picasso_, New
York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002.
[26] Gary Tinterow, Genevieve Lacambre, Deborah Rolden
(contributors), _Manet/Velazquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting
(Metropolitan Museum of Art)_, New Haven: Yale Univ. Press,2003.
[27] The seminal article is James Watson and Francis
Crick, "A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid," _Nature_,
April 2, 1953.
[28] Richard Dawkins, _The Selfish Gene,_ Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 46-66.
[29] Ibid.
[30] Lawrence Lessig, _Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace,
_Basic Books, 1999, pp. 3-9.
[31] See, for example, the overheated rant by the
otherwise talented Chris Hitchens: Christopher Hitchens, _No One Left
To Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton_, New York:
Verso Books, 1999, pp. 23-53.
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