What's the matter with moderation?

David Brooks writes, "Like most of you, I dislike the word moderate." While he never explains his assumption that most of us share his view, he does explain that the word "moderate" sounds too "milquetoast" to him. He then goes on, in a recent column, to list the praiseworthy qualities of "moderates," conceding that he'll stick with the word "until a better one comes along." The better word, I'd suggest, is moderate -- once you stop treating it, as Brooks (if not "most of you") apparently does, as synonymous with "centrist" or "middle of the road." His disdain for "moderate" is a consequence of the very bipolar political thinking Brooks urges us to transcend. Thinking in terms of American party politics, he takes to "moderate" to be seeking a dubious middle ground between the extremes of Republican conservatism and leftist liberalism. But there is nothing inherently centrist about moderation. Our English word derives from a Latin word meaning control, and its traditional meaning is "self-control." Moderation has been identified with the middle ground because it's often used to describe a philosophy ascribed to the ancient Greeks, "moderation in all things." That idea, in turn, is often identified in classrooms with the avoidance of opposite extremes, e.g. one must not be too miserly nor too profligate. Moderation thus tends to be placed in bipolar contexts, and when these contexts are controversial moderation gets equated with intellectual or moral mediocrity. But the concept of moderation doesn't depend on the concept of opposites, and the true moderate should not be presumed to cower in the middle ground between them.

There is, or ought to be, a difference between telling both right and left that they can't have everything they demand, on one hand, and merely splitting the difference between them. Because the true moderate -- a word synonymous with his position, but unfortunately tainted by association with a failed reform movement, is "temperance" -- is moderate in all things, that moderation can't be understood in terms set by the opposite extremes of bipolar politics and can't be reduced by either or both to a mere middle ground. A real moderate would be just as moderate in a tripolar or even more pluralist political order where the choices can't be reduced to opposites but the risks of extremism are just as great. The moderate has something like the quality Brooks himself calls "humility," which he describes as "a radical self-awareness from a position outside yourself," though "objectivity" might be the better word. That, at least, makes sense of his recommendation to put "truth before justice," though the obvious implication that truth and justice are not synonymous, in current political usage at least, is a future topic unto itself. In the end, Brooks, still a conservative in theory, has a very liberal sense of what moderation entails, incorporating pluralism, syncretism and skepticism into the mix on the assumption that "monadic" identities "brutalize politics." Whether these qualities truly characterize moderation depends on the extent to which any of them tend to be self-indulgent or become ends unto themselves, but the true moderate presumably will still cultivate these qualities in moderation. I don't think there's anything at all wrong with the word "moderation." Those who think otherwise may need to moderate their attitude toward reality itself.