Increasingly, political figures on the right seem to vie with student groups on the left in their demands for safe spaces: a campus safe from debate with those bearing different perspectives, a country safe from those bearing different religions. Some demand walls against desperate immigrants they deem dangerous, others demand walls against costumed students they deem insulting.
In this quickening race to raise walls, what has become of the political and philosophical middle? Does this center still hold in our national and local politics? Have voices of moderation, both in the halls of power and in the groves of academe, lost their conviction while the extremes are full of passionate intensity?
“Moderation is a complex virtue with many facets, and is bound to be a contested concept, one that reflects the ambiguity of our moral and political vocabularies,” writes Aurelian Craiutu. In a series of email exchanges over these questions, he reassured me that though moderation is alive and well, it is also terribly elusive. A political scientist at Indiana University at Bloomington, he finds himself the leading theorist of a concept that resists theorizing. As he confessed, “There is neither an abstract theory of moderation outside of particular situations nor a controlled experiment … for testing moderation in theory.”
This helps explain why, despite its long and honorable history, moderation rarely is the subject of university courses. Craiutu once taught a graduate class on the subject but found it too unwieldy for traditional course listings. As for my own trawling through various curricula, the topic heading “moderation” led me mostly to seminars in labor arbitration. Relatively few works are dedicated to the subject: Harry Clor’s classic On Moderation: Defending an Ancient Virtue in a Modern World (Baylor University Press, 2008), Craiutu’s own A Virtue for Courageous Minds: Moderation in French Political Thought, 1748-1830 (Princeton University Press, 2012), and his forthcoming book from the University of Pennsylvania Press, tentatively titled Faces of Moderation: The Art of Balance in an Age of Extremes. Moreover, moderation betrays a Zelig-like quality in the standard texts on modern political theory. Even in the works of those thinkers committed to moderation, like John Rawls, Michael Walzer, and Robert Bellah, the word rarely appears in the indexes of their books.
For younger generations, moderation is the conceptual equivalent of a plaid sweater.
That moderation often seems less a political position than a personal disposition is only part of the problem. There is also the fact that, for younger generations in particular, moderation is the conceptual equivalent of a plaid sweater. While we treasure the well-meaning aunt at family gatherings, the one who clucks “Everyone is entitled to their opinion” as food flies over questions of religion and politics, few of us want to spend much time in her company. Moderation has neither the comforting edginess of courses in queer theory nor the magnetic bleakness of classes in the history of genocide. It offers neither abysses to plumb nor identities to affirm.
Is moderation, then, to political theorists what colic is to pediatricians? A term of convenience for something we know exists, though we cannot say just what?
Not so, according to Aristotle. The history of moderation is, in essence, a series of footnotes to the Nicomachean Ethics. And yet, 2,500 years later, we still trip over the meaning of Aristotle’s golden mean. It is not, as commonly thought, simply the midway point between two extremes. If it were, Donald Trump, vowing to bar Muslims from our country, would be a moderate when contrasted with, say, Greece’s Golden Dawn party on his right and Mother Teresa on his left. Likewise, Professor Melissa Click, at the University of Missouri, with her call for “some muscle” in order to remove a reporter from a campus demonstration, would be moderate when set against Frantz Fanon on the left and Bull Connor on the right.
Yet, at least for many of us, there is clearly something deeply and disturbingly immoderate about both Trump’s vow and Professor Click’s request. Why is this? Aristotle offers one answer. Moderation, he insisted, is not a matter of axioms reached by theorizing, but of character shaped by experience. Twinned with prudence, moderation is our capacity to weigh the best course of action — not in theory, but in practice; not in the world as it should be, but in the world as it is; not in relation to a universal rule, but in relation to one’s own self — and duly act upon it. A moderate person understands not just the differences we have in perspective, but also the distinctions we make among values. As a prudent Elinor reminds the passionate Marianne in Sense and Sensibility, “It is not everyone who has your passion for dead leaves.”
