^ “There are metaphoric factors in our language — and habits of thought and usage we acquire largely through exposure and emulation — which predispose us to attempt to define ourselves in terms of ideas or situations which have nothing in common with our nature or our desire. We cannot be defined in this way, and the attempt is offensive to our minds and souls.

This often takes the form of collapsing something very complex, into something unitary and easily manipulable. Interestingly, this is a fundamental principle of prosecution. An example came up recently in which a person in a complex situation felt pressured to ‘make a decision’. This in itself isn’t problematical, but the source of the pressure was a sense that it was ‘correct or appropriate’ to decide and act without further reflection.

When I examined the matter at hand, it was clear that there was a natural ‘breathing-like’ process at play. There was the active exploration of the new possibilities and necessities, and then there was a resting period where the present situation and the past were brought in and reflected upon. This natural rhythm comprises the learning cycle, and it is crucial to have the freedom to explore it during any kind of significant choice. We may not always have this luxury, but whether we do or not is not dependent upon some apparently compelling dogma that collapses a complex situation into a binary decision, but rather our active, moment-to-moment living sensing of the flow of change, meaning, value and identity at play in and all around us. It is not rules. It is our human hearts, minds, and souls with which we will ‘de-side’ and these are not amenable to such crude abstractions as pragmatism seems to demand.

It is too common an error, this urge to collapse something complex into something easy to indict or manipulate. This is often found inside the anxiety, terror, fear or disturbance felt by people who are facing a conflict that cannot be resolved by flattening the complexities into some pseudo-accusatory abstraction. Too often, this way of seeing becomes internalized so that an external critic is no longer required to initiate it: we, ourselves, collapse the complexity and accuse… ourselves or beloved others… in the name of something we imagine to be pragmatism, but which, on closer examination, turns out to be at least as ignorant as what it is critiquing and, in nearly every case, vastly more so.

A sophisticated ignorance is really more offensive than a simple one. Don’t you think?”

— an anonymous informant