People almost always tend to see things as black and white. This happens in everyday life – at work, their views of religion, history, and, more commonly, in politics.
The proclivity to see things as black and white – or dichotomous thinking – has somehow been exacerbated with the advent of social media as oft-times people get hoodwinked by false narratives which somehow play with people’s emotions. As a result, they tend to see things in polar extremes.
For example, some people would say that if you support Palestine, that would mean you support terrorism or the Palestinian terrorists. Or if you support Israel, that would mean you support state-sponsored terrorism. You’re either with them or against them.
Another example is one’s faith: if you don’t believe in God, you have no sense of morality.
In Philippine politics, if you say that you condemn the Martial Law atrocities committed by Marcos Sr., then you are almost immediately branded as communist, or NPA, as the Marcos-Duterte fanatics would say.
Speaking of the New People’s Army, I remember before that Duterte supporters would call those who rally in the streets as “NPA” – just for the reason that they oppose the government.
I now wonder if they would consider themselves “NPA” given the recent political kerfuffle.
Anyway, my point here is that these dichotomies will lead us to nowhere, and it will only stir up emotions, trigger people, and engender chaos and unnecessary or futile debates in social media.
Nobody wins in those debates, by the way, as people are dead set on their views. Unless, of course, they start to gain cognizance, and see things (or the issue at hand) not as black and white but with a nuanced perspective.
As a historian, I always try to see study the many nuances of the past. If we start looking at it from a black and white perspective, that will just make our work less credible, and laughable. There are indeed many nuances to history – it’s not enough for us to say that this man is good, while the other is bad.
Say, for example, the Americans during World War II were the good guys, while the Japanese were the bad guys because they started the war and attacked Pearl Harbor.
Looking back further, some would say the Crusaders were the good guys trying to regain the Holy Land, while the Muslims (their enemies) were the bad guys.
Most historians don’t think like that – we don’t write history like that.
Perhaps the best example of a historical issue that has left historians debating about whether it’s right or wrong is the issue of political collaboration, whether it be Vichy France who collaborated with the Nazis, or the Filipino political elites who collaborated with the Japanese military administration, and many others.
In the Philippines, the issue of collaboration has dated back when the Americans arrived and colonized the Filipino people. Consequently, Filipino elites, who have longed to gain power and influence, tried to find ways to attain government positions under American rule, and they did this by collaborating with the Americans.
To ascertain that the Filipino people knew and understood their real intentions, the Americans made it a point to prioritize education in their drive to “civilize” the Filipino people. The ones who benefited from this were primarily the elites, as they started to gain more and more influence over the bulk of the Filipino population with their collaboration with the Americans.
As David Wurfel pointed out: “It was clear that the party system had merely strengthened the political hold of dominant, landed families, which had used quasi-feudal techniques to gain an electoral following, and could hold national power through a system of one-party dominance.”
When the Japanese forces arrived, the same group of political elites collaborated with them, and maintained their power and influence over the Philippines.
Albeit some historians would say that their influence was not as much as what they had under American rule, the fact still remains that they were able to hold on to their positions. As a result, most of them were labelled by Filipinos loyal to the Americans as traitors or quislings.
By the end of the war, these political collaborators were tried by the People’s Court, but they were able to justify their collaboration with the shield defense, as it was – according to them – a necessity to mitigate the suffering of the Filipino people.
Be that as it may, most, if not all, of these political collaborators were eventually absolved of their purported crimes, and were even given amnesty by then Philippine President Manuel Roxas, who was himself also a collaborator.
There are still many nuances to the issue of collaboration that need not detain us here, but the point I’m trying to convey here is that things should never be seen as black and white.
Historian Richard Evans, author of In Defense of History, claimed that moral judgments among historians are unavoidable when one deals with a range of historical issues. He went on by saying that “particularly in periods of mass destruction, such as the years 1914-1945, it is difficult for the historian not to take a moral stance, but the moral stance is still best articulated historically.”
Just like the issue of collaboration, there were political collaborators in the Philippines who were able to save lives, and mitigate the suffering of the Filipino people, and they cannot almost always be perceived immediately as traitors. A careful, nuanced study of their motivations (for collaborating) and actions during the war would somehow provide us with a better explanation as to why they did what they did.
This is also germane to the political issue we in the Philippines are facing at present, which is just full of dichotomous thinking, or false dichotomies if you will, and arguments in social media that are just complete balderdash.
I see people saying that if you oppose Duterte’s War on Drugs, then that would mean that you are a drug addict or a sympathizer of drug addicts, and that you never thought or sympathized with the victims of these criminals.
This very facile way of thinking will only cause more harm than good. Can’t someone just oppose wholeheartedly to the drug war because of the many innocent lives lost to it, and not be labelled as a criminal-loving individual?
Personally, I condemn those criminals or drug addicts who killed innocent civilians, but I also condemn the murder of those innocent victims (branded as “collateral damage”) during the War on Drugs. You cannot just go and pick one, and be against the other. In the end, it is the lives of the innocent we are all fighting for.
Again, looking back in history, this is just like saying that I condemn what the Americans did when they conducted a series of firebombing raids in Tokyo (codenamed Operation Meetinghouse) in March 1945, which killed around 80,000-100,000 innocent civilians in one night.
Condemning this act does not necessarily make me a Japanese supporter, right?
As I also condemn the many atrocities committed by the Japanese forces all throughout the Pacific – and there are too many to mention.
Suffice to say, we must always try to think and view political and historical issues not through black-and-white lens, but with a nuanced perspective. Only then can we really see that the world we live in is not as simple as we think, it is indubitably a complex world. Making false dichotomies, therefore, will only make it a more dangerous place to live in.
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Author’s email: JJAbulado@norsu.edu.ph
