When I was an inquisitive schoolboy, I found many things about adults 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 a few 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, 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 were explained to me in time, but not this one. Why is the entire world 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 behavior must have begun in the Stone Age when language was undeveloped, and 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 mysterious enemies and conspiracies. Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Superman almost every video game and TV drama series — they’re almost all about the mighty conflict between good guys and bad guys, the force and the dark side.
There is a name for this dark delusion: Manichaeism, a set of beliefs that arose (would you believe it?) in Iran around the 3rd century AD, when barbarians were invading Europe, and the Roman Empire was falling apart. The basic doctrine of Manichaeism was that the world could only be understood as the scene of a constant struggle between good and evil forces. This philosophy was very popular and still is, although the Church declared it a heresy more than a thousand years ago. It was particularly congenial to third-century Iranians, as it is to eight-year-old boys and politicians in any century.
But the modern world is too complicated to be run like a football match. Motives are always mixed, ideologies are always confused, nothing is ever what it seems, rules are always uncertain, and solutions are always incomplete. Taking sides means you don’t have to think about anything. But politics is not a game, let alone a video game, let alone a discredited theology from the Dark Ages. It’s more serious than that.
Fortunately, some of us at school 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.
