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 a few of the 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 shines 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 require proof or evidence. It is always willing to believe.

Was evolution the origin of our species,

with our brains evolving over billions of years,

or did God simply create us this way?

In any event, you can be sure that we have

opposing brain hemispheres for a reason.

I wonder what it is.

Roy H. Williams