The notion of a “golden mean” or “middle way” dates to ancient times and was postulated as a foundation of morality and wisdom by Greek philosophers, Gautama Buddha, Confucius and St. Thomas Aquinas, among many others.
Aristotle identified “virtue” as the optimal alternative to the two extremes of “deficiency” and “excess.” For example, Aristotle considered “bravery” the virtuous alternative to cowardice (deficiency) and recklessness (excess). Ancient thinkers did not conceive of “virtue” as an average between extremes, but rather as an optimal measure or amount of a thing, owing to its unique circumstances and characteristics. They conceived the task of identifying virtue as a disciplined exercise that required complete fealty to context and truth.
Contemporary American discourse often seems possessed of a distorted version of the golden mean, an ersatz “fool’s gold” substitute that conceals, rather than illuminates, context and truth. Supposedly serious pundits routinely bemoan discord, but only superficially engage in substantive assessments of better and worse options, or the relative merits of opposing positions.
On any question, lack of consensus is reflexively characterized as either an equal failing of both “sides” to the disagreement, or an open question for which the evidence is ambiguous. Major news outlets copiously “report the controversy” and enthusiastically assess the effectiveness of each rival’s talking points in moving public opinion, but expend relatively little effort to actually evaluate the truth and validity of competing claims.
Thus, despite overwhelming consensus among scientists that climate change is real, primarily caused by human activity and dangerous, national news outlets continue to report the misinformed rants of climate change deniers and industry-paid advocates with the same deference as they report the findings of the most robust, vigorous, comprehensive and extensively peer-reviewed studies documenting the cause and effects of climate change.
Likewise, conventional media rarely report the widespread agreement among economists that government austerity is counterproductive in the aftermath of a financial crisis. Indeed, conventional news outlets seem to view it as somehow impolite to accurately report that most proponents of immediate fiscal austerity reside on the absolute fringes of economic thought, or that the single, credible-appearing study that purported to demonstrate the virtues of austerity has been found to contain fundamental errors which, when corrected, completely reversed the original findings.
Even more rare is any mention that since the 1970s, Republican demagoguery on the issue notwithstanding, federal government deficits have significantly worsened under Republican presidents and improved under Democratic presidents, or that during the last three years under President Obama the federal deficit has shrunk at the fastest rate in decades.
It is unknown whether pundits’ and major news outlets’ failures to report context or facts which may decisively falsify the claims of one “side” results from Aristotelian “excess,” “deficiency” or some other phenomenon. Regardless, citizens are well advised to challenge these conventions of modern punditry in order to avoid being misled by this “fool’s gold” fashion in contemporary discourse.
The Democratic Town Committee supplies this column.