A Reflection on Binaries

[_honorentheos]

In going about my Friday night/Saturday morning I started a new book, The Ministry of Truth, which is both a biography of the man George Orwell as well as an exegesis and analysis of his master piece, 1984. Through this book I found myself reflecting on a number of issues that parallel our political climate today, but not in direct parallel to 1984. Nor in the easily vilified Nazism or Soviet-style communism. Rather, it was in the uncertainty of the class structure of individuals living to see a setting sun on the British empire and the far more interesting parallels in the Spanish Civil War. The latter in particular has struck me as much more similar to our times than the rise of Hitler. The conflict there captured Orwell’s passions leading him to join in what he saw as a war between fascists and communists. And it’s in Spain that 1984 began.

What’s striking to me was how Orwell went to fight a war against fascists, sided with what were a smaller faction of radical socialists among the Republican side, but ultimately discovered the nature of the conflict was so complex even historians today with the benefit of time and substantial records from all sides find it difficult to tidy up this conflict into a simple narrative form. Orwell’s wife lived in Republican-controlled Barcelona while he was on the front, and between the two of them they saw first hand what Orwell originally saw as the model of socialist egalitarianism descend into what is best described as an Orwellian terror state constricting around it’s own citizens who were fractured, distrusting of one another, and losing to Franco’s forces. And they were the supposed good guys.

It’s here where I think the echoes of the past deserve to be listened to more closely. Not because the world today has seen the reemergence of fascists, socialists, antifa, nationalists, religionists, secularists, and any number of other -ists. But because, in the second Republic of Spain the factions and disdain that boiled up but failed to find appropriate political resolution ultimately broke a society and led to Fascist control that survived for decades to see the break up of the Beatles.

What interested me in this was how such concepts from 1984 as facecrime (when your expression reveals your thoughts aren't conforming to the rigid views of the powers that be) , doublespeak (asserting a lie as truth), and other of the more famous Orwellian phrases found their genesis in the factional fear that came to define Republican-controlled Barcelona before the end of the war.

In this cultural climate different factions defined the world around them in partially overlapping but also competing binary ways. There was much in their views and aims that the different factions shared in common, but also many places they did not. And as those differences led to more fracturing, infighting and purges became as real a threat as was those who they agreed were the enemy. It suggests to me that one of the real challenges for any society caught in turbulent times - and which isn’t? at least in their own view – is to recognize our individual binaries are constructs rather than realities. And that my binary definition of a problem is almost certainly not aligned with others. Like Orwell fighting fascists on the side of socialists and communists, only to find himself in a world where those boundaries didn’t neatly define the sides of the conflict, or where the right and wrong of the matter was to be found, we divide our understanding of matters in ways that aren’t being exactly shared by those with whom we are engaged.

At the same time as starting this book I’ve also been reflecting on yesterday’s discussion from the thread on the impeachment hearings around the purely hypothetical scenario where, instead of acting as a messenger for the Obama administration to seek the removal of a corrupt government official in the Ukraine, Joe Biden instead demanded the President of Ukraine remove the Prosecutor General of Ukraine in order to protect Biden’s son’s client, the president of Burisma Holdings. And to do so in this hypothetical, rather than conditioning $1 billion in aid on a move that would help address corruption, Biden told the president of Ukraine that a billion dollars in aid would be withheld if they didn’t do this for his own nepotistic benefit.

Not to litigate the matter all over again as it’s readily available for browsing in the other thread, what interested me was how this ran into resistance whenever I suggested from my view if one assumed Joe Biden had misused the office of the VP it would both change reality including the nature of the impeachment proceedings and demand investigation of Biden. This was rejected repeated on the grounds it failed to excuse the misdeed committed by Trump.

I found myself wondering what it was that made this hypothetical alternative universe such a polarizing thing to even contemplate? To me there wasn’t much investment in it. It’s not true, as little more than a fifteen-minute investment in a Google search or following any number of links shared on this board is about the amount of time needed for anyone to realize what happened. The facts aren’t so ambiguous as to allow someone aware of them to believe it is the thing it initially appears to be or Republicans claim it to be. So it’s inserting a completely different set of facts that change reality for Joe Biden to have abused his office. Which would reframe everything, and require an entirely different series of dominoes or facts to take the place of the ones we live with, putting it squarely in a different context of actions, rational, and motives. It would change the players involved, the substance of testimonies given and who gave them, and any number of matters as to make the comparison to the actual impeachment proceedings irrational. One doesn’t tweak this one fact of such magnitude and not rewrite the history that follows. So why the opposition to acknowledging wrong doing on Biden’s part would and should be met with the same scrutiny as the actual wrong doing on the part of Trump in the universe in which we actually reside? It stopped being worth litigating as it wasn’t rational to me to spend any more time on a fictional what-if, but the reaction to its mere contemplation stuck with me.

