The Only Hard Choice

Responsibility limits your Freedom,
and freedom is a good thing.
So is responsibility wrong and evil?

Sigh.

The only hard choice in life
is the choice between two good things.

Justice and Mercy
are at opposite ends
of a teeter-totter.

Honesty and Loyalty
wrestle in your heart,
do they not?

Opportunity and Security
are inversely proportionate.
One will decrease
as the other increases.

These are just a few examples
that spring to mind when we read
the words of the Nobel Prize-winning
physicist, Niels Bohr: “The opposite of
a correct statement is a false statement.
But the opposite of a profound truth
may well be another profound truth.”

Keep in mind that Niels was a physicist,
not a philosopher.

Jonathan Haidt sheds some light on this subject
in his book, The Righteous Mind, citing a wealth of research
that indicates how our beliefs come primarily from our intuitions,
with rational thought coming afterward, to justify our initial beliefs.

That’s an uncomfortable thought, I agree.
But does that make it wrong?

Fifteen years before Knopf Doubleday published The Righteous Mind,
Bard Press published The Wizard of Ads. On its frontispiece you will find
The Seven Laws of the Advertising Universe.

The third law is this:

“Intellect and Emotion are partners who do not speak
the same language. The intellect finds logic to justify
what the emotions have decided. Win the hearts
of the people, their minds will follow”

I was able to write those words with confidence because
Dr. Roger Sperry won the Nobel Prize in 1981 for his
documentation of brain lateralization, which says in effect
that we don’t have a single brain divided  into two halves
so much as we have two separate, competing brains.

Our left hemisphere
is logical, rational, sequential, deductive reasoning.
It also contains the language functions.

Our right hemisphere recognizes patterns and is intuitive.
These can be patterns of behavior, patterns in history,
or patterns in auditory or visual phenomena.
But our right hemispheres don’t know
right from wrong, true from false,
or fact from fiction. That’s
the left brain’s job.

Speaking of the brain, Dr. Sperry said,
“Each hemisphere of the brain is indeed a conscious system in its own right, perceiving, thinking, remembering, reasoning, willing, and emoting, all at a characteristically human level, and . . . both the left and the right hemisphere may be conscious simultaneously in different, even in mutually conflicting, mental experiences that run along in parallel.”

So we have an uptight, suspicious, legalistic left brain
and a free-wheeling, ready-to-party, intuitive and mystical right brain
that doesn’t need proof or evidence. It is always willing to believe.

Whether you believe in evolution as the origin of the species,
or whether you believe in Intelligent Design, (which I believe is currently
the politically correct code name for God,) we can be sure
that we have these opposing hemispheres for a reason.

I wonder what it is.

Roy H. Williams