Makes sense, especially in light of how many comment sections devolve into political shouting matches even when the original post/news story wasn't political. Everything is either for or against my team.
Yeah, I got tired of that, too. Avocados are left! Burgers are right!
I once read a piece of silliness by George Will (a conservative), in which he tried to make the argument that trains were a Liberal mode of transportation. Why? Because you could only ride them at certain times. There are rules! Liberals love rules! Whereas cars were for Conservatives because you could drive them any time you wanted to. Freedom!
I thought conservatives loved rules, and old fashioned things like steam trains. Did he really say that? And what about ELECTRIC cars? Liberals like them, but they are cars. And made by a Trump (sometime) ally. So: yea, or nay?
While we're at it, is a cable car left wing, or right wing? And what about airplanes? They (famously) have two wings, one on each side. If either comes off, plane go down.
This gets kinda ridiculous. In German trains are considered "masculine," so it is "Der Zug" for you. But are women allowed to ride on the male train?
English doesn't assign genders to objects, at birth or any other time. Is that why the British Empire collapsed?
Mental boxes are the prisons we create for ourselves in our own minds.
I'd like a burger with avocado, and a cherry on top, please! And one for my friend.
I found the Newsweek op-ed. I was a little off, but basically got it right...
"The length of the list of reasons, and the flimsiness of each, points to this conclusion: the real reason for progressives' passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans' individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism.
"To progressives, the best thing about railroads is that people riding them are not in automobiles, which are subversive of the deference on which progressivism depends. Automobiles go hither and yon, wherever and whenever the driver desires, without timetables."
So, according to Will's logic, if you wanted to go from the east coast to the west coast you should spend a week driving rather than take an airliner to get there in six hours, because the airlines are "common carriers" run by progressives?
Got it.
But I wonder what method he uses to travel. I think I know the answer. I don't think he flies his own Cessna. And I doubt he can afford to fly by "private" jet, which is hideously expensive for a mere columnist at the Washington Post.
And he generates his own electricity by using solar cells on his own roof?
Is this the same Will who wrote "Statecraft as Soulcraft," which argues that the government should focus more on developing people's souls?
Here in New England they tried to do that in the colonial era when the Puritans were in charge, and you were not allowed to think your own thoughts, only the officially sanctioned thoughts. The church was also the state. Kinda like Iran. Anybody want to go back to that?
When I go into New York City from CT I happily take the train because it is much less hassle than driving, and cheaper too. Then when I get off the train I walk all around Manhattan using my own two feet. Or take the subway.
Great points. Will's political view of transportation reveals how ridiculous and flimsy politically categorization becomes when it seeks to explain everything.
Yeah. Lately everything turns into a cultural/political binary. See the latest controversy in Ted's new one about the NYT best songwriters list. Was about to weigh in (I actually know the former Times pop reviewer who got ousted in favor of the ones in the podcast) but held back because I am precisely the sort of person who doesn't belong to either binary, and we just went over what happens to that sort of person once the crowd gets riled up and crushes any dissent. Everybody hates the person who tries to break up a fight. Been there. Passion overrules reason. This is how free speech gets smothered in real life. Even when you try to keep it friendly, many people don't want to hear it. That's why I am so happy (and relieved) to have friendly back and forths like this one. It's risky these days! But we have to do it. BTW I didn't mention (to keep it short) that I used to read Will's columns and I bought that book of his and thought it made some valid points. From being in the news biz I know there is a danger in being the sort of opinion writer who just sits in the office and has opinions, and does no research, and can get really out of touch. A former publisher was so out of touch he literally didn't even know the name of one of his key editors! But he had plenty of opinions. Me, I have opinions, but don't mind changing them. They're worth 2 cents. LOL
This is why Jesus teaching to love your enemies is considered one of his most difficult. It’s not that it can’t be done, but it requires humility and a willingness to forgo the advantages of binary conflict that you outline here.
Related to your binary crises, I’ve been thinking about an idea I call The Monocontroversy.
