“If you aren’t with us, you’re with the terrorists.”
—President George Bush, Jr.
I don’t know if language itself is the culprit, but humanity seems largely locked into a trap of binary thinking. Black versus White, Good versus Evil, Us versus Them, Fact versus Misinformation, Safety versus Freedom… Are we doomed to play opposing roles in this shadow play, or can we step back to take in nature’s whole body of work?
Seeing the world through a bipolar lens is a convenient way to sort sheep from goats, insiders from outsiders, privilege from oppression. The implications infect religion, politics, even physics (wave versus particle; matter versus energy, or even “anti-matter”). There’s no denying a practical value in distinguishing friend from foe, threat from fantasy, knowledge from illusion. The problem is the blind spot covering the inevitable gray area or rainbow spectrum between. But to open up that view takes work, and a willingness to hang out in the slack time between opposing tides.
Daring to question the dualistic imperative of sexuality, maybe the alphabet-gendered are onto something (at least, until the letters run out). Yet nature does operate with reliable rules of thumb, when it comes to life’s basic operating system. Transhumanism takes deconstruction to the extreme, and threatens to muddy the very definition of humanity, lulling us into uncharted territory as it respects no boundaries. Anything goes—if the definition of human is infinitely malleable, clay in our own too-clever hands.
The globalist agenda likewise erases all national identities and borders in the name of all-inclusive immigration and centralized control of “public health.” Even when these formerly sacrosanct Western institutions (such as gender roles, national cultures, and individual rights) are dismantled, new walls are erected to replace them, and censorship is enforced to protect the new order of things, the new binary system where everything is either Mandated or Prohibited.
(above snippet from el gato malo)
The age-old curse of fundamentalism appears at the core of our digital age, which rests on the binary basis of computer coding, where everything is reduced to a 0 or 1. Since ancient times the ethic of tribalism and empire marked religion and politics with ironclad rules of behavior and thought. These days the decorum of political correctness has a more obscure source than in previous times, when King or Pope decreed. Now the rule of law has a shadow partner, outsourced and funded to pose as grassroots activism. The one thing top-down and bottoms-up politics has in common is commandment number one: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” In our time that translates as: Dissent is verboten.
Right and Left are meaningless labels, in a time when both conservatives and progressives sacrifice their traditional principles for power. War and Peace lose their commonsense significance when inverted for geopolitical aims and domestic propaganda. Truth and fiction have always been problematic sparring partners in the field of literature, but the disputed narrative territory becomes a deadly minefield sown by the high priests and mercenary forces of State Science.
painting by Jordan Henderson
Again I take refuge in nature’s way. We are presented with ample opportunity to again characterize everything, if we wish, in the most simple pairs of opposites: light and dark, night and day, sleep and waking, hungry and satisfied, alive or dead. But is that any way to live?
Black-and-white photography, movies and TV were better than nothing, you might say. It served its purpose as an interim technology. The same can be excused of the binary/digital technology and thinking we depend on today. If that’s the starting point of discussion.
Let’s not lose sight of the full palette of colors available, the gradations of gray. Not to get lost in muddied waters, or infinite pixelated hues… and neither to default to on or off. To acknowledge the practical use of binary thinking, and to recognize that it’s a dumbed-down simulation, a shortcut, a figure of speech, a metaphor, a convenience, a construct: two choices out of many. Sometimes in nature these are given, obvious, sensible. Sometimes there is room to negotiate a new reality—a task perhaps, or perhaps not, uniquely human.
This post first appeared at Nowick Gray’s Substack, New World Dreaming.
