In 2001, President Bush averred, "You're either with us or against us in the fight against terror." This declaration, confirmed by subsequent foreign policy decisions, is very black-and-white: either you stand with us entirely, or you stand entirely with terrorism. It's not limited to the war on terror, either; the United States invaded Iraq with similar "our-way-or-the-highway" unilateralism.
Such bifurcation betrays an incredibly simplistic way of looking at the world, and it's unfortunately not uncommon in the United States. Take a look, for example, at American nationalism: we live in God's own country, blessed with freedom; there is a sense (though I'm sure most people won't come right out and say it) that the United States really can do no wrong. A common song exemplifies the attitude: "And I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free."
But how many people really know the dark underbelly of American history? Take, for example, the brutal subjugation of the Philippines, the passing of smallpox-infected blankets to American Indian villages, the invasion of Panama or the replacement of democratically elected governments during the Cold War. When you realize that America has more than its fair share of atrocities for being so young, the miasma of godly invincibility surrounding our country begins to dissolve.
Why should we be consummately proud of living here? Because we have the biggest military in the world? Because we happen to have abundant natural resources, which have given us the largest economy in the world?
More to the point, why can't we be proud of the good things in American history while at the same time not glossing over the bad things? For example, we crushed Nazism, but 25 years before that we sent 300,000 young men to be maimed or injured in a European land contest. Let us admit the terrible crimes America has committed and temper our arrogance with humility.
But we as a country can't seem to do that, which brings us back to black-and-white thinking. There is more than one problem with such an overly simplistic view of the world, and the most glaring issue is precisely that it's oversimplistic. The world doesn't work that way; it's continuous, not broken up into discrete boxes.
For example, species are not discrete items. Biologically, two animals are in the same species if they will interbreed in the wild. However, there is a string of populations of monkeys stretching across the Amazon in South America who will interbreed with nearby populations, but the ones across the continent from each other will not interbreed. Is this string of populations a species? It defies black-and-white classification.
It is in human nature to oversimplify the world. We like to cross all the t's, dot all the i's and make sure everything is in its nice little box. It's much easier to live in a world where you and your friends are good, everyone else is evil and the prince gets the princess at the end of the day. Unfortunately, the world doesn't work like that, and when you assume it does, it comes back to hurt you. From costing hundreds of billions of dollars, tens of thousands of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives to straining friendships and relationships because of insistence on dogmatic correctness to glossing over the bad parts of American history, black-and-white thinking has and almost surely will continue to cause people pain.
Write to Levin at necoleman@bsu.edu
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