To offer an obvious example, Trump became the monocontroversy for many people in 2016. For about a decade now, everything has gradually been sorted into the buckets of pro-Trump or anti-Trump. Not only policy decisions or political stances, but all sorts of diverse and even arbitrary preferences—people’s diets, hairstyles, music, etc—have all been brought into the binary set by the Monocontroversy. Even established binaries, ie “rivalries”, like Tolstoy vs Dostoevsky get recast into who is more or less likely to vote for Trump.
Now, certain things aren’t allowed. You cannot be a vegan with blue hair who listens to Kid Rock and reads Dostoevsky, nor a mulleted carnivore who listens to Taylor Swift and Tolstoy—it breaks our new binary and distracts from the monocontroversy we all (tacitly) agreed to. And here comes your Girardian point: People don’t know what to do with you, and we don’t know what to do without other people, so we fall back in line.
Ironically, we can fix things by having more controversies. The football fans already prove this: they’re too busy arguing about Longhorns and Aggies, Wolverines and Spartans, etc to care about ordering their life around a particular politician. He’s not their monocontroversy. Likewise, I can hate on hazy IPAs, love Carnatic ragas, or have fiery opinions about book binding for reasons other than politics. My fundamental values lie deeper than our common controversies. Thus, my identity is less at risk and I don’t have to defend a common controversy to defend my identity. Instead, I’m now free to explore this identity through many more controversies with lower stakes.
When I think back to the conversations I used to have before 2016, I remember disagreeing with friends about a great many things. After 2016 I only remember us being allowed to disagree about one thing. In 2020 the “one thing” exerted more social gravity and the eggshells surrounding our conversations got sharper. Instead, I think healthy cultures comes about through a constellation of different controversies. Unhealthy cultures just sink into a black hole if they have only one controversy to fight over.
You see! Anyone who knows enough to disagree with me has so much more we’re in agreement on. Disagreeing with you would be much more enjoyable and productive than not having anyone who knew what I was talking about. 😊
Sadly, the primal aggression of our Primate ancestors still excites the lizard brain. Dominating the competition is, of course, sadistic and the promotion of it appeals to other disorders. I’m not sure what happened to congratulating the competition for a game well-played and to acknowledge that luck may shift in the next meeting. Maybe that’s the way out; with a song to celebrate the contest and show gratitude for the competition. I suppose history wouldn’t be optimistic.
On the optimistic side, I go to a lot of high school sports, and in most games now the players shake hands with each other at the end of the game and say "Good game!" to their opponents.
It is considered very bad form not to.
On the other hand, the parents still scream at the refs. Parents should learn from their children.
I would frame this differently. It isn’t about binary conflict, it’s about competition verses cooperation. Team sports are strictly competitive. Individual sports are as well, but they introduce the concept of personal best. The arts should never be a competition. It robs them of their individual greatness and universality. Our individual strength might benefit from some level of competition, but our humanity as a whole and the good of our ecosystem depends on sadly deemphasized cooperation. Until we lean to value cooperation more than competition, we will never truly progress.
Amazingly, national (and world) events have come to the point where we genuinely look to art (human creativity and responses to it, in any and every medium) as a potentially saving grace against the looming dangers. Ted is right, I believe, that music, dance, visual arts and narratives can unite us -- of course it takes artists to activate those emanations of expression, and probably leaders in other spheres of activity to organize and build real-life structures. I think of Dylan, the Beatles, Jefferson Airplane et al gathering the '60s tribes but the coalition turned out to be much more idealistic than pragmatic. The arts can inspire, sooth, elate, evoke memories, stimulate and provoke, but they don't make laws or enforce them.
