The truth shall set us free

Is moderation a bad word in politics? Peter Wehner writes at Commentary of a book entitled On Moderation: Defending an Ancient Virtue in a Modern World, by Harry Clor. Clor writes that immoderation

“is characterized by a one-sided or absolute commitment to a good that is in fact only one good among several.”

Wehner writes,

Professor Clor goes on to warn that we should want politics that incorporates moderation and “you should be quite afraid of any leaders, movements, or polities wholly lacking them.”

I quite agree, and while there is a danger that one can be frozen because of the inability to decide on the merits of competing claims, the greater danger faced by most of us is more nearly the opposite: acting as if every course of action we have chosen is obvious and enlightened and could only be opposed by knaves or fools; and that every decision should be viewed as a zero-sum proposition, with all the arguments favoring one side (ours) and disfavoring the other. We go in search of data and studies that reinforce our preexisting views and ignore (or dismiss) the others. It’s of course easy to see these tendencies in others, and much harder to see them in ourselves.

“Willingness to entertain doubts is a moderating virtue when it reminds me, before I launch into some totalistic commitment, that there is more than one viewpoint or consideration to take into account,” Clor writes. “Moderation is intertwined with humility of a sort, the kind of humility that keeps us aware of our inevitable limitations – that we are all limited beings, limited in our capacity to master the unavoidable uncertainties and contingencies of life.”

This is something thinkers from Aristotle to Montaigne to Burke to Lincoln to C.S. Lewis understood, in one way or another; and it’s an insight all of us, of every political persuasion, would be wise to reacquaint ourselves with. Because moderation and humility, rightly understood, will help us to better ascertain the truth of things. And in politics, like life more generally, the truth shall set us free.

Read more here: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2013/01/29/the-virtue-of-moderation/#more-817384