The complexity of the moderate

Over the years, people have adopted numerous metaphors to illustrate the wondrously dynamic nature of the United States Constitution, but among my personal favorites is John Dickinson’s likening of the ideal democratic government to a solar system. Within our galaxy, massive planetary bodies exert their opposing gravitational forces upon each other, such that the consequent interplay between push and pull factors allows each body to stabilize its respective orbital course. In a similar way, conflicting interests in the political realm collide against each other with forces of ideological energy, while simultaneously maintaining balance within the overall system amid the chaos of individually competing ideas. Thus, as participants in democracy, we all become witnesses to a paradox of quasi-divine proportions, in which something is created out of nothing—where a unifying sense of order is somehow forged from a milieu of partisan disorder.

James Madison echoed similar sentiments when he famously penned in Federalist Paper #51 that “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” These words have come to embody, on an almost sacred level, the spirit of checks and balances that pervades the U.S. political infrastructure, allowing it to engage critically with its own contradictory nature. If we think of modern democracy as a tangible manifestation of the human mind, then we might imagine the conflicts between various interests in the political space as visible mirrors into the invisible turmoil within an individual conscience. In the mind of every human being is a war zone of psychological complexity, on which competing ideas battle one another for hegemony over our values and beliefs. Under this paradigm, we create for ourselves a free marketplace of thoughts in which the stronger forces prevail over weaker arguments. Government, then, represents both what lies beyond our grasp and what lies deep within ourselves—it strives for the stars by engaging with forces of cosmic proportions, and it probes intimately into the human psyche through the external projection of our internal strife.

However, certain issues arise when we begin to conflate representation with reality. Despite whatever imagery we may use to idealize democracy, our world is far from a Carrollian Wonderland where the sign and signified exist on the same physical plane and where objects of our figurative language become literal. So instead of reveling in a floating quixotism, we have little choice but to contemplate how our existing political architecture has fallen short of the perfect system we imagined.

One complication I’ve noticed lies in the ambiguous position occupied by the moderate. As long as we continue to envision government as a nexus of powerful forces like factions, political parties or interest groups, the moderate opinion will remain severely disadvantaged in its ability to contribute to the marketplace of ideas. Our current infrastructure heavily favors extremity, for oftentimes it’s only the loudest of voices that can be heard above the clamor of our impassioned political discussions. As a result, those advocating for more bipartisan approaches are often excluded early on from the conversation. Since one’s first goal in politics is simply to be heard, adopting conciliatory attitudes on contentious issues is no longer the rational choice. Better to take an extreme stance so that people will listen, rather than be condemned to a purgatory of silence, as some would argue.

Yet, this rationale appears to defy centuries of philosophical wisdom that have long argued for the inherent virtue of centrism in both personal and political life. Often transcending boundaries of cultural disparity, moderatism has enjoyed the embrace of prominent thinkers hailing from both West and East. Perhaps most notably, Aristotle argued in his "Nicomachean Ethics" for the principle of the golden mean, whereby individuals pursue lifestyles of restraint from extreme impulses and governments strive for conciliatory politics rather than disputes of polar interests. Hundreds of years prior to the Athenian philosophers, Chinese thinker Laozi taught his students to act in tranquil accordance with nature—just as a running stream softly yields to external force and yet can carve even the hardest of stone over time, so the individual should take care not to move in quick extremes but in natural congruence to the flow of circumstance.

So how did our current society come to neglect the importance of a centralist approach to difficult questions? I think part of the answer can be found in our modern confusion over what being moderate actually means. Contrary to popular opinion, embracing a moderate stance does not imply that one is too indolent, indifferent, or unintelligent to take action or form an opinion. In fact, true moderatism is an active defiance of the world’s fixation with confining binaries and blind extremities. It is highly contemplative and seeks actively to provide space for all perspectives to speak and listen to one another before coming to a reasoned decision. It seeks to break free of ideological constraints in order to allow the individual to think creatively and listen intentionally, without depending on an ulterior agenda.

Of course, I recognize the paradox that inherently accompanies this way of thinking—aren’t all of our beliefs promoting a logical extreme in some way, by the very nature of their adoption at the expense of other viewpoints? How then can we navigate the complex issues of our world with a balanced intent? Martin Luther King, Jr. addresses this very ambiguity in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” by asserting that the question is “not whether we will be extremist, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate, or will we be extremists for love?” Ultimately, one must inevitably make decisions in life on whether to act or not to act, to support one belief or another. However, what’s important is not which road a person decides to take—to me, what matters most is whether a person’s principles are built upon his or her own desire to listen and contemplate with love and understanding, rather than upon a partisan ideology.

Personally, I’m waiting for the day when all of us learn to acknowledge the dissonance we feel when we’re forced to choose among equally viable opinions. Only then can we say that we truly regard each voice in the conversation with equal value. If the humanity behind each belief is acknowledged, then I believe that no matter which decision is ultimately made, all of us can be given the basic respect we deserve as people.