Black and White and Red and Blue
(Originally published in Greater Democracy)
Often, when people are confronted with a problem, they fall into what is often called Black and White thinking. They find themselves confronting a dilemma, and they think there are two possible and contradictory solutions. Even the word ‘dilemma’ implies two possible solutions.
Black and white thinking is easy. It is comfortable. It feels safer. We can easily view what is wrong with the world as coming from some outside evil, from ‘them’, and not own any of our own responsibility for things that are wrong with the world. When someone else attacks us, it is always because they are evil and hate us and we haven’t done anything to foster that hate.
To help people find better solutions to their problems, it is important to help them look for other alternatives, to get beyond simplistic black and white thinking. It is important to get them to think about their role in the problem and look at what they can change. After all, we usually have more luck changing our selves than we do in trying to get someone else to change.
Yet it seems as if our politicians and the media are getting trapped in black and white, or perhaps more accurately, red and blue thinking. It seems as if you can’t read a newspaper or watch a news broadcast anymore without hearing a reference to Red States or Blue States.
In The Polarization Express by David Broder in Sunday’s Washington Post, he talks about a conference at Princeton University's Center for the Study of Democratic Politics entitled, “The Polarization of American Politics: Myth or Reality?" He noted that U.S. history is filled with sharp partisanship.
He also noted “that ‘red’ and ‘blue’ voters are increasingly living in separate enclaves, with distinctive lifestyles, attitudes and partisan leanings shared among neighbors”. He goes on to observe that “polarization is not just a phenomenon affecting politicians but something rooted in deeper social changes. Especially as sophisticated line-drawing for new congressional districts combines with the emerging pattern of like-minded voters living in geographical clusters, the latent divisions in American culture are made explicit on Election Day.”
While it may be tempting to spend time talking about the extent to which gerrymandering and media consolidation is contributing polarization, the more interesting question is what can and should be done about it.
One approach is to challenge the media to be more responsible and to present a more nuanced view of America. Perhaps that is some of the appeal of shows like ‘The Daily Show’ which pokes fun at parts of the media that lack nuance.
One organization that has done great work in changing media coverage of conflict is Search for Common Ground. They have great programs in places like Burundi, Macedonia, Sierra Leone, and, yes, even in the United States. As the title suggests, they try to encourage people to find act on commonalities as they try to understand their differences.
Likewise, Robert McNamara’s 1966 speech Security in the Contemporary World, also called us to move beyond black and white thinking to achieve more creative problem solving.
Entering into dialogs with people that are different from us is hard work. It is challenging, and we need to be open to learning something new about ourselves and to changing. Yet it is this hard work that is the most rewarding and most promising. We need to challenge those around us to do this hard work, and we can best do that by doing it ourselves.