Breaking free of the Manichaean world
Why I no longer feel guilty for not eating my veggies
In the year 386, the north African theologian, Augustine, converted to Christianity leaving behind his earlier infatuation with the tenets of Mani, a Parthian “New Ager”. The Manichaeans, as the followers of Mani were known, believed in a dualistic world which was locked in a perpetual struggle between spiritual goodness or light and spiritual evil or darkness. Upon conversion, Augustine began to understand the world in a more nuanced fashion. I am not sure that my parents ever made so complete a break with Mani.
In their defense, we lived in a small resource community in which life seemed to be straight forward – at least to me. If you messed up, you got hit and were told to stop. The hit might come from your parents or some random teenager who happened to be within range. I don’t remember getting hit for no reason nor do I have recurring nightmares of the visitation of sudden punishment. My point is that my world while growing up was either evil or good with no conjoining spectrum. The idea of there being a sliding scale between good and evil might have occurred to me while being held by the scruff of the neck, but it certainly never occurred to my parents.
For example, when I balked at eating my veggies was there an opening for a nuanced view of the childhood trauma associated with forced eating? Not a chance. It was always, “Think of the starving kids in China!” Either I ate my vegetables or kids would starve in China. There was never an opening to suggest that maybe Mao Zedong had more to do with their starvation than my uneaten vegetables.
When I was about ten, I was given a Daisy Red Ryder B-B gun with the admonition that I do not shoot my eye out. (As an aside, when I saw the trailer to the movie “A Christmas Story” I thought someone had stolen my story.) But notice the binary nature of my mother’s concern. If I get the gun, I will shoot my eye out. There was no room for a more nuanced view of my marksmanship. That I almost did shoot my eye out owed more to my inability to make the connection between shooting at my father’s winter tires and Newton’s Third Law than to my inherently bad aim.
Everywhere we are pushed into seeing the world through a narrow, monochromatic lens that filters out the kaleidoscopic reality of the world around us. What news broadcast attempts to portray the nuances of the stories they choose to report? “If it bleeds, it leads.” There is not much room for nuance with such a blunt-instrument business model.
But can we absorb the nuances of the human experience even if we are confronted with them. I argue that, in general, we can’t obsess over or absorb much nuance in our thinking, or we would never be able to make decisions. Our brains are wired to create shortcuts so that we can make rapid assessments and respond quickly enough to remain alive. “Guy pointing gun at me. Bad. Run!” There is no time to consider the personal ethics of the gun pointers and there are no extra points given for dying in the belief that your killer might have been a nicer person had his father not been such a tyrant. That kind of stuff is best considered over a beer with your friends long after the threatening event.
As with so much of life, then, we are confronted with a dilemma. In a complex world isn’t it advisable to simplify things and be prepared to say sorry when you are wrong about the simplification? Or is it better to consider the nuances of life safe behind the walls of the fortress that protects you from knife wielding crazies? Is it better to think shallow thoughts and meet life head on or is it a better strategy to put on the tin hat and wait for the Rapture? Rather than offer solutions to this dilemma or give suggestions on how to live, I hope to tell stories that illustrate “life on the spectrum” in hopes that a bit of reflective, non-Manichaean thinking takes place.
For example, I have recently begun to take an interest in the claims of the Artificial Intelligence people about the immanence of the Great Singularity by which machines will take on consciousness as a direct result of increasingly intense and complex computation. If this is true, then Klaus Schwab and Yuval Noah Harari should be given our undivided attention. But is it true? Nobel prize winning Dr. Roger Penrose argues that consciousness is the mechanism in our synapses that bridges between the quantum and classical physical worlds[1]. If he is right, then thinking and consciousness are not computational and Artificial Intelligence becomes “algorithmic iteration”. If you don’t think this stuff is nuanced and worth thinking about then you need to watch “2001: A Space Odyssey” again. What is the morality of turning off the power to an independently thinking HAL 9000? If computers become conscious, then should we pile them into space craft and send them off with no intention of bringing them back?
Or how should we think about mass school shootings? Is solving the problem as simple as taking away the guns of law-abiding people? That seems a simple and elegant solution, but will it work? What about the correlation between such psychotic episodes and marijuana use? Or the use of over-prescribed psychotropic drugs? Or the influence of missing fathers? Or the killer’s association with national Bolshevism? Should we consider jailing parents for the hideous crimes of their ignored and now dead children? Maybe it is time for some nuanced thinking rather than slavish devotion to what our favourite news reader is saying.
How are we to think about Ukraine? Is the Jewish president held hostage by Banderista fascists? Is Putin a thug? Is Zelenski a thug? Are the Ukrainians the last thing standing between Sino-Russian communist hegemony and western liberal freedom? Did the CIA-sponsored colour revolution of 2014 spark the current fighting? Who killed the 14,000 people in the Donbass since 2014 and were those dead people civilians or soldiers?[2]
And I won’t even get started on covid.
What qualifies me to ask and attempt to answer such questions? In a word – nothing. I am a mining engineer with a specialty in blowing stuff up so there will be no resolution to these questions coming from me. But that doesn’t mean that the questions aren’t interesting and worth probing with instruments that can measure deviations. Instruments like history. Very often we miss the nuance in life because we don’t have a proper historical understanding of the events in question and the philosophical substrate that informs both the history and the events. I call this mix of history and philosophy a worldview. Whether we know it or not we all have a worldview that was and is formed by what we read, who we speak with and how we were potty trained. Actually, I am not sure about the influence of potty training.
Our worldview is the grid through which we view the world and make quick decisions when someone comes at us with a weapon or when the brother-in-law makes yet another inane comment. It informs all that we think and do. To introduce nuance into our thinking, we must ask questions about both our worldview and the worldview of the person or persons whose ideas we are considering. If you follow the work of Dr. Jordan Peterson (and what sane person doesn’t) it is similar to his concept of maps of meaning without all the sciency stuff.
What I propose, then, is a walk into the corridors and cul-de-sacs of worldview to enjoy the colourful, kaleidoscopic nature of our world by examining the nuances of life under the sun. If it is not taken too seriously, life can be very funny, and it is always good to have a laugh. After a couple of years of mandated lock downs and “follow the science” we are due for some humour even as the events being dissected are beyond serious.
This is not a call to always and forever dissect our thinking but rather to occasionally have a beer with friends to consider the nuances of life and how narrowly we sometimes escape them. This will be my break with the rigid logic of my long dead parents and my embrace of the nuanced life of the longer dead Augustine.
Please leave your comments and criticisms below and try to be more nuanced than “You are an evil, thumb sucking pervert with a brain that ceased to operate more than 20 years ago.” I already know all that. And remember that to be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. Cicero said that and he was a smart, nuanced thinker.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orMtwOz6Db0
[2] https://www.theepochtimes.com/debunking-the-far-right-extremist-lie-uvalde-shooting-undermines-gun-grab-narrative_4497662.html?utm_source=Enews&utm_campaign=etv-2022-05-30&utm_medium=email&utm_content=1
Great piece of writing
Eloquent as always. Keep it coming!