Near Misses

Every now and again I am confronted with evidence that the average human and I are wired differently. This month's evidence, fittingly, is in the latest issue of Wired magazine. It's not yet available online, so I will quote Ben Paynter:

...[N]ear misses aren't successes. They are indicators of near failure. And if the flaw is systemic, it requires only a small twist of fate for the next incident to result in disaster. Rather than celebrating then ignoring close calls, we should be learning from them and doing our very best to prevent their recurrence. But we often don't.
Post-Columbia...researchers at Georgetown's McDonagh School of Business...asked NASA employees and MBA students to rank different versions of a mission scenario. One described a highly successful project; the other project nearly self-destructed but was ultimately saved by a lucky break. Regardless, subjects ranked both missions as equally well done..."


I wouldn't rank them that way. Though I admit I probably would have in my childhood and teenage years. My parents, my stepfather especially, used to regularly chide my black/white thinking. Things were either wrong or they were right, there was no gray area. Well, the older I get, the more I believe that almost everything is some shade of gray. Hell, gray has been my favourite colour for years.

I used to fall into the binary trap on a daily, if not an hourly, basis: making snap judgements that overwhelmingly tended towards "either/or" instead of, perhaps, "both/and". This made life considerably simpler, but it blinded me to different modes of thinking...rather ironic for someone who always felt inexplicably "different" himself.

My spiritual path reflected my attraction to binary thinking. I had ricocheted rather oddly from Christianity to fervent atheism and back; neither end of the continuum felt right to me, in a way that was  exceedingly hard to describe. The sense that everything you believe just might be bunkum doesn't lend itself to ready analysis. But I persisted, with the help of several prods to the mental posterior that came along. Most notably, Neale Donald Walsch's there is no such thing as right and wrong.

As I migrated inward, seeking spiritual answers that didn't fail my internal bullshit tests, I came first to dispense with dyads and eventually to recognize continua in more and more places. And to settle, more or less, in the spaces between.

Whenever I find myself stomping down on one end of a see-saw--it still happens today--, my own Mrs. is near the other end to keep things from flying off the handle. Eva's a big girl, in more ways than just the physical. Dislodging her is no easy task, because she has thought out her position on any number of issues. Not just decided something...actually thought it out. The upshot of this is that she's able to take up contrary viewpoints with a facility that still occasionally frightens me and befuddles me. She would make a killer debater. No matter what view I blurt out, she can demolish it in short order, then take the view she just espoused and demolish it in turn. This is tremendously liberating: it can't help but bring me back into balance quickly. It is, of course, far from the only reason I married the woman...but it's a damned good one. Binary thinking is not her usual mode--she doesn't just think outside boxes, she occasionally questions whether there are such things as boxes.


Binary thinking is hellishly hard to combat, not least because in doing so you're apt to start thinking that it is bad and your "new" thought patterns are good. 
On this and several other subjects, I owe a debt of gratitude to John Michael Greer. Binary thinking is not bad, per se: it's just, as Greer notes, often used nonproductively.  Things are deemed "right", a "success" and "good" if they work; "wrong", a "failure" and "bad" if they don't. Well, stepping outside the binary box, a method might "succeed" after a "near miss"...is something that almost failed really a success? Or maybe there was no "near miss" and all objectives were achieved. Were they really the right, so to speak, objectives? Can http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_consequences">unintended consequences be foreseen with more thought and understanding--which might spring out of ternary, rather than binary, thinking? 


"Moderation in all things, including moderation." --Petronius (27-66 AD)


"Ours is not a better way. Ours is merely another way." --Neale Donald Walsch