Heroes Not Zombies

I was going to title this post “And not or”, but then I realised that very title was falling into the trap which “or” always poses – it divides. The General Semanticists talk about “two value thinking”. Others say this tendency to categorise into two categories is “digital” thinking, in the sense of “on” or “off”, “1” or “0”. Of course we are often faced with such simple choices in life – “go left” or “go right”, “stay home” or “go out” and so on. The drawback of “or” comes when one of the choices is rated as “right” and the other as “wrong”. When that happens, the digital choice is reduced to only one option – the RIGHT one, or as Mrs Thatcher famously said, “There is no alternative”. We see this in health care in the dangerous distortion of “evidence based medicine” to create a digital rating system – treatments “which work” and those “which don’t”, which is then extrapolated to those treatments which should be made available and those which should be withdrawn. In so many instances this is a delusion. Most drugs don’t do what they’re “proven” to do for most of the people who take them.

So, what’s the alternative?

“And”

This insight has emerged from the internet, but applies to everything which could be considered using networks as a conceptual framework. On the net, you don’t have to think, will I publish my work on “Flickr” of “Blipfoto“? Will I “tweet” or post on “facebook“? Will I blog, or will I “stumble“, or will I “posterise“? You can do them all, link them all, and communicate much more widely than I could if I had to choose only one, and discard the other options.

But “and” has another great power. Instead of considering a reduced set of information, say, for example, from using “the scientific method”, we can also consider the perspectives brought from subjective experience, from cultural mores, from both individual and group perspectives and so on.

Think of Deleuze’s three ways of thinking – science – thinking about function; philosophy – thinking about concepts; art – thinking about percepts and affects.

Think of Wilber’s “Integral Theory” with it’s elegant four quadrants.

Think of the benefits of truly multidisciplinary working where all the disciplines bring relevant insights.

I much prefer “and” to “or”, and I rarely believe Mrs Thatcher’s “There is no Alternative”. Alternatives are always there. We just need to open our eyes to see them.

Here are two songs about “and” and “or” – I love them BOTH.