Here is some more telling about America. In his book Endless Holocausts: Mass Death in the History of the United States Empire, the political scientist David Michael Smith calculates that the US has been responsible or shared responsibility for the death of 54 million people between 1945 and 2020. Add in domestic social killing and move the time back to the founding of the American Empire in 1776 and the body count climbs to 300 million. In his 2013 book America’s Deadliest Export, William Blum reported that the United States after World War II: worked to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments; interfered in elections held by 30 sovereign nations; tried to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders; bombed more than 30 nations; and tried to suppress nationalist, leftist, and populist movements in at least 20 nations. (These numbers need to be updated for the last three years of the Obama administration and the Trump and Biden presidencies to include, among other things, US funding and protection of Israel’s 2023-20?? genocide in Gaza, Trump’s boat strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific, Trump’s kidnapping of Venezuela’s sovereign elected president, and Trump’s reckless and failing fiasco of a war on Iran.) The United States is the only country to have attacked human beings (unnecessarily) with nuclear weapons (twice) and has brought the world remarkably close to nuclear annihilation on multiple occasions. It is the clear leader in the global march to societal collapse if not human extinction via climate collapse, ecocide (broadly understood), nuclear proliferation, pandemicide, and artificial intelligence
"The United States is the only country to have attacked human beings (unnecessarily) with nuclear weapons (twice)", I agree with your entire post except this one. The poor Marines that were drug into the war by the powers in charge of the U.S. could not invade anymore islands controlled by the Japanese without massive casualties. Read "With the Old Breed" by E.B. Sledge and you will understand why war is so bad and you would never volunteer to fight in any wars. Those Marines suffered enough and the atomic bombs ended their suffering.
The fact the Russians were landing in Japan not the nuclear bombs ended the war. Bombs do not end wars.Reearch that before you give a reactionary response.
Just as everyone likes to forget that the CIA collaborated with the British in the overthrow of a democratically-elected government in Iran, then installed a dictator, the Shah, and armed him to the teeth. Imagine if the reverse had happened and the Iranians overthrew Eisenhower's government and backed a dictator in Washington for the next 25+ years. Wouldn't Americans be a tiny bit pissed off at Iran--as pissed off as the Iranians were at America when they overthrew the Shah?
The expectation was that a land invasion of Japan would also kill hundreds of thousands of Japanese, and tens of thousands of American troops. Our experience from fighting Japan in other Asian and Pacific lands at that time was that their military culture was one of never surrendering, of fighting to the death. The fire bombing of Tokyo six months before had also killed about 100 thousand, without prompting surrender. The atom bombs arguably saved many Japanese lives, in being sufficient to quicken the end of the war.
I have been thinking and reading about the role of music in military organizations - Coltrane and Brubeck and Tony Bennett and many others played in and lead bands while in the service. Music is for morale and unity. And it can even create respite within the horrors of war.
Excellent article on Binary Conflict. Triggered many thoughts. I am reminded you did a piece on Gregory Bateson I've previously commented on. You are concretely well paralleling here Bateson's theory of two forms of "Schismogenesis." Escalating feedback loops locked in explosive reactivity to each other until death do us part. Carl Jung also had a theory something akin to the more extreme opposites become the more they are unconsciously mirrors of each other. Fits what you succinctly described. James Carse has a wonderful book called "Finite and Infinite Games," analogical to your comparing sports with art and especially music. Finite games as organized sports are inherently competitive, have arenas, rules, time limits, referees, (though the NBA appears not to use them much), and clear personal and/or tribal team winners and losers. Infinite games tend to be cooperative, and the goal of the game is to keep the game going, evolving, co-creating, with the aesthetic purpose of felt mutual satisfaction in the play itself for it's own sake, etc. You would enjoy his perspectives. And finally, I am a Whiteheadian of sorts philosophically. The root of his ontology(view of deepest reality), is aesthetic - meaning all about integrations of the many into a novel one, which itself then increases the many by one. This is ubiquitous at every level of reality as an ongoing process-relational integration of past achievements of value with new potentials imaginatively conceived on the fly so to speak. A Jazz ensemble is an apt metaphor for Whitehead's metaphysical ontology in my perspective. The point here is that evolutionary process itself is an aesthetic movement of inter-relationships (with polarities and diversities integrated as mutually felt energizing contrasts, not simplistic rigid opposite forms of mutual distruction). In short, the gift of life happens, evolves aesthetically (diversities within sustainable unities, e.g. an ancient definition of Beauty with a capital "B"), not via unilateral one size fits all escalating power dynamics of entropic destruction. For Whiteheadians, it's about mutually open persuasion and integration, not coercion and fragmentation. In any case, thanks for stimulating further thought from your piece on the current pervasive binary conflicts - political, religious, economic, and sometimes athletic - where the fallacies that only winning and competitive success matter and are the primary "games" in town. John B.
