Be a Slider, not a Toggle

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.

Edmund Burke, Preface to Brissot's Address to His Constituents (1794)

Cosmic Scales vs. Cosmic Wars

I don’t believe the stars affect your personality, but I’m about as Libra-y as anyone born in early October can be. I like balance; I like moderation. I like it so much that I try to moderate my moderation with occasional bouts of excess.

I like the middle-path. I like it when everyone is getting along. I’m politically liberal, but I believe the old adage about a bird with one wing only being able to fly in circles. I try to test my biases by reading ideas and opinions that I don’t share—from both political extremes. I’ve always felt it’s a basic civic duty of someone living in a democracy.

I know my bias towards balance colors the way I look at the world, and I know other people see things differently. Some people love a good fight. Some people love rooting for one team and despising the other team. Some people fight well and healthily. I don’t. I never learned that skill, so I just tend to…avoid fights if I can. I enjoy a good argument—about politics, art, ideas, etc. I’ll happily sit up all night at a bar or a coffee shop, debating and discoursing with friends about pretty much anything. But I get uncomfortable when it becomes angry and personal—when all the logical fallacies get pulled out and people start attacking each other instead of exploring ideas together. I don’t plunge happily into conflicts like that. I don’t plunge at all.

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As you can imagine, I’m not loving our current political environment, where everyone is expected to wear a team jersey and adopt every position that comes with it—where everybody seems to believe that we’re engaged in a cosmic battle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. Variety and complexity and ambiguity are out; having absolutist and extreme positions is in.

People with a fancy vocabulary might refer to this worldview as Manichaeism. The term comes from a cosmology with its roots in Mesopotamia (the prophet Mani was born into a Jewish Christian Gnostic family in what is now Iraq), centered around an eternal battle between good and evil, light and darkness. It thrived and even rivaled Christianity for popularity between the third and seventh centuries, CE, stretching from the Roman Empire all the way to China. The religion drew from many faiths and philosophies, including Zoroastrianism, which grew up in the same region about 400 years earlier, and which also featured a cosmic battle between good and evil, light and dark.

Those ancient worldviews definitely affected and informed our own, competing for attention, as they did, with early Christianity. That kind of dualism wasn’t really present in ancient Judaism. There was no concept of heaven or hell there, no cosmic battle for the souls of humankind. Later interpretations by both Jews and Christians layered some aspects of that dualism on top of the old texts.

The ancient Greeks, who influenced Roman religion before Christianity took hold, were more concerned with cosmic balance than with cosmic victory. They had a whole pantheon of gods representing a wide range of human emotions and attributes, each of which had to be honored and respected if one wanted to lead a good and happy life. Focusing on one and ignoring the others was often the cause of doom and downfall in their stories. Finding the middle way between extremes was seen as a virtue. As Aristotle said:

First of all then we have to observe, that moral qualities are so constituted as to be destroyed by excess and by deficiency—as we see is the case with bodily strength and health….Strength is destroyed both by excessive and by deficient exercises, and similarly health is destroyed both by too much and by too little food and drink; while they are produced, increased and preserved by suitable quantities. The same therefore is true of Temperance, Courage, and the other virtues. The man who runs away from everything in fear and never endures anything becomes a coward; the man who fears nothing whatsoever but encounters everything becomes rash.

Nichomachean Ethics, Book Two

Those ideas of balance and moderation and restraint influenced the Stoics, who influenced all kinds of folks throughout history, including our first few presidents (as I wrote about recently), as well as English conservatives like Edmund Burke, who said, “Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites.” (National Assembly, IV. 319)

But maybe that idea of balancing equal and opposing forces is too simplistic, too binary, too chained to Manichaean ways of thinking. Maybe the idea of a wider and more chaotic pantheon of cosmic forces is a healthier cosmology. It’s not a see-saw we’re trying to balance; it’s more like that old plate-spinning trick that used to be on early TV variety shows. After all, how much of our world is truly binary? How much falls neatly into black or white, good or evil, temperance or vice? Very little, it seems to me.

Banning the Binaries

I’m starting to worry that we’re ruining ourselves by insisting that our most important issues are toggle switches instead of sliders.

You know the difference. A toggle switch has a limited number of settings, often just two. The lamp is either on or off; there’s no midpoint between the two settings. A slider, though, like a lamp’s dimmer switch, can glide along a span between extremes and can stop at many points along the way.

Toggle-thinking allows for only two states: A or B, black or white. Slider-thinking allows for a continuum of states: you can land anywhere from A all the way to Z. Black and white are in there, but so are many shades of grey—and the full spectrum of visible colors. Maybe it’s hard to see the reality of the rainbow if your only settings are black and white.

