Roslings’ book Factfulness begins with a sword swallower. As a child, senior author Hans Rosling loved going to the circus. He was intrigued by the sword swallowers he sometimes saw there. Later, after he’d trained as a medical doctor, he learned that the anatomy of most people’s throats allows for “swallowing” a flat object by thrusting the chin forward. (Please don’t try this at home.) He began to understand that many phenomena we regard as impossible are manageable, given a set of gradually developed knowledge and skills. Throughout the rest of his work life, he tried to develop further his openness to manageable progress, along with further knowledge and skills.
Rosling spent much of his career as a health researcher in a variety of countries in sub-Saharan Africa and in Asia. During his travels he saw over time how some areas had improved substantially in the goods and services people had access to. When he later returned to his home country of Sweden and taught local medical students, he realized that many of his students had an outmoded view of the world—thinking it consisted only of “rich” countries and “poor” ones.
During the latter part of his career, Hans made it part of his life’s work to get people to take a more nuanced, changeable view of the range of global incomes and living conditions. The Roslings characterize the tendency we all have to simplify lots of different aspects of life (rich/poor, big family/small family, limited education/full education) as binary, with no in-between stages, focussing solely or primarily on the extremes. They call this the “gap” instinct.
It took Hans Rosling most of two decades to help persuade the World Bank to group nations into multiple income levels, rather than just characterizing countries as either “developed,” or “developing.” He theorizes that maybe changing the misconception of an unbridgeable gap between rich and poor countries was so hard because, “…human beings have a strong dramatic instinct toward binary thinking, a basic urge to divide things into two distinct groups, with nothing but an empty gap in between.”
If you’ve followed some of my previous blog efforts, you’re likely aware that I am very wary of the “red state/blue state” gap, among other attempts to depict the American electorate as two extremes with little or nothing in between. Our politicians and our media do us a disservice when they characterize our beliefs or voting patterns that way. Even more damaging and dangerous is the tendency to characterize anyone with a set of beliefs or a voting pattern different from ours as somehow misguided or, even worse, evil.
I don’t know how to counter this particular American “gap” tendency entirely—after all, our country has had the same two major political parties for about 150 years (though what each party emphasizes or claims to believe has changed over time). To some extent, we all need to “clump” individuals into groups, especially when we are talking about large populations. There are over 8 billion humans currently alive, so the effort to see each human individual “whole” is beyond even the most sophisticated analysis. However, we can resist the tendency to reduce every issue, every grouping, to just a binary choice.
Some other countries already practice one small step in the direction of more nuanced voting patterns: as of 2014, the CIA World Fact Book listed 22 countries with a total population of nearly 750 million where voting is required of citizens over the age of 18. Most widely known among these is Australia, where, if you fail to participate in an election, you will be liable for a small fine. Brazil, with over 200 million people, also requires voting, as do Costa Rica, Greece, Mexico, and Thailand, among others. Practicing democracy requires constructive engagement, and voting, made as convenient and easy as practical, is one measure of that engagement. Requiring everyone to vote doesn’t guarantee a 100% turnout, but it is something of an incentive. It can help reduce electoral polarization, especially in primary or off-year elections when U.S. turnout has often been weak, with mostly the more extreme partisans at either end of the political spectrum bothering to show up at the polls.
Other voting practices that can reduce either/or thinking may involve such things as multi-member districts, rank choice voting (sometimes called “instant run-offs”), non-partisan primaries, open primaries (allowing votes for candidates of other parties than the one you are registered in), ballot initiatives and referenda, and independent redistricting commissions. None are perfect tools. In the U.S., few have been tried at the national level. Multiple localities and states have experimented with a variety of these measures. Emphasizing local voting and local elections may be a partial antidote to our current fixation with officials at the national level. Further experimentation might help reduce partisan wrangling and government gridlock.
While the “gap” instinct in characterizing voters and voting patterns may provide a way station in our journey toward more complete understanding, it’s a very fruitless place to get stuck.
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