In Defense of Binary Thinking

The new devotion to complexity gives carte blanche to even the most trivial scholarly enterprise. Any factoid can "complicate" our interpretation. The fashion elevates confusion from a transitional stage into an end goal. We celebrate the fact that everything can be "problematized." We rejoice in discarding "binary" approaches. We applaud ourselves for recognizing ?- once again ?- that everything varies by circumstances. We revel in complexity. To be sure, few claim that the truth is simple or singular, but we have moved far from believing that truth can be set out at all with any caution and clarity. We seem to believe that truth and falsehood is a discredited binary opposite. It varies according to time and place. "It depends," answer my students to virtually every question I ask. That notion permeates campus life. Case in point:

Decades ago I took with my classmates the New York State Regents examinations, which were required for graduating seniors. Our gruff gym teacher, who proctored the exam, read us the law ?- literally ?- as we cowered in the cavernous gymnasium. He recited the relevant New York State statute that threatened us with imprisonment and a fine for cheating. We dutifully swore to obey and affixed a signed statement to our exam booklets.

Nowadays academic opinion offers a more complex understanding of cheating. At the University of California at Los Angeles, the official examination booklets include a credo that students must sign testifying to their honesty. The statement begins on a time-honored note. Students must swear they have not committed "academic dishonesty." The penalty for transgression, the booklet warns, is suspension or dismissal. "My signature below signifies that the work included is my own and I completed this assignment honestly." Underneath the signature, the credo continues, but the tone shifts: "There are alternatives to academic dishonesty," it offers. "Please see your TA, professor, tutor, the Ombuds, or the Dean of Students to discuss other options."

"Alternatives to academic dishonesty?" How many are there besides honesty? "Other options" to discuss? "Hi, Prof! I'm stressed about the exam. Honesty doesn't work for me. What are my other options?" The mind-set is familiar. Complicate things. For the partisan of complexity, honesty/dishonesty presumably exemplifies antiquated binary thinking. To identify something as "binary" in a university seminar not only damns it but demonstrates the superiority of the speaker, who embraces hybridity ?- or hybridities. The Dictionary of American Academic Speak labels "binary" an insult. One author, who draws ?- of course ?- on Foucault, castigates the "prevailing social constructions of oppression and binary logic."

To defend binary thinking is to invite opprobrium. It is true that fixed oppositions between good and evil or male and female and a host of other contraries cannot be upheld, but this hardly means that binary logic is itself idiotic. Binary logic structures the very computers on which most attacks on binary logic are composed. Some binary distinctions are worth recognizing, if not celebrating: the distinction, let us say, between pregnant and not pregnant, or between life and death. Others are at least worth noticing ?- for example, that between a red and a green light. You either have $3.75 for a latte or you do not. Can that be "complicated"?

Of course, to defend simplifications always and everywhere is not only anti-intellectual, but dangerous. Already in the 19th century, the historian Jacob Burckhardt feared that "terribles simplificateurs" would descend upon "poor old Europe." They did descend ?- upon the rest of the world as well ?- with facile ideas about nation and religion. We should indeed distrust them, but not by rote. Complexity for its own sake is no virtue. More turrets are not necessarily better than fewer. Perhaps it is time to return to Ockham's principle of parsimony, his so-called razor: "Plurality is not to be posited without necessity." Instead we have gone in the opposite direction. The cult of complication has led ?- to alter a phrase of Hegel's ?- to a fog in which all cows are gray.



Russell Jacoby is a professor in residence in the history department at the University of California at Los Angeles. A columnist for The Chronicle Review, he is author, most recently, of Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age (Columbia University Press, 2005).