Even the Grammys has its binary battles and well meaning rock stars preach on the global stage to binary applause. Music can heal, the financial engine that drives it, does not. Elections come down to bad compromises and lesser of two evils choices. Filling the air with music in WW1 would be powerful. Today it’s harder to cut thru the din. That said, Fast Car is one mesmerizing groove and story, pulling us in and inviting to escape with them. Post 9/11, we turned to music to heal…acoustic music moving the air between us. Then we went back to our samples, beats and 60cycle drops. If music is an answer to conflict, it’s man made music.
The current issue of The Journal of Consciousness Studies, whose theme is 'Mind, Music & Mental Health,' features an introduction claiming "Haunted by stress, depression, and diagnoses pertaining to emotion regulation an attention deficits, society is long past the threshold where individualized psychological counselling or psycho-pharmaceutics can adequately respond. Already, research in music therapy and in music and peacebuilding shows that musical engagement can respond effectively to this collective mental health crisis." (Høffding & Lueke)
Maybe one problem is few people sing (or dance, or play instruments). Just go to a large public event; no one sings the national anthem anymore. People do not sing in public, unless they are "singers."
They might be better off if they created the sounds themselves in their own bodies, rather than simply listening to an entertainer over a loudspeaker.
This could also be connected to the lack of physical play kids get to do, as opposed to screen staring. And grown ups need that too.
We all have a need for spontaneity! Spontaneity is aliveness.
Ted, opposites (binary) is simply a psychological development stage. Our psyche splits into opposites before they can be then reconciled, and we become whole and complete again. It can take awhile, especially when it happens collectively, like the Romans, but it will all come together because there is always a forward movement in our psychological development.
I'd like to believe that psychological development is always forward moving, except that I am seeing people go sideways a lot (if not regressing)LOL. It is also interesting that psychology "tricks" like the Double Bind can be used both to manipulate us (the government) or to guide someone out of their circular self-reinforcing behavior (Milton Erickson seems to have used this technique with great positive effect). I hope you're right, though, that humanity is gradually healing the rift.
Su, I totally hear you. It’s not straightforward. I didn’t want to add too many things so that the central point would be lost. Weir Perry watched the psychological stages unfold in his psychotic patients and the psyche naturally healed from being split into opposites to coming back to a place of wholeness. The phase of ‘opposites’ has a lot of energy to it and so it can become quite addictive. The next natural stage is reflective and deep inner enquiry, so people and whole countries resist going into this stage. It has to happen because, like the seasons, there is a forward momentum. The underlying psychological tectonic plates are always moving.
Watching from Canada as the decades accrue I have often wondered: How much of the growing antipathy that routinely seems to paralyze constructive US governance can be boiled down to the failure of a Two-Party-System?
Here, the majority barely respects our 3rd and 4th parties but even non-supporters know they are useful places to store one's vote when your own Party needs a cooling-off period to step back and earn our trust again. A natural process of pruning and regrowth is allowed to happen without the spectre of actively supporting the Enemy.
Political opposition that leads to paralyzing hatred and blind faith is a sign of a system breaking?
One of your best in recent memory. Wish it were an op-ed in the NYT.
Makes sense, especially in light of how many comment sections devolve into political shouting matches even when the original post/news story wasn't political. Everything is either for or against my team.
Yeah, I got tired of that, too. Avocados are left! Burgers are right!
I once read a piece of silliness by George Will (a conservative), in which he tried to make the argument that trains were a Liberal mode of transportation. Why? Because you could only ride them at certain times. There are rules! Liberals love rules! Whereas cars were for Conservatives because you could drive them any time you wanted to. Freedom!
I thought conservatives loved rules, and old fashioned things like steam trains. Did he really say that? And what about ELECTRIC cars? Liberals like them, but they are cars. And made by a Trump (sometime) ally. So: yea, or nay?
While we're at it, is a cable car left wing, or right wing? And what about airplanes? They (famously) have two wings, one on each side. If either comes off, plane go down.
This gets kinda ridiculous. In German trains are considered "masculine," so it is "Der Zug" for you. But are women allowed to ride on the male train?
English doesn't assign genders to objects, at birth or any other time. Is that why the British Empire collapsed?
Mental boxes are the prisons we create for ourselves in our own minds.
