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Socrates, Maimonides, Lincoln, Churchill — and Us
An astute reader raised a question in response to my last article’s mention of the golden mean of Aristotle and Maimonides. The question: Given that balance is a fine ideal in the abstract, what relevance does it have in a society that is already far out of balance and in which violent and extreme rhetoric has become the norm, at the very least, among the Party That Must Not Be Named? Must we submit passively and be martyred politically? Must we give up the ability to actively combat the pernicious politics we have suffered under already for so long, and not turn it back by actions immoderate by our own standards?
That Lincoln aspired to return to a balance is evident in the astonishingly conciliatory tone of … his Second Inaugural.
It should come as no surprise that this is not a new question. Socrates so upset the Sophists, the master demagogues of Athens whom he embarrassed into confusion whenever they debated, that they put him to death. Socrates consoled himself and his followers by making the point that it is better to suffer evil than to do it, and that the truth of the soul for which he sacrificed himself would live forever.
Certainly, he was right, and such an extreme dedication to principle is something that religion demands we be prepared to do, if necessary. Perhaps, as Gandhi advised Martin Buber, the Jews should respond to Hitler by committing suicide, and that would be more morally persuasive than armed force.
A better case might be that the passive response to Hitler’s serial provocations encouraged and enabled him. The results are exhaustively documented in the Nazis’ own records, the observation of tens of thousands of liberating soldiers (go see Nuremberg).
Just as Patton reminded his soldiers that the goal of a successful army is not to have its soldiers die for their country, so too we have a lesson or two from the past reminding us that the goal of good politics is not to die from the society’s sickness, but to heal it and be healed ourselves.
Last week’s article quoted from Maimonides’ code of law as well as Aristotle. The law springing from Scripture, the law that he codified, addresses individuals in their private lives as well as in their national lives. Some of these laws are not capable of being enforced by a court. They are meant rather to be internalized. This law is one of them. Maimonides places it almost at the very beginning of his code, indicating that its observance is fundamental, and creates a character that is open to God’s instruction and ready to live as a citizen of a free and peacefully ordered world.
The law of the mean is a general guide for our own character development. Just as eating too little food results in malnutrition and eating too much results in obesity, so too in character — too much generosity makes one a pauper and too little makes one asocial and stingy; too much levity makes one a fool but none at all makes one morose and choleric; et cetera.
But that is not the end of the matter. The fact of it is that both individuals and the societies constituted by them are often not presently at the balance point. What to do then, in real life, when we have to deal with an obstinate and messy reality instead of the philosopher’s clean abstractions?
Maimonides knew the difference well. He was not only a philosopher but a man of practical skill at the highest level of competence. He was the leader and teacher of Egypt’s Jewish community and his advice was listened to by far flung communities whose precarious existence needed an unerring practicality as well as high ideals.
Maimonides did not make his living from his role as rabbi, but rather from his practice of medicine. He authored nearly forty treatises on various medical topics and his fame was so great that he was invited to serve as physician in the court of the Mameluke sultan, Saladin, the famous victor of the Battle of the Horns of Hattin and opponent of Richard the Lionheart.
Maimonides applied the lessons he learned from medicine to law. He wrote about the applicability of medicine to character in an early work of his known popularly as the Eight Chapters. There he writes:
Now just as those who are physically ill imagine that, on account of their vitiated tastes, the sweet is bitter and the bitter is sweet and likewise fancy the wholesome to be unwholesome and just as their desire grows stronger, and their enjoyment increases for such things as dust, coal, very acidic and sour foods, and the like which the healthy loathe and refuse, as they are not only not beneficial even to the healthy, but possibly harmful to those whose souls are ill, that is the wicked and the morally perverted, imagine that the bad is good, and that the good is bad. The wicked man, moreover, continually longs for excesses which are really pernicious, but which, on account of the illness of his soul, he considers to be good.
