Craiutu’s book looks at the moderate mind in the political sphere. He suggests moderation is a temperament and not an ideology because “what is moderate in one context and period may significantly differ from what is moderate at another point in time.” Nonetheless, moderates share some features including “their belief in dialogue, their rejection of Manichaeism and ideological thinking, their embrace of trimming and eclecticism, and their opposition to extremism and fanaticism in all their forms.” These ideals are especially needed in the modern age where “reckless overconfidence came to be regarded as manly courage, while prudent hesitation and careful consideration of facts were deemed to be forms of treason or cowardice.” Modern politics has become a winner take-all battle, where the poles trade spoils and the middle is lost. This study in defense of the political moderate explains that moderation is not cowardice or opportunism, but a principled temperament which seeks to balance while being loyal to the truth. Craiutu profiles five very different thinkers, from the socialist left to the right, who chose to contest the battle of political ideas with a temper of moderation, instead of retreating into the realms of higher philosophy or aesthetics.
Raymond Aron was disappointed by how the citizenry of post-WWII France possessed “increasing disregard for the rule of law and legality and their preference for emergency measures instead of laws.” Fascism and communism were the twin secular faiths that had been damaged, but not discarded, by the war. The existentialists were still proposing a new ethic of authenticity, which freed man from the chains of society and recovered his true human nature. “The most radical among them were even ready to purchase a distant and alluring redemption at a high price that implied the sacrifice of the present for the sake of an abstract, radiant, and uncertain future.” Aron feared his fellow citizens felt, “reform was boring and revolution exciting…. The myth of Revolution serves as a refuge for utopian intellectuals; it becomes the mysterious, unpredictable intercessor between the real and the ideal.” Aron was not willing to throw away popular beliefs, customs, and conventions that were tested by time. He was an Aristotelian who started from “what is” rather than “what ought to be”. Aron argued, “to think politically in a society one must make a simple but fundamental choice. This fundamental choice is either the acceptance of the kind of society in which we live, or its rejection…. From this fundamental choice flow decisions.” For Aron, politics, by its nature, was not pure and could not be judged with the moral clarity of religion or philosophy. He was opposed to the determinism of his day, espoused by both Marxism and scientism. History is “neither progress nor decadence, neither movement toward a final end nor the endless repetition of the same facts or the same cycles.” Humans had agency, but contingency also played a role in the future of men’s affairs. Every political situation “always allows for a margin of choice, but the margin is never unlimited.” Aron was also politically moderate because he feared his own fallibility. He was conscious of his limited knowledge, of the plurality of opinions, and was, therefore, cautious and skeptical. He declared, “I have chosen the society that accepts dialogue. As far as possible, this dialogue must be reasonable; but it accepts unleashed emotions, it accepts irrationality.”
Isaiah Berlin was a scholar of the Enlightenment, who was fascinated by Counter-Enlightenment figures. He claimed, “what is interesting is to read the enemy, because the enemy penetrates the defenses, the weak points, because what interests me is what is wrong with the ideas in which I believe- why it might be right to modify or even abandon them.” Nonetheless, he was firmly anti-monist, the idea that there was one single discoverable truth or answer, one Platonic ideal. There could be no synthesis of values that could be found rationally and no single path that headed to any final end. He deplored the definitive, the unambiguous, the universal. He posited, “if you are truly convinced that there is some solution to all human problems that one can conceive an ideal society which men can reach if only they do what is necessary to attain it, then you and your followers must believe that no price can be too high to pay in order to open the gates of such a paradise.” However, this idea of treating humanity as an abstraction and present man as a mere steppingstone in the course of history resulted in “a terrible maiming of human beings…. political vivisection on an ever increasing scale…. the liberation of some only at the price of enslavement of others, and the replacing of an old tyranny with a new and sometimes far more hideous one…. If there were a final solution, a final pattern in which society could be arranged, liberty would become a sin.” The alternative was pluralism where “human goals are many, not all of them commensurable, and perpetual rivalry with one another.” Like Aron, Berlin viewed culture as providing unique understandings of the good life, virtue, and dignity and so there could be no universal scale on which to judge a particular society. However, his was not a cultural relativism, but an understanding of pluralism. Even within society, he defended this pluralism and with it, the minority. “What the age calls for is not (as we are so often told) more faith, or stronger leadership, or more scientific organization. Rather it is the opposite- less Messianic ardour, more enlightened skepticism, more toleration of idiosyncrasies, more frequent ad hoc measures to achieve aims in the foreseeable future, more room for the attainment of their personal ends by individuals and by minorities whose tastes and beliefs find (whether rightly or wrongly must not matter) little response among the majority.” He felt that “democratic politics demand a sense of humility and the conviction that every form of power requires solid opposition and relentless correction…. [He believed] politics must start low and aim relatively low, by seeking first and foremost to reduce as much as possible the amount of suffering and violence in the world.” Again like Aron, Berlin was motivated in his humility by his own fallibility and the idea that “life’s fundamental diversity…. is the most powerful argument against utopianism or monism…. Life’s diversity, complexity, and murkiness must then be protected against those who have an excessive craving for unity, simplicity, clarity, and purity.”
