In an instance of Jungian synchronicity, my trail has lately been dogged by a spate of odes to moderation. It’s not exactly surprising that people should begin to find moderation appealing since we live in a time of polarization, of going to extremes – extreme sports, extreme politics, you name it.
Of course, “moderation in all things” goes back at least to Aristotle, and the Athenians had reason to prize it since they were surrounded by people like the Spartans and the Persians who did not. Moderation comes in for praise in “The Road to Character” by David Brooks, a sort of midlife crisis book in which an ostensibly successful man takes a long look at values askew, ego amok, disappointment in the place of glory.
In a chapter describing how Dwight Eisenhower tamed his tendency to anger and volatility, Brooks calls moderation a “misunderstood virtue” that means neither “bland equanimity” nor split-the-difference compromise.
Instead, Brooks argues that moderation is a realistic response to the nature of a world that contains “competing half-truths” and “legitimate opposing interests.” In such an environment a final, perfect answer is not available. Instead, a person’s realistic path is moderation, “forever seeking a series of temporary arrangements…that will help him or her balance the desire for security with the desire for risk, the call of liberty with the need for restraint.”
Every school child in America gets the checks and balances unit in Social Studies, but not all internalize the lesson, which is that humans are liable to extremes and any workable modus vivendi must devise a way to control this dangerous tendency to excess.
In a blog on his website (May 14, 2014, michaelgruberbooks.com), the novelist Michael Gruber argues that the ideals of the French Revolution, however betrayed in practice, contain an important insight. Any humane governing arrangement must achieve a balance of virtues – Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. To tilt too far in one direction or the other is to invite ruin.
For example, he describes communism as a “monstrous and murderous system that claimed equality and fraternity were the only things that mattered” so that “liberty was defined as acceding to the will of the Party.”
Similarly, he describes the fatal flaw of Nazi Germany as the elevation of fraternity above all else, so that “love of family, country and fellow citizens” soon led to the notion of a master race. Germany thought theirs the finest culture in the world. “Nothing wrong with that – it’s natural to root for the home team. But without due attention to equality and liberty” the next step is “we are great so therefore we are entitlesd to rule over everyone else, and dispose of those we deem too inferior to live.”
So far Americans ought to be feeling pretty superior to those examples, but Gruber argues that we are increasingly in danger of creating a “society with liberty, especially economic liberty, as its sole value.” Without the counterbalance of equality and fraternity, trouble in inevitable. Saying we are all equal in the eyes of the law doesn’t address the fact that “we have unequal abilities, and unequal achievement or just bad luck.”
Liberty produces lopsided results and presents a challenge to society to ameliorate the result. Otherwise, “if you get enough economic inequality then the ideal of equality before the law becomes a joke. Then you’re a banana republic, you’re Egypt, where the elite are treated practically as a different species from the 99 percent below them. Immune from the law, they dwell in splendid isolation, partaking of the best, while the rest of society suffers and seethes.”
Sound familiar? Sound like a culture where hedge fund criminals escape prosecution while cops pull guns on teens crashing a pool party in a gated community? Every time white cops are acquitted of shooting unarmed black kids or jobs are outsourced to enrich management or possessing an ounce of a drug earns you jail time but crashing the markets or stealing employees’ pensions earns a fine, or the ills of the rich are treated at the Mayo Clinic and of the poor at the emergency room, it helps “destroy fraternity, the sense that we are one people united in a common purpose.”
Politicians, teachers and preachers may say otherwise, but seeing is believing, and Gruber notes that “once the bond of fraternity is broken, people will seek other bonds – gangs, tribes, faiths, parties. Then come the tribal wars the confessional wars, all the things we see happening today…insane partisanship – in the name of liberty! – and the most degraded political discourse since the thirties.”
Tough talk, but worth considering. Tyranny comes in many forms and we may be creating a variety based on economic liberty that creates a fatal lack of fraternity and a toxic inequality. Call it plutocracy, kleptocracy or oligarchy, it has happened before and never ends well. Not even for the plutocrats.