Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
...
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
--or?--
"Extremism in the name of liberty is no vice." --Barry Goldwater
"Dissing" the center is an old game. To many people it seems to be about lacking conviction, "flip-flopping", going with the flow, "triangulation", etc. There is that kind of centrism. But there can also be a resolute stand, on a given issue or set of issues, that the right answer isn't all of one thing or all of another -- that no simple set of axioms will tell us just what to do about everything; that maybe only by painstakingly studying the results of our actions will we over time discover what works best.
Then again, maybe there is a right set of principals, but we don't know what they are, and won't for a very long time. The tenacity of people's desire to understand and get mastery is a marvel. For thousands of years people tried to understand the body and how to correct its problems. In all that time, there were some people looked to as medical experts. Yet until 1-200 years ago, they had next to no really useful, applicable knowledge.
All the same, we had to have a theory, so for a long time we had the theory of humours, four bodily fluids whose imbalance caused illness. One of the few things we could do about the balance of these fluids was remove blood. We certainly had no safe means to add it. The other humours, black and yellow bile, and phlegm weren't so easily removed or added. The practice was shaped to the available tools. To the man with only a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail. Maybe shibboleths like the liberal "Help the needy" (too often with a lack of creativity and empathy that dooms the "help" to failure) or today's Conservative/libertarian battle cry of "No new taxes!" could be usefully compared with the "medical" practice of bleeding. There are, in fact, conditions that can be helped by reduction of the amount of blood, but far far fewer than doctors at one time imagined, when that was the only thing their theory could prescribe.
Maybe I'm for the center, and for conviction and passionate intensity. But where do we find that? My own reactions to political events and people has long lacked any clear explicit system. Yet I think they are grounded -- mostly in diverse studies of history, and in study of what is reportedly going on in the world today. Humans are very prone to close linking of belief systems with our identities, and identifying those who disagree with some kind of elemental evil. All competent propagandists know what to do with this. Our tendency to focus heavily on some theory or simple model of the world has often helped pave the way to mad tyrannies, such as Nazism or Communism.
When people speak of "conservatism", they nearly always mean a particular conservatism for a particular time. But we could define a general (moderately) conservative position for any place and time by saying "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". I.e. it is the sentiment that we have something that is working reasonably well, and we are afraid that radical (usually big-idea based) changes will make it worse. And this sentiment is very often right.
What draws me to the idea of the political center? And what is it, or what could be made of it? I have been thinking about this, and looking for books, people, articles, web sites, and the first thing that dawns on me is that different people draw very different pictures of it. Conservatism and liberalism can come to mean (to most people who use them) positions almost opposite of what they once stood for, and centrism might be even harder to pin down.
So we can look at centrism as a general idea, or identify it as a set of positions that seem centrist in a given political situation, or with respect to the dominant party system at a particular point in time.
Just looking at centrism per se, and not the positions it seems to imply to one person or group at one place and time, what seems attractive about it (to me)?
- The personal quality of being "centered", is often viewed as positive, although on close examination, I think its meanings vary.
- It has a positive aspect if viewed as the opposite of being "out on a limb", though sometimes being "out on a limb" may be seen as bold, even heroic.
When legislators on different sides of an issue are close enough, or respectful enough of each others' points of view, debate and compromise can have at least two big positive effects:
- The person arguing an opposite point can uncover flaws in ones position and lead to its improvement.
- A majority based governing structure, with two closely matched (in strength), and rigid parties may project an inconsistent face to the world. The U.S. has suffered from many radical oscillations between policy extremes, such as a policy of strength and force vs. one of engagement, and empathy with the grievances of other peoples. These and other extreme oscillations and avoidance of the center have resulted in projects started by one party and dismantled by the other, costing much and achieving nothing.
Knowing this breed's EEA gives a trainer knowledge of what tendencies must be modified for them to be agreeable and safe companions. What about people?
Human beings are adaptable like no other species, but in the last few hundred thousand years, in order to live off the natural produce of the land (being "hunter-gatherers") we know at least that they had to live in small scattered groups or "bands". This based on observation of how remaining (or recently surviving) peoples living off the land actually live(d), and reasoning that larger settlements would take more territory to feed them, so that expeditions in search of food must go too far.
E.g. we often face threats to our dignity, position within an organization, or financial well being which are not at all physical, yet our bodies have a highly emotional "fight or flight" reaction which can cloud our thinking or endanger our health. If we anticipate this, we may cope with it by meditating or going for a run for example to satisfy the desire to act in some physically vigorous way.
Are there social and emotional tendencies that helped human settlements, in our almost forgotten EEA keep roughtly to the "right" size? Looking at how we in fact tend to factionalize, could it be that an unconscious or barely conscious sense makes us irritable and less tolerant with one another as group size grows, and could it be that when the group dynamics, after a succession of messy and unpredictable results of this irritability and tendency to find fault, fall into a pattern that looks like a split down the middle, this feels right, the split occurred cleanly, and the two groups move apart.
Consider where we are today. What would our system of responses recognize as "the group" (or band)? In evolutionary time, the group consisted of basically everyone a member was very familiar with -- everyone we ever spoke to or heard speak, except on a few extraordinary occasions. If that is how it works, then modern humans may constantly live with whatever sort of sense arose from a "too large" group whose tendency would be to somehow bring about a split. Perhaps given our current situation, we experience that response all the time, possibly in the form of a nagging sense that it's time for a "split" and looking for a set of differences that would guide us in making the split.
Could this hypothetical "splitting" tendency help explain, along with our love of team sports, the very widespread pattern of societies with fairly well matched parties (that go on without much change for decades), accompanied by the strong sense (which I suspect is illusory) of this being a very fundamental and "real" division?
If my speculations are right, it is certainly not serving the purpose it evolved to meet. For the split to produce two groups of more optimal size, it is way, way too late for that. And the two groups can never move apart and forget about each other, but are perpetually stuck in the moment just before that split should occur.
To live in this world, which sprung up far too fast for evolution to follow it, I suggest it is useful to have some mantra like "We are less divided than we appear to be" or "Much of this apparent division is illusory".
I am strongly inclined to make "Desperately Seeking Radical Centeredness" an ongoing series within "Owning Our Democracy" or maybe eventually a separate blog. I have been exploring the idea for a long time, and have discovered many promising resources to share.
