Gene Lyons reviews Brokeback Mountain in the Decatur Daily Democrat, in which he says:

The inability to tolerate ambiguity defines the authoritarian mind. To control freaks, there’s no such thing as art, only propaganda. Every story must have a didactic message, the simpler the better. In that regard, self-styled “Christians,” in the politicized sense, are much like Marxist advocates of “Socialist realism.”

Lyons’ review of the film and its critics is very much worth reading on its own merits, but it struck me with particular force because I’ve been musing a lot lately about tolerating ambiguity in life, and how much of becoming an adult—much less a writer—requires the ability to do so.

Freud supposedly wrote “Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.” By that standard the world is full of neurotics. I think while the desire for a black-and-white worldview is at odds with the way the world actually works, that desire seems to be part of the human condition. If “wisdom” means anything, I think it means the willingness to continue struggling with our attraction to absolutes.

The very idea that the struggle is worth making is abhorrent to many people. Christian fundamentalists call that struggle “relativism,” with the belief that acknowledging complexity leads to evil. Fundamentalists of all stripes are opposed to this so-called relativism (or “liberalism” or “western ideology”); that’s the defining characteristic of the breed. To cite one example, the bumper-sticker biology of “life begins at conception” is at least in part a way to avoid struggling with the complicated biological and ethical question of what it means to be human, and the biologically inescapable reality that “human” is a difficult point to fix on the continuum from fertilization to old age.

It’s easy, though, to point the finger at fundamentalists and say “Bad!” It’s an example of how seductive the call of absolutism is: we freethinkers are good, and those fundamentalists are bad. has a terrific quote from Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett on The Fabulous Quoteserver: “Most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.” (From the novel Good Omens.)

In my own life I’m often tempted to collapse the wave function: a bad answer, in many ways, is easier to tolerate than no answer at all. When I’m in the throes of temptation to (over)simplify things, I try to ask myself if I’d really prefer a dead cat.