ISRAEL | SAUDI ARABIA | LIV GOLF | COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS

The World (Especially the Middle East) Reflects More Shades of Grey Than Any Box of Crayola Crayons

Black-and-white thinking, confirmation bias, identity politics, and polarity consciousness are cancers upon humanity, while moderation, which respects all colors of the rainbow, contains more powerful messages than even the most vibrant grey

File ID: 5076081 by zhanna licensed from depositphotos.com

Introduction

What is color? I used to think that white is all color as it reflects all wavelengths, and black is no color as it absorbs all light. Those are true. Yet it is also true that black is all colors, as when one combines all colors of paint, black results. To us, color is what our brains tell us we see based on the wavelengths of light reflected by the surface and detected by the receptors in our retinas. To another species, earthly or extra-terrestrial, the colors we perceive in an object may look entirely different. Yet, is it different? The lenses through which we observe various matters, both tangible and intangible, color our perspectives. (See my Of Lenses, A poem on differing perspectives).

When a person is color blind, does the object or person observed have color? Does color matter, or is it just a label, and labels limit and obscure the true essence? Do labels describe or create false narratives of superiority designed to maintain power structures? Is racism about race or the few rich fearing the strength of a united poor? See this New York Times piece I read recently — Opinion | Why an Unremarkable Racist Enjoyed the Backing of Billionaires (a gift link that should work for two weeks). See also Douglas Giles, Ph.D.’s Can a Black Person Be Racist? Trump’s ad hominem attack on Fani Willis dredges up an old question.

The answer is not apparent on the surface and requires the ability to think in a nuanced and critical fashion.¹

Those streams of consciousness paragraphs flowed from my having read another recent NYT article, Growing Segregation by Sex in Israel Raises Fears for Women’s Rights (that’s another gift link), which, together with this in-depth essay by Thomas Friedman (another gift link) I read a couple of months ago, Opinion | From Tel Aviv to Riyadh, My recent journey through the Middle East was unlike anything I’d ever experienced in a region that has long been my…, all made me recall a Medium essay by Jensipidy’s Pen, Grey is Gone, I Miss Grey, which I read about four months ago and that inspired the title of today’s essay.

Jensipidy writes:

It was my first day of kindergarten, and as I peered into my brand new box of 64, there were all shades of grey…light grey, dark grey, and even blue grey. From the beginning, there was always grey. My Mom would say,” The world is not black and white; it is grey.” The meaning of her words was lost on me at the time, but as I grew older, I understood. … It was the very definition of how we interacted with others, and acceptance was as easily given as it was received. … Groupthink has replaced individual thought. Gone are the days of voicing one’s opinions or thoughts if it does not fit the declared narrative. Our imagination is a gift that should be shared with the world. If something can be imagined, there is typically someone who has the ability to bring it to fruition. … We must use our imagination to make the world a better place. … There should be no set of rules that require groupthink that has been determined by a small sector of the world population.

…

I miss grey. It made the world so colorful. Now it is only black and white.

Responding specifically to “Groupthink has replaced individual thought,” quoting myself from my Can We Please All Find the Space Within Which to Breathe the Same Air and Agree Not to Agree, I commented to Jensipidy:

Typically, but not often enough in our polarized, factionalized, and tribal-mentality-based society, one would state my title with the words “agree to disagree.” I chose “agree not to agree” to evoke that no one’s alternate truth, as long as based upon indisputable facts, needs to be disagreed with, and to show that nuances are not semantics. I cannot stand when I point out in a discussion, with a black and white thinker, using rhetoric appropriately, that the answers may reside in a grey area [emphasis added] that does not comport with their need for simple answers to support their positions, and their snorty retort is “that’s just semantics.”…Independent thinking seems not to exist in our society infected with confirmation bias.

Israel, Saudi Arabia, and LIV Golf

Talk about shades of grey, oy vey — it’s very difficult to separate fact from the mishegas.

I used to steadfastly oppose LIV Golf, in so far as I vowed never to watch it. I did not begrudge the players that accepted millions of dollars to participate in the Saudi sport washing of their atrocities — but I personally would not participate. Then I read Thomas Friedman’s article and I realized how many shades of grey a painting of the situation contained.

Yes, the Saudi regime suppresses dissent with reprehensible jailings and executions, and the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. Yes, the regime, fearing the same fate as the Shah of Iran after religious extremists stormed the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979, decided to give the woman-suppressing, fundamentalist, and intolerant clerics great powers to impose their version of Islam on the country and export it to the world, which contributed to 9/11 and other terrorist acts and years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Yet recently, while only doing so to maintain the regime’s power, it has reversed course, dismantling the morality police, scrubbing intolerance from their school textbooks, and empowering women in society generally and in the workplace, which Saudi Arabia can also export to the Muslim world.

