Sunday May 22, 2005
Ways of visualizing issues
On The National earlier this week, host Peter Mansbridge asked the CBC\’s chief parliamentary correspondent Keith Bogue, “What might we expect tomorrow?”
With a self-deprecating grin, Bogue replied, “Whatever you can imagine probably won\’t be enough.”
At the beginning of the week, the Conservative Party, opposed to separatism, joined forces with the Bloc Quebecois, equally opposed to federalism, against the Liberal minority government.
On Tuesday, Belinda Stronach, a recent contender for the leadership of the Conservative Party, become an instant Liberal cabinet minister.
Conservative member Gary Grewel and Liberal health minister Ujjal Dosanjh traded accusations about who had initiated contact with whom about defecting.
The NDP committed itself to keeping the government in office — at least long enough to pass the budget. But when a Conservative member would have to be absent for cancer surgery, NDP member Ed Broadbent offered to abstain from voting, imperilling the government once more.
Viewing filters
As Bogue implied, Canadian politics don\’t fit our expectations any more.
Or maybe we operate with expectations that prevent us from seeing more clearly.
Because all of us, including me, view the world through our own particular filters. We see what we expect to see. When the world doesn\’t conform, we find ourselves adrift in confusion.
I watched a driver pull out of a Canadian Tire parking lot right in front of a motorcyclist. The bike smashed into the car\’s front fender. Its rider cartwheeled across the car\’s hood and crumpled to the pavement on the far side.
As an ambulance rushed the rider to hospital, the shaken driver leaned against his car, muttering, “I can\’t understand it. I looked to see if there were any cars coming…”
That was the problem. He had looked for cars. Not for motorcycles.
At a continuing education course on our relationship with nature, most of us saw nature as generally benign, worthy of protection. One woman saw it as hostile, malevolent. She had recently moved to Wisconsin. Where, she said, she had had to teach her children not to trust nature. In winter, they could freeze to death. In summer, they were at risk from tornadoes.
“It\’s a consequence of the Fall,” she explained. “Because of man\’s disobedience (yes, she said “man\’s”) in the Garden of Eden, nature is also fallen and therefore hopelessly pervaded by evil…”
She saw in nature what she expected to see.
Between extremes
Most of us, I suggest, base our model of reality on polar opposites. If this is right, then that must be wrong.
During the Cold War years, the U.S. saw Communism as such a threat that it spawned Senator Joe McCarthy and the House Unamerican Activities Committee.
Once the Roman Catholic Church accepted Augustine\’s thesis that equated sexuality with original sin, celibacy became the inevitable alternate for priests.
Schools afraid of potential abuse banned all physical contact between teachers and children.
It\’s a straight line model. It assumes that if that thing over there is wrong, then the farther you can distance yourself from it, the more likely you are to be right.
It has been the ethical worldview of Western civilizations for centuries. If capitalism is good, socialism must be bad. If God gave white men dominion, then blacks and women must be dominated. If Jesus is the way to salvation, every other way must be false.
But that straight-line mindset disagrees with our daily experience.
In real life, we know that the extremes are always the most dangerous.
The current mania for extreme sports invites participants to take relatively safe middle-ground activity — such as cycling or swimming or hiking — to a level where they risk life and injury.
The other extreme, of course, is indolence — also life threatening.
Many chemical elements — iodine, selenium, lithium — are poisonous in large doses. But their absence also harms health. Somewhere in the middle is “just right”.
Without water, we perish. In too much water, we drown. Without fire, we freeze. Our cars won\’t run, our planes won\’t fly, our industries grind into silence. But fire out of control destroys our forests, our homes, our bodies. Somewhere in the middle is best.
Child abuse results from too much physical contact with an adult. But the other extreme — neglect, emotional deprivation — depends on too little contact.
Healthy child rearing falls somewhere along the line between the extremes.
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But the straightness of that line is itself a model, a presumption that affects our understanding. Increasingly, I prefer to think of that line as curved, almost into a circle. The farther apart you move from your opposite, the closer together you end up.
So Joe McCarthy, attempting to root out communism, emulated some excesses of the Kremlin\’s purges.
Fundamentalists who still denounce popery find allies against abortion and euthanasia in the Roman Catholic hierarchy.
Christian evangelicals and fervent atheists can sound remarkably alike in their zeal to promote their particular beliefs.
In Ottawa, the opposite ends of that line overlap as Conservatives who reject separatism and the Bloc who reject federalism combine efforts to bring down the government.
Belinda Stronach puts distance between herself and Stephen Harper, and becomes Paul Martin\’s buddy.
On a straight line model, unions and management look like opposite extremes. But historically, the more militant each became, the more likely Jimmy Hoffa or Walter Reuther were to behave as autocratically as J.P. Morgan.
Stalin, reacting against capitalism, oppressed workers as much as industrial barons ever did.
For all I know, the circle may be also prove an inadequate metaphor. Perhaps a better model would be a sphere. Or even the multi-dimensional string theory of the formation of the universe. My mind can\’t cope with those images. Yet.
For the time being, though, visualizing polarities that draw closer the farther they try to get from each other helps me make sense out of apparent nonsense.
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Copyright © 2002 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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