On Being in the Middle

One often hears of the virtues of moderation, that golden mean Aristotle so elegantly extolled and which common sense appears to confirm. To be neither excessive nor deficient, neither too daring nor too timid, seems to promise a harmonious existence—a life guided by reason rather than passion, by balance rather than frenzy. Yet, as is often the case with principles so universally praised, the closer one scrutinises this idea of “the middle,” the more elusive it becomes.

An even stranger can of worms is opened when we attempt to elevate the middle as the ideal. For what is an ideal, if not an extreme? And if the middle is the highest goal, does it not cease to be the middle? If one were to strive for moderation with all one’s might, would one even be striving for moderation?  Can one fanatically strive to be moderate? The question then becomes: Is there a middle way to being in the middle?

This conundrum reveals much about the human condition. We are drawn to simplicity, to principles that can be neatly packaged into aphorisms or rules of thumb. "Be moderate in all things," we are told, as if moderation itself were a universal solution for the chaos of life. Not to mention, the middle is assumed to be a place of peace and calm, not unlike the eye of a storm. But it is not a place of rest; it is a place of tension, requiring constant vigilance and adjustment. One does not stand still in the middle; one balances, teetering between competing forces.

Take, for instance, the realm of politics. To occupy the middle ground in an age of polarised extremes is too often hailed as a virtue. The centrist, we are told, avoids the dogmatism of the far right and the reactionary fervour of the radical left. I would like to believe that this is generally achieved. At least as long as the middle ground represents a genuine synthesis of opposing truths, and not a mere refuge of the cowardly and the indecisive. In the case of the latter, or if the middle shifts too much with the extremes, what once seemed a stable centre can become, over time, a position of quiet complicity in absurdity.

The same can be said of personal virtues. Take courage, for example, which Aristotle famously located between the extremes of recklessness and cowardice. It is easy to admire courage in the abstract, but in practice, the boundary between courage and recklessness is not all that easy to draw, especially at the outset. A soldier who charges into battle may later be lauded as courageous or dismissed as foolhardy, depending not on the purity of his intention but on the outcome of his action. Perhaps, this is why parents usually teach young children virtues of courage, honesty or selflessness as abstract ideals rather than context-specific values. Nuance is learned through life-experience, not instruction, and parents hope that teaching only the blacks and whites to their children will help them, over time, to lean more towards the white in a world destined to gradually fade into greys. To attempt to teach the greys too soon is not only futile but denies the child the opportunity to establish a relationship with the ideal, to strive for progress, if not perfection.

Perhaps this is why the middle, while rhetorically appealing, often fails to satisfy us emotionally. We admire the hero who charges headlong into danger, the ascetic who renounces all earthly pleasures, the rebel who defies convention—not because we believe their choices are necessarily wise, but because they embody a clarity and conviction that the middle rarely permits. The middle, by its nature, is ambivalent, nuanced, conditional. It resists the siren call of absolutes and therefore rarely inspires.

And yet, the middle is indispensable. Civilisation itself can be seen as a collective endeavour to impose balance on the extremes of human nature. Without the middle, the pendulum of history would swing wildly from tyranny to anarchy, from asceticism to hedonism, from zealotry to nihilism. The middle may lack the glamour of extremes, but it is the ground upon which stability and progress are built. 

The challenge, then, is to embrace the middle without fetishizing it, to recognize its value without falling into the trap of treating it as an ideal. For the moment we declare the middle to be the ideal, we elevate it above the extremes, thereby rendering it an extreme in its own right. To live in the middle is to accept that there is no final resting place, no formula that will resolve all tensions. It is to engage perpetually in the art of adjustment, the practice of discernment, the pursuit of wisdom that can never be fully attained.

In this sense, the middle is not a destination but a discipline. It requires humility, for one must admit that no extreme—whether of thought, action, or belief—can encompass the whole of truth. It requires courage, for to stand in the middle is to risk being misunderstood by those who prefer the clarity of extremes. And it requires patience, for the middle offers no easy answers, only the ongoing work of holding opposing forces in creative tension.

Perhaps, then, the true virtue of the middle lies not in its being a point between extremes but in its refusal to be pinned down at all. The middle is not the absence of conviction but the presence of discernment; not the rejection of ideals but the recognition that all ideals, taken to their limits, become distorted. To live in the middle is to inhabit a paradox: to seek the ideal while understanding that the ideal is never static.

And if this seems unsatisfying, even maddening—well, perhaps that is the point. The middle, like life itself, resists simplification. It demands that we engage with its complexities, not in the hope of resolving them but in the belief that the struggle itself is worthwhile. For in the end, the virtue of being in the middle is not that it is easy or comforting or even ideal. It is that it is often necessary.