Either-Or

Republican or Democrat?  Liberal or Conservative?*   Right or Left?  Jefferson or Hamilton?  Capitalism or Socialism?  Adam Smith or Karl Marx?  Competition or cooperation?   Freedom or Equality?   Liberty or Justice?  Young or old?  Past or future?  Male or Female?  Faith or Reason?  Science or Religion?  Determinism or Free-Will?  Nature or Nurture?  Destiny or Chance?  Thinking or feeling?  Head or Heart?  Which side of each of these pairs are you?

No matter which side of any of these pairs you favor – as the true side, the right side, the moral side – you are wrong to favor one to the exclusion of the other.  For example.  Many if not most liberals believe that most or all conservatives are either evil or stupid, or both.  Guess what: conservatives believe the same about liberals.  Is it possible for one half of the nation to be always right while the other half is always wrong?  Hardly likely.  Liberals and conservatives alike have their geniuses and their fools.  Another example.  A man is a man, for sure.  But if he denies his feminine side, he leads a fractured life. C.G. Jung called the denied side of us all the Shadow side.  He wanted us not to deny our Shadow side, but to integrate it into our lives.   If the Shadow side is ignored or tamped down, it will sure as hell create havoc in our lives.  Another example: Men live their lives according to either Faith or Reason, and it makes a huge difference which side they choose.  One is not always a better guide than the other, but most people are quite certain that it is.

In our world today, we may be excused for seeing several of the first of the (political) pairs as essentially good or evil choices.  Perhaps the reason is that none of these choices is truly represented by our political leadership.  In politics, you gotta choose whom to follow, right?  Is Donald Trump a conservative?  Surely NOT!  Does that make him a liberal?  Of course not.  Donald Trump is a DonaldTrumpist.  Honestly, there are few if any liberals or conservatives in Washington, DC.  There are teams – the Red team and the Blue team.  Do they really represent any coherent political philosophy?  Not really, you just follow your leaders.  You are forgiven for being confused, as you ought to be.   You would be forgiven for thinking, for example, that Jefferson is the first of our home-grown leaders to represent today’s Democratic party and for thinking that Hamilton is the same for Republicans (in my next essay, I will make the case that neither man fits well into today’s divisions).  Even Adam Smith – that hoary old capitalist who never uttered the word “capitalist” or “capitalism” in his An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations – is not the man that free market capitalists think he was.  Smith had two children: the other child’s name was The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and he favored that child.  In a very simple-minded way, these two books are about cooperation (TMS) and competition (WoN).  Smith was a philosopher before he was an economist.  Back in the day, things were more complicated.  No, not really.  Today we are accustomed to lazy thinking.  Either-or thinking.  That is the problem.

We live in a black and white world of our own invention.  It is (nearly) always a mistake.  Reality is not black or white, reality is always black and white (and purple, and blue and magenta and teal, etc.).   The Yin Yang symbol at the top of this rant does NOT say choose one or the other!  It says black and white, not either-or but both-and; deal with it.

Yes, I realize the subject that I have written about is worth a book.  Many books.  Sorry, folks, I am late to this game.  This book has been written tens of thousands of times.  Read more.  Think more.  All I want to do is to mess with your brain.

In a good way, of course!

+++++++++++++

I nearly forgot.  This is one of the best things ever written about what’s a life made of, this or that?  It is totally on-point.  The narrator ("I", Ishmael) is the hero of the book and Queequeg is his savage bunk-mate; they are weaving a prayer-mat.

I was the attendant or page of Queequeg, while busy at the mat. As I kept passing and repassing the filling or woof of marline between the long yarns of the warp, using my own hand for the shuttle, and as Queequeg, standing sideways, ever and anon slid his heavy oaken sword between the threads, and idly looking off upon the water, carelessly and unthinkingly drove home every yarn; I say so strange a dreaminess did there then reign all over the ship and all over the sea, only broken by the intermitting dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as if this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates. There lay the fixed threads of the warp subject to but one single, ever returning, unchanging vibration, and that vibration merely enough to admit of the crosswise interblending of other threads with its own. This warp seemed necessity; and here, thought I, with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads. Meantime, Queequeg’s impulsive, indifferent sword, sometimes hitting the woof slantingly, or crookedly, or strongly, or weakly, as the case might be; and by this difference in the concluding blow producing a corresponding contrast in the final aspect of the completed fabric; this savage’s sword, thought I, which thus finally shapes and fashions both warp and woof; this easy, indifferent sword must be chance – aye, chance, free will, and necessity – no wise incompatible – all interweavingly working together. The straight warp of necessity, not to be swerved from its ultimate course – its every alternating vibration, indeed, only tending to that; free will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads; and chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines of necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by free will, though thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the last featuring blow at events.

from The Mat-Maker, chapter 47 of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick

If you can't see the relevance of this quote to the subject at hand, ask me.  Or read it again.  Or, best, read the book; it is, after all, a great American classic.

*

True conservatism dates back to Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797) and Barry Goldwater.  True liberalism dates back to Thomas Paine (1737 – 1809) and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  Conservatism has been corrupted by fundamentalist religious dogma that teaches a young Earth and universe (6,000 – 12,000 years old), a disdain for secular science (especially Darwinian Evolution), and an imminent End of Times.  Without this opportunistic marriage of opposites (is there a chance in Hell that Jesus would be a conservative if he lived today?), conservatives cannot win elections.  Liberalism has been corrupted by political correctness, censorship of “bad” people and thinking that throwing other people’s money at a problem is the way to fix any and all problems.  Without caving in to identity politics, liberals fear they will lose elections.