You understand that good is a bias, right? Doing the right thing is biased. As is following rules. Everything of value is a reflection of bias.

So why does bias sound bad?

Well, I hope we both can hear that calling bias bad is…well…biased.

Here’s why we’re confused about bias.

We hear three arguments about bias.

1. All bias is bad.
2. We’re all biased.
3. Out of proportion bias needs to be balanced.

In short: we want to define bias as bad, inevitable, but we also want to celebrate our own biases.

This, of course, is a paradox. But when it serves our goals, we don’t mind it so much.

What the paradox does, however, is leave us confused, and feeling quite a bit guilty about biases in general. Even our own. And definitely other people’s.

Our bias against bias undermines our thinking.

What we are seeking is an impossibility: a true neutral view of the world. Sometimes this is made into a rationalist argument. Sometimes it is offered as critique of media. But in most cases it is rendered the same: a pursuit of a negative state.

We construct bias as a positive condition—like the pressing on one side of the scales. Eliminating bias, then is subtraction—removing the thumb.

Of course, we don’t actually know how to do that. Because we can’t have a true neutral. And, let’s be honest, if we could, we wouldn’t like it.

Achieving true neutrality would come out like the great answer in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The joke, of course, is that we know the answer, just not the question. Which is clever. But it is doubly clever in reducing the question into something necessarily meaningless.

Why? Because bias is how we find value in the living. Removing bias will render coverage of our world as meaningless as opening the newspaper to “42”. That’s all that’s there. Ever. Nothingness.

The pursuit of bias-free journalism is dangerous.

I generally roll with the vibe that wanting a good thing is generally the ideal response. As Thomas Merton described the desire and the value:

and the fact that I think I am following your will
does not mean that I am actually doing so.
But I believe that the desire to please you
does in fact please you.

from The Merton Prayer

But there are times when the seeking of an ideal leads us into wrong belief.

While we often consider politically biased journalism dubious, the pursuit of an idyllic neutrality blinds us to the biases we take for granted.

Order rather than chaos is one. That often reflects a bias for institutions over individuals, governments over citizens, corporations over workers, police over protestors, for example.

Now, I’m confident we don’t actually want neutrality on this. I don’t think the response is to bothsides the debate between a democratic republic versus anarchy. But we also shouldn’t pretend this is, in fact, neutral either.

The false neutrality of the last century has celebrated war and encouraged the internment of Japanese Americans. It has rejected civil rights and called welfare expensive. It beat the drums for the Iraq invasion and rendered torture as a “political hot button.”

This isn’t neutrality. Nor should we wave our hands at all of it and dismiss it as bias. And we definitely shouldn’t pick up the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and think we’ve got “both sides” covered.

The truth isn’t binary. But it is biased.

When we treat bias as the problem, we are making a fateful mistake. We imagine the world exists within a political binary. Which is like being stuck in a tunnel with only two options. And therefore, bias represents the preferring of one to the other.

But the world isn’t binary. And therefore politics itself isn’t binary. There are so many options.

Living in the world means choosing some things over other things. And we should feel good about it.

Choose good over bad. Honesty over deception. Inclusion over exclusion. Hope over fatalism.

But don’t forget that the world isn’t binary! So we must bias good things over many other things! Good over bad is easy, but we also want good over neutral! Good over doing nothing. Or good against meh, shady, or we’ve-always-done-it-that-way.

Bias reveals truth that neutrality hides.

Our conviction that we can pursue neutrality and remove bias leads us to ignore uncontroversial biases as given and render more controversial biases as avoidable. But this doesn’t help bring out truth.

It often covers up parts of the truth. Like the way we cover protests or the relationship between police and the white power movement.

Truth itself is biased. So are we. That isn’t something to decry. Nor should we think bias is a dirty word.

Bias is natural. And it can also be good. When we indulge a bias for good. That is, after all, what we want. Good, healthy, generous, hopeful. A world full of flourishing. That’s what we actually want.

Say that. Advocate for that. Make that what we do with our time.

Devalue the negativity bias. And crank up the good. And we can all feel good about it.