I have not heard anything good about “black and white thinking” for a long time. In fact, I haven’t heard anything good about discrimination of any kind for a long time.

The discrimination problem is easier to understand. It is what I call an “aphetic expression.” It is what is left of a longer expression, the rest of which has just disappeared. Back when, there was an expression “invidious discrimination” where invidious meant “envy producing.” You can see why that kind of discrimination would get a bad name. But after a while, when “discrimination” itself came to have a bad smell, “invidious” really didn’t add anything and we dropped it. “Discrimination” simply presumed that it was “invidious.” [1]

“Black and white” as a criticism as in “we seem to be mired in black and white thinking,” presupposed that “the truth” is somewhere in the middle or that “the truth” cannot be usefully separated from error. It’s a “mystery” or a “paradox” or something. In that way, “black and white” as a criticism specifies the shape of the truth that is there to be found. It is indistinguishable from or it is intermediate between the two poles.

But it would be surprising if the only important differences here were to be found in the nature of the data. And, in fact, they are found also in the nature of the data collectors. Two common names for kinds of data collectors are “lumpers” and “splitters.”

Lumpers can be said to assign examples to broad categories, judging that the differences between the entities are not as important as the similarities. That is not what lumpers look like to splitters, of course. To splitters, lumpers treat as the same, instances that lose their meaning without differentiation. Splitters always think there are crucial differences between the instances that are being lumped together.

Splitters use narrower and more tightly defined categories. That is why they need so many more categories. And to a lumper, most of those categories are needless because the most prominent characteristics are very nearly the same.

Take for instance, the question of self-esteem. If you are embedded in a conversation about people who think they are considerably better than they are [2] then it is easy to say that people would be better off if they had less self-esteem. It might be said that they had a notable lack of “humility.”
If a splitter were to point out that “show a little humility” is terrible advice for someone who has too little self esteem to start with, a lumper would say he was talking about “people in general” and that it is true about “people in general.”

I was once part of discussion that carried across several years. It was about a bumper sticker that said “Wag more. Bark less.” My position on this advice was that is was really good for people who barked too much, but it was truly terrible advice for people who already didn’t bark as much as they should. I was accused of being a splitter, but I didn’t take it as much of a criticism.

I recently read a series of articles about personal traits in the New York Times. Maggie Jackson wrote glowingly about uncertainty. She cited tests that measured “uncertainty intolerance.” So far as this one column is concerned, the more uncertainty, we can tolerate, the better. Uncertainty brings us some valuable rewards, such as making new scientific discoveries.

But it isn’t just that. Jackson cites Michael Dugas. a professor of psychology as saying “Life is inherently uncertain, and if you have difficulty dealing with that, you will have difficulty dealing with life,” Apparently, the more uncertainty you have, the better off you will be. That is not the “teaching” of the column. It is the presupposition.

Now I, as a splitter, would wonder immediately if having too little uncertainty would be a problem and I would wonder that for the same reason I wondered whether wagging more was always a good idea.

Christina Caron, on the other hand, wrote a column about anxiety. “The emotion of anxiety and the underlying physiological stress response evolved to protect us,” Wendy Suzuki, a neuroscientist and the author of “Good Anxiety,” said. In her book, Dr. Suzuki explains that managing stress may be more useful than banishing it.

That way of approaching the topics made instant sense to me. The idea that there is an optimal level of anxiety seems right. If there is too little, you will not be alert to some categories of important things. If there is too much, you will find it toxic and difficult. You situations will fluctuate from one time to another so the “right level” of anxiety will fluctuate. Saying that “anxiety” is good or bad seems as odd to me as saying that “uncertainty” is good or bad.

Black and white

There is a tendency, it seems to me, to criticize splitters who value clarity—and who find that clarity in many discrete categories—as “black and white thinkers.” The pejorative hit of “black and white” comes from the inclusion of some data and the exclusion of other data into the set of categories that are organized to make important distinctions. If the distinctions are not important, all the care needed to manage them properly is care wasted. It is simply inefficient. But noting the existence of all those categories is not the same as showing that there are too many of them. Let’s see, first, if they pay for themselves by the clarity they provide for both parties in the discussion.

[1] Similarly, “reached” is all that is left of the baseball announcer’s expression, “reached first base.” Since “reached” always meant the same thing, they just dropped the rest of the expression, so we hear now that the leadoff hitter “reached” in the first and fourth innings.
[2] Most drivers, I have heard, say they are “above average” drivers. What does it mean when 80% of the drivers are better than “most drivers?”