A One Dimensional World

We do not have to live in a two-sided reality.

Many people adjust to life in a simple two-sided world.  It comes with benefits.  There are teams to join, friends to make and enemies that create drama and excitement.  It is a reassuring illusion.  Sometimes it is lucrative.  It’s play for pay. 

It requires, however, that we stay with one perspective, a perspective that allows us to see the world as essentially two-sided.  We find comfort and meaning by choosing one of the two sides.

Even if you find the middle and squat on the fence, you have not left that two-sided world.  You’ve just become “fair-minded” (to some), cowardly to others.

And even when you shoehorn more than one issue into your either/or world view, you don’t leave your two-sided single dimension. Sprinkle a little partisan dust on the issues and they cluster together and become two sides of one-dimension. Call one side liberal and the other conservative, one American and the other unAmerican or freedom loving and communist, or God-serving and woke.

And I’m pretty sure that the answer, the way out, isn’t just to change perspectives when you get tired of your old one, i.e. jump into another perspective, take root there, and find new friends and enemies. 

I am suggesting we start with recognizing there are many interests that we share with others, at different times and in different places, and then move from one perspective to another, across many dimensions as we work together to solve problems.  Our moment in time matters.  The places of our lives matter.  We discover wider choices, more varied challenges, and new possibilities as we experience the breadth of experience.    

It is true that we live with a construction of government called “democracy,” or I should say one version of it, that encourages a two-party system.  Such a construction privileges one-dimensional, two-sided, choice.  We see people being herded into the future in lines in front of two doors, i.e. in voting centers.    

One way to think about this problem is the distinction between a “knower” and a “learner.”  The world itself that we experience is fundamentally “unknown,” but infinitely capable of showing us new ways of seeing. (This is one of the common insights of both advanced physics and the Judeo-Christian tradition.) When we insist upon the sufficiency of our present “knowing,” we lock ourselves into that two-sided, one- dimensional world view.  “Learners” are open to experience.

Some say that such a turn toward being imaginative, and visionary, is “being on the frontier,” being “far out” and therefore marginal (on the margins of society)—a construction of moonbeams and honeycombs. I see it as being truly “centered.”  Being in the moment, aware of a place, perhaps for the first time.

While it may feel like being “blown away,” it is finding one’s true “centers,” one among many, and beginning a new flight of discovery. 

Keats well expressed the experience, when he wrote of the Spanish explorer Cortez first glimpsing the Pacific Ocean.  At that moment Cortez’s old understanding of the world changed.  His perspective changed.

 “He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men

Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.”