“Fo’ Real?” #4: Death to dualism and its evil twin

Dualism

So much of our certainty is derived from the modern usage of dualism. I will define dualism as that which has two opposing realities. For example, day and night, light and dark, winner and loser, man and woman, adult and child. In short, it is an either/or perspective on life.

Of course there are opposites, but when the opposites are offered as the only possibilities for all things considered, then we can get into trouble real fast. When everything in life is an either/or proposition, then we feel compelled to choose. Furthermore, there is an underlying sense which choosing one way will be the right way and the other way is necessarily the wrong way.

So, when someone does not choose the same way we do, they are automatically wrong and are to be opposed or converted. And when people choose as we do, then they are automatically right and are to be celebrated or in-grouped.

Enter postmodernism. One of the great strengths of postmodern thought is that it dethrones dualism and lets lots of different options sit at the round table. Yes there is black, and yes there is white, but there is gray, yellow, purple infra-red, etc. Postmodernism does not say either/or, but rather it says both/and. This expansion of options is truly good news. At the same time it exposes complexity and can create uncertainty. Postmoderns sometimes seem to get real certain about their uncertainty – a dilemma.

So, modern dualism is narrow-minded when it comes to the number of options and acceptable options in a given situation. However, and here is the evil twin part of the story, when postmodernism uses a knee jerk “both/and” response to dualism’s “either/or” posture, a strangely familiar and equally hideous metadualism emerges.

When I say metadualism, what I mean is dualism on the next higher level such that the only two options are modernism and postmodernism working as ying and yang.

Although postmoderns would never admit to participating in any kind of dualism as it is to them very narrow minded and unenlightened, their strict adherence to all things nondualistic plays right into the hand of what I am calling metadualism. It is the evil twin.

This plays out in churches, in generational cohorts, in politics, and any other way people gather or organize. So much of academic allegiance to postmodernism is out of either fear or frustration of modern thought, or worse, down right hatred for it. Yet the postmoderns overplay their hand such that their antidogma dogma acts, in process, the very same way the thing that they so vehemently criticize acts. It’s like violent protesters at a peace march.

The truth is that there are some dualisms, but not as many as moderns think. There are vast numbers of options, but not for everything. There are limits and there is no static system by which to know everything. Learning, discovery, and creativity must not become slave to certainty in any of its forms, modern or postmodern.