For a couple of weeks after the election, Dot Tom Coffee developed a bitter taste:

http://www.cartoline.it/pics/_zoom_flash.htm?immagine=scherzi_150404_01.swf

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Helen Cariotis helped bring things back into balance...

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Helen Cariotis, Re. Coffee Controversy

...What I don't understand is why people have to be "one" or "the other." Why Democrat or Republican? Why pro-choice or pro-life? Why a tree-hugger or a clear-cutter? I suspect you are many, many things, and I know I am. Kathleen said on the DFWMCF list this morning that she liked having categories for conversation. Although I admit that does make things safer, I would find it difficult to do, because I am not just one thing, and at my age my brain tends to skip among them pretty easily.

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Dear Helen,

Re. "at my age my brain..."

Dialogue, Carolyn & Tom following a phone call:

C: Who was that?

T: Our grandson says we're expected, so I told him we'd be over in an hour or two.

C: Did he call you on the family phone or on his own phone?

T: He has his own phone now! Good grief, when did that happen?

C: It happened the last time they were here, and he found an old phone of ours...? And he asked if he could have it...? And it was okay with his parents, so we gave it to him...? Earth to Tom.

T: Oh. Well. As you say - I've slept since then.

Sigh...

Unlike yourself, I'm not a good controversialist. You always keep your humor & your humanity intact, no matter how strongly you're voicing your opinion. But I grew up in an angry home. Consequently, all too often my anger drowns out the thoughts I'm trying to convey. I served on the high school debate team my junior year, and one reason we lost the initial Interscholastic League contest was my angry tone. I was replaced by Don Hockady. Not hard to believe, huh?

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Don Hockaday Responds:

Tom,

"and one reason we lost the initial Interscholastic League contest was my angry tone. I was replaced by Don Hockady. Not hard to believe, huh?"

All I remember about high school debate is Todd always put us on different teams for school debates and I always knew my team was sunk before you were half-way through your first rebuttal.

We don't hear debates much anymore. A "presidential debate" is a misnomer. The news media is a waste. Congressional debates on CSpan are sometimes good when the questions are simple and straightforward, but too often the speakers divert the issues and fill up their time with irrelevant patter. They don't debate questions such as congressional term limits and don't spend much time discussing their own raises.

I hear arguments made that knowledgeable people on the same side of the issue readily concede to be invalid. I think most people would like to know the real facts and sound arguments for both sides of issues. These may not change their minds, but at least they will have some foundation for what they accept and reject. Few people have the time and energy to wade through multiple issues and weed out the half-truths and invalid positions, and it is especially difficult to do for one's own positions.

I would like to see a magazine or a web site that contains debates -- statements, rebuttals, second rebuttals -- on specific issues along with the history of the issue if appropriate. If I was editor of such a pub I would find three teams for each question -- for, against, and judges (to call foul). The teams would all have a look at all the statements and have a chance to change their own positions and wording and resubmit before publication. I would add on one more thing. Each side can make the statement that they hear the public opposition make such-and-such point and ask, "Does your team conceded that point is invalid?" If not, its on the table for you to defend.

If so, it goes in a section for concessions with your "But,...." disclaimers.
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Dear Don -

As regards your imagined debate site, the third category is the most important: Judges who remain above the fray. Helen Cariotis' question last Coffee, to the effect: "Why must we be either/or - Democrat or Republican, tree hugger or clear-cutter, pro-choice or pro-life?" reminded me of Fr. Wylie's commment on the not-so-gay debate in the Episcopal Church a while back: Choosing up sides is the problem.... The problem isn't different opinions, or interpretations of scripture. The problem is choosing up sides.

Despite Fr. Wylie's better judgement, however, choosing up sides has continued in the Episcopal Church. The Either/Or Divide now reaches from the indivdual parishoner to world-wide Anglicanism. The following situation is now possible:

A Dallas Episcopalian who objects to the elevation & consecration of openly gay Bishop Robinson is alienated from...

His Parish Church, which has filed a letter of objection to the AAC Network (which was formed mainly to object to the elevation & consecration of Robinson) because his Parish Church is alienated from...

The Diocese of Dallas, which has joined the AAC Network to express its alienation from...

The Episcopal Church USA, wherein Robinson has been elevated & consecrated, and which has learned via the Windsor Report from the Archbishop of Canterbury's Office, that it is alienated from...

The Anglican Communion.

Communion?

Now, back to Either/Ors in general.

The philosopher Hegel, as best I can make out, suggested that either/or is a built-in process of thought. One cannot assert the thesis Being without its antithesis arriving soon after - Non-being. To borrow a term you used long ago, the resulting cognitive dissonance demands a synthesis, a neither-nor or both-and: Becoming. Maybe pro & con is automatic. We have much in our culture that pushes us to see things that way, the two-party system & the adversarial system of justice. And, of course, high school debates.

I didn't recall the practice debates until you mentioned them, only that Noe Galvan & I lost in the first Interscholastic League round, and I was blamed. I did get 2nd. place one year in extemporary speaking. My opening sentence, on the topic Deficit Spending, began thus: "If we take the definary diction of 'deficit' ..."