For any political or cultural issue, there are extreme positions and people who hold them. But there are millions of people who hold views between those extremes, and their voices are effectively shut out of the discourse, because winning an argument is more important than solving a problem, and maybe a strident “A” is a stronger argument than, “I don’t know, maybe it’s somewhere around Q.”

The problem with leaning towards A or Z extremes to win arguments is that most of us live somewhere in the in-between—and we land on different in-between positions depending on the topic or issue. Just as we’re not always standing at either A or Z, we’re not consistently at Q, either. I may be at Q on some questions, D on others, and maybe J somewhere else. We are jagged, not continuous, as Todd Rose makes clear in his book, The End of Average. Saying that the average weight of a population is, say, 250 pounds, doesn’t tell you anything about the varied individuals who make up that group. Individual qualities get lost to the average; individual perspectives get lost to the extremes.

We need to reclaim some jagged space for ourselves.

We have a young generation trying to reclaim that kind of space with their understanding of gender and sexuality, and God bless them for doing it. But they’re still locked into our old vocabulary. Saying you’re “non-binary” claims a new space, but only as a negation of the old spaces; it accepts the idea that the binary is the Thing, and you’re just against it. When it comes to gender expression and sexual attraction, do we really accept that it’s a world defined by twos, and anything that doesn’t fit the definition is either a lie or a weird outlier?

There are men who have what traditionally would be thought of as more feminine attributes and qualities. Some are attracted to women; some are attracted to men. There are men who present as more traditionally “macho.” Doesn’t tell you anything about who they’re attracted to or how they define themselves. We have no good classification language for any of this—for men, for women, for trans people. “Straight White Male” doesn’t come close to defining who someone is, and neither does LGBTQ, though we make a ton of assumptions based on labels like these.

I remember what I wrote about the duck-billed platypus, and how he was defined out of the biological classification scheme because he didn’t fit neatly into any of the man-made categories that scientists so confidently created. Maybe we need toss our old categories overboard and start over. Look at actual reality and make room for the variety that’s really there.

If we are slider switches, we consist of multiple sliders, and each of us has unique settings for each switch, like in a recording studio. On one attribute, I might be at setting 3; on another. I might be a 7. Who we really are, in our depth and complexity, looks much more like this image than a red flag or a blue flag can convey:

Let’s Talk

Here’s one example of what I mean: Pro-Life and Pro-Choice are great team names but unhelpful ways of describing reality at an individual level. Most people in this country are pro-life to some extent, in some circumstances, and pro-choice to some extent, in some circumstances. “To some extent and in some circumstances” actually matters. Acknowledging that there are extenuating circumstances and mitigating details when these issues come up in real life—that’s the beginning of productive discourse. Exploring where we all set our slider-switches, and when, and why, is how we begin to craft compromise and, ultimately, policy…if that’s what we want (as opposed to endless warfare).

Some people do hold extreme and absolutist positions on all kinds of issues. Taxation, healthcare, gun rights, religious liberty. I get it. I find some of those people a little scary. Their worldviews admit only true believers and apostates, the forces of God and the legions of Satan. For them, the only resolution to the conflict they’ll accept is cultural—or actual—war, and the obliteration of the Enemy. Is that really where we want to live?

When we accept that there are many positions one can take between the extremes, and that most people live at different points along the continuums, there’s more opportunity for dialogue. When we accept that there are many ways to live between or outside of the binaries we’ve used to describe life—whether in politics, gender, sexual attraction, or anything else—life looks a lot more vibrant and interesting.

So, let’s talk. Let’s argue about where along the continuum we want to take a stand. Let’s accept and even revel in the grey areas, the ambiguities, the extenuating circumstances that make life complicated but also interesting. Let’s put it all on the table so that we can say, “Now, what are we going to do about it?”

I’m tired of us not being able to get to, “What are we going to do about it,” and I’m tired of pretending that this inability is accidental or fated. It’s neither. Our inability to talk to each other and solve problems is deliberate and planned. We are placed and kept at each other’s throats to build and maintain the power and wealth of those who represent the extreme positions—many of whom don’t even believe in those positions but have found it profitable and advantageous to hold them.

The continuum is messy and confusing. It requires respectful argument. It requires understanding and empathy. It requires shoving the slider a little more this way, a little more that way, till you get the setting just right for most people—or close enough to “just right” to live with. Choosing A or Z is easier, I know. Hating Z because you’re at A is also easier.

But none of this was meant to be easy.

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