Believing in the black and white

When I was a child, watching cartoons on a Saturday morning used to be a unique and stolen pleasure. Today, it makes me sad to see all the strange and backward ideas we seem to be contributing as our creative gift to the next generation.

The ever bony Wile E. Coyote reaches his emaciated and dully colored fingers toward the bright and brilliant Road Runner, an epic illustration of malevolence vying for revenge against goodness. It seems the only lesson we are supposed to learn is that there is nothing about Evil that is not accompanied by wrinkles and drab fur and nothing about Good that is not topped off with a shiny yellow crest.

I can only hope that such an oversimplified message is as terrifying to you as it is to me. Perhaps we can excuse that little iniquity with the notion that our children learn better from clear cut distinctions and will certainly grow out of them in time.

And yet, do we ever really grow out of the initial black-and-white statements of belief we learn as children, or are we forever and always the sages of the logic of false dichotomies?

In every introductory psychology course, the first myth that must be dispelled is that of the nature-nurture debate. For hundreds of years, philosophers and scientists alike have been swayed by the easy conclusion of an either/or understanding — genetics versus environment. But such a divided answer is never correct.

In a similar way, we cut apart the fields of art and science, teaching students that they must choose their place in one or the other. We call the first creative and the second analytical. We speak of the emotive and the rational as if they are separate. But we are not telling the whole story when we rely on such categories.

Unfortunately, I think it might be true that we have a tendency to hold onto those black and white ideas that once marked our childhoods. And even more unfortunately, I think it might be a fundamental danger to our ability to make judgments.

To see the world as if everything comes in clearly delineated pairs is not a comprehensive view of reality. For every instant in which a dichotomy is useful, it is also treacherous.

When we do not understand the flow between what we call good and evil, we become stuck in our ability to be diplomatic or understand opposition.

When we speak of nature and nurture in separate ways, we risk missing all the lessons that can be learned about our humanity by way of understanding their mutual interaction.

And when we call art and science the children of two different worlds, we neglect our greatest assets for ingenuity in favor of easier categorization. 

Perhaps it is time that we learn to celebrate a different framework — a consideration of reality in which concepts are capable of flow and ideas are malleable and subject to frequent reworking with new information. Perhaps, just once, we should see the big picture as it really is — without the illusion of imagined dichotomy.


E-mail: cmcglass@indiana.edu