In the early 20th Century, Niels Bohr created a model of the hydrogen atom that looked a lot like the sun and one planet: a central proton with an orbiting electron. Tidy, black and white, supported by good math. Contemporaneously Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, and many others, were discovering that single particles moving through tiny openings interfered with each other in ways that resembled waves. Yup. Quantum mechanics was being birthed. Is it a particle, or is it a wave? Argue back and forth, but the truth is, it’s both. Not intuitive, hard to grasp.
Guess what? Most questions are framed as binaries! He, or she? Yes, or no? In favor, or against? Do, or don’t? Not all, but the great majority of these questions are misframed. Life is far messier than that, and most answers have large gray areas. This is just a fact.
Now, recent psychological research shows that conservatives prefer binary answers, and progressives not so much. Of course, surprise, there is no binary of conservative and progressive! There’s a continuum, and on any given issue, one might fall to the left or right of center. H. L. Mencken, culture critic of the early 20th Century, famously said, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”
“How long have I got, Doc?” A good physician will parry that question and give a broad range estimate, if any. Often the question is unanswerable.
How long do YOU expect to live? Life expectancy is a statistical 50% chance of a child born today. It’s not YOUR chance! But you CAN ask the question for an average American of your age. You can even answer a dozen questions and refine the estimate. I did that for me. I’m pushing 72, and can “expect” another 25 years. Yup! But not if I drown tomorrow, get hit by a car, text while driving, try fentanyl, or kill myself with that loaded gun I was cleaning and thought was unloaded….oops. Or, I might get “lucky” and live much longer. It’s a 50% chance of living to that life expectancy.
Three cheers for abandoning binaries and accepting messy complexity! It’s a choice between accepting reality, and pretending. We can continue childish games and pretend. All of us do, about some things, but reality bites, and eventually wins. Some call it God’s will. Others fate, and atheists just what happened. So which is it?
All of the above. They are the same thing. But viewed in binary, just another argument wrongly framed.