Round World Square Thoughts

  If I said “Spencer or Jamie?” you could give me an answer. If I said I watched Twilight last night, you wouldn’t assume I was stargazing. If I asked where the 2012 Olympics were you wouldn’t need a second guess. If you don't know what I'm on about, you must be living a deep sea cave. So you are probably not reading this anyway, what with the wifi signal not being that reliable down there and all. Point is you are well acquainted with what's going on in the world.

  Or are you?

  Here is the most basic question of all:

  What model do you think in?

  Most people come up stumped. The virtual tumbleweed is probably rolling across the page right now. But stick with it. You should know it because this model organises our language and therefore shapes our world.

   We are well versed in current events and entertainment, but know very little about the model of perception our information flows though. Ever heard of a thing called “dualism”?

  Dualism means there are two parts. It is a way of thinking in pairs. Try picking one thing and you can very quickly think of its other; man and woman (Spencer and Vanessa), human and animal (Bella and Edward...), rich and poor (Made in Chelsea and Eastenders). More than pairs, these phenomena are organised into “opposites”, meaning that they are one and not the other, different and not the same. Think: “opposite sex”, or “opposite side of the room.”

  This way of understanding the world is called “dualistic” and the things in the world have been organised this way since the time of Rene Descartes. In the 17C Descartes noticed that the world existed in pairs and using this methodology of opposition, split the mind and body into two separate parts. These pairs are said to be co-eternal binary opposites; two kinds.

  So why is this relevant to me?

  By using language today, you are using this model. Language is not just words. There is a methodology which structures it, which has guided your thinking from the moment you acquired speech. It organises your thoughts; it creates you. You wouldn’t fly a plane without at least a lesson or two before hand, so why career around the world without knowing what the model that frames the things you come into contact with is? You need to know that your perceptions are guided by a /central model of opposition/ – but what is more, this model may not be wholly accurate.

  What, you frown, hovering your mouse over the “x” button. You tell me my world is made out of a model, and now you tell me my model is wrong?

  How can my thinking not be correct?

   The dualistic model has come under heavy attack in the social sciences being misleading. In fact, Tim Ingold sees dualism as the “the single underlying fault upon which the entire edifice of Western thought and science has been built” (Ingold, 2000, 1).

  The problem is that these pairs do not actually exist as two separate things; these things that we order into opposition are not two kinds, they are /two of a kind/. They are like hybrids of the same thing rather than two things. Pairs traditional spoken about as opposites, such as man v woman, light v dark, white v black, sanity v madness illness, to name but a few, are more like hybrids of the same thing and exist upon a spectrum rather than as two categorically different kinds. For example, male and female are more like two distinct expression of one body, and man and animal are two presentations of a living thing, rather than separate entities. Light and dark is a spectrum.

The consequence of dualism is an illusion that the pairs (found naturally in hybridity) are not connected in any way. This idea of difference without common ground does not actually capture the world as it really is.

  Before Goethe found that human's had a inter-maxillary bone which proved human's and animals shared a common ancestor, biologists point blank did not accept that human and animal were anything to do with each other - eg. they refused to accept the connection and see hybridity, certain that these were two distinct kinds they were dealing with. All a result of thinking in dualistic opposition.

This is the main distinction: opposites have nothing in common, like matter and antimatter, and therefore cannot share anything, such as existence, and physically annihilate on first meeting. With the pairs that exist in the world, they exist together, therefore they share their quality of existence, so the term “opposite” subtle peels away from the reality it pretends to capture. Man actually depends on female for its existence – did you know men have nipples because they start off in the womb as female? And white skin depends on the existence of black skin, it is produced by a gene which inhibits melanin? And although most psychiatric research searches for an abnormal gene to prove sanity and madness as two different kinds, outside of this opposition categorisation, it is more likely that insanity was the primitive consciousness which sanity depended on its existence to develop from.

  But why does it matter?

  You could say that since we know that beneath this way of framing things that these pairs are not actually two separate things it doesn’t matter that we organise the pairs in this way.

 The problem with dualism comes in because we superimpose opposition on top and align these pairs accordingly. Right and wrong, good and bad, moral and immoral, winner and loser. One must be better and one must be worse, one right and one wrong. "One perspective" will always be excluded for the one we view as "better." At its darkest, strict adherence to this model of good v bad, categorical difference and opposition has been responsible for blind subjugation and exclusion; historical examples being woman's rights (man v woman) slavery (white v black),  and the holocaust (Nazi v Jew.) This sort of thinking allows races to blindly subjugate.  Dualistic thinking applied to people is to make a distinction and pose that they are only different with nothing in common. It ignores what is common - the fact that were are all people. History is testament to how using a model of thought that poses mutual exclusivity where there is none can lead the thinker to make drastic errors of judgment.

  The reality is that the way we are taught to think can obscure what is really there. It's a bit like being colour blind; we can see the world but we do not capture the whole spectrum of what is out there.

  If we frame reality in a way which doesn't quite fit and forget that the shape isn't quite right (or never even know, as the case may be) we are distorting our picture of the world. All sorts of problems could occur - and we aren't exactly living in the Garden of Eden, let's face it. Think #badlyfittingpairofshoes. They do the job but make life a lot harder than it should be. The War in Iraq, 9/11, cancer, 1/4 of us will be classed as having a mental disorder at some point in our life... these are all signs the world isn't right.

  This blog's main concern is with trying to gain an awareness of how the world really is and not just how it is given to us.

  But enough about dualistic thinking for now.

  I just wanted to let you know there was a different sort of world out there then the one we are immediately presented with with the language we come to understand the world through. There is another world out there which we haven’t yet touched, or maybe, we lost touch with.

  I study an MSc in Philosophy of Mental Disorder and this last year I've learned a lot about the way the world is constructed - and how the things in it can be thought to be a bit different from what they actually are. I feel it is my job to tell you about them.

  The first thing I'm going to do is delve into these pairs of things that have been considered so uncommon to each other and be a bit creative in putting them back together. I'm trying to say things don't have to be right and wrong, they can be right and right. I think if we recombine these two things we can be surprised with what we come up with that we never saw before. Let's say I want to find the inter-maxillary bone of a few more things: science v spirituality, mind v body and me v you, to name a few I have my eye on...

  I hope you want to join me in suspending the belief in certain opposition, piecing together (blog by blog) the divided pairs, and trying to see the world as it really is.

Difference is out. Equality is in.

By Jessica Marie Heath

Works Cited

Ingold, T., (2000) The Perception of the Environment: Essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill, Routledge.