I've been thinking a lot lately about attitudes toward duality, especially with regard to us-vs.-them thinking, which of course relates to identity.
Certain strands of Western thought distinguish between contrasting things in terms of polar opposition--good vs. evil--while certain strands of Eastern thought tend to see contrasting things in terms of balance: Everything yang has some yin in it, and vice versa, and the purity of an extreme is to be avoided, not sought.
This splitting of good and evil comes up again and again in Western thought. One example that a friend and I were recently discussing, in a poetic context, was the mortification of the flesh (self-flagellation, anorexia, sleep deprival, etc.) that some Roman Catholic saints and poets thought was the way to achieve spiritual purity. They rejected and controlled and battled against the body, which they characterized as inherently sinful. Because if the soul is good, the body must be evil, right?
Other examples of that mindset of polar opposition would be political extremism, racism, misogyny, and homophobia (the latter two being similar in their idealization of a certain definition of maleness as the only possible example of goodness).
That sort of
psychological splitting of everything into rigid dichotomies, between which compromise is undesirable, is characteristic of a lot of mental disorders, too. Including narcissism, which is of course all about identity.
Yesterday I was listening to an hour-long interview (you can click on the link below to hear the audio or read the transcript) with author Iain McGilchrist, in which he discussed why our brains have two hemispheres which process reality differently;
why every individual needs both of them; and why Western society's glorification of the left brain (focus, fine detail, literality, logic) over the right brain (big-picture context, abstraction, nuance, empathy, emotion--except for anger, which seems to be located in the left brain) is problematic. Apparently his book has been available for almost a decade, but this was the first I'd heard of it.
One Head, Two Brains: How The Brain's Hemispheres Shape The World We See
If you don't have time for the longer interview, here's
an 11-minute version on YouTube. (My own brain can't process what he says while the distracting visuals are going on, but it's definitely worth listening to.)
As a pretty stereotypically left-brain-dominant person myself, who definitely struggles with handicaps due to my inability to do certain right-brained things well (facial recognition and reading others' emotions both seem like superpowers to me), I was sorry to see the left-brain/right-brain model discredited in the early 2000s, because I found it useful in many ways. That model really does explain a lot, both on a personal and a societal level. I'm glad to see that model rehabilitated (with some important caveats), in a more balance-between-yin-and-yang sort of way.
) 
Hybrid Mode
