Excluded Middle

How can a president be “destroying the country” and “doing nothing” at the same time?  The only reason I ask that question is that my Republican acquaintances hurl criticisms at President Obama that fall into one of these two categories.  What they probably don’t know is that according to Aristotle’s logic, you can’t be doing something and doing nothing at the same time.  At least not in classical physics.  Something can only be one or the other.  So he’s either destroying the country by doing something or he’s doing nothing and therefore not destroying the country.  Unless of course you want to argue that doing nothing is a passive way of destroying the country.  I just can’t figure out why a duly elected president would want to destroy his own country. 

Personally, I think he’s doing something and it’s not destroying the country.  To simplify this for the logic impaired, Western culture is so influenced by Aristotle’s thinking that we’ve come to believe that there is an “excluded middle” in every argument.  For instance, Obama can only be good or bad, right or wrong, smart or dumb.  There is nothing in between.  Sound familiar?  Well, we can thank the ancient Greeks for that. 

What’s not so obvious is that he can be doing both.  Oh well, subtlety is wasted in American politics.  So it’s no wonder that all of our politics fall into the same mode of thinking.  Everything must be one or the other.  Here’s some bad news; reality is not like that.  The world is an infinite array of shades of gray.

Eastern thinking is based on the concept of “cosmological unity” meaning that everything is a point on a continuum.  For instance, Obama could be good and bad,  right and wrong, etc.  It depends on each issue and your point of view.  For instance, he may be right on healthcare and wrong on continuing our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the middle on regulating the financial industry. He may be partially right on acknowledging our actions in the world and dead wrong on certain appointments to his cabinet. 

In the final analysis he is a human being who is right sometimes and wrong others.  He is not always one way or the other.  Sorry folks.  I know I have some friends who cannot find a single thing he’s done right.  And some friends who can’t find a single thing he’s done wrong.

To both groups I have to say, “give it up”.  The world is not black and white.  I don’t care how strongly we feel about something, it’s only our point of view.  It doesn’t necessarily trump all others.  Actually it may not even be valid.  So when it comes to opinions, it isn’t necessary to have one on every topic: especially when we don’t know the facts.

Some advice that you didn’t ask for; learn a bit about how you form your opinions.  It’s not really us doing the forming.  It’s our culture.  All we’re doing is adding the content and a lot of emotion.  That doesn’t make it right – or wrong.  It just makes it ours.

So let’s review:  We think in opposite pairs.  We think there is nothing in between.  We think we need to have an opinion on everything.  We think because we have an opinion we need to express it.  We think everyone wants to hear it.  We think freedom of expression is equal to validity.  None of this is correct.  For instance, there is much in the area between the opposite pairs of our logic; often what’s more valid.  Our opinions mean a lot more to us than they do to anyone else.  Freedom of expression is good if we qualify our opinions.  Otherwise they just “muddy up the waters”.  If we really want the kind of America we aspire to, “we need to listen more and talk less”.

Robert DeFilippis