I’ve been AWOL from this substack for slightly more than 2 months.1 It may happen again. But I’m back at least for this piece.
“Gray” is not a color that is generally prized. It may work well as a “neutral” color against which splashier items are placed, whether in a house, a plaza, a city, and so on. But if you asked 100 people for their favorite color, it’s highly unlikely that “gray” would show up at all in the answers.
If we move from the physical world and its colors to the world of ideas, it’s remains true that most of us don’t like gray. We want to be able to identify ideas and the actions that come from those ideas as either white or black, and we prefer to choose the white, even if our idea of what is white differs from the opinions of others. And people: we want to be a able to label a person either as “good” or “bad,” not some combination or mix of those two ethical categories.
A good case can be made that the ability to see and accept—or tolerate, or simply acknowledge—the presence of gray in our world and the people in it is a mark of maturity.
This does not mean that we’re happy about the gray or that we have to like the gray or that we shouldn’t describe the gray as gray.
Here’s my concern: There are posts on social media and in other venues that identify a group or a person as completely bad, or wicked, or, in the opposite direction, claiming that they are completely good, or completely right. Given our human propensity to see the negative, the former happens more than the latter.
The immediate context that I’m thinking of is the 2024 presidential election: some (it seems to be only a few; but I could be wrong) on the right have a very hard time imagining that they can vote for a candidate from the opposing party, the Democrats, because of all that Democrats stand for, including some policy stances that people on the right oppose. Some on the left (more or fewer than those on the right? I don’t know) don’t want to vote for the current president for various reasons, including that he doesn’t espouse policies that are far enough on the left.
Both of these perspectives are a failure to see that choices such as this are always gray, although the shade of gray may vary from one election to the next. But so it has always been and always will be.
In politics, and in much else in life, we will always be faced a choice between binaries neither of which we fully like or think right or good. It’s always a choice between 2 or more goods or 2 or more bad things. A choice between a lesser evil and a worse evil is frequently the way that we put it.
Or, to put it a bit differently: to choose to sit out an election that pits two (at best) imperfect politicians against each other does not render you pure.
Some things are simply worse than others, and to choose something that is less bad is a mature and better (but never perfectly good) choice.
Of course, this is not true only in politics; the problem is present in almost all aspects of our lives.
Should you have a lawn (given that lawns require chemicals and money and generate pollution to maintain) or do away with your lawn? Should you drive a hybrid or electric vehicle rather than a carbon-fueled vehicle (with all of the trade-offs in various directions that come with this choice)?2 And so on. Examples of the issues abound.
For a bit of humor, in case you haven’t seen it in a long time, I leave you with a bit of rock-n-roll that makes this point quite well; the video is excellent.
In case anyone is interested in the excuse, or the rationale, here are a couple of realities that led to my absence. (1) Shortly after my last post, Merna and I left the country on a nearly two-week jaunt to a place we have long wanted to visit. (2) After our return, the yard and our property called for much attention, which we devoted to it.
Another mark of maturity is the willingness to talk about and weigh and wrestle with the issues associated with these gray choices.