The zero-sum crisis and the paradoxical solution

Two recent editorials in The New York Times—one by Damien Cave and one by Amanda  Taub—argue that “zero-sum game” thinking is on the rise in American geopolitics. In a zero-sum game, like tic-tac-toe or chess, one person’s gain is the other’s loss; in other words, the net sum of the exchange is zero. This kind of thinking, they argue, runs afoul of the post-war consensus of the positive-sum game: the cooperation that not only benefits the other side but redounds to my own—a rising tide that lifts all boats.

The irony of both pieces, which neither author seems to see, is what the whole argument hinges on: this rise in zero-sum thinking and its evils entails a corresponding fall of the positive-sum perspective and its goods. In other words: a zero-sum game.

Indeed, the authors are at pains to admit, at times, that zero-sum exchanges do indeed occur. No pie—whether of apple or Apple Inc.—can be divided into wholes. In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below—where two finite objects cannot occupy the same physical space and two finite experiences cannot fill the same temporal expanse—it is simply a hard fact of reality.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that Cave and Taub aren’t onto something. We do seem to be in the grip of a crisis of zero-sum, either/or thinking.

But the key question is this: Where is the crisis? It doesn’t seem to be, pace Cave and Taub, in a particular political party: A Harvard study found that “zero-sum thinking does not map neatly with party affiliation,” and, in fact, if one had to choose a more binary bunch, it would be the Democrats, who “proved slightly more zero-sum than Republicans.” It also doesn’t seem to be in politics on the level of practical exchanges: Again—as the authors admit and demonstrate—zero-sum scenarios are, to a certain degree, unavoidable in economic transactions and power struggles.

No, the crisis runs far deeper, to depths even game theorists and psychologists never quite reach.

Very little about the Times pieces on binary thinking, about our polarized political climate, or even about the whole riven twenty-first century is intelligible apart from a view of the human being as forever caught on the horns of one great dilemma: Are we infinite spirits navigating a finite world, or finite bodies with a dream of infinity? Is the meaning of life with God up in his heaven or with man upon this earth? The more we move toward one side of the dilemma, the more we seem to move away from the other side; one side’s gain is the other side’s loss. This is the human crisis: a war of ultimate—that is to say, religious—ideas.

Cave and Taub are right in stating there’s a crisis of zero-sum thinking in politics. But it is inherent in the great political divide itself—the division of middle Americans and coastal elites, of Republicans and Democrats, of conservatives and liberals, of the “right” wing and “left” wing stretching back to the seating of France’s National Assembly. And behind this divide is the dilemma between order and openness in governing human society. The first group tends to privilege tradition, custom, hierarchy, and local stability; the second tends to privilege innovation, liberty, equality, and universal justice.

And this dilemma of order and openness is, ultimately, an extension of our great dilemma of heaven and earth. In our secular age, this seems like a category mistake. But conservatism is deeply rooted in a defense of traditional religion from skeptical liberalism, and to this day, conservatives tend to be more religious than their liberal counterparts. And consider the psychological profiles of each: orderly conservatives, who favor clear boundaries, tend to have a higher disgust sensitivity, while open-minded liberals, who favor bold bridges, tend to register higher levels of neurosis.

We see these same thought patterns in various “heavenward” and “earthward” movements of philosophy and religion across the centuries: on the one hand, the “spirituals” who would withdraw from and discipline this world below, and on the other, the down-to-earth who would shrug off or even deny a world above. The conservative mind knows that this place isn’t heaven and never will be, while the liberal heart longs to build some kind of heaven on earth.

The crisis isn’t that these poles of order and openness are defined and distinguished, or that some of us tend toward one and others to the other. It’s that they are absolutized at the expense of their opposites. This is the source of our either/or polarization. We lament the splinters of our opponents’ eyes but excuse the beams protruding from our own; we cry foul on them for doing today what we did yesterday, and would do again tomorrow if given the chance; and we read every one of their gains as our loss, and every one of our advances as their retreat.

All the while—bereft of the deep truths the other side honors—ideological order succumbs to paralysis, and ideological openness to chaos.

This would be a hopeless situation indeed if it weren’t for one who called himself “the Way” (Jn 14:6)—the God-man who, as Saint Paul said, gathered and reconciled all heavenly and earthly reality in himself (Eph 1:10; Col 1:20). The rich tradition of Catholic philosophy and theology has a whole host of both/ands to speak to our either/or age —not through a bland, centrist middle position, but through a higher plane that holds the opposing forces in tension. Catholic social teaching, in particular, has much to teach modern politics, including the geopolitical pull between a particular nation and the global community, about holding together heavenly order and earthly openness.

“Welcome to the Zero Sum Era,” the Times correctly observes. “Now How Do We Get Out?” In answering that question, we ignore the absolute paradox of Christ, and the paradoxical wisdom of Christianity, at our peril. And in our struggle against the Evil One—or, if you want, the negative force that relentlessly divides us from each other and ourselves—there’s no positive sum to be had: our loss is his gain.

Catholic World Report