Herein lies the rub: Moderation can never be a science. In fact, as the French philosopher André Comte-Sponville argues, moderation begins where science ends. This suggests, in turn, that the literature on moderation is to be found, well, in literature. Consider the member of the Bordeaux parliament who, a little more than five centuries ago, decided to call it quits and turn to writing. On February 28, 1571, Michel de Montaigne declared that he was “long weary of the servitude of royal and public duties” and would “retire to the bosom of the Muses, where in calm and freedom from all cares he will spend what little remains of his life now more than half run out.”
This was Montaigne’s disarmingly polite way of saying he would no longer moderate between two armed camps beholden to different interpretations of their faith and bent on one another’s destruction. Could one blame him? For almost a decade, France had been convulsed by acts of political and religious terrorism carried out by its warring Roman Catholic and Protestant communities. The era’s horrors are most often associated with the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572. The Seine turned red with the battered corpses of at least 5,000 men, women, and children as Catholic mobs broke into Protestant homes and slaughtered entire families. In one typical case, a group of Catholics hacked to death a Protestant artisan while he and his wife were still in bed, stabbed his wife in the abdomen and heaved her body out the window. Her nearly born infant died with his mother in the street, his head poking through the abdominal wound.
France’s wars of religion left precious little place for political moderates. Yet Montaigne had done his best, serving as a trusted negotiator between the opposing camps of Catherine de’ Medici and Henri of Navarre. He was counted among the so-called politiques — men who, zealous only in their skepticism, rejected the absolutes of religious faith and accepted the ambiguities of real life. The moderation embraced by Montaigne was so repugnant to fanatics that at different times both Protestants and Catholics threatened his life.
The literary genre that Montaigne largely invented, and which occupied the remaining 20 years of his life, the Essays, could be seen as moderate politics by other means. As with any test, or effort — the literal meaning of “essai” — the genre is open-ended and provisional, best done by those who are patient and prudent. By its very nature, essay writing also prevented Montaigne from making a systematic case for moderation, but he improvises tirelessly on the theme. One of his earliest essays happens to be titled “On Moderation.” Declaring that he likes “temperate and moderate natures,” Montaigne observes that the “excess enslaves our natural freedom and leads us astray from the fine and level road that nature has traced for us.”
Most of us prefer the extremes at times of upheaval and fear.
Nearly two decades later, in his last, magisterial essay, “Of Experience,” his plea for moderation verges on the immoderate. His skeptical bent, he notes, leads to a “constant coolness and moderation in my opinions” but also to his “hatred for that aggressive and quarrelsome arrogance that believes and trusts wholly in itself, a mortal enemy of discipline and trust.”
Two centuries later, this same arrogance again battered France, but it was now expressed in ideological rather than theological terms. As the Revolution careened into the Terror, Robespierre’s associate Louis Antoine de Saint-Just declared: “The Republic consists in the extermination of everything that opposes it.” When terror was made the order of the day, in 1793, it set in motion not just the quasi-judicial execution of nearly 17,000 men and women but also the wholesale slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians elsewhere in France. As one commander, General François Joseph Westermann, reported, “Following the orders that you gave me, I have crushed children under the feet of horses, massacred women who at least will give birth to no more brigands, and have no prisoners with which to reproach myself.” In Nantes, more than 4,000 civilians were drowned in the Loire River, while in villages women were raped before being bayoneted, and entire families were buried alive in pits they had been forced to dig.
Among those who fled France on the eve of the Terror was Germaine Necker, better known by her married name, Madame de Staël. Unlike Edmund Burke, she applauded the opening phases of the Revolution. Like him, she was appalled by the revolutionaries’ conviction that they could simply apply their universal and abstract principles to a vast assortment of peoples separated by languages, histories, and customs. This display of “philosophic enthusiasm,” she drily remarked, was at the root of the revolution’s excesses. The fanaticism that burst onto the political scene in 1793 was the “most powerful of all human passions,” one that poisoned any value — including liberty or equality — that it touched.
