Demand Nuance

(This is not a post about Game of Thrones.  I promise.)

I’ve had nuance on my mind lately.

It started months ago when I was wondering what the hell is wrong with us, (us being Americans) and our current political situation.  But my ideas crystalized when the last season of Game of Thrones began.  It revealed a little something about nuance I may have missed.  That’s right, I missed some nuance about nuance.

Fans of GOT, which is a show watched around the world, are split on the last season or two.  The details aren’t necessary here, but essentially dozens of characters and storylines are ending and the pace toward the end has sped up.  In previous seasons, the characters traveled at a snail’s pace across their world or were locked in the middle of family squabbles or political issues.  The characters were becoming more nuanced.  Both good and evil, both predictable and unpredictable.  At the end of the story, that work is done and now the life and death decisions have to be made. As a fan/nerd, it is your prerogative to agree or disagree, but in the end, choices are made by the creators of the show and you have to just deal with it.

However, even though I’m fine with what has happened, the last two seasons lacked nuance.  Whether out of necessity or not, those character-driven moments are now replaced by ones that further the plot, and viewers apparently miss those moments. Nuance is everything.  It is the collection of details that tells the true story, whether a fictional world of dragons or the real world of greedy assholes.

Remember Jon Stewart’s last show?  (I do.  I still miss him.) After all the tearful goodbyes, he talked briefly about the importance of calling out bullshit.  At the time, I thought it was a strange note to end on.  I get it now.  Bullshit is the enemy of nuance.  Bullshit keeps voters home or elects a ridiculous human being to the presidency.  Bullshit keeps people fighting with each other.  Bullshit is the sum total of lies, cover stories, and rebranding designed to hide the truth from you.  It buries nuance, so all that is left are two choices.  You’d be a fool to not choose A!  Only communists choose B!

There is a backlash against the media in general. (I think this argument is also missing nuance, but I can’t talk about everything.) There is a lot of evidence to support the notion that the media is dividing us and blinding us from what matters most.  However, if we as a culture sought out the nuance we obviously crave in our TV shows, the flashy graphics and sensational stories the media pukes out there wouldn’t work. The news would change if we refused to watch. How many stories that are covered on any cable news network are covered for more the 4 or 5- minute snippets? Not many.  Or none. Nuance takes time, nuance reveals the complexity of life, nuance inherently understands there are more than two sides to a story.  With nuance, you get scope and scale.  It can quickly tell you that this thing you are concerned about isn’t anything at all.  The thing that needs your attention may be boring, but you need to know about it.

It is our duty to sort through what we are fed like our parents sifted through Halloween candy in the eighties looking for razorblades in our Tootsie Rolls.  One of the biggest lies I see on social media pops up every now and then.  During a political squabble, some wannabe life coach says: “Life is simple.” It could be a hard-edged country boy from a red state or a burned-out hippie from downtown Portland. They are both wrong.  Nothing about life is simple.  With every passing year of our lives, it gets more complicated.  Our brains need to sort it out and put labels on things so we don’t walk around drooling and babbling all day.  We need to organize everything somehow. That still doesn’t mean that life is simple.  It is incredibly nuanced.  We are doing our best to simplify what we can.

If you don’t believe me, I’ll attempt a metaphor.  Look out your window.  Your home, work, your dentist office.  Even with artistic skill, could you accurately recreate what you see with the standard eight crayons in the box they give you in kindergarten?  (Do that even have black in there?)  How about the sixteen-box?  The sixty-four?  How many would it take to get all the colors just right?  The more crayons, the better chance you have. The more details, the closer you are to an accurate picture.

Also, nuance, and I’m stretching here, isn’t mathematical.  It rarely can be summed up as A = B.  Math is neat and clean because it can be proven.  Life really isn’t that way.  The circumstances change.  The rules, the law, the values, the environment…they are all variables.  There aren’t a lot of constants. Nuance means things are messy.  What is true today may not have been true twenty years ago or twenty years from now.  I can see how black and white thinkers would be frustrated.  But, tough shit.

My eye doctors have always told me to spend significant time away from screens to refresh my eyesight.  This also helps with perspective.  All of us could do this.  Go on a media hiatus every once in a while.  The world will still be crazy when you get back, but you may gain insight that you didn’t have before.  That tiny sliver of knowledge is the building block of nuance.