The subversive power of moderation

Post-liberals, reactionary conservatives, radicals: these are the ideological stances shaping our polarised times. What they have in common is a rejection of liberal civilisation and the open society, viewed as tired labels to be discarded. In favour of what? It is unclear. What is clear, however, is that freedom is no longer seen – has it ever really been? – as the mother of order and an indispensable element of a good society. Karl Popper argued that it is better to strive to combat concrete, visible and limited evils rather than abstract and universal enemies with uncertain contours: the latter is usually the path followed by those who wish to make a clean sweep of the existing order, the Jacobin path, which is always in vogue. Can one ever hope to build anything by adopting the strategy of the ‘Great Rejection’? It is difficult. History is full of examples to this effect; but, as we know, although history ought to be the teacher of life in theory, it has rarely been so in practice. Hope, however, remains.

Aurelian Craiutu, a political theorist at Indiana University, has written a book that is truly unconventional, for all the reasons we have just mentioned. In "Being Moderate: Letters to Young Radicals" (IBL Libri, 284 pp., 20 euros), the scholar asserts – in the true spirit of Oakeshott, that is, drawing on the liberal scepticism of the British philosopher Michael Oakeshott as typically expressed in "Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays", also published by IBL Libri – just how necessary the virtue of moderation is, all the more so at a time when fervour and excessive enthusiasm for any political cause, however noble it may be, seem to make us forget how easily they can lead to fanaticism and fundamentalism: ‘Although moderation does not provide all the answers to our social and political problems,’ it reads, ‘it at least provides us with an indispensable compass for navigating stormy and dark seas towards a harbour whose location we do not know’. In the book, Craiutu imagines a conversation with two young people: a right-wing radical and a left-wing radical, each a mirror image of the other because they are united by the most visceral anti-liberalism and a hatred of moderation. The guiding lights the author uses to illustrate the qualities of this virtue include both classical thinkers, such as Aristotle and Cicero, Montaigne and Montesquieu, Burke and Tocqueville, and contemporaries such as Oakeshott and Ortega y Gasset. Ortega y Gasset, in particular, pointed out not only that liberalism constitutes ‘the supreme generosity’, since it protects minorities from the arbitrariness of majorities, but also that being or claiming to be on the right or the left is often ‘one of the infinite ways in which a person can choose to be a fool’. Why? They are nothing more than ‘forms of moral hemiplegia’, that is, ways of viewing reality in a narrow-minded, a priori, ideological and sectarian manner.

In one of the letters he sends to the two fictional, yet realistic, radicals, Craiutu calls for realism: “In real life, there are no easy choices, only difficult compromises between conflicting values and principles and various shades of grey. There are very few (perhaps none) reliable tests, and achieving total clarity is an impossible goal in most political matters. So be wary of the prophets of doom who divide the world into irreconcilable factions and want to convince you that you must either storm the cockpit or resign yourselves to death.” A concise manifesto of radical common sense: not bad at all.