Black and/or White

The following is a transcription from the chapter titled "Black and/or White" from the book "Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown" by Alan Watts. I thought sharing it might be an appropriate way to honor MLK day.

Day by day the tragic “crisis of color” between black and white peoples (or should I say colored and discolored?) moves towards a lofty and terrifying showdown. Remote and lofty as such matters may seem (thought I would call them basic), it is always important to look into the religious and metaphysical background of social disturbances which, in this case, looms rather large. Through Christianity, and to a lesser extent Judaism, the West has inherited certain associations of ideas and symbols as unique among world religions as the are absurd. Consider these two columns:

White --- Black
Light --- Darkness
Life --- Death
Good --- Evil
God --- Devil

The avowed aim of popular Western religion is to retain column 1 and to get rid of column 2. Most other religious would transcend both. We, however, have been persuaded that the white aspect of the universe can be experienced and enjoyed without the contrast of the black.

Strictly speaking, Africans are no more black than Caucasians are white, but first the Caucasians and now the Africans have adopted “white” and “black” as proud and belligerent labels, implying an opposition cruder and more irreconcilable than greyish pink versus brown. Yet if you are proud and happy to be white, how do you know you are white? But for the existence of colored people, we would never have thought of ourselves as white, for in an all-white world being white carries no distinction, and we surely like to be “people of distinction”.

A necessary part of having an effective personality seems to be membership in some elite in-group of religion, class, or race, some sect, coterie, club, gang, or secret society. Even one’s own body looks- deceptively- like an isolated in-group of cells. But just about the most basic metaphysical principle that I know is simply that every inside involves an outside, and every outside an inside. They are different, yes, but quite inseparable. The only exceptions to this rule are such topological gimmicks as the Mobius strip and the Klein bottle, though here there is neither front nor back, inside nor outside. Thus the principle is transcended, not annulled.

If then, I am to be “in,” someone else must consequently be “out,” and consequently I owe him a debt of gratitude for the realization that I am “in.” To congratulate myself, if I must, on being a white, saved Protestant, a hard-working, family-minded and solid citizen, what is more convenient that the peripheral presence of a class of black, thinly disguised heathens, of shiftless, philandering, and irresponsible fellaheen? If the description doesn’t fid, it must be made to fit. Otherwise, no congratulations. If I must, at all costs, be right I cannot discover myself in that position unless someone else is wrong, or left.

But the debt of gratitude is seldom, if ever, recognized- just as it would hardly occur to us to thank the darkness for light, sinners for saints, or the open air for being indoors. We think of the “in” situation as more energetic and even more real than the “out,” for everyone who is not right inside is left outside by default. Yet when certain outsiders “want in” by virtue of equal energy and intelligence, they are not so much left out as pushed out. However, the lack of recognition here hoes much deeper than racial prejudice.

As you read these lines, it seems obvious that the black print is more significant, more worthy of attention, and thus somehow more real, more “the thing,” than the white paper, and the same would be true if it were white print on black paper. The Gestalt theory of perception explains that in any figure/background situation, the figure captures our attention to the extent that it is relatively small and enclosed, or that it is moving against a still background. The figure is then “the thing,” and the background is more of less ignored- even though the figure would be invisible without its contrast. Yet, in the accompanying picture of a Mexican blanket, do we have a black design on a white ground, or a white design on a black? And what about a zebra? Does it remind you of a yellow horse with black stripes, or a black horse with yellow stripes?

In the case of printed words on a page, it is clear that the words and not the page are what one is supposed to notice. But when two contrasting colors are equally distributed we seem to have a choice. On the other hand, what about stars in space? Although our modern common-sense view is that the stars are “the things,” and space just inert nothingness, some of the ancients saw the sky as a firmament pierced with apertures into the light of heaven, and for a long time now astrophysicists have considered space as having “properties,” such as curvature and expansion. Furthermore, the nuclear exploration of solids suggests that even a rock contains far more space than “matter,” while “matter” itself seems to dissolve more and more into energy patterns. Suppose, for example, that space is in the same sort of relation to solids as the diaphragm of a loudspeaker to the various sounds which it produces. We attend to the sounds as such, hearing voices, instruments, or footsteps, ignoring their common source and background- the vibration of the diaphragm, which is, in this instance, the active principle, translating electrical impulses into sound. Though one must be careful of analogizing too much in these matters, I am convinced that switching attention back and forth from figure to ground, regarding each in turn as “the thing,” is a fruitful heuristic method, especially if one wants to understand the relation of contexts to individual events, of environmental processes to organisms, and of fields of force to the patterns which the contain. L. von Bertalanffy, in his “systems theory” of biology, has argued very strongly that every biological process must be understood both by microscopic analysis and in context with the physical situation in which it occurs. This should, perhaps, be obvious but scientific method has hitherto been overbalanced toward the analytic approach to nature.

