Binary Thinking is an Epidemic
Compared to what though?
There’s a Hannah Arendt quote I’ve seen people share, usually in meme form, in order to promote a simple, black and white understanding of morality:
Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.
I encountered this quote numerous times last year for example in people’s posts about the presidential candidates. That makes sense, since the idea of voting for the lesser evil is something people have to confront in almost every election. People who deployed this particular Hannah Arendt meme in the context of the election were making the argument that since both candidates and/or parties are evil, voters should reject them both, either by supporting a particular third party candidate (the motivation behind most posts I saw accompanying the quote) or by not voting at all.
When I would come across this and similar memes, I initially thought of them as calling for a certain kind of mental calculation, where we’re to take our actual opinion of a thing (a candidate or political party or whatever) and then sort of round it all the way up or down, arriving at an absolute. Later I understood it as a reflection of how some people actually see things, that they see the world in black or white.
In psychology, this kind of black-or-white thinking is considered a cognitive error or bias that’s sometimes referred to as splitting. In discourse, it’s considered a form of the false-binary fallacy. It’s everywhere, and it’s maddening. In the context of presidential candidates, it’s a lazy and fallacious way to declare that a person’s vote doesn’t actually matter or conversely that a vote is too important to allow for any compromise. It manifests in other ways all over the place. To offer another example, I used to see a lot of anti-EV memes that purported to illustrate how destructive EVs are to the environment—specifically with respect to the mining and processing of battery materials:
The argument is that while combustion vehicles may be bad, EVs are also bad. So there! In this case, people who posted these memes were not trying to convince everyone to choose a “third-party” (hydrogen fuel cell?) car or to refrain from buying cars altogether. Rather, it was just a way of telling EV owners to get off their moral high horse. (Interestingly, I’ve seen far fewer anti-EV memes since Elon Musk went “dark-MAGA,” but I digress)
Framing issues as black or white is lazy and well-suited to our digital world of hot takes and memes. It avoids complexity and obscures ignorance. On the other hand, when you ask “compared to what” and force people to identify specific criteria, you move the issue into the full color spectrum. Yes, gasoline vehicles and EVs both have negative impacts on the world, but which is worse? Are we talking about air pollution? Exploitation of labor? Acres of land destroyed? Now you have a discussion that requires people to actually know things!
Returning to the Hannah Arendt quote, it’s from an essay she wrote in 1964 called Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship, and like so much of Arendt’s work, it resonates keenly in our current moment. As the title suggests, this essay about how we should judge individual conduct in the context of a totalitarianism where “every moral act was illegal and every legal act was a [moral] crime.” Choosing the “lesser evil” in this context is not about items (e.g. candidates) laid out before us but about a person’s actions, about doing A versus B (or C or D).
Arendt begins the essay by contemplating what it means to judge a person’s actions—who has the right to judge, differences between legal and moral judgement, etc. It is important to emphasize that courts judge the legality of individual actions not people. Separate from the legal questions, an action may be immoral or evil. Legality and morality may not be in alignment, as during the slavery era of the US or in Nazi Germany, when certain moral acts were illegal and certain immoral acts were the law of the land.
Arendt next considers all the ways that Nazi defendants facing trial after WWII attempted to rationalize their evil actions: refusing would have been pointless because someone else would have done it anyway; I was just following orders, etc. Finally, she discusses the difference between obedience and consent with respect to any kind of government rule and declares that “there is no such thing as obedience in political and moral matters.” It’s always about consent. Every action one takes is a matter of personal choice.
Arendt’s conception of choosing the lesser evil is being misapplied in memes about presidential candidates and lots of other things. People and institutions and many kinds of issues are too complex to be deemed evil or immoral, except perhaps in extremely rare cases. But the question is actually relevant to voting as an example of individual action.
I have often used the metaphor of a restaurant menu to talk about presidential elections, where there are only two choices on the menu, both bad. Sometimes people complain that here I am guilty myself of the false-dichotomy fallacy, because there are always more than two candidates for president. The two-party system exists, they say, only because we make it so! This is true in theory of course, but people who don’t understand theoretical versus practical reality are lost in a different fallacy.
Anyway, with the restaurant menu metaphor, people sometimes send me down a rabbit hole of “well, I’d just refuse to order.” So here’s a better, if somewhat strained metaphor: Imagine you and your friends have been kidnapped, and your kidnappers are going to force feed you lunch. You can choose between a dirt sandwich and a shit sandwich, but you can’t refuse to eat. Both are bad, but degrees suddenly matter now, right? Would you abstain from choosing and leave it up to your kidnappers?
When it comes to voting as an individual action, black-or-white thinking is lazy and simplistic and therefore not a moral way to approach it. In elections, the choices are always relative to one another, including the choice not to vote. This is true of most choices, and the moral path requires us to identify actual criteria and weigh each choice honestly and diligently, and also in terms of its likely result.
What it means to weigh things honestly and diligently according specific criteria is a huge topic for another day, especially in our current climate of misinformation, propaganda, and general noise.
Beside the point
ICE continues its cruel, costly, and probably illegal targeting of immigrants, but there are some encouraging signs of meaningful resistance:
Yesterday, protests erupted in Milford, MA after a high school student was apprehended by ICE on his way to volleyball practice. And in San Diego there have been multiple large protests following an ICE raid on a neighborhood restaurant where agents detained all the workers regardless of citizenship status.