Assuming a moderate or middle-ground position on any issue gets bad or sometimes no press at all these days. Those who scream, threaten and drum up the worst accusations get attention.
Moderation in all things is ancient and usually good advice, not often heeded in the age in which we live, where extreme views grab the headlines or cyberspace. No wonder we feel confused and worried about the state of things.
Go ahead and call me names, but I want to assert that the middle ground is where most of us stand, and that this may be a way out of our nasty name-calling, irrational discussions.
Eating moderately seems beneficial to our health, as does consuming too much alcohol or sweets seems unhealthy. But being a moderate politically these days seems in disrepute, as the columnist and former Texas commissioner of agriculture Jim Hightower wrote: “There’s nothing in the middle of the road but a yellow stripe and dead armadillos.”
I’m more like a Pennsylvania groundhog or British hedgehog. I know when to get out of the road to avoid traffic.
But in most cases moderation is the best position, and it comes with a great philosophical pedigree.
More than 2,500 years ago the Greek philosopher Aristotle spoke of what he called the Golden Mean. The basic principle was to seek balance or the middle way between extremes of excess and deficiency.
For example, take the virtue of courage. One extreme would be foolhardiness, the other deficiency or cowardice. The art of living would be to gravitate toward the middle, neither making foolish decisions or no decisions at all. Aristotle argued that as rational creatures, choosing the middle path would lead to a better life.
Today, at least in our political life, we seem to disavow moderation, going to one extreme or the other, left or right. No wonder our policy discussions are so fraught with conflicts. We can’t reach any consensus because we seldom seek the middle ground, and those who do are criticized.
I’d like to argue that sometimes finding consensus or the middle ground may be the best path toward progress.
Take the issue of voting, which seems to separate us into camps. One camp wants to secure voting even if that means restricting it, while the other wants to expand and increase it. One says the last presidential election was stolen, the other that no one has shown any widespread voter fraud which would have changed the outcome. The result is either no decision or a bad one.
Perhaps, using the middle way model, we can find common ground. What might the middle way be? Perhaps to make voting accessible to as many people as want to vote, while making sure votes are accurately tallied by impartial counters.
Most of us, I suspect, are not in the extreme left or right, although that’s where we appear to be when you listen to or watch the media. We become what we hear or watch, thus feeding the frenzy.
Most of us are somewhere in the middle when it comes to our views. We may be center-left or center-right, but it’s still the center. We want to find common ground. It’s seeking and acting on that consensus that may yield the results most of us desire — commonsense solutions.
It’s hard to find the middle way when people are screaming or turning fellow citizens into enemies. The democratic process may be messy. No one may get everything they want. But finding common ground is essential. Without that we may end divided, frustrated, and less than we might have become.
John C. Morgan is a columnist who writes about ethical issues.
