Sunday 12 September 2010

Pegs and Tightropes

The metaphor of an ideological continuum seems to help deconstruct dichotomies between simple extremes. But when it comes to describing the intellectual world of a person or group, we usually look for a point where our subject stands: the continuum is only a tool for comparison with other subjects, or perhaps with other moments in the subject's life. There is one extreme end there, another over there, and we are interested in this particular point here between them.

How accurate is this metaphor for the description of thought? It seems faulty to me. For one thing, it offers no way of accommodating or accounting for a shift in thought, a movement between the extremes. For another, although we never succeed in really specifically placing someone on our line of continuum, the metaphor creates the illusion of specificity: think of the grid on Political Compass for example (a two-dimensional continuum there).

These illusions of immobility and specificity create a third illusion, of stability. On one hand, no intellectual description or history can proceed unless there can be some assumption of stability in thought. But it seems equally true to me that we cannot proceed if thought is assumed to be in general completely stable (even if subject to specific shifts). How fixed are our ideas at any moment, especially our underlying, unexamined beliefs? The very stuff of thought is to be able to hold contradictory ideas in mind at the same time. We are mobile enough, at least, to do that.

Minds cannot be pinpointed on a grid. They are unbalanced acrobats on tightropes, whose feet may step one way or the other at each moment. Ideas, beliefs, opinions exist only on the line of tension between one point and another, they rely on pegs - extremes - to hold the rope taught, even when they're standing in the middle. Describing thought is more about which ropes are tied to which pegs than where exactly the tightrope-walker stands between them.

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