Hey, so, remember the election?

I know, a bunch of you are thinking, "Don't remind me." And don't worry, I'm not going to rehash the entire turbulent saga of the 2016 Presidential Election. But I want to bring you back to November for a moment, because I want to talk about something specific. In the weeks before and (especially) after November 8th, Election Day, there was an increase in discussions that followed this general theme:America really doesn't understand itself.

Do you remember this? For example, in April, Pew Research Center published a study that showed that 41% of Democrats view the Republican Party as a threat to the nation, and 45% of Republicans felt the same way about Democrats. Then, in the November issue of The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf noted that "No matter who wins the election, or the next skirmish in the culture wars, most Americans must live together...with people whose actions or views are anathema to them” (italics mine). After the election, Paul Krugman wrote in an op-ed for the New York Times that “There turns out to be a huge number of people...who don’t share at all our idea of what America is about." And then, during his 2016 Election Night Special, late-night comedian Stephen Colbert said this, summing up the state of things better than anyone, I think:

"[During this election,] we drank too much of the poison. You take a little bit of it so you can hate the other side, and it tastes kind of good, and you like how it feels, and there’s a gentle high to the condemnation. Right? And you know you’re right, right? You know you’re right.”

So, in November of 2016, there was a sense among many on both sides that we had crossed a new threshold as a nation. We'd taken too much of the poison. "More divided than ever" was a phrase thrown around quite a bit. But...IT WAS OVER. The election was over. It was time to lick our wounds, move forward, and try to understand our neighbors again. At the end of the day, we were all Americans. There were things to fix, of course. But, President Trump himself said in his victory speech that he would be "a president for all Americans." Meaning: it was time to be one nation again. Or, in the words of Colbert, "Whether your side won, or lost, we don’t have to do this s--- for a while.”

Okay. So fast forward to today. Are we making strides in coming together and being united? Gotta be honest—I don't think so. America does not seem all that united or indivisible; it seems increasingly divided and extremely divisible. We've continued to demonize, continued to turn the opposing side into monolith, continued to say that WE are good and THEY are not. Want proof? Just take a look at your Facebook feed. The election is long gone, but things aren't different. We've continued to "do this s---."

Why?

It's a complicated question, of course. It's complicated because there are so many answers. There's the cultural reasons, of course, as well as socioeconomic reasons, not mention race, sex, religion, interpretations of government, and so on. You can answer this question with any of those lenses, but I'm less interested in that. I'm interested in what's behind it all, the thing that has made not just Americans, but human beings divide and demonize each other since the very beginning. And that thing is something called "binary thinking."

What is binary thinking, you ask? Well, at the most fundamental level, it describes our tendency to divide things into two opposing entities. Day and night. Dead and alive. Good and bad. We're hardwired to think this way, for survival purposes. Psychologists Jack Wood and Gianpiero Petriglieriassert that binary thoughts "make the world predictable and allow for instantaneous, lifesaving action.” It's also necessary for self-representation and identity formation, as Noora Kotilainen and Marjen Vuorinenpoint out; to distinguish yourself as a morning person, for example, means that you are not a night person. Simple enough? Just wait.

See, by categorizing yourself as a morning person, you have made a judgement call on morning. You have said that, as you see it, morning is better than night. This is where things get tricky. In his article, "The Use of Binary Thinking," Peter Elbow writes that "Binary thinking almost always builds in dominant thinking or privilege—sometimes overtly and sometimes covertly.” So, we are hardwired to think in binary terms, often giving preference to one thing over the other. And sure, this is helpful in terms of survival and identity, but when it comes to people, it can be come downright deadly.

Let's replace "morning person" with "Hilary supporter." You define yourself as a Hilary supporter, and in doing so, you distance yourself from the alternative, a Trump supporter. It's fine to be a Hilary supporter; that's not the issue. The trouble comes when the thing that you are not—Trump supporter—coalesces into one, monolithic, easily definable thing. Binary thinking says, "You are good, and they are not. Hilary supporters are not racist, but Trump supporters are. Hilary supporters love America, and Trump supporters do not." Binary thinking leads to an "US" and "THEM" mentality. As Kotilainen and Vuorinen note, "We cannot indulge in feelings of distinction, superiority or self-righteousness unless there is a lesser counterpart with whom to compare ourselves."