By this, Maimonides connects the ideas of ethics with hard reality. Medicine has to deal with the hard realties; so must our morality. Ethical cogitations out of contact with the world are mere conceits and in themselves do not satisfy what divine truth demands of us. Imagining won’t heal our bodies; they also will not heal our souls or our societies. We need to address the illness of the soul with the same skill, seriousness, and practical wisdom that healing the body requires. Moral illness is no less concrete and real than physical disease.
Maimonides writes: “What is the remedy for the morally ill? They should go to the wise, for they are the healers of souls. They will heal them by teaching them how to acquire proper traits, until they return them to the good path.”
The wise will then use the ideal of balance as a guide, constantly exerting a pull on the moving line of their behavior to one closer to it. It is the true north, the lodestone, that enables us to correct ourselves constantly. Furthermore, as Maimonides extends it here with the metaphor of the physician, it serves as a true north, guiding us in the world outside towards our purpose. It applies outside ourselves, to our social relations, and to our politics.
How is it to be applied? To an individual who is chronically angry, he prescribes training in the opposite quality, requiring the patient to take on a passivity that is as unnatural to him as taking bitter medicines is unnatural to a normal diet. The overcompensation leads the person back to the normal, even if it takes many swings of the pendulum before he can rest easy in a golden mean in which his temper follows a rule, and it is employed only when required to correct the imbalances of others.
Anger serves as a limit. He writes:
One should take a similar course with each of the other traits. A person who swayed in the direction of one of the extremes should move in the direction of the opposite extreme, and accustom himself to that for a long time, until he has returned to the proper path, which is the midpoint for each and every temperament.
This principle then is no mere abstraction, impossible to apply to real life because, instead of making it better, it only makes its believers into sitting ducks for the first mild psychopath that crosses their path. It is a stable pattern that is applicable to human moral behavior at every level, from the individual to the body politic to the world as a whole.
In response to the issue the reader raised, upon noting a political situation that is sick — an excess of dishonest language and suppression of opposing views — one following Maimonides’ advice would seek to cure the situation by applying a force in the opposite direction — immoderate freedom of expression that is equal in its power to the diseased imbalance that presents.
The goal, though, must always be in mind. That requires personal balance.
Two of my favorite examples in modern history come from two political leaders of extraordinary character. Facing an extreme attack on the constitutional order, Lincoln did not hesitate to go to the extreme limit to stop the whole imbalanced structure from toppling over into ruin. Though habeas corpus is the most basic of rights, the Constitution provides for its suspension in times of emergency, though it never specifies who is empowered to do so. With a boldness meant to counterbalance the recklessness of the secessionists, Lincoln asserted that that power was his, and locked up without trial the legislators who were ready to vote Maryland out of the Union.
That Lincoln aspired to return to a balance is evident in the astonishingly conciliatory tone of his last great state paper, the text of his Second Inaugural, familiar to our readers already (and if not, remedy that omission as soon as possible).
That same spirit of balance is the key to understanding Churchill’s leadership as well. When disaster threatened, he took whatever acts were necessary to keep the great cause alive, whether locking up people like the British fascist Moseley for his political opinions, or bombing the French fleet at Mers el Kebir, or setting up the SOE, also known as the Ministry for Ungentlemanly Warfare.
Churchill expressed the balance best in what he originally prosed as an inscription for a World War I memorial and which, rejected there, he used as the moral of his six-volume work The Second World War:
In War: Resolution
In Defeat: Defiance
In Victory: Magnanimity
In Peace: Good Will
As in any practical matter, all is dependent on the final step of application. The North Star of the principle of the mean gives our own discernment a sure point of reference. But to do that well, we must engage one very specific balance which focuses on integrating our self-interest with our devotion to things beyond the self — our spouse, our family, our community, our nation, our God.
On that next week, Deo volente.
READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin:
Extremism and Its Virtue
Friends May Betray Us, but Choose Agency
Wendell Berry Shows Us How To Love in Loss
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