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Don Hockaday, Re. Debates, &c.

I tried to look up 'the' rules for a formal debate on line, and found they come in flavors. Of the two most popular forms, Parliamentary Debate seems the most sporting and is more popular in Europe. The more American form is Cross-Examination Debate, and what I remember from high school. In both cases, the teams don't know which side they will defend until right before the debate. Cross-examination debaters know the question well in advance with plenty of time for research, while Parliamentary Debaters don't know even the question until 15 min before debate starts.

Helen: "Why must we be either/or -

Tom: "We have much in our culture that pushes us to see things that way"

In our culture, there may be even more to it than that. I was introduced to a beach game in Valpariso, Chile. It seems almost everyone who goes to the beach there has two paddles and a ball. The object is to hit the ball back and forth. There is no net, nor are boundaries marked off. I tried it until I got the hang of it and asked what seemed the obvious question, "How do we keep score, and what is needed to win?" The shocking answer: "If we keep in in the air a long time, we win."

"I didn't recall the practice debates until you mentioned them, only that Noe Galvan & I lost in the first Interscholastic League round, and I was blamed."

Maybe there is insight there. If you had lost the practice debates badly as did I, you would have remembered them. Perhaps we tend to remember the losses and the pains more than the wins and the pleasures. The easiest to forget is when we kept it in the air a long time.

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Dear Don,

One writer compared discovering thought & delivering it to the reader intact to the delicate business of "prying the limpet from the rock" without destroying the living creature within. Steinbeck perhaps it was, or someone very like him, a man familiar with how tide pools incapsulate the depths beyond. Nice essay.

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Mike Wright, Re. Biological Roots of Either/Or

Regarding the following:

Helen: "Why must we be either/or?"
Tom: "We have much in our culture that pushes us to see things that way."

I don't think it's just *our* culture. I've been pretty heavily exposed to Japanese culture (7.5 years in the Tokyo area--calligraphy, Aikido) and Chinese culture (coming up on 39 years of marriage next month, and a good portion of my 20 years in the Army as a translator), and, in spite of a veneer of Zen and Daoist (formerly known as "Taoist") esthetic, both seem to be more like ours than unlike ours in that regard. Many of the supposed differences appear to be more theoretical than actual.

It seems to me that any culture that engages in war must already divide the world into "us" and "them".

In fact, I think the tendency to a binary approach to the world is probably largely built into our cognitive mechanisms--and into those of all living creatures. To a great extent, survival as an individual means being able to distinguish between "me" and "not-me", "edible" and "inedible", "predator" and "non-predator", "potential mate" and "potential rival"...

For those of us who look at life through the eyes of Charles Darwin and his heirs, this makes perfect sense. The "goal" (though not conscious) of a biological entity is the successful production of offspring that can reproduce successfully. Anything that goes beyond what is required to reach this goal is just a frill. Therefore, there is no inherent requirement, for example, of an ability to perceive all frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum, or of a capacity for the instinctive understanding of complex statistical facts.

From an evolutionary standpoint, all a human has to do to be a success is to have kids, and then to do whatever he or she can to ensure that those kids do the same. This view also provides an explanation for the
way our bodies deteriorate with age. There is no evolutionary pressure to live much beyond the early adult years of our children. We've done our job, and we are no longer needed. Although we live on a much longer
time scale than that of the mayfly or the salmon, we aren't inherently any different. We reproduce, and then we die. Where the mayfly and the salmon have it over us is that they probably don't know that they're going to die. If they did (assuming, first, that they even could), then it would probably bug them, too.

At the time we split off as a recognizable branch of the apes, it appears that we lived in small, mobile bands. Protection of the group was protection of self. ("United we stand... .") From this perspective, it seems entirely reasonable to believe that there was evolutionary pressure that favored the reproductive success of those who
instinctively promoted the welfare of the group. There have been quite a few studies, both practical experiments and abstract game-theory-based thought experiments, on cooperation and altruism, leading to a pretty good understanding of how these things fit into what was once thought to be a "dog-eat-dog" world.

What's funny is that among the abilities that we developed as a species is an analytical approach that can produce results that conflict with the simplistic version of "either-or". Taken in small quantities, a bitter poison may be the medicine that saves my life. Someone from a different group may join with me in an enterprise that makes both of us--and generations of our progeny--successful and wealthy.

So, all we've done in modern times is to extend our perceptions of what group membership entails. Our inherent group-oriented nature hasn't really changed; it just appears that way when we don't look closely
enough.

But knowing that something is "true" doesn't automatically erase our biological imperatives, just as knowing that there are frequencies outside the visible range of the electromagnetic spectrum doesn't automatically permit us to view them. However, just as we can develop ways of "seeing" X-rays and radio waves, so we--or, at least, some of us--can sometimes "change our minds" about the appropriate way to perceive the dichotomies of the world. At the very least, we can sometimes go for a more fine-grained analysis of a question, rather than the automatic knee-jerk reaction.

