by Jeff Polet, director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right,
Here I am, stuck in the middle with you.
–Stealers Wheel
Being in the middle has a bad reputation. Middle children often seem willful and resentful. Middle-of-the-road indicates playing it safe. Something uninspiring is “middlin’.” “Being in the middle” smacks of fecklessness and a lack of principle, and in any case few of us ever wish to be “in the middle of something” except as an excuse to get out of an unpleasant conversation. And none of us aspire to a life where we have clowns to the left of us and jokers to the right. “Middlebrow” is cheap and poorly executed art. Even in our politics, “the middle” connotes an absence of conviction. The search for “middle ground” reveals a lack of zealous belief.
Our politics have been described as people on the extremes, principled and well-armed, sitting in trenches and firing at the large mass of weak and indecisive people in the middle. In his book The Bill, Steven Waldman describes the creation and passage of the National Service Bill during the Clinton administration. Clinton, famous for his strategy of “triangulation,” headed up the DLC (Democratic Leadership Council) which sought to tilt the party back to a more centrist politics. In the book, Waldman quotes a Democratic Hill staffer who refers to the DLC as “represent[ing] all the forces of evil.” The middle is where compromise takes place, after all, that distasteful political dreg spit out by all true believers.
Yet philosophers and divines have had a different view of the middle. Granted, Christ remanded that, being neither hot nor cold we should prepare to be spit out, but the Buddha recommended “the middle way,” one that avoided the extremes of self-denial and self-gratification, as the path to Enlightenment. Aristotle’s “golden mean” worked on the principle that true virtue always occupied that middle space between extremes.
In life, Aristotle argued, we find ourselves constantly faced with situations that require us to act. Sometimes we find ourselves in a life-threatening situation, one likely to produce fear in us. We react viscerally: do we cave in to our fear and run, or do we completely suppress it and rush ahead into the teeth of the threat? Turning and running we refer to as cowardice. In his book Achilles in Vietnam, Jonathan Shay describes soldiers in a “berserker” state, so filled with rage and so indifferent to their fate that they behave with reckless abandon and unrestrained destructive force, often excessively maltreating the bodies of their victims. Courage is certainly not cowardice, but neither is it recklessness. Courage is a purposeful self-possession that masters our fear and directs it into action that is both self- and other-regarding and seeks to eliminate the danger and nothing more. It occupies the middle between courage and reckless disregard.
Aristotle believed all virtues had this quality of avoiding extremes. This key to understanding virtue opens up the possibility of understanding virtue rightly and cutting through jargon. Is toleration a virtue? Well, it involves our reactions to things that we find morally reprehensible; we must therefore ask ourselves whether to allow these morally condemnable acts under any circumstances (intolerance or narrowmindedness) or simply to allow them with a kind of shrug of our shoulders, a kind of permissiveness that refuses to take moral stands (or a mind so open it refuses to close on anything; a mouth that won’t chew but swallows whole). The tolerant person, not afraid to make moral judgments, will indulge morally suspect activities because he believes that either a) the harm that results from prohibiting them is greater than the harm that results from allowing them; or, b) allowing the activity will produce a greater or alternative good. Toleration thus depends on the cardinal virtue of prudence, the ability to make sound judgments. Toleration requires us to protect proper ends by determining acceptable means. Human beings seek to know the truth of things, and we will protect the means of open debate even though we know that this requires us to indulge errors and mistakes that threaten the understanding of truth itself.
Too much or too little of the goods of this world, Aristotle wrote, is contrary to the rule of reason. A person lacking in beauty had a hard time being virtuous because that person would often be bitter and angry, while a person excessively beautiful would often get away with things that others can’t (as portrayed in this Seinfeld sketch). What’s true of the individual, he thought, also held for society. A healthy society avoids extremes of all types. How to deal with the stranger or the foreigner? A good society would not banish all (exclusion) nor welcome all (inclusion) but exercise prudent judgment toward who should be welcomed and under what circumstances (hospitality, related to generosity). Just as poverty and wealth both tended to compromise us morally – the poor person driven by envy and resentment and the rich person by pleonexia (wanting more than your fair share) and ostentation – so too a healthy society is defined by the absence of extremes in the distribution of wealth and possessed of a vibrant middle class.
Many Americans decry our current politics and its absence of a healthy middle, the center pulled apart by the extremes. We would not reduce such considerations simply to economic ones, but we aver that the most important political development of our age is the hollowing out of the middle class. As society increasingly devolves into extremes of wealth and its absence and the concomitant opportunities that wealth determines, the middle class not only increasingly disappears but so do its attendant virtues that undergird democratic order: hard work, honesty, thrift, cooperation, aspiration, modesty, adherence to norms and so forth. Many social theorists have long claimed that middle-class virtues are essential to social cohesion and growth. Without them, a society will soon fall prey to disintegration and stagnation.
Many Americans fear that we occupy such a moment. Two of the defining features of our age, Americans claim, are polarization and the dying of the American dream, which may well be defined as the ability of each and every person to achieve a satisfactory, stable, and secure middle-class life. Even those who come from more privileged strata no longer believe that hard-work and self-sacrifice will yield a life as materially rewarding as that enjoyed by their parents.
Democracy, we have argued, is always a messy business that involves compromise and toleration and negotiating — not negating — our differences and disagreements. The friction generated by these interactions is greased by the middle-class virtues that keep the machinery from getting too hot, in no small part because we find ourselves constantly in different modes of association with our peers. Bob may be a nutjob when it comes to politics, but he is a good worker and does a heck of a job coaching the little-league team. He is, in short, a good neighbor and how he votes in the upcoming election matters far less to me than whether he keeps his lawn and house in good repair and cleans up after his dog does his business on my yard. It’s more important to me that my neighbor will keep his or her eyes on my street and children than nod in enthusiastic agreement with the opinions on MSNBC or Fox News. Middle-class people respect reliability and a temperate disposition.
The disparaging of middle-class life as somehow colorless or bland or stifling or boring – so often a theme in movies and TV shows – undermines the very qualities that stabilize democratic practices. Having spent decades treating bourgeois life as a dystopic nightmare populated by Stepford Wives and Lester Burnhams filled with despair, we now find ourselves shocked that we can’t figure out ways to live peacefully together. We not only tolerate activities such as gambling and pot-smoking that undermine middle-class morality, we encourage them relentlessly. Drive through the state of Michigan sometime and count how many billboards advertise cannabis or online gambling and lotteries. For there is an enormous difference between tolerating something and encouraging it. As Aristotle realized already long ago: a people obsessed with pleasure or with getting ahead without having to work for it are a people not capable of self-governance. We systematically diminish our capacities and then wonder why we can’t rise to the challenge that democracy presents. We coarsen life across the board and then wonder why we elect crass and crude people to office. We retreat ever further into privacy and solitude and then wonder why we can’t get along.
Working from the middle is how democracy is meant to operate, but it can only work if there is a healthy middle to work from. Restoring the middle class is not only a matter of economic policy, it is also a matter of restoring the virtues and social norms and arrangements that made the American middle class the envy of the rest of the world. Being stuck in the middle isn’t such a bad thing, so long as you’re not surrounded by clowns and jokers.
Discussion Questions:
- Has the American middle class declined, and if so what factors contributed to this decline?
- How do we account for the rise and success of the American middle class?
- What sorts of steps might we take to try to restore the middle class?