The late Elliot Richardson declared, “I am a moderate – a radical moderate.” The very phrase seems like a contradiction, but is it really? Often, when we speak of balance, we are referring to balance in our personal lives, but we need balance in the public sphere, too. Amidst the shrill pronouncements of ideologues and others with extreme viewpoints, public discourse might benefit from some radical moderation – in religion, in politics, and in everyday life.
I must confess that I’m feeling neither balanced nor moderate this morning. I suspect that many of you may be in the same frame of mind. The events of the past two weeks have been truly horrifying, as if life can’t be troubling enough without the machinations of megalomaniacs and the gyrations of geopolitics to make things worse. My sleep has been disturbed and my waking hours distracted, my anxiety has peaked and a sense a calm has eluded me. I have even been nursing fantasies of which I am neither proud nor ashamed – natural projections of my inner state and the desire to return to normal – that is, to reclaim a sense of balance.
So let me admit right up front that I wished I had selected a different theme for my sermon this morning. Or that I had the wherewithal to abandon what I announced and, like Star Trek, “go boldly forth where no preacher has gone before.” But I’m neither that nimble nor that creative, though I can tell you that my remarks today will bear little resemblance to what I had originally mapped out, although I will say that a wholesome dose of “radical moderation” is precisely what the world could use right now, although I trust we will come to understand that true moderation and genuine balance cannot afford the luxury of false equivalencies or settling for the midpoint in a conflict.
The world is dealing with an act of naked aggression that simply cannot be justified by sophistry and apologetics. I’m in no mood for superficial historical analyses that seek to explain the inexplicable and justify the unjustifiable. The resolution of the crisis we are facing – if it is to be a just resolution and not acquiescence – isn’t going to be found in the kind of balance that involves give and take and finding some abstract middle point. Its resolution will only be found in restoring order and, from there, returning to the slow and painstaking quest for a more just and peaceful world.
Although it was hardly my intent when I selected the passage from William Ellery Channing to share with you this morning, I do find useful guidance in his words – at least when it comes to finding some semblance of personal balance and moderation in an imbalanced and immoderate time: “There are seasons when to be still demands immeasurably higher strength than to act. Composure is often the highest result of power.” Still, I wonder if, when we are “stripped of [our] property, of the fruits of a life's labors,” it’s humanly possible to “quell discontent and gloomy forebodings, and serenely and patiently return to the tasks which Providence assigns.”
So I try to be still. And it’s to the poets that I turn when I need to find stillness. Over the past week, I’ve turned particularly to Ukrainian poets to find a sense of perspective, hoping that I’m not simply pandering to my own prejudices in doing so. I’m skeptical of nationalism and patriotism, especially when they manifest what is more accurately called chauvinism, and yet I can appreciate the love of country and especially the love of the land where someone dwells, if they dwell there in harmony.
As I’ve watched the images of displaced children and their loving mothers, I was especially taken by a verse by Lesya Ukrainka, who lived on either side of the opening years of the 20th century. It was her first poem, written when she was only 8 years old, in response to the arrest and exile of her aunt, Olena Kosach, who was a democratic activist opposed to the tsarist autocracy of the time.
No freedom have I, my good fortune has flown,A lone hope is left, the one thing that I own.The hope of returning once more to Ukraine,To feast longing eyes on my homeland again,To feast longing eyes on the Dnieper’s rich blues,And there live or perish, whatever ensues;Feast my eyes on the steppe and the grave mounds I love,Recall ancient thoughts and the dreams I once wove.No freedom have I, my good fortune has flown,A lone hope is left, the one thing that I own.
It is a melancholy lament with a faint but real hope. That appeals to my soul and brings me a sense of balance, even if it doesn’t exactly cheer me. It puts current events into perspective, I think, and leads us away towards the realization that challenges as daunting as the ones we face have been faced by nearly every generation that has preceded us. We have perhaps been lulled, by time and place, into believing that life is fairer and more just than it is. I hope that each of you has been able to find sources of comfort and understanding that have helped you keep your balance amidst the tumult of world events.
The Unitarian minister Julian C. Jaynes, who was the father of the author of the same name who wrote The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, said from his New England pulpit: “The power of the human soul is to remain calm and unafraid amid all the shifting circumstances of the environing world! The human spirit possesses just that power – the power to preserve its own health, the power to hold itself steady and true to the normal standard, the power not to dictate or control circumstances, but to guard itself from being overwhelmed and destroyed by circumstances.”
But let’s move on more clearly to the quest for moderation – for radical moderation, as Elliott Richardson described it. We tend to use the word radical as a noun to describe someone who might otherwise be called an extremist, and we apply the term to whole groups of people as well as individuals. So the idea of “radical moderation” may seem jarring, something of an oxymoron. But Richardson used it as an adjective, and in this case, he was returning to its purest meaning: “relating to or affecting the fundamental nature of something; far-reaching or thorough.” You see, radical derives from the Latin radix, which simply means root. To be radical means to reclaim the root of something, to focus on the fundamentals, to deal with the essence of things. So when he called himself as a “radical moderate,” he was describing his aversion to extremes and his natural affinity for moderation.