We seem to be in a weird place, as a nation and even more broadly than that. Yet it’s not really that unique, either. We see the world through our own binary views, and seem quite certain that we know what is right, what is wrong, and that we are on the side of what is right.

Yet, the world isn’t binary, society isn’t binary, and right and wrong isn’t neatly aligned with any one person’s binary view. We recognize that people are seeing and seeking to define the world from very different viewpoints. But we usually contextualize this as a way of explaining why those who don't see things the way we do are wrong. What we don't do well is extend the same to ourselves, recognizing that we are also working with constructs that have reduced reality down to easily divided parts. We tend to see our own point of view as quite intricate and informed. So we view our own ways of dividing the world as being more justified. It seems to me this results in the typical roll and tumble of political give-and-take, unrest and indifference that shapes but does not completely upend society as a whole. But the potential is there for them to gain momentum that is no longer containable, and other forces can be all the tipping point needed to tilt the field in the direction of escalation. Our ingroup orthodoxies are points around which to rally, but can also be fault lines that divide us.

Maybe this is a bit of a rambling post but the impression I came away with is the world we occupy is far closer to the one that resulted in the Spanish Civil War than either Tsarist Russia or the Weimar Republic. Our ideologies are diverse, our -isms define a spectrum of aligned but also competing orthodoxies, our politics partisan beyond even two-party partisanship, our economic opportunities uneven, our optimism challenged, our hope constrained. Some argue its because of Trumpism. Some, because of racism. Some, because of capitalism. Some, because of liberalism. Some, because of atheism. Some, because of religion. Social media is a venue to convey our orthodoxy as well as discover and call out facecrime when its revealed.

[_mikwut]

I would like to thank you for that post. I could not agree more wholeheartedly with you. I would add, It is our, at least some of us, duty to not align ourselves with the present constructs in order to avoid the over reaching each construct creates. As I said in the recent thread when you remove your self from, in the spirit of your post, the "binaries" is when you can see more clearly the complex and intricate fault lines on all sides.

Take as example the recent IG report that was shuffled under the rug by the mainstream media as no problem just a few clerical and human errors. When it is anything but. I know this is a right leaning website it was just the best I could find that compiles the liberal's Michael Tracey's tweets respecting it.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa ... t-n2557719

Civil liberties are a big deal to me. And over the past two decades I have been watching them ever so slowly yet not trivially erode. In matters of importance to our everyday lives that scandal is way more important than what we hear about it. But the binaries like Trumpisms either way hide it.

by the way, I was baffled by the hypothetical discussion, to me you were pointing out something simply obvious but I see your point that you have elaborated on from it here.

mikwut

[_honorentheos]

Hi mikwut -

I apologize for the late reply to this. Life is busy, the limited amount of time I could give here was taken up in the hearings thread, and the ideas behind this thread in particular aren't such that I could be succinct and pinched for time. I'm not saying this reply is either succinct or developed, but hopefully is less reactive and more engaging with your comments.

I wanted to focus on this idea if I may -

As I said in the recent thread when you remove your self from, in the spirit of your post, the "binaries" is when you can see more clearly the complex and intricate fault lines on all sides.

While I agree with the simple reading of your comment, in a sense, I feel like I apparently failed in my OP as I didn't intend to convey binary sorting is something a person can choose to participate in or avoid. I mainly take issue with the idea we can actually remove ourselves from the binaries. To the contrary, my intent was to point out the problems the OP sought to explore lie in the inevitability of binary sorting. In this reply is a binary - "getting the OP" or "not getting the OP", that pretends at perceiving nuance in others views. The reality is, it is presented as a correct view competing with an incorrect view. Binaries occur where facts become tangled up with emotions. The reality is that belief in seeking nuance as important to understanding the world is partially an illusion (we can't understand other's perspective particularly well from an etic point of view without somehow engaging the experience of how it feels to those for whom it is emic) and largely secondary to where I feel more engaged as emic experience of reality rather than etic observer.

Since this thread used Orwell as a jump-off point, I think his comments from "Notes on Nationalism" are worth considering. Here's a link:

http://www.george-orwell.org/Notes_on_N ... index.html

From it, excerpted from the above link -

We are all drowning in filth. When I talk to anyone or read the writings of anyone who has any axe to grind, I feel that intellectual honesty and balanced judgment have simply disappeared from the face of the earth. Everyone’s thought is forensic, everyone is simply putting [forward] a “case” with deliberate suppression of his opponent’s point of view, and, what is more, with complete insensitiveness to any sufferings except those of himself and his friends. . . One notices this in the case of people one disagrees with, such as Fascists or pacifists, but in fact everyone is the same, at least everyone who has definite opinions. Everyone is dishonest, and everyone is utterly heartless toward people who are outside the immediate range of his own interests and sympathies...What he wants is to feel that his own unit is getting the better of some other unit, and he can more easily do this by scoring off an adversary than by examining the facts to see whether they support him.

