Let’s talk about nuance…what it is and why it’s important. It allows my friends and I to discuss the discontinued publication of six of Dr. Suess’ books and whether or not that is a good thing. It allows my family and I to discuss the pros and cons of our recent presidential candidates. It allows for mostly (or not) coherent, drunken debates on whether or not organized religion is still a net positive. A mastery of nuance helped Dr. Martin Luther King to write Letter from a Birmingham Jail, which is one of the most extraordinary documents to have ever been penned.
Dictionary.com defines nuance as “a subtle difference or distinction in expression, meaning, response, etc.” Merriam-webster.com defines it as “a subtle distinction or variation.” While I agree with those definitions (if I didn’t agree with them, I’d be a moron because WORDS HAVE MEANINGS), I also define it as critically important to and largely missing from American public discourse.
What happens without nuance? Without it, there can’t be in-depth discussions about complicated topics like national defense or racial equality or public education, which leads to bad policies. Without nuance, people and institutions can’t have useful public discourse concerning presidential candidates, which leads to bad presidents. Without nuance, people are reduced to making unqualified value judgements, which means they aren’t entirely correct, which means they’re not true. Without true statements, progress can’t be made, which means that the depth and breadth of our understanding can’t be expanded. If we can’t expand our understanding of the world, then we won’t be able to further improve upon our existence. If we can’t continue to improve our collective lot, then what’s the fucking point, eh? Might as well just end it, right?
Well, not just yet as it’s not quite so dire. It’s less that nuance is completely gone and more like a large number of otherwise intelligent, very vocal humans (these folks are dangerous, at least in the short term) have forgotten the concept. Everyone’s all ‘it’s my way or the highway’. It’s this or that. Black or white. Right or wrong. There’s no middle ground. No gray area. Tooth and nail and fight, fight, fight!
This lack of nuance, the lack of the use of nuance, has largely destroyed public debate and replaced it with the mindless, tribal yelling that occurs on social media and the TV. The public no longer seems capable of having critical discussions on topics which have any possible sort of controversy about them (nowadays, anything that can be seen in different ways, from different perspectives, is controversial), which is nearly every topic.
So far, I’ve only paid lip service to the idea of nuance. If all it took to truly understand a concept was to know the definition, then I wouldn’t have struggled with calculus. To better understand, let’s look at the statement WAR IS BAD.
If you walked up to Joe Blow on the street and asked him if war was good or bad, he’d probably say bad. Most any sane person thinks that undue suffering and wanton destruction are bad. But, war is complicated and the question “is war good or bad” is a garbage question. It sets up a false dichotomy that doesn’t allow for nuance in thinking or in answer, which doesn’t allow for a correct answer, a true answer. Why not?
Because the ideas of good and bad are conditional. That is, they change depending on the conditions. That is, what is good for A at time X might be bad at time Y. It’s subjective and situationally dependent. For the statement to be true, it must be qualified, which I’ll represent like this: WAR IS BAD*, with the asterisk indicating that it’s qualified.
So, how can war be good? Well, there’s a strong argument that WWII was what finally pulled the US out of the Great Depression, so it could be good for the economy. Warring to stop Hitler was good (assuming you disagree with the Nazis), though it would’ve been better if it hadn’t been necessary in the first place. At the same time, war was good for Hitler, at least initially.
War drives R&D, which has led to advances in transportation, nuclear, communications, and so on.
War was good for Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great. War was bad for the people and cultures that they destroyed. The list is nearly infinite.
So, you can say war is bad, but only if you then qualify it by explaining who it’s bad for and why.
Most any noun can be substituted for war: republican, democrat, cat, dog, computer scientist, hairdresser, writer. That same statement can then be made (i.e. good or bad), but, again, it must be qualified. Any sort of declarative, value based sentence must be qualified.
These types of sentences are about as simple as it gets, yet nuance is still vital. The more complicated your sentence, the more complicated the system you’re describing, the more controversial the topic, the more you need nuance. It is inescapable*.
Another thing that’s required to use nuance is knowledge of the topic at hand. If you’re discussing the weather, then you need, at the very least, a casual understanding of rain or heat or tornadoes or hail. But, people with a deeper understanding of weather can have more nuanced conversations, discussing whether or not it might rain in the future or how a drought affects the prices of seed corn or global warming. The deeper the understanding, the more nuance can be applied and the more interesting and possibly useful the discussion might be.
One more thing that is necessary for the flourishing of nuance is for people to once again engage in ‘good faith’ discussions. That is, if two people are debating a contentious topic, then both must give the other the benefit of the doubt regarding motive and allow them to build a nuanced argument as well as they are able.
An example: Joe Blow and Susie Q are discussing healthcare and Susie says, “On paper, universal healthcare seems to be a good thing, but I think it could be difficult to implement in the US.” Then Joe says “Oh, so you don’t care about the homeless?”
He is not arguing in good faith, as he immediately jumps to a ‘worst case’ interpretation of Susie’s initial statement and her motives. This sort of manipulation has become commonplace, at least on social and legacy media. I know that virtue signaling and sensationalism and fear and group identity all play a role in this sort of behavior, and I do have a small amount of sympathy because some folks are simply weak, but none of those things excuses it.
If people are going to come together, then their mindsets must change. They must expand them so that they are able to consider ideas with which they don’t agree, if only so as to counter them.
Currently, the only place where nuance and good faith discussions seem to be the norm are podcasts and some are much better than others. I like to listen to complicated discussions about AI and the nature of intelligence and cryptocurrency and literature and the frontiers of medicine. I’m an expert in none of these things and I surely don’t understand all of various nuances of the conversations, but I learn, which allows me to further push back the dark boundaries of my known world. This expansion, whether large or small, increases my understanding and allows for a more nuanced view, which is a good thing*.
Nuance is vital to overcoming differences, to reaching compromise. It is vital to our ability to progress as a species. Currently, nuance is almost taboo (some people seem to think that entertaining a notion which is offensive somehow makes them complicit). It’s bonkers and this prohibition against thinking must stop. People must be able to have good faith discussions about controversial ideas without fear of retribution. We are guaranteed freedom speech by our constitution*, but a portion of the public seems very much intent on silencing free speech and rather in favor of only allowing speech which fits nicely within their or their in-group’s particular worldview.
This shuttering of the mind and mouth impedes progress because thoughtful people are being damned for thinking and talking about the solutions to hard problems. These complicated problems require critical discussion and thought to be solved and, as a necessity, they require nuance, which means that nuance must make a return*.