I'd like a burger with avocado, and a cherry on top, please! And one for my friend.
I found the Newsweek op-ed. I was a little off, but basically got it right...
"The length of the list of reasons, and the flimsiness of each, points to this conclusion: the real reason for progressives' passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans' individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism.
"To progressives, the best thing about railroads is that people riding them are not in automobiles, which are subversive of the deference on which progressivism depends. Automobiles go hither and yon, wherever and whenever the driver desires, without timetables."
Thanks for looking that up.
So, according to Will's logic, if you wanted to go from the east coast to the west coast you should spend a week driving rather than take an airliner to get there in six hours, because the airlines are "common carriers" run by progressives?
Got it.
But I wonder what method he uses to travel. I think I know the answer. I don't think he flies his own Cessna. And I doubt he can afford to fly by "private" jet, which is hideously expensive for a mere columnist at the Washington Post.
And he generates his own electricity by using solar cells on his own roof?
Is this the same Will who wrote "Statecraft as Soulcraft," which argues that the government should focus more on developing people's souls?
Here in New England they tried to do that in the colonial era when the Puritans were in charge, and you were not allowed to think your own thoughts, only the officially sanctioned thoughts. The church was also the state. Kinda like Iran. Anybody want to go back to that?
When I go into New York City from CT I happily take the train because it is much less hassle than driving, and cheaper too. Then when I get off the train I walk all around Manhattan using my own two feet. Or take the subway.
Whatever floats my boat.
Great points. Will's political view of transportation reveals how ridiculous and flimsy politically categorization becomes when it seeks to explain everything.
Yeah. Lately everything turns into a cultural/political binary. See the latest controversy in Ted's new one about the NYT best songwriters list. Was about to weigh in (I actually know the former Times pop reviewer who got ousted in favor of the ones in the podcast) but held back because I am precisely the sort of person who doesn't belong to either binary, and we just went over what happens to that sort of person once the crowd gets riled up and crushes any dissent. Everybody hates the person who tries to break up a fight. Been there. Passion overrules reason. This is how free speech gets smothered in real life. Even when you try to keep it friendly, many people don't want to hear it. That's why I am so happy (and relieved) to have friendly back and forths like this one. It's risky these days! But we have to do it. BTW I didn't mention (to keep it short) that I used to read Will's columns and I bought that book of his and thought it made some valid points. From being in the news biz I know there is a danger in being the sort of opinion writer who just sits in the office and has opinions, and does no research, and can get really out of touch. A former publisher was so out of touch he literally didn't even know the name of one of his key editors! But he had plenty of opinions. Me, I have opinions, but don't mind changing them. They're worth 2 cents. LOL
Such an engaging and interesting post, thank you.
This is why Jesus teaching to love your enemies is considered one of his most difficult. It’s not that it can’t be done, but it requires humility and a willingness to forgo the advantages of binary conflict that you outline here.
Related to your binary crises, I’ve been thinking about an idea I call The Monocontroversy.
To offer an obvious example, Trump became the monocontroversy for many people in 2016. For about a decade now, everything has gradually been sorted into the buckets of pro-Trump or anti-Trump. Not only policy decisions or political stances, but all sorts of diverse and even arbitrary preferences—people’s diets, hairstyles, music, etc—have all been brought into the binary set by the Monocontroversy. Even established binaries, ie “rivalries”, like Tolstoy vs Dostoevsky get recast into who is more or less likely to vote for Trump.
Now, certain things aren’t allowed. You cannot be a vegan with blue hair who listens to Kid Rock and reads Dostoevsky, nor a mulleted carnivore who listens to Taylor Swift and Tolstoy—it breaks our new binary and distracts from the monocontroversy we all (tacitly) agreed to. And here comes your Girardian point: People don’t know what to do with you, and we don’t know what to do without other people, so we fall back in line.
Ironically, we can fix things by having more controversies. The football fans already prove this: they’re too busy arguing about Longhorns and Aggies, Wolverines and Spartans, etc to care about ordering their life around a particular politician. He’s not their monocontroversy. Likewise, I can hate on hazy IPAs, love Carnatic ragas, or have fiery opinions about book binding for reasons other than politics. My fundamental values lie deeper than our common controversies. Thus, my identity is less at risk and I don’t have to defend a common controversy to defend my identity. Instead, I’m now free to explore this identity through many more controversies with lower stakes.
