I play a lot, although my play probably would be between inscrutable and mind-numbingly tedious for most.
Anyway, I was playing with this yes/no operator. It seems to me that three basic cultural statements can be made: no/no, yes/no/yes/no, and yes/yes.
In a no/no system you are defined not by what you ARE, but by what you are not. This is a very strange place to be, but I would submit that it is the lot of most leftists. They are not imperialists, sexists, racists, bigots, homophobes, Islamophobes, etc. But what ARE they? What do they believe on principle? As it turns out, nothing. An act which will draw no comment at all when done by a Democrat becomes horrific when done by a conservative. Does anyone seriously think Bill Clinton never made unwanted sexual advances to anyone? Kennedy, Ted, John or Robert?
Or take the example I cite in my definitions of terms: Cuba. On Cuba are different types of prisons. The regime itself runs political prisons where “soft” torture was practiced–and may well still be practiced–for many years on persons whose sole crime was to question the regime’s good intentions. They lock people in what amount to small doghouses and leave them there for months. Sometimes they block the air holes, so they can barely get enough to breathe. This elicits no comment from the Left.
Yet Guantanomo Bay, which houses the worst of the worst, generally people who have committed or tried to commit mass murder against civilians, and who are housed better than most Americans are for much lesser crimes, is somehow horrible
Wait, it’s not horrible. Obama inherited it, he hasn’t closed it, so now it is OK. It will become bad again if a Republican is elected and does not close it.
No, you are not a Republican, or conservative, or bible pounder, or “truther”, or “birther”, or idiot, or Fox News whore, or any member of the long lists of things it is undesirable to be. But who are you? You don’t know. This causes anxiety.
An intact culture contains both markers for what you ARE and what you are NOT. If you want to say Americans value freedom, and that we are not barbarians, then you have included both. In the flow of events, both markers have to be present for FORM to exist.
The Yes/yes marker inverts the No/no marker by saying that there ARE no rules. You define yourself by what you do, and you do whatever you want.
Psychologically, as discussed in the book “Willpower”, humans tend to lose all restraint once they pass certain “bright lines” of rules they have. As long as you don’t cross a line, you control your behavior. Once you cross that line, though, behavior does not become SLIGHTLY less controlled, but the control evaporates entirely. The You who made those lines is gone, and you are now someone else.
As Voltaire said in Candide, the perfect connoisseur is not the person who rejects everything. And self evidently they are not the people who accept everything. They are characterized by standards that they hold to diligently. This is the task of culture.
Imagine a culture in which we all hold to our own chosen lines, and stray no farther. This would be wonderful. We need freedom, but we also need restraint. Yes, and no.