Dualistic Thinking
Sometimes it feels like our tendency toward dualistic thinking never gets us anywhere but disagreement.
How far back does the dualistic thinking go in western thought? Descartes? Maybe even, the ancient Greeks? Zoroaster? Doesn’t really matter. It seems to be an essential way in which many people, seemingly the majority of people, in the U.S. tend to think — myself included.
What are we thinking about here? The way we divide many issues into a binary? It is either yes or no, on or off, real or fake, etc.
Here are some of the binaries that we’ve pondered, maybe for millennia:
mind vs. body
good vs. evil
immaterial vs. material
nature vs. nurture
Humans argue about these things from time to time. Is there an assumption that one is right and one is wrong? There goes another binary! Either X or Y is correct or true or however you want to call it? What if in many of these debates it is not just purely X or Y? What if it is a little bit of X and a little bit of Y? And, a little bit of A, a little bit of B, C, and so on?
My point is, does dualistic thinking force us to oversimplify whatever issue it is that we are considering? If we see things starkly in black and white does it ever get us closer to understanding things? In recent centuries some people have begun thinking of things more metaphorically in shades of gray. But is that limiting too?
What if grayscale is only one axis of how we could see the world? But what if we are dealing with a reality that has more than one axis or that is multi-planar? Have you ever seen the color picker in Adobe Photoshop? Other apps have copied this idea, but it is a square with gradations of colors, and to the right is a vertical bar that shows a gradation of all possible colors. As you slide the arrows up and down on the bar, the gradations in the square change based on which color region you are in on the bar.
What if instead of thinking in black and white or grayscale, we saw the world in deep technicolor? What do I mean by that? What I mean is instead of breaking concepts into binary oppositions, we could see them in much greater complexity. Like grayscale, except not just gray — every gradation of every color that we can possibly see or imagine. Does that make any sense?
Rather than considering whether it is nature or our genetics that define who we become vs. nurture or the environments we experience that define who we become, what if we allow for the possibility that both of those could be different colors with differing gradations of how much impact they may have on each of us. And what if the way those colors interact create new colors that affect us? And, what if there are other colors too, like some limited concept of free will? That there are times in our life where our choices have a major effect on who we become. Or how we frame up the stories we tell ourselves and about ourselves can shape us too?
And, what if there are unseen forces that we cannot yet imagine that play some role in shaping who we become? The colors are helpful as an analogy, but there are also regions of the electromagnetic spectrum that our visual systems cannot detect or see. What if there are aspects of what we call reality that we cannot perceive, and therefore we can’t account for them in determining what makes a person who they become? Like Gamma radiation and how it can affect the expression of our genes.
And what if we treated every issue in the same way? That it is probably more complex than we can understand and account for. Would that prevent our tendency toward dualistic thinking from causing so much disagreement?