The absolutist position that Adam Gopnik takes against Buddhism, as Robert Wright laid out, seems indicative of the exact position of duality that Buddhism does not favor. Specifically, when Gopnik says “Science is putting names on things and telling stories about them, the very habits that Buddhists urge us to transcend” he implies that naming something is giving it a self – which is unclear. Why does something have to have a self just because it is named? This kind of thinking (something has to be one thing, and if it is that one thing, it cannot be another) is precisely the habit that “Buddhists urge us to transcend,” not “putting names on things.”
Every object/person/idea can have more than one way of believing or existing, multiple facets