“For the lines are drawn and the fat is strong

And they’re breaking down the distance between right and wrong”

Bob Dylan

It is always wise as well as kind and sympathetic not to see things simply in black and white but feel for the nuances the contradictions and the things that don’t neatly fall into categories. It is the art of showing genuine care and sympathy and understanding and humanity.  It is the gift of seeing beyond our own background upbringing and experience and recognising that others come from a different place and think differently about things. Some of the worst evils and heinous crimes have been committed in the name of perceived divisions between groups which feed on a blinkered view of how things actually are. In our haste, however, to rid ourselves of “binary thinking” we can end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater. When “non-binary” rather than a sympathetic attitude, becomes an all-encompassing ideology, bent on demolishing all borders and boundaries, it, in the process ends up eating itself.

For the reality is that our world, the earth and the cosmos and how we navigate existence is grounded and ordered in the binary. The creation narrative in Genesis makes this clear. The world God created was varied, all related, but, at the same time binary: light and dark, day and night, land and sky, sea and dry land, fish and birds, humans and animals, male and female and within these further binaries of each in their kind. While all were part of the whole, connected and from the same substance, there was clear borders and distinctions and boundaries between them. Science and medicine as well as many other disciplines depend on that binary principle to make progress as well as the whole business of relationships, diplomacy and living. The entire digital world is based on the binary too. It is this and not that.  It is something and not nothing, life not death, sleep not awake, inside not outside, positive not negative, reality not fantasy, private not public, child not adult, past not present, good not evil, me not you.

I remember a well-known theologian speaking on the radio say that as far as belief in God was concerned, he was non-binary. He didn’t fully explain what that meant but I took it that he found he could believe in God and at the same time not believe. It seemed an astonishing conundrum and I couldn’t get my little mind round it. If faith could be turned on and off surely it wasn’t faith.

But it is not just that the binary is a reality, one that is hard to deny, but the binary helps us make sense of the world and helps us circumnavigate all the complexities of life. It is practical. It works.

Frank Furedi explained this lucidly in “Why we need borders”. In many ways it is a misleading title. While he does speak about the importance of borders between nations, and focuses on that in the first section of the book dealing with sovereignty democracy and citizenship and countering the progress towards a borderless world, he broadens his theme to embrace the dismantling of the boundaries between the public and the private, the personal and the political and between the child and the adult.  He explains in a very readable way why the maintaining of these given boundaries is so important and the careless dismantling of them so disastrous. It is his exploration of this phenomena which is particularly revealing.

On the fudging of the private/public spheres he centres on the ideology of “openness”. When transparency is called for in public life that can only be a good thing but when it leaches into the private, real problems arise. 

“Openness undermines discretion to the point that it encourages a voyeuristic disregard for intimacy. The industrialisation of pornography illustrates that the age-old boundary between what one should or should not see has lost much of its cultural significance”…“The capacity for moral autonomy requires a genuinely private space and the quest for complete transparency is itself anti-tolerant.”…“The very idea of tolerance had as its premise, the conviction that individual conscience and private belief should not be subject to the laws directed at the regulation of public behaviour and views.”

Social media has blown open the private to the public. So many figures are trapped when their “unacceptable views” half thinking aloud, as between friends, becomes open to public dissection. Understandably many people now believe that the safest way to navigate this minefield is to say nothing, write nothing, tweet nothing other than the blandest of comments.

Recently a councillor was suspended from her duties in an English local council for an on-line comment that she personally did not want to see flags promoting sexuality paraded in the street. Her argument was not that she objected to the specific sexuality being promoted but any sexuality. These belonged in the bedroom not the pubic square was her view. Her local party didn’t agree. While it is sadly true, that what happens behind closed doors can be quite evil, forcing open the door and breaking down the distinction between the private and the public won’t necessarily eradicate it.

But the binary is not only realistic and practical, it is beautiful. There is something wonderful and intriguing about it. It holds mystery and inspires curiosity, That, you are not me, makes you interesting. There is something beautiful about the otherness: the relationship between a child and an adult, between someone from a different culture, background, religion, language, between the present and our record of the past, between the openness of the public and the intimacy of the private, between the fantasy of a novel, a play a song and the reality of life. 

When all these boundaries are transgressed and a non-binary dogma is followed to its inevitable conclusion, you are left with a disturbed, illogical, impractical world and one devoid of beauty and loveliness.