Mark Edmundson recently wrote for this site about the binarism of our current political culture and what he called the “cloven fiction” of crudely dividing people into either conservative or liberal camps. I think Edmundson is absolutely right that this tendency has “deeply harmful effects on us all,” and I think the problem he points to is greatly illuminated by a book I am teaching right now.
In one of my classes we’re reading Montesquieu’s brilliant Persian Letters—a great book that doesn’t get read nearly often enough in Great Books classes—and I’m noting a curious strategy that Montesquieu pursues as the book goes on: a change in his method that may be useful to us today.
The basic conceit of the book is this: We read a series of letters to and from a couple of Persians, Usbek and Rica, who are visiting Europe for the first time and noting the contrast between its manners (to which Rica is especially attentive) and its morals (Usbek’s primary territory) to those of their native land. So the first half of the book focuses on the strange habits and practices of Frenchmen.
For instance:
The Christian religion is burdened with an infinite number of exceedingly demanding observances; and as the Christians deemed it less easy to follow these observances than to appoint bishops who can give dispensations, the latter choice was adopted for the convenience of the public; thus, if a person prefers not to keep Ramadan, or not to conform to the required formalities for marriages, or if he wishes to break his monastic vows, or to marry in defiance of the proscriptions of the law, even sometimes to renege on an oath, he goes to the bishop, or the pope, who will immediately provide the dispensation.
How different from the elegant simplicity of Islam, with its Five Pillars!
Moreover, Rica reflects,
Whether it is more advantageous to grant, or to deny, their freedom to women, is a great matter of debate among men; it seems to me that there are many arguments to be advanced on both sides. If Europeans say that it is ungenerous to make people one loves unhappy, our Orientals reply that it is contemptible for men to renounce the dominion nature gave them over women. If Europeans point out that keeping a large number of women confined is troublesome, they reply that ten obedient women are less trouble than one who does not obey. If they, in their turn, object that Europeans cannot be happy with women who are unfaithful to them, they are told that this fidelity about which Orientals love to boast does not prevent the weary distaste which invariably follows satiated passion; that our women are too exclusively ours; that so calm a possession leaves nothing to be desired or feared; that a little flirtatiousness is a spice which stimulates, and averts corruption. Perhaps someone wiser than I am would find it difficult to decide, for if Orientals are quite right to devise ways to alleviate their anxieties, Europeans are likewise quite right not to feel those anxieties.
One wonders what Usbek would say about this, afflicted as he is by a series of angry or pained letters from his wives and the eunuchs charged with protecting their virtue. (The tragedy that unfolds in Usbek’s seraglio offers the closest thing this book has to a plot.)
But as the story moves on something new is introduced: triangulation. Here’s an example, from Usbek:
The Jewish religion is an ancient tree, from which have sprung two branches that cover the whole earth: Muhammadanism and Christianity; or rather, it is a mother who bore two daughters who have wounded her in a thousand places: for in matters of religion, those who are closest are the bitterest enemies. But whatever cruel treatment the Jewish religion may have received from its progeny, it does not cease to take pride in having brought them into the world; it uses them both to embrace the whole world, while at the same time embracing all the ages by virtue of its venerable life-span.
The Jews, consequently, see themselves as the source of all holiness, and the origin of all religions: they regard us, by contrast, as heretics who have changed the Law, or rather, as rebellious Jews.
The “us” in that last sentence? Muslims and Christians. Islam and Christianity are consistently opposed to one another…until Judaism provides a tertium quid from the perspective of which certain hitherto unsuspected commonalities linking the two are suddenly visible.
Similarly, we are treated to a lengthy story about a Zoroastrian who loves and wishes to marry his sister, a desire in full accordance with his religion’s principle of Xwedodah, but alien to Islam and Christianity alike. (And Judaism too, for that matter.) That the Muslim and the Christian instinctively react in the same way to the Zoroastrian’s story is illuminating and disrupts the logic of simple and eternal opposition.
If the first half of the book features binary oppositions between Islam and Christianity, between “the Orient”—this is one of the foundational texts of Orientalism—and Europe, the second half of the book repeatedly suggests the wisdom of triangulation. It is only through triangulation that one can accurately assess the claims of a particular tradition; which is to say, it is not enough even to know one other religion, or civilization—or language, for that matter. The more points we can plot in the field of our perception, the richer and denser will be our understanding. This does not mean that we will see one choice as good as another, but rather that we will make our own choices (even when we choose to remain securely embedded within our inherited tradition) with more wisdom and insight.
In Tom Stoppard’s play The Invention of Love, young Moses Jackson—an enthusiastic sportsman who is studying science at Oxford—is asked what it’s like to kiss a girl, and replies “Kissing girls is not like science, nor is it like sport. It is the third thing when you thought there were only two.” The discovery that there is a “third thing when you thought there were only two” is a great and vital one, and not just when kissing is the means of discovery. It is to see the world with a depth of field—three-dimensionally.
The Persian Letters is the second book I’ve assigned in this particular class, and the first book, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, pursues similar ends through the means of fictional journeys rather than fictional letters. The four places Gulliver visits (Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa, and the land of the Houyhnhnms) all provide mirrors in which England can perceive itself. And every country—every religion, every culture, every person—needs triangulation at least in order to achieve self-understanding and prudent decision-making. The satire of Gulliver’s Travels can be broad at times, but taken as a whole it promotes a form of intellectual and moral reflection that is neither narrowly provincial nor flaccidly relativistic, but rather prudential—comparative in a complex, flexible, but urgent way. Urgent because we must, and often under pressure of time, make choices about our social, moral, and political lives, and because those choices can have great consequences for us and for others. The more depth of field we have when we must make those choices, the more appropriate they are likely to be.
Montesquieu likewise perceives this urgency, and the vital importance of not allowing urgency to disable our critical faculties. Usbek and Rica are intellectual protagonists for our time, because they go beyond binarism: They come to understand that France vs. Persia, Europe vs. “the Orient,” Christianity vs. Islam, do not simply and immediately exhaust the possibilities available to us.
In American political discourse today, anyone who sees problems with our two dominant political parties will immediately and loudly be accused of “both-sidesism.” But that charge is built on the double assumption that (a) there are only two sides and (b) we must choose one of them. Montesquieu’s Usbek and Rica remind us that the world is more complicated than that—and because the world is, so should we be.