Norberto Bobbio was a professor, and later a senator, on Italy’s socialist left, though never a full-blown Marxist. He was a pessimist by disposition, who, in his own words, was “unsuited to politics” and had an academic’s “typical professional deficiency, that of being an eternal doubter” with a “natural inclination to expect the worst.” He viewed the defining tension of the twentieth century as the struggle between liberty and equality. Bobbio viewed his politics as eclectic, that is, “looking at a problem from all sides [which] is an approach which is reflected at the practical level in political moderation.” He particularly was cautious about politics’ relationship to power. “The higher the ends, the greater the temptation will be to invoke dubious and ultimately violent means for achieving them.” He believed in a unified European culture that saw no national borders or line between East and West. “The fight against moral impediments is a struggle for the defense of the truth [and] the commitment of the men of culture is above all a commitment to the truth.” He condemned all censorship, falsification of facts, and spurious arguments even to achieve noble ends. As a moderate, he felt his task to be to “sow the seeds of doubt and not to gather certainties.” He was not interested in conflict with the opposition, but in true dialogue. “I learned to respect other people’s ideas. To pause before the secret of every conscience, to understand before arguing, and to argue before condemning.” He suggested “maximum openness, which is a form of mental generosity, toward the opposing set of values.” He preferred a “bad democracy” to a “good dictatorship”, seeing the value of pluralism and dissent. He preferred politics to interfere in the lives of the citizenry as little as possible. He claimed the lives of the masses “are lived out in most cases in areas which lie outside the one occupied by politics. [When the State begins to dominate society] it is a sign that the individual has been reduced to a cog in a car engine and has no clear idea of who the driver is and where he is driving.” Instead of “either-or” choices, he preferred “neither-nor” choices. He characterized his temperament as meek. But “unlike a submissive person who is often passive and abandons the struggle due to weakness, weariness, or fear, the meek never entirely yield and are neither inert or docile. They seek instead to curb and “repudiate the destructive life out of a sense of annoyance for the futility of its intended aims.””
Michael Oakeshott was a British academic, conservative in his politics, but bohemian in his personal affairs. He felt that “the business of a government [is] not to inflame passion and give it new objects to feed upon, but to inject into the activities of already too passionate men an ingredient of moderation.” He wanted to temper both radicalism and a zeal for perfectionism. He also rejected the materialism of capitalism as an end in and of itself. He believed greatness “cannot be derived from material wealth alone; the latter tends to foster bourgeois philistinism, intellectual mediocrity, conformity, and complacency, which characterizes the “middle mind” and the rationalist spirit.” Despite his conservatism, he ridiculed the ancient Greek philosophers who viewed nature as a normative yardstick and political activity as the mark of good citizenship. “The things political activity can achieve are often valuable, but I do not believe that they are ever the most valuable things in the communal life of a society.” He wanted a stable politics so that “artists, poets, and philosophers- the “salt of the earth”- should not be compelled to leave their lofty retreats in order to bring their wisdom down into the political realm.” Like Berlin, he was an anti-monist, who did not want to impose a uniform pattern of life or direct public activities to shape people for the good. He also did not believe that conservatism offered a full-fledged philosophy of life. Nonetheless, he viewed it as “a propensity to use and to enjoy what is available rather than wish for or to look for something else; to delight in what is present rather than what was or what may be…. To be conservative is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the super-abundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.” At the same time, he claimed, “there is indeed no inconsistency in being conservative in politics and ‘radical’ in everything else.” He believed in Lord Halifax’s “character of a trimmer”, whose motto was “neither Dionysus nor Apollo, but each in his place and season.” The disposition of the trimmer was, “success he will observe with suspicion, and he will lend his support more readily to weakness than to power; he will dissent without dissidence; and approve without irrevocably committing himself. In opposition, he will not deny the value of what he opposes. Only its appropriateness; and his support carries with it only the judgement that what is supported is opportune.”