When I think back to the conversations I used to have before 2016, I remember disagreeing with friends about a great many things. After 2016 I only remember us being allowed to disagree about one thing. In 2020 the “one thing” exerted more social gravity and the eggshells surrounding our conversations got sharper. Instead, I think healthy cultures comes about through a constellation of different controversies. Unhealthy cultures just sink into a black hole if they have only one controversy to fight over.
Carnatic, eh? What, are _Hindustani_ ragas not good enough for ya?
You see! Anyone who knows enough to disagree with me has so much more we’re in agreement on. Disagreeing with you would be much more enjoyable and productive than not having anyone who knew what I was talking about. 😊
tremendous observations, great stuff
It's worth remembering that the USA's two political parties barely have 50% support COMBINED.
Sadly, the primal aggression of our Primate ancestors still excites the lizard brain. Dominating the competition is, of course, sadistic and the promotion of it appeals to other disorders. I’m not sure what happened to congratulating the competition for a game well-played and to acknowledge that luck may shift in the next meeting. Maybe that’s the way out; with a song to celebrate the contest and show gratitude for the competition. I suppose history wouldn’t be optimistic.
On the optimistic side, I go to a lot of high school sports, and in most games now the players shake hands with each other at the end of the game and say "Good game!" to their opponents.
It is considered very bad form not to.
On the other hand, the parents still scream at the refs. Parents should learn from their children.
I would frame this differently. It isn’t about binary conflict, it’s about competition verses cooperation. Team sports are strictly competitive. Individual sports are as well, but they introduce the concept of personal best. The arts should never be a competition. It robs them of their individual greatness and universality. Our individual strength might benefit from some level of competition, but our humanity as a whole and the good of our ecosystem depends on sadly deemphasized cooperation. Until we lean to value cooperation more than competition, we will never truly progress.
Have you seen this? An unforgettable gem of rare and unusual beauty in sport:
The black American Jesse Owens and his white German opponent/friend Luz Long competing in the ultimate pressure test:
The 1936 Olympics in Berlin, under the gaze of Adolf Hitler.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quQopJmQry4
https://www.bbc.com/sport/athletics/articles/cd1xlr5ewrro
The binary was collapsed. It was BOTH competition and cooperation.They were joined in the search for excellence!
This is how humans can be.
Amazingly, national (and world) events have come to the point where we genuinely look to art (human creativity and responses to it, in any and every medium) as a potentially saving grace against the looming dangers. Ted is right, I believe, that music, dance, visual arts and narratives can unite us -- of course it takes artists to activate those emanations of expression, and probably leaders in other spheres of activity to organize and build real-life structures. I think of Dylan, the Beatles, Jefferson Airplane et al gathering the '60s tribes but the coalition turned out to be much more idealistic than pragmatic. The arts can inspire, sooth, elate, evoke memories, stimulate and provoke, but they don't make laws or enforce them.
Here is some more telling about America. In his book Endless Holocausts: Mass Death in the History of the United States Empire, the political scientist David Michael Smith calculates that the US has been responsible or shared responsibility for the death of 54 million people between 1945 and 2020. Add in domestic social killing and move the time back to the founding of the American Empire in 1776 and the body count climbs to 300 million. In his 2013 book America’s Deadliest Export, William Blum reported that the United States after World War II: worked to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments; interfered in elections held by 30 sovereign nations; tried to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders; bombed more than 30 nations; and tried to suppress nationalist, leftist, and populist movements in at least 20 nations. (These numbers need to be updated for the last three years of the Obama administration and the Trump and Biden presidencies to include, among other things, US funding and protection of Israel’s 2023-20?? genocide in Gaza, Trump’s boat strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific, Trump’s kidnapping of Venezuela’s sovereign elected president, and Trump’s reckless and failing fiasco of a war on Iran.) The United States is the only country to have attacked human beings (unnecessarily) with nuclear weapons (twice) and has brought the world remarkably close to nuclear annihilation on multiple occasions. It is the clear leader in the global march to societal collapse if not human extinction via climate collapse, ecocide (broadly understood), nuclear proliferation, pandemicide, and artificial intelligence
"The United States is the only country to have attacked human beings (unnecessarily) with nuclear weapons (twice)", I agree with your entire post except this one. The poor Marines that were drug into the war by the powers in charge of the U.S. could not invade anymore islands controlled by the Japanese without massive casualties. Read "With the Old Breed" by E.B. Sledge and you will understand why war is so bad and you would never volunteer to fight in any wars. Those Marines suffered enough and the atomic bombs ended their suffering.