When we consider energy itself, the mutual interdependence of positive and negative, of “white” ons and “black” offs, is still more obvious because all energy is a vibration or pulsation, or a propagation of waves. Unless plus and minus, on and off, wave-crest and wave-trough alternate, there simply is no energy. It is therefore tempting to assume that all negative aspects of the universe imply and involve the positive, and vice-versa, in such a way that the notion of final and absolute blackness is as absurd as its opposite. But when the white/positive is seen as “the real thing” there is always the fear that light and life may at last be overcome by darkness and death. However, the notion of plus and minus as generating one another in an eternal rhythm is far less a strain on my credulity and imagination than the idea of a brief and mysterious firing of energy occurring once, and once only, in the black waste of the void.

But the assumption that the black or negative aspect of he world is as essential to life as the white or positive is against the common-sense of Western man. He believes, in general, that life is, and should be, a relentless effort of mind and muscle against all forces of decay, dissolution, and death. “Fight the good fight with all thy might.” “Accentuate the positive.” Life is therefore seen as an intrusion into the dark emptiness of space- a darkness with which light has nothing in common, and which will engulf it forever if effort and total vigilance are not maintained. In one sense, this is a philosophy of nihilism in that it sees darkness and non-being as the truly basic and enduring reality- against which life is a magnificent though ultimately futile gesture. Unless, of course, there is some kind of God who exists necessarily and therefore effortlessly for all eternity. But if such a Go is not merely the dark void, which is supremely effortless, He (or It) must somehow comprise or transcend the dark/light polarity. It would then be impossible to engulf or annihilate God, for He/She would be the black/white whole with no opposition.

My own feeling is that the universe is just that sort of arrangement, and that it is not actually chopped up into a multitude of separate bits. It is an arrangement, or pattern, in which every so-called part is a function of the whole. Thus the Western attitude of being alive by virtue of being against death and darkness is not only naïve but also destructive and violent. Its major technological achievement is the equipment for destroying the planet. It knows nothing of judo, the gentle way of getting where you want to go by going along with the movements of nature, using, say, gravity as a sailor uses the wind.

Every object in this universe is falling, gravitationally, but there is no concrete floor under the system upon which it can crash! The expert in judo gets the feeling that all his actions are “falling,” and when he uses muscle he never strains. When he climbs a hill, he has the feeling that it is lifting him, for he takes it one step at a time and does not fight with it. He is never uptight because he is not afraid of the negative aspect of the world. He knows that it cannot destroy existence, because existence-energy is being/nothing, on/off, now you see it, now you don’t. And, since the world has no truly separate parts, the only final and fundamental “I” or “Self” that we have is the whole thing. The WASP attitude to the black world is, then, only a symptom of a state of consciousness which does not see the universe as a whole, which feels, quite one-sidedly, that the white design is the figure, “the thing,” the reality, and the black background the evil, the nothing, the denial of life. So, too, it feels the individual person as isolated and disconnected from that essential background which we call “the other” or the external world. As the in-group does not acknowledge its dependence on the out-group, the life inside the skin has no sensation of being one with the life outside the skin …but I have no self except everything which is happening, and it sees itself from all the different standpoints called sentient beings.

We must go to the roots of a problem and not invest too much energy fiddling with the symptoms. We shall never get whites and blacks, or Orientals and Occidentals, to unite by trying to tie the different branches of the human tree together with string. Attention must instead be shifted to the stem and the root, where, under the surface, we are one. It will take much less time.