Meanwhile, in Israel, the far-right religious parties seek to blow up the Oslo Accords and impose Jim Crow levels of female segregation upon the entire country and thus Israel starts to slip down a slope toward theocracy resembling Iran (I’m exaggerating to make a point). The current governing coalition that holds its position due to a 30,000 vote margin among 4.7 million total votes (0.6%) cast, seeks to impose all this and to blow up the system of checks and balances that has held Israel together by stripping the independent judiciary of power and claiming that it seeks to do so in the name and spirit of democracy. Give me an effing break. Yet, one of the most intelligent, emotionally and otherwise, people I know, my best friend of 53 years, politically independent here, has always seen through Trump and the MAGA crowd’s framing of events, at least as of the last time we spoke about this a few months ago, bought into Netanyahu’s narrative.

Confirmation bias can infect the best of us, me included, I’m sure. We must always remain open to the possibility that we have made errors in actions or judgments and manifest the ability to shift course and gears.

Moderation Absorbs Many Wavelengths of Thoughts and Reflects Beautiful Shades of Grey

In my agree-not-to-agree essay, I did not argue for conservatives and liberals to move to the center. I pointed out that each side can and should practice moderation. As David Brooks wrote in February 2019 in his Opinion | An Agenda for Moderates, The policy implications of love your neighbor (gift link):

Moderation is not an ideology; it is a way of being. It stands for humility of the head and ardor in the heart. When you listen to your neighbor, you see how many perspectives there are and you’re intellectually humble in the face of that pluralism. When you listen to your neighbor, you see that deep down we’re the same and you hunger to deepen that connection.

In other words, moderation, regardless of where you fall on the political, religious, and cultural spectrums, allows the space to agree not to agree. How else can a multicultural and pluralistic society ever survive?

In my streams of consciousness section of today’s essay, I mentioned my poem Of Lenses, A poem on differing perspectives. It contains these lines:

What is my philosophy Why did I pen this poem

Yet Acceptance Moment by moment Ethics are universal Live and let live or die, life just is — live it.

My poem Manifesto, contains this stanza among the ten forming the acrostic “Guardian Angels Only Protect Convergence Of Free Will and Death”

Freedom to live and let live, yet Respect the collective Enlist all for one and one for all Eschew separation

Last night I read another piece by Thomas Friedman, Opinion | Beirut’s Nightmare Could Become Israel’s Future, Netanyahu’s power grab violates a principle that has held the country together (another gift link — I’m blowing through my rolling 30-day allotment of ten in this one essay):

When your democracy is … really, really diverse, there’s only one way to maintain stability — all the diverse actors must respect the principle of “live and let live.” Or, as the Lebanese described it each time some faction there breached that principle, plunged the country into civil war and then had to re-establish balance among sects, “no victor, no vanquished.” Everybody has to abide by certain limits on their reach. … Instead of “no victor, no vanquished,” Hezbollah imposed the principle often associated with African dictators — “it’s our turn to eat,” meaning democracy be damned, it’s our turn to get more than our fair share of state resources, operating unchecked by any independent authority (such as a judicial system).

I see this “it’s our turn to eat” mentality infecting politics here in the United States on the far right and on the far left. I am neither equating nor assessing the moral or ethical positions or tactics of the two sides, as a friend accused me of recently after reading my poem, A Poem of Triumphant Trials, Failures, Tribulations, and Growth, My reaction to the latest and likely not final indictment, which I wrote after the second Federal indictment:

Please do not rejoice Tragic day for our nation Feels like my divorce How did we get to this point? How do we together heal?

Kool-aid drinkers left and right Scream into echo chambers I urge cooler heads prevail Trust the Universe

Civil War happened before Oxymoron may again Extremists will stoke your fears In the name of God

Ask yourselves upon which feeling to act Quiet the noise, remove emotion, and discern how to react

(My line about Kool-Aid reflects the cultish nature of all political parties (see Markus Scorelius’s, Which Cults Do You Belong To?, 6 (or more) examples of Modern Day Cults) and yes, my friends, as the current Republican party has devolved into the Trump Party, it is far and away more cultish than the Democratic party.)

Please do not rejoice Tragic day for our nation Feels like my divorce How did we get to this point? How do we together heal?

Friedman’s latest piece includes:

“Elections must not become a winner-takes-all contest, in which the victor seizes everything and the loser risks losing everything,” concluded Plesner. “That is not democracy: It is a recipe for civil war.”

Indeed, I asked the Israeli author and essayist Ari Shavit what he feared most today in his country. It was not, he remarked, that Israel would become “an elective dictatorship — another Hungary, Poland or Russia. That’s because the Jewish-political heritage cannot countenance authority-through-absolutism, and because the radical right in Israel doesn’t have enough power to impose its will on the liberals.”

The true danger, he argued, is that Israel will descend into chaos and disintegrate.

While I certainly hope it will not, it would be naive to assume that chaos will not envelop our nation.

Conclusion

Repeating from the quoted portion of Jensipidy’s essay:

I miss grey. It made the world so colorful. Now it is only black and white.

I’ll start to close today’s article with the poem portion of an essay I posted a couple of days ago:

Poem of United Purpose and Place in and of the Human Race

Men Women Human race All God’s children Superconsciousness Connecting all our souls Black white brown yellow and red So many colors form rainbow Incarnate across species spectrum Spirits gain full human experience

Villains, victims, lovers, haters, and saints Life’s plays need actors for all these roles Not judged for good and evil deeds Juried for how well played parts What we learned from process What work still remains Eat the apple As Adam or Eve Live