The fact the Russians were landing in Japan not the nuclear bombs ended the war. Bombs do not end wars.Reearch that before you give a reactionary response.
Yes, everyone likes to forget that it was the Russians who won the second world war, not the "Johnny-come-lately" Americans.
Just as everyone likes to forget that the CIA collaborated with the British in the overthrow of a democratically-elected government in Iran, then installed a dictator, the Shah, and armed him to the teeth. Imagine if the reverse had happened and the Iranians overthrew Eisenhower's government and backed a dictator in Washington for the next 25+ years. Wouldn't Americans be a tiny bit pissed off at Iran--as pissed off as the Iranians were at America when they overthrew the Shah?
The U.S. backed the wrong side because FDR was a Commie.
Who was worse Stalin or Hitler?
Stalin seems to have killed more, and Mao still more than that. But history deemphasizes those things for reasons I’m not clear on.
Probably because the Nazi's wanted to literally murder a whole group of people in death camps, the Jewish people. Murder was the goal.
Whereas Stalin and Mao just didn't care who died as long as they got their way. They did win the numbers race.
But it isn't just the numbers. Murder is considered the most heinous crime by every religion and philosophy.
You are also saying better to kill hundreds of thousands Japanese civilians than American soldiers.
The expectation was that a land invasion of Japan would also kill hundreds of thousands of Japanese, and tens of thousands of American troops. Our experience from fighting Japan in other Asian and Pacific lands at that time was that their military culture was one of never surrendering, of fighting to the death. The fire bombing of Tokyo six months before had also killed about 100 thousand, without prompting surrender. The atom bombs arguably saved many Japanese lives, in being sufficient to quicken the end of the war.
We are ultimately all tribes. My tribe is not Japanese.
The Japanese had already agreed to surrender before those bombs were dropped. They were dropped as a demonstration, to "shock and awe". Pure evil.
This would be false. All of the information in the world is available on the internet if you want to look it up.
August 6, 1945: The United States dropped the first atomic bomb ("Little Boy") on Hiroshima.
August 9, 1945: The second atomic bomb ("Fat Man") was dropped on Nagasaki.
August 15, 1945: Emperor Hirohito announced Japan's surrender in a radio broadcast (known as "Jewel Voice Broadcast").
September 2, 1945: The formal surrender was signed aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, officially ending World War II.
I think you're lying. Or are repeating lies. I guess you're entitled to your opinions but outright lies are wrong.
I have been thinking and reading about the role of music in military organizations - Coltrane and Brubeck and Tony Bennett and many others played in and lead bands while in the service. Music is for morale and unity. And it can even create respite within the horrors of war.
And George M Cohan was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his songs!
