Aim for horizons

"Be careful how you interpret the world: it is like that." – Erich Heller

Life has become Technicolor ever since that house landed on the Wicked Witch of the East, but even with that red-shoed inspiration, I still think we humans see most things in polarized terms. (Or perhaps that’s true of humans from the U.S. culture more than others.)

We often see things in black and white, don’t we?—it’s either right or it’s wrong, yes or no, me or you, up or down, in or out, victim or perpetrator, rich or poor, pro-choice or pro-life, tastes great or less filling, whole or two percent, gay rights or religious belief, environment or big business. Win or lose.

But life isn’t that simple, is it? After all, what’s the dilemma in right versus wrong? Wouldn’t we just pick what’s right if it were that clear? Instead, it’s “right versus right” that is at the heart of our toughest choices.

As Rushworth Kidder says, “tough choices, typically, are those that pit one ‘right’ value against another.” Kidder, president of the Institute for Global Ethics, goes further. “Consider that:

•    It is right to protect the endangered spotted owl in the old-growth forests of the American Northwest–and right to provide jobs for loggers.
•    It is right to honor a woman’s right to make decisions affecting her body–and right to protect the lives of the unborn.
•    It is right to provide our children with the finest public schools available–and right to prevent the constant upward ratcheting of state and local taxes.
•    It is right to extend equal social services to everyone regardless of race or ethnic origin–and right to pay special attention to those whose cultural backgrounds may have deprived them of past opportunities.
•    It is right to refrain from meddling in the internal affairs of sovereign nations–and right to help protect the undefended in regions where they are subject to slaughter.
•    It is right to resist the importation of products made in developing nations to the detriment of the environment–and right to provide jobs, even at low wages, for citizens of those nations.
•    It is right to support the principle of creative freedom for the curator of an exhibition at a local museum–and right to uphold the community’s desire to avoid displaying pornographic or racially offensive works.
•    It is right to ‘throw the book’ at good employees who make dumb decisions that endanger the firm–and right to have enough compassion to mitigate the punishment and give them another chance.”

As Kidder’s list reminds us, it’s not the right versus wrong dilemmas that are our biggest challenges. That doesn’t mean that anything goes, he says: “That doesn’t mean there are no right-versus-wrong choices; the world is full of them—from cheating on taxes to lying under oath, from running red lights to inflating the expense account, from buying under-twelve movie tickets for your fourteen-year-old to overstating the damage done to your car for insurance purposes–the world abounds with instances that are widely understood to be wrong.”

But right-versus-wrong choices are very different from right-versus-right ones, he says. The first is a moral temptation; the latter reach inward to our most profound and central values, setting one against the other in ways that will never be resolved simply by pretending that one is "wrong.” Yet, truly, isn’t that how we approach many of these issues, by saying that They are wrong?

As Kidder reminds us, the really tough choices don’t center on right versus wrong. They involve right versus right. They are genuine dilemmas precisely because each side is firmly rooted in one of our basic, core values: truth versus loyalty, individual versus community, short-term versus long-term, or justice versus mercy. When I look at polarizing issues in my community, my first challenge is to determine which of these value sets are at play. For instance, conversations about development vs the environment pit short-term thinking against long-term vision. The dialogue about affordable housing taps into the dilemma of the individual versus the community. If my friend lies about her background on a resume, I’m torn between truth and loyalty. If Emma doesn’t hand in her oral history project to Mrs. Bollinger and gets an “F” on it (hypothetical, of course), I’m torn between justice and mercy.

How does this translate into my wee life? It’s right to respect my teenager’s privacy and it’s right to do what I have to do to protect her. It’s right to hold her accountable and it’s right to acknowledge how hard it is to be a teenager. It’s right to provide for my family and it’s right to be true to my life’s work…It’s right to…and it’s right to….

As I pondered these right vs right dilemmas, James Carse’s work on finite and infinite games came floating to the surface, foundational as it is to my own work: how do I see the world and the life in it? How does knowing how we see the world influence everything else in our world–as Heller said, "Be careful how you interpret the world: it is like that."

Living life as if it were a finite game is to play within a well-defined set of rules, a game in which one side wins and one side loses: war, for example, is the ultimate finite game. As another blogger summarized after hearing Carse speak, “the boundaries are important to finite games. There has to be an ending, and there has to be an agreement on how you get there.” There is a right and a wrong, a beginning and an end, a set of rules to play within.

Infinite games are ones that mess with the rules, changing them if need be; they are games whose point is to continue playing, not win. In a speech, Carse compared “the difference between finite and infinite games as the difference between a boundary and a horizon. You can approach a boundary, and cross over it, and then you’re on the other side. However, as you move towards the horizon, the horizon keeps on moving away from you, and you have changed your perspective.”

“He also pointed out that finite games require ‘veiling,’ where we consciously restrict ourselves to play the game, take it seriously, and ignore any other considerations"—we talk ourselves into believing that it’s the only game in town, so to speak, that it matters, that it is right and just and true (and that the opposition isn’t) and that we must win.  But as Carse writes, “The rules of an infinite game have a different status than those of a finite game. They are like the grammar of a living language, whereas those of a finite game are like the rules of a debate.”

Speak that living language instead, moving into a world of both/and, not either/or.

~*~ 37 Days: Do it Now Challenge ~*~

Play life like it is an infinite, not a finite game. Play to learn, not to win. Play to keep the game going, not end it. Aim for Technicolor, not black and white.

Learn to talk across difference, to make differences discussable in order to make them usable and learn-from-able–it’s tough to do that from a polarized position.

Resist the temptation of simply pretending that the other is wrong.

Aim for horizons, not boundaries.