You may have heard this before: Statistically, automobile accidents more often happen at dusk. Once night has fallen, our eyes naturally adjust to full darkness. But as the sun hovers near the horizon, the disparity between light and dark creates vision problems that impair our ability to spot hazards, slow reaction time and cause increased driver error.

But what if our diminished capacity in half-light extends beyond limitations of the optic nerve? What if it's also related to a deep-rooted resistance to navigating the twilight of our minds? Before I explain, please bear with me for a brief foray into the physiology of light.

Animals divide broadly into two categories. Most reptiles, birds and mammals are diurnal — active by day and asleep at night. Their reliance on sight for hunting, mating and self-defense heightens their dependence on daylight.

Other animals are nocturnal — they sleep by day and come out after dark. These include bats, wolves and opossums, which possess acute hearing, scent or tactile awareness; also cats, raccoons and owls, whose specialized eyes endow them with penetrating nighttime vision.

But there is a less familiar category, which is our current addition into the Ethical Lexicon:

Crepuscular (cre*pus*cu*lar/ kri-puhs-kyuh-ler) adjective

Of, resembling, or pertaining to twilight.

Relating to animals appearing or active at dawn or dusk.

Rabbits, ferrets, deer, bobcats and the common mouse are all crepuscular. They inhabit the murky twilight times either to elude predators or to reduce competition while searching for prey.

Human beings are designed for daylight activity. And although some of us are night owls who revel in darkness, you rarely hear people expressing any great affection for twilight. Dawn comes too early, and dusk typically passes with scant notice.

Clearly, our natural indifference to twilight has little to do with hunting or mating patterns. Just possibly, it emerges from an entirely different aspect of our nature: our dislike for intellectual ambiguity.

To put it bluntly, our brains are lazy; when faced with too many or too complicated choices, they respond by shutting down or oversimplifying. Determined to conserve energy, the brain eliminates options until it reaches the fewest and simplest choices. As our subconscious minds desperately attempt to reduce complexity, we reflexively default to black-and-white thinking.

The result can be an almost pathological aversion to the gray areas of subtlety and nuance. We insist upon operating as diurnal or nocturnal creatures, which leaves us ill-equipped to function in the crepuscular world of moral uncertainty that governs so much of our lives.

Consider how political extremism has hijacked the national dialogue on policy. With the continuous marginalizing of moderate voices, we find ourselves compelled to choose between the most polarizing positions and candidates. Common ground has been largely abandoned.

Does it bother you how few news outlets offer a balanced editorial outlook, even in their reporting of hard news? It should. And in business as well, tales abound of CEOs and executives who sabotage their own long-term success by chasing after short-term wins, benchmarks and profits.

The sad irony is that savvy politicians do recognize the importance of understanding both sides of the issues. Before proposing legislation, they prepare arguments favoring the opposing viewpoint to help them anticipate all possible objections and rebuttals. Trial lawyers employ the same technique prior to presenting the case before a jury. Such 360-degree perspective makes it possible to offer a more coherent defense or, even better, to find common ground that weakens counterarguments or converts adversaries into allies.

This is not a modern innovation. Some 2,000 years ago, Jewish scholars from the Academy of Hillel codified the totality of Jewish law. In doing so, they not only included minority opinions; they always recorded those opinions first.

The reason is self-evident: Only after we understand the opposing viewpoint can we fully understand our own. By arming ourselves with broader perspective, we learn to reject binary thinking, make more ethical decisions and find clarity amidst the gray.

To see more from Yonason Goldson and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

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