The Moral Myopia Of The Middle Ground
You either believe in something, or other people die for nothing.
The year is 1815, and I’m a centrist trying to end slavery.
I want to clarify, right from the start, that I consider slavery to be “an atrocious debasement of human nature,” “a great moral, social and political evil,” “the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man.” But as much as I’d like to indulge the abolitionists’ emotion-driven calls to “free” the slaves, the real world isn’t so simple.
In the real world, we have to think about the broader economic and social impact that freeing the slaves would have, we must respect the convictions of those who believe equality violates God’s natural order, we must remember,as Thomas Jefferson said, that slavery is like “[holding] a wolf by the ear […] we can neither hold him nor safely let him go.”
So I advocate for a balanced, rational middle ground. We must find a reasonable compromise between slavery and freedom.
The year is 1938, and I’m a centrist trying to end Jewish persecution in Germany.
Before I go any further, I will admit that Hitler hasn’t always been perfect. The stripping of Jewish citizenship and voting rights, the employment discrimination and ghettos, the pogroms, at some faraway point in the future, I’ll ask myself whether these were red flags.
But sadly, in the meantime, the Jewish people don’t have the cards. So while they might find the choice between expulsion or extermination unpalatable, I‘m not hearing an alternative that Hitler will accept. Say what you will about the final solution, but at least Hitler is offering solutions.
So I suggest a middle way that recognises the plight of German Jews and the legitimacy of Hitler’s “demographic concerns.” No matter how many people die as we debate, we need a compromise that balances the Jews’ humanity with the Nazis’ desire to “annihilate the Jewish race in Europe.”
The year is 1963, and I’m a centrist trying to advance the civil rights movement.
First, the good news: I support Martin Luther King’s dream of a world where we no longer judge each other by the colour of our skin.
Unfortunately, I cannot support his attempts to pressure segregationists into treating black people like human beings. To be clear, I’m not taking the segregationists’ side; I’m simply suggesting that African Americans quietly endure their oppression while I demand nothing from the segregationists whatsoever.
Because, as I often do, I support incremental, piecemeal changes to an oppressive status quo that I would never accept for myself. We must find a solution, however long it takes, that both African Americans and the Ku Klux Klan will embrace.
In every age, on every issue, there are the people who plant their flag in the middle ground.
People who have outgrown childish notions like fairness and morality, people who look beyond distractions like justice and empathy, people who think rationality means treating every situation as if it has equally fine people on both sides.
And annoyingly enough, these people are often right!
It is valuable to engage with both sides of an argument in good faith, it is wise to base decisions on as much rationality and objectivity as possible, and in almost every case, solving problems does require compromise from both sides.
But for some problems, thankfully very few, compromise isn’t an option. There’s just a right thing to do. And centrists have a near-perfect track record of failing to see this until it’s too late.
Take, for example, the war in Ukraine. A certain politician, who boasted he’d have this conflict resolved “on day one,” has repeatedly clarified that he’s not on either side, he just wants a Nobel Pea...excuse me, he just wants peace.
But sadly, Zelensky doesn’t have the cards. To be clear, Trump isn’t supporting Putin, he’s just calling Zelensky a dictator and berating him in the Oval Office and strong-arming him for minerals, all while demanding nothing from Russia whatsoever.
So it’s taken him three years and over 13,000 dead civilians to understand that it’s the guy who started the war who needs to “STOP!”
Or consider the “war” in Gaza. Most politicians will gladly acknowledge that the suffering in Gaza is “heartbreaking.” That it’s a “humanitarian catastrophe” in which “too many innocent people are being killed.” But as much as they’d love to indulge the emotion-driven calls of activists to “free” Palestine or even demand a ceasefire, the real world isn’t so simple.
In the real world, we have to pretend that an almost completely one-sided campaign of bombing, starvation, and displacement is “self-defence,” we must respect the convictions of those who believe a two-state solution violates God’s 3,000-year-old real estate agreement, we must remember, as a former officer in the most moral army in the world put it, that “the woman is an enemy, the baby is an enemy and the first-grader is an enemy.
So it’s taken them over twenty months and 56,156 dead Palestinians to even begin to figure out that there’s no way to balance two million Palestinian civilians’ desire to avoid expulsion or extermination with the Israeli government’s desire to “annihilate everything that remains in the Strip.”
It’s one thing to disagree with someone who knows where they stand, who can explain the price they’re willing to pay to uphold their values. Yes, it’s tiring and frustrating and corrosive to your faith in humanity, but at least there’s a point of view, a strongly held conviction, moral choices that you can challenge and demand justification for.
The problem with centrism is that it has none of this, no guiding principles, no fiercely held convictions, just a failure to value decency and empathy as highly as a veneer of “balance.”
With a few decades of hindsight, we can all see that it wasn’t “one-sided” to ignore the wishes of the people who wanted to sell their fellow humans, it wasn’t “biased” to reject the segregationists’ lies about “separate but equal,” there was no way to appease a guy willing to murder six million Jews.
But sadly, a disappointing number of otherwise intelligent people are unable to figure this out in real-time.
In 1963, during one of his many stints in solitary confinement for asserting his humanity, Martin Luther King vented his frustrations with centrism in a letter to his fellow clergymen:
I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension, to a positive peace which is the presence of justice […]
Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
In a world where every political conversation is one imperfectly chosen word away from a screaming match or a knee-jerk accusation of some form of bigotry, the middle sometimes feels like the only sane place left.
Nobody gets too emotional, you can have long, stimulating debates about other people’s suffering, and civilians far away can die needlessly while you talk about how tragic it is and devise ways to appease the people killing them.
But there’s a quicker, more reliable way to resolve moral dilemmas like these.
So I advocate for the people who can’t figure out whether there’s a compromise position on oppression or displacement or eradication to join the people who are being oppressed and displaced and eradicated for as long as it takes for them to resolve their confusion.
I have a feeling they’ll choose a side pretty quickly.