On Oct.7, Hamas went into Israel and massacred over 1,400 Israelis. Israel vowed to destroy Hamas, and thousands of Gazans have been getting killed in the ensuing bombings, including thousands of children. By the time you read this, the fatalities will
likely be over ten thousand, and Israel may be occupying parts of Northern Gaza. There are widespread calls for a humanitarian ceasefire and criticisms of excessive force, but it’s hard for Israel to stop going after Hamas when they have spilt so much Israeli blood. It also knows a ceasefire is precisely Hamas’s endgame. Many Palestinians fear Israel’s endgame is a landgrab: burn everything to the ground, then
let Jewish settlers move in. The fog of war is thick in Gaza, civilians keep dying, no end in sight.

The Israel-Palestine conflict may be the world’s most intractable problem, but it’s only the latest instance of a troubling trend. A mean-spiritedness seems general all over the world. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. China’ s growing belligerence toward Taiwan. Civil wars in Africa, Syria, Myanmar. Anti-refugee sentiments everywhere. Daily mass shootings in the US. Even Canada and India are going at it over the assassination of a Sikh in Vancouver. Perhaps North Korea will say remember me? and detonate another nuclear
device. Humanity seems bent on being more warlike these days, more tribal and intolerant, more dichotomous.

But many things we encounter in life are false dichotomies. They tempt us with their simplicity. There we see the world in black and white. You are with us or against us. Either or. With God or the Devil, heaven or hell. False dichotomies. What if there’s a heaven but no hell? God but no Devil? What if I don’t want to take a side? What if I want colors and shades of grey? I’m not claiming circles are squares. Of course, binaries exist. But many presented as such are false choices.

The word for contradiction, mosun (矛盾), is itself a false dichotomy. A merchant selling a spear (矛) says it can penetrate any shield, but he also has a shield (盾) that he says is impenetrable. It seems he’s contradicting himself because both cannot be true. But this isn’t a contradiction. It’s a faulty thought experiment, or as philosopher Daniel Dennett would say, a bad intuition pump. Think about it. What does it mean for a spear to penetrate something? It’s work (energy) from some force. The force comes from a person thrusting the spear. So the claim is really that the spear will not break under pressure. If you cannot penetrate a shield and the spear doesn’t break, it’s not the spear’s fault. You’re the one who
couldn’t supply enough force. Put it that way, when the spear meets the shield, the shield should always prevail because, assuming you’ re holding the spear, the force applied will always be finite.

Dichotomies. We draw lines on the ground and say inside is us, outside them. Live on a stretch of land long enough, we come to believe the land belongs to us. The sacred land of our ancestors, the Promised Land. We have the right to live here, not them. We belong here, not them. On the other side are the barbarians, invaders, conquistadors. Might makes right. The land belongs to whoever wins. So we fight, us versus them, and write our history in blood. It was ever thus and ever shall be? I believe this is also a false choice.

After William Shatner (Captain Kirk) flew into space on Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket, he said something profound: “Everything I had thought was wrong. Everything I had expected to see was wrong … I saw the blackness of space … all I saw was death.” The man broke down and cried. He saw the thin film of blue hue that we call the troposphere, where we find clouds and most of our air. It’s only about 12 kilometers high. I could walk that distance in two hours. Just two hours and that’s it. That’s what nurtures all life on this planet. We look up and the sky seems endless, but looking down, Shatner saw a fragile Earth against the cold blackness of space. All he saw was death there, while this is all we have, this planet of ours.

Astronaut Chris Hadfield would describe what Shatner experienced as the “overview effect.” Hadfield says when you see from the International Space Station the whole world spinning 16 times a day, your view of the world changes. How could it not? There are no artificially drawn nationalistic borders, there
is no ‘They’ anymore, he says, “It’s just sort of all ‘Us’.” If only we could see each other that way, could we not say with all sincerity that “us versus them” is also a false dichotomy?


 

Peter Lee
Assistant Professor
School of English Language and Literature