On Moderation: Defending an Ancient Virtue in a Modern World

2. Personal Moderation: Taming the Excess

47 8 PERSONAL MODERATION Taming the Excess Chapter 2 The primary purpose of the aforegoing essay was to articulate a definition of moderation, especially as related to public affairs. As a definition it presents only an outline of the subject and its key elements: balance or proportionality, recognition of limits, some capacity for disinterestedness —and the type of character that sustains them. The secondary purpose was to show why you should want a politics incorporating these qualities, and why you should be quite afraid of any leaders, movements, or polities wholly lacking them. Perhaps it is not so difficult to show that we’d better have these moderating qualities, and, to paraphrase a great poet, the center ought to hold, in the political side of life. But what about the private side of life and those aspects of our existence that transcend or precede public affairs? The observations about moral character, and about reason and passion, upon which (with qualifications) my argument has largely relied, are hardly complex enough to provide a sufficient basis for conclusions about requisites of a successful personal life or a healthy one. It could be that what moderation means and requires in public affairs is not the same thing as what it means and requires for the individual and interpersonal relations; perhaps there is even a divergence between the 48 / On Moderation two desiderata. More radically, modern viewpoints, needing some attention , dismiss the very idea of moderation as a key either to our understanding of the human condition or our flourishing in it; they envision rather different keys. Couldn’t one say that flourishing, at bottom, has nothing to do with any rational balancing but is a matter of vitality— living energetically and spontaneously? Or of audacity—a spirited willingness to take large risks? Or of love, which is inevitably unbalanced? If sheer vigor or audacity or love is what it is all about—if these are the main routes to happiness, or if one of them is its crucial component—then there is apparently little to be said on behalf of mere moderation and the personality type associated with it. Of course, these are questions of what is good for us. But then what of the radical philosophic claim that all such questions are unanswerable, being entirely dependent upon subjective moral opinions, indemonstrable assumptions about human nature, and ideological constructs that purport to give us unbiased representations of reality but cannot do so? We are forced to consider whether, and in what way, there may be a center that can hold under such challenges. 8 To begin at the surface, there is a type of easygoing, self-satisfied equanimity that sometimes passes as moderation. This personality lives largely if not entirely with a view to material security, comfort, and a continuing supply of modest gratifications; his predominant effort is focused upon the acquisition of the material instruments conducive thereto. He demands little but thinks well of himself, devotes much attention to physical health or longevity, and engages in activities as harmless to others as to himself. The emergence into prominence of this figure in what is termed bourgeois society is a subject much observed and commented upon in literature from the eighteenth century to the present. In its current incarnation this mode of life is infused with large doses of an egalitarian moral relativism; one refuses to make any judgments about alternative lifestyles, thereby avoiding offense and any need to justify one’s own. If there is a moral imperative here it is: “Thou shalt not be judgmental.” (In the crude vernacular, “I’m OK; you’re OK, equally.”) I Personal Moderation / 49 Nietzsche, a profound diagnostician of modern tendencies, was not in a position to observe empirically this latest incarnation, but he forcefully predicted it. Of the personalities he envisioned modernity would produce, Nietzsche writes, “They have their little pleasures for the day, and their little pleasures for the night, but they have a regard for health.”1 On account of the pettiness of their interests and smallness of their vision, Nietzsche, who did not eschew judgmentalism, called them “the last men”—those who “maketh everything small.”2 Whether or not you agree with the harshness of that evaluation, do you want to regard the type of person under consideration as an exemplar of moderation? Yes, you might say; he is, as the expression goes, “at home in his own skin...