Our Polarized World Cries Out for Balance – The American Spectator

Many people in our polarized world rage over the idea that balance means compromising on principles.

Give them their due: compromise on principle is evidence of moral weakness. Afraid to stand up for what is right, the compromiser temporizes, creates plausible excuses, and subverts language into double-talk. All of it is in order to evade making a brave and necessary stand.  

But this criticism, true as it is, does not admit the limits of its grasp. There is a moral weakness of a similar sort that it ignores: the reduction of all problems to a simple either/or. Some problems are indeed that uncomplicated, and their stark simplicity must not be muddled. But almost everything in human experience does not easily reduce to such a stark and exclusive formulation.

If the polarizers are right, freedom of speech would be unnecessary. What’s to debate? The polarizers prefer the tyranny of ideological abstraction, in which all the complex interactions that are the substance of our daily lives are meaningless concerns. For them, every knotty problem needs only the slash of their conqueror’s sword. 

Ideologues love enforced simplicity and forever strive to force all of life into a great either/or that the ideologue alone defines.

The great sage Moses Maimonides lived in an age, nearly a thousand years ago, of great clashing ideologies. Christians and Muslims fought long wars to establish their supremacy, pausing now and again to take a breath.

Maimonides served as court physician to the sultan in Mameluke Egypt. In his spare time, he wrote medical treatises, studied and wrote philosophy, guided Egypt’s Jewish community, and wrote enduring classics of Jewish law that earned him honor and respect through the centuries, not only among Jews, but also among the greatest scholars of law of other nations and religions.

Maimonides saw balance as the key to health, whether of the body, the mind and soul, or the political community. In physical health, one maintains a physical equilibrium, making sure to have physical activity as well as proper rest and nutrition, and shuns those foods or behaviors that upset that equilibrium.

However, once the body has been unbalanced and one is suffering disease or disability, a skilled physician can prescribe a course of action or medication that can address the difficulty and seek to restore the balance.

At the first, acute stage, the physician will, let us say, prescribe a medication or course of action that would be wholly inappropriate for someone in good health. A healthy person, for instance, would best avoid having surgery, but for a person, let’s say, with a dangerous growth, an operation would be necessary.

Once the physician’s interventions have succeeded, and normal health is restored, to have an operation or to continue with strong medicine would hurt the patient, for it would imbalance the body once more. But when the body is already imbalanced, the physician’s careful use of an offsetting imbalance helps to restore health.

Maimonides’ principle of balance popped up in my mind as I remembered a conversation I had with a local and well-respected federal district court judge. Our talk took place about 20 years ago. We were discussing affirmative action in education. I told him that when I started seriously following American politics, the supreme moral issue was civil rights. My parents’ staunch support for ending segregation seemed as noble a cause as there could be, closely aligned with our own struggle as Jews to fight the oppression that in its most horrible form had just wiped out a third of all our people. In a free country, one whose founding declaration stated without qualification that it is self-evident that all men are created equal, governments should protect the civil rights of all. Racial discrimination by law was clearly against the Constitution and the application of racial discrimination in the private sector was morally indefensible,

In the light of that commitment, I said to the judge, I cannot understand or support race being used once more by the government and by institutions as a valid criterion for such things as preferential treatment in college admissions. 

The judge replied that he hoped we would still reach that place I wanted to be in already and that he was uncomfortable all the time that we have not yet arrived there. Yet, he cautioned me, we have a real history of injury and disability that is the result of that unconstitutional and immoral practice of racism. Law must remedy injustice by restoring those unjustly injured to wholeness.

It was a reasonable conversation because we both admitted the truth in the other’s arguments. Even though we did not convert each other, we were each changed a bit and deepened by our back-and-forth.

The judge was saying, as Maimonides might have: we both want to restore balance. American governments supported and enforced racism in many places. Its damage has been real. To correct the imbalance, we have to be unbalanced in the other direction for a time.

For a time. For to continue to tip the scale after balance has been restored is to ensure ill health continues and balance is never attained. Unless the illness has become chronic or terminal, or the disability permanent, the healing process should always try to restore the balance and never to prolong imbalance save as a temporary and focused measure.

The laws that enforced segregation are long gone from the books. Black Americans are no longer shut out of political power; their voices are heard, their votes are counted. Even more important, the moral victory has been achieved. The overwhelming majority of Americans abhor racism.

We also abhor a lot of other bad things that don’t stop existing because we abhor them. But in order to counteract robbers and murders, we do not tolerate the violation of the several prohibitions in the Bill of Rights that make law enforcement harder than in a police state. That would imbalance us. So, too, it is time to end racial quotas as too damaging to the principle of equality that our Declaration proudly proposes. To tolerate them now in law is like continuing to take powerful medicine even when the disease has been cured.

Evil still confronts us in ways large and small. All of us will be challenged by it — challenged as individuals to keep our balance and to continue on course. These are the stories of our lives, revealing our weaknesses to ourselves and challenging us to overcome them. That is done as individuals standing alone. Then we tell the story of it to our fellows and find common cause to the degree that our own work rings true to our fellows.

Telling the story of being challenged by evil in a still imperfect world is inspiring. Each person has his or her individual distinction, and students will be free to make sense of their lives to show the character they gained in struggling to overcome latent discrimination or poverty among the many other challenges they may face. A wise admissions committee will value the essays such candidates would submit by the same standards as any other story of significant accomplishment that gives worth to life and indicates the kind of character that a good student should have. 

The quality of their character will be the criterion now, not the percentage of people with a certain skin color, religion, or ethnicity. We’re sound enough now to handle the corrections ourselves as a free and self-governing people.

We’ve learned how to regain our balance and then to keep it.

READ MORE:

The Quest for Competent Populism

The National Fabric Frays in the Absence of Political Vision