Adam Michnik was a Polish anti-Communist, who, alone in this study, had to practice moderation, instead of just preaching it. He was involved with both the Workers’ Defense Committee (KOR) and Solidarity Movement in Communist Poland. As for his temperament, he claimed, “I think that ‘anti-authoritarian’ is the key word. We rebelled against different authorities, but the sense of rebellion was the common denominator.” Like the others in this study, he was cosmopolitan while being wedded to the particularities of his nation. He advised, “remain faithful to your national roots, but cultivate your permanent rootlessness.” The KOR’s strategy was not to seize the machine of power in Poland to affect change, but to change reality on the ground first, to the best of their limited ability within the confines of the oppressive Communist State. Jonathan Schell summarizes their philosophy as, “start being what you think society should become. Do you believe in freedom of speech? Then speak freely. Do you love the truth? Then tell it. Do you believe in an open society? Then act in the pen. Do you believe in a decent and humane society? Then behave decently and humanely.” Michnik believed in the plurality of democracy, but he was no utopian idealist about what relief it would bring to Poland. “Democracy is not infallible because in all debates all are equal. That is why it lends itself to manipulation, and may be helpless against corruption. This is why, frequently, it chooses banality over excellence, shrewdness over nobility, empty promise over true competence. Democracy is a continuous articulation of particular interests, a diligent search for compromise among them, a marketplace of emotions, hatreds, and hopes; it is eternal imperfection, a mixture of sinfulness, saintliness, and monkey business.” Like Bobbio, Michnik believed in the primacy of dialogue. “The person of dialogue attempts to transform the enemy into an opponent and the opponent into a partner. An opponent is for him one who presents a challenge, who wants and asks to be understood. The person of dialogue believes that dialogue is the only way to be understood by others. So he makes an effort to look at the world through his opponent’s viewpoint, to “change hats with him,” and to “step into his shoes.”…. He does not shy away from defending his own arguments and is not afraid of the truth, but, invariably, he puts respect for human dignity first…. Each partner accepts that the dignity of the other is of immeasurable value. This presupposes the ability to strike a compromise, whenever possible, the readiness to admit that one is not in possession of the sole and complete [truth], and the willingness to accept somebody else’s reasoning and to change one’s own attitudes.” Michnik believed in the value of political tension. He confessed, “I would nevertheless be afraid to live in a world without conservative institutions and values. A world devoid of tradition would be nonsensical and anarchic. The human world should be constructed from a permanent conflict between conservatism and contestation; if either is absent from society, pluralism is destroyed.”
Craiutu suggests that when “thinking about politics or acting in the political sphere, one must start from the facts themselves and acknowledge that there are certain structural tensions between values and principles that cannot be fully solved or eliminated forever.” He quotes Leszek Kolakowski on the virtues of an inconsistent mind, “reasonable inconsistency does not seek to forge a synthesis between extremes, knowing it does not exist, since values as such exclude each other integrally. The real world of values is inconsistent; that is to say, it is made up of antagonistic elements.” Craiutu views the moderates in his study as embodying the ideals of Montaigne, “no premise shocks me, no belief hurts me, no matter how opposite to my own they may be…. When I am contradicted it arouses my attention not my wrath.” Craiutu sees in moderation a temperance, a humbleness, a humility, a recognition of fallibility and imperfectability that leads one to accept a world of incremental changes that gives space to plurality and differences of fundamental values and not just means. Craiutu ends by echoing Albert Camus’ words on principles, “if anyone…. still thinks heroically that one’s brother must die rather than one’s principles, I shall go no farther than to admire him from a distance. I am not of his stamp.”
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