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Nuance: from the Latin nubes and the Greek νεφος -- "cloud." In our palaver, a "nuance" is considered to be a deviation from some kind of absolute. "Thou shalt not bear false witness" is generally taken as an absolute prohibition of a deliberate telling of a falsehood. A "little white lie" might be seen as a nuance, a slight clouding or veiling of the truth.
The Gestapo officer demands to know of the French farmer if any Jews had passed that way of late. "Non," is the answer. Perhaps in a hurry to get to the nearest village and its bierstube, the fearsome Nazi accepts the answer with a shrug and orders his stooges to get a move on.
The farmer is much relieved. He can say to himself that the Jews he has hidden under the floor of the barn out back did not exactly pass his humble home even as he sheltered them in an outbuilding to get to which they had to pass his house, though they did not pass by it on the road out front. His answer was a nuanced one. An answer wrapped in a cloud of ambiguity.
Without recourse to that nuance on truth, a whole family likely would have been on its way to Auschwitz or some other killing place. Heraus! Schnell!
If I read current American politics correctly -- and it hurts my eyes and lays low my spirit to do so -- the country is being oratorically coerced into accepting absolutist, un-nuanced almost a priori policy statements that leave no room for real-world dilemmas. "Telling it like it is," they say.
One presidential aspirant declares that there is no question that a woman impregnated against her will is required by God and should be required by the government to carry the child to full term. Period. Paragraph. No further discussion, not even of the woman's health and other complications.
Another compares the nuclear agreement between the United States, its allies and Iran to negotiating with terrorists. "We never negotiate with terrorists." Never? Was it not Winston Churchill who said, "It is 'better to jaw-jaw than to war-war"?
Yet another will say that pure capitalism is the only American way, that the so-called entitlements of Social Security and Medicare are outright sins against the invisible but nevertheless all-knowing, occult Hand of the free market economy.
Not to be outdone, still another will say there is no such thing as poverty, as have-nots. They are not-yet-haves. Not even a thin glitter of light gets through the wall of that closed system. No nuance, not the slightest cloud of uncertainty.
Likewise, if one dares question Israel's provocative building of settlements in the West Bank, he is automatically an anti-Semite. One is either for Israel or against it. It's all or nothing. Clear as a cloudless day.
To make a no-nuances-allowed political system work, the people who in effect run it must see themselves as knowing better than anyone else. They must publish something like Mao's Little Red Book. They must rule as Lenin and Stalin and Mussolini and Hitler ruled: czar-like in absolutist terms.
Certain expressions of religion traffic in absolutisms, viz. contraception of any kind is a grave moral lapse as is the physical expression of love between persons of the same sex; the husband is the head of the household to whom his spouse and children must cede their freedom to live and move and have their own being; the Bible is the literal Word of God; he who denies so much as a letter of it is not only to be shunned but is destined to eternal perdition.
Whenever I encounter the bitter fruit that comes of living under such absolutisms, I recall this passage from the Gospel according to St. John: The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth/1-- a passage Rudolf Bultmann/2 suggested was rooted in ambiguity: "The operation of the πνευμα [or wind] is bound by no discoverable law. Admittedly it is the ambiguity of this term πνευμα that makes it possible for us to entertain this idea, as a hidden meaning lying behind the initial sense of the word."/3
Albert Einstein, a contemporary of Bultmann, helped us to see ambiguity in a phenomenon when otherwise we might have expected to see it in absolute clarity. He demonstrated with his Theory of Special Relativity that an event occurring at one time for one observer could occur at a different time for another.
That one observer at one time and one at another could be viewing the same event whilst in different contexts and situations strongly suggests that each might be seeing the same event differently. Thus no singular truth of the matter could be determined.
Nuance and ambiguity are our friends. We do well to embrace them and go where they take us. Both are at the heart of responsible scholarship and research that matters.
Ambiguity is part of our very selves and of those with whom we live. An adoring spouse can say to his or her partner, "I love you," but it can and frequently does mean many different things separately and together. A smile may be seen as a questioning, as a judgment, as an apology, as an unspoken desire, as an affirmation -- indeed, as a mystery.
Nuance is to the human mind and heart what grace and lilt are to the poetry of Keats, what gaiety and brilliance are to the music of Mozart.
1/ John 3:8 KJV
2/ Bultmann (1884-1976) was the 20th century's eminent scholar of New Testament texts. He taught at Marburg University in Germany.
3/ Bultmann. The Gospel of John. Philadelphia, PA. The Westminster Press. 1971. 142
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