The most dangerous thing about binary thinking is that it does away with nuance. There is no room for detail. It is either/or, because either/or is easiest. Thus, the problem isn't America. The problem is our flawed human tendencies. We're fighting against our own binary assumptions. Our default setting is "US" and "THEM."

The good news is that our hardwiring can be rewired. We can move beyond our binary assumptions without changing our political views or having different opinions. Stay Republican. Stay Democratic. Stay Libertarian. Stay Independent. Do what floats your boat. But we can take steps to understand our neighbors, to reintroduce nuance into the conversation, to flesh out our monoliths into living, breathing human beings. There is something you and I can do, something simple, that we're probably doing already, even if we don't realize it.

What is it, you ask?

Watch some Netflix.

Or go see a movie. Or read a book. Or listen to a podcast, or go see a play, or buy a comic book.

Listen, I don't know the solution to all of our problems in America. I don't know how to fix race inequality, or how to close the wage gap, or how to get Congress to get along with each other and get stuff done. Those are complex, multi-faceted problems. What I do know, however, and what I believe fervently, is that stories have the power to increase empathy. It's hard to hate someone after you've heard their story. It's hard to categorize a human being when you know where they've come from.

Philosopher Richard Rorty, in his book Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, has this to say about stories and empathy:

“[The] process of coming to see other human beings as “one of us” rather than as “them” is a matter of detailed description of what unfamiliar people are like and of redescription of what we ourselves are like. This is a task not for theory but for genre such as ethnography, the journalist’s report, the comic book, the docudrama, and, especially, the novel….This is why the novel, the movie, and the TV program have, gradually but steadily, replaced the sermon and the treatise as the principal vehicle of moral change and progress.” (xvi)

(If Rorty were alive today, he might add podcasts and Youtube to his list. Just saying.)

Great stories bring the nuance that binary thinking likes to eliminate. In the television show Breaking Bad, for example, Walter White is most certainly a drug dealer and crime lord, but he is also a father, a husband, and dying of lung cancer. He's complicated. That's one of the things that stories do: they complicate our assumptions. They also flesh out worlds that we like to paint as black or white. One of my favorite things about The Godfather is the way it shows how religious and family-oriented that Corleone mafia is; I mean, the movie starts with a forty-minute wedding scene! But that's real life, folks. People are not binary. They are complex, far more complex than we would like to believe them to be.

In the Colbert quote I shared earlier, he suggests that we drink "the poison" so that we can "hate the other side." I will admit that I was guilty of that throughout the election. As unbiased as I tried to be, I continued to return to media outlets that confirmed my point of view and made me scoff at the other side. But now, I'm trying to do the opposite, and I challenge you do to that as well. Read the books and watch the movies of the "Other" in your life, and see what it does for your perception of them.

Listen toS-Town, a podcast that explores the life and world of a clockmaker from rural Woodstock, Alabama. Watch Fruitvale Station, a movie based on the true story of Oscar Grant, a black man involved in a tragic case of tragic police brutality. Read American Salvage, a collection of short stories about working-class individuals trying to make it modern-day America, or read Manuel Munoz's "The Happiest Girl in the Whole USA," a short story about a woman who travels to Los Angeles once again to meet up with her husband after he's crossed over the Mexican border. Engage with stories about the people you've never met and places you've never been. Read Bright Shiny Morning by James Frey. Watch Hell or HighWater. Watch Master of None on Netflix, specifically the "I Love You, New York" episode.

Take risks with your stories. Destroy your binary assumptions.

"And what will this do?" you're wondering. "What will this solve, long-term?" And my answer is, I don't know. Some people say that we're more divided as a nation than we have been since the Civil War. Perhaps that's true, in one sense. But in a larger sense, people have always been divided. That's our thing. We're binary-thinking creatures. And as I mentioned earlier, that's often good. We need up and down, right and wrong, good and bad, in order to function. But we also need, as Wood and Petriglieri argue, a "third option." We need nuance. By reflecting on our differences, exploring the complexity between the binaries, we can begin to understand each other. We can see each other as people, vastly different, but people nonetheless.

Stories can begin to give us that complexity. They are not the solution, but they are the beginning of one. They are a first step, a necessary one. And perhaps, if we can move beyond our binary assumptions and see the nuance in others, the ones we like to demonize and condemn, maybe then we can stop doing "this s---" for quite a long time.

So go read a book.