Back in the olden days when I was a schoolboy there were many things about adults that I found mystifying. High on the list was their habit of dividing up people, ideas, activities, and just about everything else into good or bad, right or wrong, friend or enemy. Ours was a small school with only about three hundred boys, but even so we were randomly divided into four artificial groups called “Houses,” indicated by a colored border around our caps. I was in Charter House, I remember, with a green cap. We were encouraged to despise, compete with, and generally set ourselves apart from boys in the other “Houses,” both in sports and in academics. The four groups had everything in common except the colors on their caps.
Many mysteries of adult life became clearer to me as I grew up, but not this one. It seems that the entire world is artificially divided into mutually suspicious teams, tribes, parties, gangs and sects: Sunnis and Shiites, Democrats and Republicans, Mets and Yankees, Muslims and Hindus, black and white, Capitalist and Communist. Whose side are you on, our side or their side?
This primitive habit of thinking is older than history, and it must have begun in the Stone Age when language was undeveloped and very few people had a good grounding in logical or analytical thinking. The tribe over the next hill was different, and therefore dangerous and bad. Your own tribe was familiar, and therefore good: time for a fight.
We flatter ourselves that we have progressed since then. We have psychology, sociology, public education, and public radio. Yet our popular culture seems to be stuck in the stone age, obsessed with enemies and conspiracies. Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Superman almost every video game – they’re all about the mighty conflict between the good guys and the bad guys
There’s a name for this, of course: Manichaeism, a set of beliefs that arose (would you believe it?) in Iran in around the third century AD, when barbarians were invading Europe and the Roman Empire was falling apart. The basic doctrine of Manichaeism is that the world could only be understood as the scene of a mighty struggle between good and evil forces. This philosophy was particularly congenial to third century Iranians, as it is to eight year old boys in any century. But the modern world is too complicated to be run by either of these groups. Motives are always mixed, ideologies are always confused, nothing is ever what it seems, and solutions are always incomplete. To state the obvious, life is not a game, let alone a video game, let alone a discredited theology from the Dark Ages.It’s more grown up than that.
Fortunately, when I was at school, we kept our heads and refused to believe the nonsense about ‘us versus them’ that was fed to us by our teachers. But I must say that those of us in Charter House were never on the dark side, while boys in the other houses were often stupid, disobedient, and even wicked. We beat them at cricket too. But Charter House was a special case.
Copyright: David Bouchier