Echoing Aristotle and Montaigne, Madame de Staël observed that everything that “partakes of reason, justice, and humanity demands attention, concessions, and a reason always adjusted to the present moment without losing sight of the future.” Until forced to flee Paris, she courageously defended the philosophical and political center. Hounded by forces on the left and right, she refused to cede her ground. It is all too easy, she declared, to “heap ridicule upon opinions that are removed equally from two conflicting extremes.” Most of us, she continued, prefer the extremes at times of upheaval and fear. But does this mean we are “to allow every lunatic who discovers a new madness to erect a new barrier to truth?”
As any fox can tell us, the answer is no. Isaiah Berlin’s celebrated distinction between hedgehogs, which know one big thing, and foxes, which know many things, goes to the heart of philosophical and political moderation. Along with Shakespeare and Balzac, Berlin pinned a fox’s tail on Aristotle and Montaigne. (Plato and Dostoevsky are the heavy hitters among the hedgehogs.) To Berlin’s list of foxes, we can add not just Madame de Staël but also writers and thinkers otherwise as diverse as Jane Austen, Albert Camus, Adam Smith, and Hannah Arendt.
Unlike the hedgehog, who sees the world through the narrow prism of a single truth, the fox thrives in a pluralist world, aware that it abounds in values and alert to the inevitability that they will conflict. As Berlin concluded, “Not all good things are compatible” — a view acknowledged, accepted, and acted on by moderates. Notwithstanding popular misconceptions of moderation, this requires a character that is neither weak nor indecisive, but instead passionate about tolerance and wild about prudence.
That helps explain why so many political moderates spend much of their lives in exile. Threatened by the Jacobins, and then by Napoleon, Madame de Staël spent several years drifting across Europe, setting up temporary shop in cities from Saint Petersburg to London. As for Montaigne, exile was internal. Even as he served powerful men and women, his essays reveal the shifting portrait of a free mind, one attached to questioning and thus at stunning variance with the temper of the times. “We must reserve,” he wrote, “a back shop all our own, entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat.” Even Aurelian Craiutu, born in Romania during the Ceausescu era, opted for internal, then physical exile. As he wryly remarked, having “lived under an immoderate regime might have something to do with my interest in moderation.”
As it turns out, exile also became the fate of two courageous moderates at Yale University. During the recent controversy over Halloween costumes, Nicholas and Erika Christakis embraced the virtues and burdens of moderation. Posing questions about the university’s role in determining the kinds of costumes students should wear on Halloween, Erika Christakis tried to moderate, with remarkable care and thoughtfulness, the conflicting claims of the various sides in the debate. Nicholas Christakis, wading into a crowd of students who were outraged at his wife’s intervention, persisted in pursuing a dialogue while his interlocutors tried to shout him down and shut him up. While the couple continue to serve as master and assistant master at Silliman College, Erika Christakis decided to take a leave as a lecturer in early-childhood education.
Given the issues at stake, the Yale controversy veers between the comic and tragic. But a glance at our current political scene reminds us that the comic can, at times, morph into the catastrophic. At the end of his life, Montaigne observed with equanimity: “Affirmation and strong opinions are express signs of stupidity.” No age, of course, is a stranger to stupidity — a prosaic truth that helps put in perspective our own era’s particular stupidities of extremism and excess. Though the degree and details vary dramatically, college campuses no less than national capitals have become stages for such stupidities.
But campuses have one advantage over capitals. The former, unlike the latter, have as their raison d’être critical inquiry and sustained conversation. Where better than a university to consider writers and thinkers who have made the case for moderation? The late philosopher Bernard Williams rightly hailed the “heroic Aristotelian capacity for compromise.” Such compromise requires open forums for debate and dialogue. This seems a pious wish when student movements insist on “safe spaces” in which to fixate on their pain, and a leading Republican presidential candidate encourages attendees at his rallies to hound and pound dissenters. It is time, perhaps, for everyone to absorb and emulate the humility of one of Montaigne’s final and finest observations: “On the loftiest throne in the world, we are still sitting only on our own rump.”
