The Problem with Thinking About Opposites

Straight from when I was young, I remember learning about how to identify opposites; those things around us that are clearly defined, and equally opposed to one another. Up from down, heads from tales, right from wrong, light from dark, etc, etc. This is a major part of teaching children how to read, how language works and how to tell good stories, but I do wonder if focusing on opposites brings along with it some unintended and unexpected baggage as well.

I think it’s possible that by focusing on opposites as much as we do, we come to think of not only language and stories in these terms, but also the rest of the world as well. This makes sense as we tend to try to look for coherent narratives to make sense of the news and the big things going on around us, but the problem with doing this is that there simply aren’t always clearly defined equal opposites to be found.

For an example of how opposites are not always as clear-cut as we think they should be, I ask you ‘what is the opposite of purple?’' If you are some variety of artist, I suspect you will think of the colour wheel and immediately answer yellow. But there is another valid answer as well; black. Purple is nothing more than how our brains interpret a particular wavelength of light, and as was established back in paragraph one of this post in a statement I don’t think anyone reading it had a problem with, the opposite of light is always dark, is it not? Well, what colour (or shade I suppose) do you get when no light is hitting your eye at all? Black.

Or for an example of how not all things have an equal opposite, why don’t we look to the world of military history? In either World War Two or the American Civil War, how were you taught to think of the power of the different sides of those conflicts? If it was anything like how they were put to me, you likely think something along the lines that both sides were more or less equally matched, and that the outcome was far from certain right until the end. That is certainly the telling Hollywood tends to go with for both of these wars. But in reality, in both situations, the productive capacity of one side of the conflict so dwarved the other that it would have taken a straight-out miracle for the aggressors to have won either of these wars. The different sides were in opposition, sure, but equal? Not in any true sense of the word.

Not all things have clear-cut equal opposites. And so to try and impose that way of thinking brings with it problems. I ask you what is the opposite of God? For many of us, the obvious answer is “the devil”. But that isn’t true, as God by definition is omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent, while the best you get of what the devil is from the Bible is that he tempts us to sin. The devil is no more the opposite of God than I am the opposite of Steph Curry at sinking three-pointers. Yet by thinking that all things must have their equal opposite, and assigning that title to the devil, we end up elevating the devil past what he actually is, which has real implications for how we live our own lives, and how we think of the world in turn.

Or another one. Why is it that we think of salvation by faith alone vs. salvation through works as clear-cut opposites to one another? We have certainly talked of salvation in those terms since at least the time Martin Luther had his tussle with that Winnenburg door, which makes it a little odd how the Apostle Paul doesn’t really seem all that concerned about it. We are saved by faith alone, sure, but how do you know you have faith? Because faith tends to pour out of us in how we live in the world around us. Works are not the opposite of faith, they are a descriptor of it. Yet by posing these two things as clear-cut opposites, you come away feeling that to be a good Christian you have to either whole hog the one at the expense of the other, or somehow try to balance them, which is again, not at all what Paul actually tells us.

There are many things in this world that have a clear-cut equal opposite. But there are also many things that don’t. And by simply thinking of all things in this opposing way, we create for ourselves tension where there doesn’t need to be any, anger where there doesn’t need to be any, heresy where there doesn’t need to be any, hurt where there doesn’t need to be any, and sadly, often suffering as well.

So I ask you this question in conclusion, what are some things you can think of that we often frame as opposites that actually aren’t, and what impact does that misidentification have? Keep an eye out for these things, because they tend to impact our lives more than we think.