In Defense of Nuance

So what's wrong with nuance?

Douglas Adams wrote:

"The Universe, as has been observed before, is an unsettlingly big place, a fact which for the sake of a quiet life most people tend to ignore. Many would happily move to somewhere rather smaller of their own devising, and this is what most beings in fact do."

Life is complex, and, as the cliché goes, things are not always as they seem.  However, many people can't handle complexity and nuance.  They want to believe the easy, black and white answer.  Anything more nuanced than that requires critical skills that many people either don't have or don't bother to use. They don't want to have to think things through, or investigate for themselves, or listen to anyone who says that the answer is neither X nor Y,  but somewhere in between, taking into account factors C, D, and J. Answers like that don't fit into sound bites, and leave the speaker open to false charges of "flip-flopping."

On the other hand, people can be very uncritically accepting of a forwarded email that appears to confirm something compatible with the reader's world view. If the claims in it make readers angry or sympathetic enough to send money to a cause or to vote  against certain candidates, so makes the better--from the original sender's point of view.

Take for example the email I recently got from a former member of a learning team I was in at University of Phoenix.  G. is a reservist and a prison guard who, when I met her, was so new to computing that she didn't know how to send an email. She's probably been in Iraq since I last saw her.  I haven't asked.  At any rate, she now knows how to send an email, and how to forward one.

The forwarded material was a nasty little attack on John Kerry's voting record, claiming that he's "voted to kill" every major military weapon system to come down the pike since 1988. "With Kerry as president," the email concludes, "our Army will be made up of naked men running around with sticks and clubs." Now, really, think for a moment. Even allowing for hyperbole, how likely is this claim?  I didn't believe it, but I didn't want to argue with G., either (I was terribly busy at the time, but that's another rant), so I deleted the email without comment.

Last night I finally got around to looking up the email attack on www.snopes.com, the Urban Legends Reference Pages.  It's the same place I always go to check on claims of dubious veracity.  Snopes has a whole page of links to analyses of claims about John Kerry.  Most of the claims aren't true, which is fairly typical for a lot of the topics that Snopes covers. The George W. Bush page also debunks more claims than it affirms.

The emailed claim about Kerry's anti-weaponry votes is rated "False."  Actually, the reality is more complex than that, with superficially true data forming the core of a highly misleading, basically false claim.  I'm not going to reprint the explanation here; you can go to the page and read it for yourself. Essentially, it says that Kerry voted against three appropriations bills that included the listed weapons, some of which, as Dick Cheney acknowledged in a separate quote, were obsolete.  (The B-1 bomber, for example, dates back to the mid-1970s, and was argued over by my high school Star Trek club.) The bills included many items each, from weapons systems to pay increases, and senators only got to vote yea or nay on the whole thing.  Kerry voted nay. 

As the Snopes page points out, senators may vote against an appropriations bill for any number of reasons.  Maybe the overall military appropriation is too high.  Maybe it's too low. Maybe it just needs to be tweaked, and the hundred dollar hammers and such removed (not that they're actually listed that way), before the senator will sign off on it.

I haven't researched these bills myself, so I don't know exactly what happened and why.  But it's a clear example of a complex reality reduced to libelous distortion for political purposes.  On Snopes you can also find discussions of false claims about Kerry's wife and Heinz outsourcing, a fake quote in which Kerry disses Reagan's body and Reagan's followers, and, for that matter, a false, particularly egregious example of George W Bush misspeaking before a pro-life group. Just the other night, a radically left-wing acquaintance of mine was chortling over that one.  I should have realized it probably wasn't true.

So while I didn't get to see Kerry's acceptance speak last night (I was in class), I fully agree with him that life is complex and nuanced, and the complexities must be acknowledged.  Otherwise, you're in danger of falling back on answers that are easy, and comforting--and wrong.

Karen