Earlier, speaking specifically on the topic of nationalism, he describes these deeply held beliefs as not requiring even being for something.

It is also worth emphasizing once again that nationalist feeling can be purely negative. There are, for example, Trotskyists who have become simply enemies of the U.S.S.R. without developing a corresponding loyalty to any other unit. When one grasps the implications of this, the nature of what I mean by nationalism becomes a good deal clearer. A nationalist is one who thinks solely, or mainly, in terms of competitive prestige. He may be a positive or a negative nationalist--that is, he may use his mental energy either in boosting or in denigrating--but at any rate his thoughts always turn on victories, defeats, triumphs and humiliations. He sees history, especially contemporary history, as the endless rise and decline of great power units, and every event that happens seems to him a demonstration that his own side is on the upgrade and some hated rival is on the downgrade. But finally, it is important not to confuse nationalism with mere worship of success. The nationalist does not go on the principle of simply ganging up with the strongest side. On the contrary, having picked his side, he persuades himself that it IS the strongest, and is able to stick to his belief even when the facts are overwhelmingly against him. Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also--since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself-- unshakeably certain of being in the right.

He then points out to the reader what I've already asserted. That being, his description could replace references to nationalism with just about any person's deeply held belief and find it still holds:

Now that I have given this lengthy definition, I think it will be admitted that the habit of mind I am talking about is widespread among the English intelligentsia, and more widespread there than among the mass of the people. For those who feel deeply about contemporary politics, certain topics have become so infected by considerations of prestige that a genuinely rational approach to them is almost impossible. Out of the hundreds of examples that one might choose, take this question: Which of the three great allies, the U.S.S.R., Britain and the USA, has contributed most to the defeat of Germany? In theory, it should be possible to give a reasoned and perhaps even a conclusive answer to this question. In practice, however, the necessary calculations cannot be made, because anyone likely to bother his head about such a question would inevitably see it in terms of competitive prestige. He would therefore START by deciding in favour of Russia, Britain or America as the case might be, and only AFTER this would begin searching for arguments that seemed to support his case.

How we recognize where our binary views lie might be illuminated in Orwell's three primary of the Nationalist: Obsession (being the primary topic we turn to in almost any given discussion), Instability (our positions and the facts we employ bend towards the part of the binary with which we associated our own, correct view such that they can and do change in order to protect the binary and our place in the correct side of it), and Indifference to Reality (as above, we start with the result and back facts and history into them).

The ultimate concern of the OP is that our society, becoming ever more deeply entrenched in binaries viewed to be of such importance nothing less than the future itself is at stake, results in conditions where a certain momentum is granted to permissive attacks on the other. And yes, that's my own bias claiming nothing less than the future is at stake. But in Orwell's words:

The point is that as soon as fear, hatred, jealousy and power worship are involved, the sense of reality becomes unhinged. And, as I have pointed out already, the sense of right and wrong becomes unhinged also. There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when 'our' side commits it. Even if one does not deny that the crime has happened, even if one knows that it is exactly the same crime as one has condemned in some other case, even if one admits in an intellectual sense that it is unjustified--still one cannot FEEL that it is wrong. Loyalty is involved, and so pity ceases to function.

And then we cheer on punching Nazis, burning crosses, running over migrants or protestors, ambushing police officers, bombing churches, etc., etc., etc. We come to see the other as a mass irredeemable.

I say that not to make a case for my particular binary, though it's unavoidable that because I am of course an obsessive or else a hypocrite. Rather, I say it because it helps us to recognize where our own binary views lie and that, while we don't want to accept it, there is danger in those views.

I agree with Orwell that, at best, we are obligated to make an attempt at understanding our own biases in order to further attempt to engage with others where they are. And in doing this, not erase their binary but attempt to see it's outlines as they relate to our own when it comes to some subject under discussion.

As for the nationalistic loves and hatreds that I have spoken of, they are part of the make-up of most of us, whether we like it or not. Whether it is possible to get rid of them I do not know, but I do believe that it is possible to struggle against them, and that this is essentially a MORAL effort. It is a question first of all of discovering what one really is, what one's own feelings really are, and then of making allowance for the inevitable bias. If you hate and fear Russia, if you are jealous of the wealth and power of America, if you despise Jews, if you have a sentiment of inferiority towards the British ruling class, you cannot get rid of those feelings simply by taking thought. But you can at least recognise that you have them, and prevent them from contaminating your mental processes. The emotional urges which are inescapable, and are perhaps even necessary to political action, should be able to exist side by side with an acceptance of reality.

That all said, I agree we need to have voices outside every binary to help provide perspective. In the narrow sense we need people who don't side with the prevailing two-party binary or pro and anti-Trump binaries, we agree and are better off for it.