Whether he realized or not, he was aligning himself with Gautama the Buddha and his Middle Path, also known as the Noble Eightfold Path: right understanding, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. Sure, we may quibble over what makes any of these eight qualities “right,” but it’s clear that the extremes are meant to be excluded.
Some of you may well remember Elliott Richardson. I had the pleasure of meeting him once – decades ago – because he was a member of what was then called the First and Second Church of Boston, a Unitarian Universalist congregation in the heart of the city, which was my preferred place to worship whenever I was in the city. He was a moderate Republican of the kind that most conservatives today would dismiss as a liberal. He held four different cabinet positions under presidents Nixon and Ford and is best remembered for having resigned as U.S. Attorney-General rather than follow Richard Nixon’s order to fire Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox. He subsequently served as an ambassador under Jimmy Carter.
“I am a moderate – a radical moderate,” he said. “I believe profoundly in the ultimate value of human dignity and equality. I therefore believe as well in such essential contributions to these ends as fairness, tolerance, and mutual respect. In seeking to be fair, tolerant, and respectful I need to call upon all the empathy, understanding, rationality, skepticism, balance, and objectivity I can muster.” Such moderation is hard work. It requires constant effort and continuous reflection. It doesn’t entail deferring to a mushy middle or waiting for consensus, so much as it entails finding a wholesome balance that most can recognize as good.
Not everyone believes in moderation, of course. In The Rights of Man, Thomas Paine asserted that, “A thing moderately good is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice.” And Belgian playwright and poet Maurice Maeterlinck cautioned that, sometimes the playing field is so low, the prevailing standards so weak, that moderation is part of the problem, not an answer to one. “The average, the decent moderation of today, will be the least human of things tomorrow,” he noted. “At the time of the Spanish Inquisition, the opinion of good sense and of the good medium was certainly that people ought not to burn too large a number of heretics; extreme and unreasonable opinion obviously demanded that they should burn none at all.” So faced with the Spanish Inquisition – or, let’s say, an act of aggression against another person or a whole people – and I may well find myself counselling something other than moderation.
But even the best of ideas will fail when tested against an extension to its logical absurdity. Moderation does not necessarily involve some sort of mean between two extremes – indeed, it generally doesn’t. As often as not, moderation involves the reasonable reconciling of a variety of considerations.
Moderation oftentimes involves the avoidance of two equally unpleasant, unhealthy, or untenable positions. If you consider the traditional political spectrum of left to right, for instance, moderation might be conceived as some abstract point or range of points between the two ends of the spectrum – let’s say, between communism and fascism, to name the two competing ideologies of the last century. But a closer analysis of the kind of states these two ideologies created quickly reveals that there were countless ways in which they were more alike than unalike, so that the spirit of moderation was represented not by some golden mean between the two, but by the active avoidance of both.
Extremism is a kind of socially-sanctioned temper tantrum – a privileging of pious and principled sounding selfishness and absolutism – while moderation represents a kind of visible maturity, on the part of individuals, groups, and whole societies.
It is essentially about finding the balance in life that allows for health, happiness, and wholesomeness. In ethics, it’s the balance between freedom and responsibility; in economics, the balance between the spendthrift and the miser; in religion, the balance between faith as blind belief in unprovable things and faith as a quiet confidence in our own experiences and aspiration.
I recall Forrest Church asserting that most great movements in history destroy themselves on the basis of their own first principles – that is, taking something that may be true and beautiful and good to extremes. So I think Thomas Fuller rightly observed that: “Moderation is the silken string running through the pearl chain of all virtues.” It prevents us from exaggerating our genuine virtues into extremes that become caricatures of themselves.
Like Elliott Richardson, I have discovered that, at my heart, “I am a moderate – a radical moderate.” Oh, I’ve nurtured fantasies of being a badass hardliner of uncompromising principle, but when push comes to shove … I don’t. I’m content to live in this world with its imperfections, even as I strive to nudge it towards greater goodness and justice. But radical moderates know that perfection is the enemy of the good, as the old proverb goes, and that evil is often good perverted. There are times to take a stand, and there are times to let things go. The best way to demonstrate our most cherished values is to live them fully without imposing them on others or seeking to draw attention to our own perceived virtues. And I echo Elliott Richardson own list of virtues as the best path to balance and I claim them as my own: “I believe profoundly in the ultimate value of human dignity and equality. I therefore believe as well in such essential contributions to these ends as fairness, tolerance, and mutual respect. In seeking to be fair, tolerant, and respectful I need to call upon all the empathy, understanding, rationality, skepticism, balance, and objectivity I can muster.”
A sermon delivered to the Lakehead Unitarian Fellowship in Thunder Bay, Ontario.
Reading – “On Composure” by William Ellery Channing:
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