Isn’t Almost Everything Non-binary?

You may have noticed that black-and-white thinking is taking over many areas of life from politics to sports to spirituality and more. I’m not naive enough to think that this is new. I think people draw great comfort from the notion that things are either one thing or the other: good versus evil, man versus woman, us versus them (a favorite theme of mine), gay versus straight, on versus off…you can think of your own examples, I’m sure. It makes decision-making much easier when there are only two very different options to choose from (as opposed to choosing paint colors from the giant swatch collection from the paint company–so hard.

Simplicity is comforting, as is knowing in your own head that you are right and have made good choices. We’re all on Team Good and Team Us! No one wants to be on Team Evil or Team Them. Those are the “others” we don’t want to associate with. I get it. But. Too bad.

I’m here to remind you that very few things are actually either/or. They’re more likely either or or or or or. This has been a passion of mine since I was very young. I didn’t even like the part of Genesis in the Bible where Yahweh divided everything into little binary bits. It’s not Night and Day, God! There’s twilight, dawn, dusk, the Golden Hour and many other parts of the daily cycle.

Once upon a time I was writing about linguistics and my job was to describe how some little “feeling” words at the ends of sentences in Japanese worked. I listened to people talk, I watched Japanese movies, I asked people who spoke Japanese what they thought. Then I tried to write it up. It was obvious to me that the little words went from expressing a soft, feminine touch to a hard masculine emphasis. The words weren’t divisible into two categories. It was a continuum or a scale. That didn’t jive with the currently popular theories of how language worked back in the olden days, so my analysis didn’t go over well. I was not happy to feel compelled to slam my little words into a theory that didn’t explain them.

This experience attuned me to notice other parts of the world that were non-binary (long before I heard of nonbinary people). It helped that other people were noticing this, too. Pretty soon I heard that autism was on a spectrum, as were personality traits like psychopathy. By gosh, then sexual preferences turned out to be on a spectrum, which was a big aha moment for this woman who never felt particularly womanly. And this week the whole man versus woman spectrum has been explicated everywhere I look. That’s all good, of course. It’s just that the binary believers aren’t pleased by all this science hoo-ha.

It’s not just human traits. The more I read about biology I see that genus and species in many life forms isn’t as binary as taxonomists would with they were. I learned how hard it is to distinguish some birds and that sometimes species diverge and then re-converge again. The Earth herself doesn’t have as many set boundaries as people think. It’s not land and sea. There are marshes, glaciers, reefs, and such, with the edges changing over time.

The more I look around, the harder it becomes to find anything natural that’s really binary. I think working in a binary fashion may be one clue that something is made by humans, like computers, cars, political parties, religions, and the ilk. It’s all very confining.

Some of these institutions really try to restrict us from being true to ourselves. For example, in the US the political system forces you to choose a party (I realize there are more than two). You must be Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative, red or blue. But most people have their own ideas and opinions that fall somewhere in between or outside the limits of these labels. I don’t like this. I am a pacifist, but I still support law enforcement. I don’t like guns, but they have their place and wouldn’t take them all away. You can see, I’m somewhere in between, as are many people who aren’t among the substantial percentage of the population that prefers to draw comfort in black and white thinking.

I guess I’m trying to convey a message here. Please, if you are presented with a view of any issue that says there are only two options or choices, pause to think about it. Are there REALLY only two opposites, or are there actually many points on a continum, of options. We need to allow ourselves to see ambiguity and fluidity as natural and beautiful, since it turns out that’s how the natural world works. I find things more interesting and fun when I see all the possibilities, and I’m fine with not always knowing exactly where I fit in.

People can change, too. Once you’ve made a choice or decision, you can make another one based on current information. I’m not the same me who made immature decisions in my twenties; I’m a different me with more experience, so my decisions may still be questionable, but they’ll be different, along some nonbinary continuum of growth.

Feel free to argue.