Shades of Gray
In praise of nuance.
It is so easy, because it comes so naturally, to apply black and white thinking to our perception of the world. Our socialization, education and experience teach us to categorize what we come across, to place labels on things that consign them to handy generalizations. We gain a sense of security from dropping new and challenging experience into familiar boxes. An event, a situation, an institution, an idea, a person is put into a selected box, becoming either this or that, black or white. Now we know how to respond to it.
Yet this urge for classification, often done quickly, polemically or unconsciously, is often misleading, sometimes dangerously. Most events and people are too complex to fit exactly in the boxes we have fashioned for them. The generalizing labels we assign to them obscure a portion of their full reality, often a significant portion. This results in misunderstanding, ignorance, and ultimately in polarization, a reflexive opposition to different perspectives that admits no accommodation, compromise, or genuine understanding.
This tendency drives our current political discourse. Conservatives who value economic freedom tag the label “socialist” on mainstream liberals (such as presidents Obama and Biden) who believe that some government intervention is needed to temper the damaging excesses of corporate capitalism…