Hi Ted,
Excellent article on Binary Conflict. Triggered many thoughts. I am reminded you did a piece on Gregory Bateson I've previously commented on. You are concretely well paralleling here Bateson's theory of two forms of "Schismogenesis." Escalating feedback loops locked in explosive reactivity to each other until death do us part. Carl Jung also had a theory something akin to the more extreme opposites become the more they are unconsciously mirrors of each other. Fits what you succinctly described. James Carse has a wonderful book called "Finite and Infinite Games," analogical to your comparing sports with art and especially music. Finite games as organized sports are inherently competitive, have arenas, rules, time limits, referees, (though the NBA appears not to use them much), and clear personal and/or tribal team winners and losers. Infinite games tend to be cooperative, and the goal of the game is to keep the game going, evolving, co-creating, with the aesthetic purpose of felt mutual satisfaction in the play itself for it's own sake, etc. You would enjoy his perspectives. And finally, I am a Whiteheadian of sorts philosophically. The root of his ontology(view of deepest reality), is aesthetic - meaning all about integrations of the many into a novel one, which itself then increases the many by one. This is ubiquitous at every level of reality as an ongoing process-relational integration of past achievements of value with new potentials imaginatively conceived on the fly so to speak. A Jazz ensemble is an apt metaphor for Whitehead's metaphysical ontology in my perspective. The point here is that evolutionary process itself is an aesthetic movement of inter-relationships (with polarities and diversities integrated as mutually felt energizing contrasts, not simplistic rigid opposite forms of mutual distruction). In short, the gift of life happens, evolves aesthetically (diversities within sustainable unities, e.g. an ancient definition of Beauty with a capital "B"), not via unilateral one size fits all escalating power dynamics of entropic destruction. For Whiteheadians, it's about mutually open persuasion and integration, not coercion and fragmentation. In any case, thanks for stimulating further thought from your piece on the current pervasive binary conflicts - political, religious, economic, and sometimes athletic - where the fallacies that only winning and competitive success matter and are the primary "games" in town. John B.
Even the Grammys has its binary battles and well meaning rock stars preach on the global stage to binary applause. Music can heal, the financial engine that drives it, does not. Elections come down to bad compromises and lesser of two evils choices. Filling the air with music in WW1 would be powerful. Today it’s harder to cut thru the din. That said, Fast Car is one mesmerizing groove and story, pulling us in and inviting to escape with them. Post 9/11, we turned to music to heal…acoustic music moving the air between us. Then we went back to our samples, beats and 60cycle drops. If music is an answer to conflict, it’s man made music.
The current issue of The Journal of Consciousness Studies, whose theme is 'Mind, Music & Mental Health,' features an introduction claiming "Haunted by stress, depression, and diagnoses pertaining to emotion regulation an attention deficits, society is long past the threshold where individualized psychological counselling or psycho-pharmaceutics can adequately respond. Already, research in music therapy and in music and peacebuilding shows that musical engagement can respond effectively to this collective mental health crisis." (Høffding & Lueke)
Is this paywalled, or is a public link available?
Maybe one problem is few people sing (or dance, or play instruments). Just go to a large public event; no one sings the national anthem anymore. People do not sing in public, unless they are "singers."
They might be better off if they created the sounds themselves in their own bodies, rather than simply listening to an entertainer over a loudspeaker.
This could also be connected to the lack of physical play kids get to do, as opposed to screen staring. And grown ups need that too.
We all have a need for spontaneity! Spontaneity is aliveness.
Not aware of a public link. Available in many university libraries, if you've access.
Ted, opposites (binary) is simply a psychological development stage. Our psyche splits into opposites before they can be then reconciled, and we become whole and complete again. It can take awhile, especially when it happens collectively, like the Romans, but it will all come together because there is always a forward movement in our psychological development.
I'd like to believe that psychological development is always forward moving, except that I am seeing people go sideways a lot (if not regressing)LOL. It is also interesting that psychology "tricks" like the Double Bind can be used both to manipulate us (the government) or to guide someone out of their circular self-reinforcing behavior (Milton Erickson seems to have used this technique with great positive effect). I hope you're right, though, that humanity is gradually healing the rift.
Su, I totally hear you. It’s not straightforward. I didn’t want to add too many things so that the central point would be lost. Weir Perry watched the psychological stages unfold in his psychotic patients and the psyche naturally healed from being split into opposites to coming back to a place of wholeness. The phase of ‘opposites’ has a lot of energy to it and so it can become quite addictive. The next natural stage is reflective and deep inner enquiry, so people and whole countries resist going into this stage. It has to happen because, like the seasons, there is a forward momentum. The underlying psychological tectonic plates are always moving.
Watching from Canada as the decades accrue I have often wondered: How much of the growing antipathy that routinely seems to paralyze constructive US governance can be boiled down to the failure of a Two-Party-System?
Here, the majority barely respects our 3rd and 4th parties but even non-supporters know they are useful places to store one's vote when your own Party needs a cooling-off period to step back and earn our trust again. A natural process of pruning and regrowth is allowed to happen without the spectre of actively supporting the Enemy.
Political opposition that leads to paralyzing hatred and blind faith is a sign of a system breaking?