Dualism is a Natural Beginning

On Monday we talked about why Dualism is such a popular philosophy. Essentially, it's the easiest of the worldviews because it only requires two categories for everything. Even a child can understand the basic tenants of dualism.

And, in a way, that's the point. A child's mind isn't equipped to deal with difficult moral dilemmas. Toddlers need a clear right and wrong in order to develop in a healthy way. Children push boundaries because they want to know what the boundaries are. They crave moral clarity and a dualistic worldview offers that.

As a child develops into adolescence, they should be invited to determine their own standards from a variety of options. This is a relativistic perspective. Adolescents need to practice decision making from a relativistic perspective. The clear boundaries of childhood are dissolving as freedom increases. Adolescents have the mental capacity to engage in relativistic thought.

Adults should move beyond relativism to a principled worldview. It's one where experience, understanding and logic lead to the development of core principles for an individual that can be applied across a wide range of situations. It has the boundaries of the dualistic worldview and the personal responsibility of the relativistic worldview combined.

However, we often will distill our principles into dualism once again, or allow the principles of others to become dualism for us. This is, primarily, because a principled worldview is hard work. It takes rigorous examination, difficult life experience and considerable mental effort to sort through the various options and arrive at a viable principle. We don't want to do the hard work, so we rely on the work of others and trust their experience and examination. Their principles become our dualism.

Though dualism is a natural beginning, it's not a viable end. Extremism relies on dualism, and the best way to combat extremism is to work to move people out of a dualistic perspective and toward a principled worldview.

How have you moved away from dualism?

Why is Dualism so Popular?

Among the ways to look at the world, dualism is, perhaps, the most simplistic and most common. I don't believe that correlation is a coincidence.

First, what is dualism? It's a philosophy or belief system with two mutually exclusive parts or ideas. Moral dualism states that there is an absolute right and an absolute wrong. Metaphysical dualism separates matter and spirit into separate realms. Philosophical dualism sees two essences in the world - like Yin and Yang.

Of all the ways to view the world, dualism is the easiest. It requires the least effort on the part of the individual to figure out. Once you've decided the categories, you just lump everything into one or the other. If something doesn't quite fit a category, you enlarge one of them to encompass it. Eventually your two, mutually exclusive groups categorize all things.

But dualism is a forced reduction of complex ideas, often beyond what they can bear. For example, if you are a metaphysical dualist, then things are only matter or only spirit. How can people exist? They are either pretending to be physical (or trapped in the physical form and yearning to be released) or they are pretending to be spiritual and are only physical. This completely ignores the complex interaction between spirit and body that happens in each person and tends to vilify matter (from a spiritual perspective) or to vilify the spirit (from a materialistic perspective). Only one category in a dualistic worldview can be good, so either matter must be bad or spirit must be bad.

Moral dualism is the basis for conflict and hatred in the world. Thought it's a reductio ad absurdum, moral dualism assumes that everyone and everything are either good or bad. I must be good; therefore, if you disagree with me you are bad. If you are bad, then I'm justified in hating you, as I should hate evil. Since I hate evil, I'm justified in fighting you and killing you.

Then why, oh why, do we continue in dualistic worldviews? What do you think?