The world is not simple, but our view of it tends to be. This causes conflicts that can lead to suffering. At the personal level, this is the kind of conflict that Buddhism tries to resolve--by leading us to let go of our instinctual, reactive perceptions in order to see more deeply. I think that writing like yours can perform that same function in a more indirect way.

While our instincts are well honed for life in small bands of roving hunter-gatherers on the plains of the African Savannah, they don't work quite so efficiently in a relatively overcrowded hi-tech world.

When a species fails to develop fast enough to deal with a changing environment, it may go extinct. There's no inherent reason that this shouldn't happen to our own species. On the other hand, another possibility could be the destruction of "civilization" and most of the population, which would put the survivors right back into a world that might fit us, as a species, better than we imagine.

Of course, this view conflicts with the idea of humans as beings with some kind of immortal, immutable soul, created in the (apparently partial and imperfect) image of an omniscient God.

All cheery and happy now? I'm to busy to get involved in any deep discussions at the moment, but I have been doing a little reading lately that touched on this subject, and the foregoing thoughts were triggered by that little exchange between you and Helen.

The books include two by Michael S. Gazzaniga, "Nature's Mind: The Biological Roots of Thinking, Emotions, Sexuality, Language, and Intelligence" and "The Mind's Past". Gazzaniga is the neuroscientist who wrote up the original studies on split-brain patients, leading to the plethora of references to "right-brain thinking" and "left-brain thinking", and such. I've also been reading a lot of books on "neurophilosophy" and cognitive science by Patricia and Paul Churchland.
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Dear Mike -

I vaguely remember a Buddha & Disciple anecdote somewhat as follows: A disciple said to the Buddha, "Either all is the universe, or all is God. Which is the case?" The Buddha did not answer.

I put "Either all universe or all God - Buddha" into my search engine in hopes of nailing the story chapter & verse. No luck, but I did find a relevant quote, from the Lankavatara Sutra:

"Nirvana...is seeing into the state of Suchness, absolutely transcending all the categories constructed by mind..."

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A dilemma similar to "All Universe or All God" arises in Western thought in England, circa 1750: Is mind a product of matter, or matter a product of mind? Here's a more detailed treatment from www.Bloomsbury.com:

"David Hume's theory of knowledge was distinct from the theories of John Locke and George Berkeley. Locke had said that ideas proceeded from sensations, ie from experience received through the senses, implying that we know mind only through matter.

"Berkeley said that on the contrary we know matter only through our mental conceptions of it and that this proves the primacy of mind.

"Hume said that we cannot know of the existence of mind, except as a collective term covering memories, perceptions and ideas. He further argued that there was no necessity in the law of cause and effect, except in mathematics; what we call that law is inferred but not observed, a customary association confirmed by experience but with no provable necessity in it. Thus if Locke had seemed to validate science at the expense of religion and Berkeley the reverse, Hume seemed to drive at the roots of both.

"The graceful lucidity with which Hume expounded this extreme scepticism caused a wit to summarize his philosophy in the epigram: `No mind!—It doesn't matter. No matter!—Never mind.'"

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An even more fundamental dichotomy in philosophy, between Being & Nothingness, begins with Parmenides (Flourished 475 BC). He reports a vision of Wisdom herself in which she instructs him. Here's a quote:

"That which is there to be spoken and thought of must be.

For it is possible for it to be.

But it is not possible for nothing to be. I bid you consider this."

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In a similar vein, Thomas Aquinas pointed out the semantic problem created by "nothing," "nothingness," "non-being," &c. - unique among nouns in that they have no referent. We operate with the general notion, "All nouns have referents" - but if we use one of these empty-category nouns as if it pointed to something that exists, then we get into logical errors.

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All food for thought, grist for the mill.

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Helen Cariotis, Re. Mike Wright's Essay

Great post, Mike Wright!

I do agree that all living things seem to look out for themselves first, and yes, if they didn't I guess that would lessen the chances of survival. I gotta comment on the "dog eat dog" world, however.

Although humans and dogs are very different species, and naturally see one another as "us" and "them," dogs have also learned (evolved?) to see themselves as a part of the human pack. By seeing humans this way, dogs have benefitted themselves enormously. So does the family dog run from bed to bed waking the children so that they can flee a fire acting out of altruism? Or does he understand somehow that if the family goes, so does he? Why does the border collie herd the sheep instead of killing them? Does the German Shepherd Dog protect the master in order to save himself, or does he see the human as pack member?

Personally, I think dogs and humans do what is in their own best interests. Sometimes that interest is to cooperate, get along, and protect the self by protecting the group. Well put, Mike!

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Dear Helen,

Here's a related sidelight: Altruistic Apes

You've probably heard of Teilhard de Chardin - who was characterized by NY Times in 1937 as "the Jesuit who held that man descended from monkeys." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Teilhard_de_Chardin

An enthusiastic reader of de Chardin once told me that the scientist had observed, one night, two apes fight feircely to keep a tiger away from the sleeping congeries - their community. They were over-matched and both were eventually killed, but the tiger was wounded and discouraged enough to go elsewhere in search of easier prey.

"Greater love has no man, than that he lay down his life for his friends."

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