Winston Churchill with Neville Chamberlain, circa March 24, 1935.Via Wikimedia Commons [Public Domain]

(This is the first of a series about how apparent opposites work together, an idea that helps us see beyond fixated or linear thought patterns, and diminish polarization.)

Winston Churchill and Neville Chamberlain were two British politicians in the 1930s and 40s who were often considered as opposites. The former is viewed as the triumphant leader of Britain against Adolf Hitler, the latter, an appeaser who pandered to evil. However, the two men were not only opposites in character and policy, they may have also been complementary beings that could not have fulfilled their roles one without the other. This ‘coincidence of opposites’, of qualities and roles in stark contrast, exists within each man, between them, and in a kind of reconciliation where both are seen to serve a larger pattern.

The traditional characterizations of each man are true but ignore other inconvenient qualities. Churchill was an unabashed imperialist with grand military failures in his past, including the disaster at Gallipoli in World War I. Chamberlain was a well-meaning man who desperately wanted to avoid a repeat of the horrors of the First World War. It is only in 20-20 hindsight that one appears only as a hero, and the other, a man of great political error. During their time, they would have both been viewed as mixed and complicated figures. In our age of digital simplification, the idea that an individual can have both merits and demerits is not popular and caricatures prevail.

In fact, the mixed and contradictory qualities of each man were critical for the fulfilment of their roles. Churchill’s careless and arrogant daring was needed for him to become the bold victor of World War II, and Chamberlain required goodwill to make a deal in Munich in 1938. Furthermore, the two also needed each other, as opposites, for history to unfold as it did.

Neville Chamberlain discounted Hitler’s grand plans and ambitions. He was driven by a naivety and linear thinking that assumes that from good intentions to good results is one simple step, a mistaken belief that is quite popular in our era. Hitler had Chamberlain on in 1938. He was testing Western Europeans’ will to fight and found it wanting, spurring him to invade Poland and France. However, there was a silver lining in the Munich deal – it bought a precious year for Britain to ramp up its military capacities.

Chamberlain’s erroneous path also paved the way for the rise of his contrary, the combative Winston Churchill who had foreseen the dangers of Hitler all along. The goodwilled man was the necessary preface for the true warrior; he ensured that Churchill would be more keenly listened to once he did finally become leader.

All of this is reflective of how contraries not only coexist but need each other to come about. The gentlemanly and wan Chamberlain and the pugnacious cigar chomping Churchill became more themselves through their arrival in history at the same time, by their “co-incidence” and contrast.

Another way of looking at this is that the two men are opposite poles of one event: Britain’s confrontation with Nazi Germany. They are two facets of one process, the defeat of Hitler. Chamberlain not only delayed war by a year, he left a seed in Hitler’s mind of possible peace with the UK, spurring further German delays, providing time to save the remnants of the British army at Dunkirk and rallying confidence in the UK to fight once again. It was of course for Churchill to take the battle head on, but the two were a kind of yin and yang tag team to defeat Hitler, even if they may not have known it at the time.

Can we learn to seize such contrarian ideas at once in our minds instead of rushing to one simple pole of opinion? Such perspectives are often derided in favour of hard and fast truths without their opposite. Life is simpler that way, but that may also be the greater lie.

If we do try to see both forces at play at once,  we can better perceive that decisions in Britain at the time were filled with uncertainty and on a knife’s edge. No one truly knew then whether Churchill’s or Chamberlain’s option was better. There is nothing like a dose of the unknown to humble us all into the nature of reality: we’re all guessing at best.

Such views also modify our perception of both men. The great are humanized by this mixed reality, heroes are seen to be inevitably, deeply flawed while villains and appeasers are somewhat raised in our esteem.

If two apparent adversaries like Churchill and Chamberlain were in effect working together, even without knowing it, and if the consequences of their actions are not only linear but indirect in time and space, this speaks to a larger field of relation at play. Such a recalibration towards a larger context, a zoom out if you wish, may well be closer to a God’s eye view than the partisan, fixated and polarized minds that we nurture today.

There is no Churchill without Chamberlain. Opposites coexist seamlessly, intricately relating to each other in order to for a larger patten, a greater truth to unfold – in this case the UK’s role in the defeat of Adolf Hitler. As scholar and scientist Iain McGilchrist has said, “although a thing and its opposite, or a thing and its negative, are customarily thought of as separate warring entities, they are mutually sustaining, inseparable and intertwined.”

John Bell is Director of The Conciliators Guild, an organization dedicated to highlighting the critical importance of innate needs and motivations in politics.

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