Meet me in the middle- The golden mean and morality

As a recovering ex-Catholic, morality has always been a present thought. Like most religious folks, understanding what it meant to be a good Catholic also mirrored what it looked like to be a good person, to me at least. The thing about morality is it’s subjective, which also means it’s subject to change; it exists as a living and thus, dynamic sense of virtue.

So, we ask ourselves currently what we believe good people do or don’t do. We allow it to inform our evaluation of others, and ourselves. We begin to assess through a moral lens what is good or bad, right or wrong. This is a facet of everyday life. It’s so pertinent to the human experience, that it occupies a seat as a key branch of philosophy known as moral philosophy, or maybe even better known as ethics.

This idea of what it means to be a good person is self-evaluated, which means it’s privy to the limitations of our incredibly subjective and hardly reliable analysis. What is morally acceptable is both innate and socialized. Much of our ability to differentiate between right and wrong involves an evaluation based on cultural capital, or what is socially valued. We take in information and make evaluations; I’d imagine it is something that has served humans well in our quest for long-term survival as a species, at least in part. This also means that deciding what is morally acceptable will have virtues that appear nearly universal across populations, and some that are more localized.

So how do we decide what is good? Well, I want to talk about one specific idea, not because I think it is the answer by any means, but instead because I think it holds space for its own application cross-culturally, and I find its presence in my daily life often enough. But remember, this still isn’t all the time, or even most.

This is Aristotle’s virtue theory, also known as the golden mean. This is a unique approach to ethics in that it is agent-centred or focused on the characteristics or traits of the agent rather than act-centred. Aristotle then looks to presentations of character to define morality. These traits are still associated with acts but are viewed as more than simply behaviour. Instead, they are expressions of character.

So, I’ll get right to it. The Golden Mean is the idea that behaving virtuously is behaving in a way that is the middle of two extremes. Living in this way is finding this sweet-spot between excess and deficiency. An example of virtuous behaviour could be acting courageously, or, the central point between behaving cowardly or with extreme disregard. To walk the middle path you’re essentially acting morally, according to Aristotle. I want to be clear for a moment that this is not a conversation about governance, because moderate governments behave differently than what this alludes to. Instead, we are talking about living, the day to day within the politic; how do we engage with ourselves, our lives, and our neighbours?

 I like this one a lot. We often speak about living a balanced life, finding work-life balance, eating a balanced diet, all of which are attributed to wellness. Maybe morality means nurturing ourselves so that we can nurture others. Who knows.

Taoist ethics are more focused on becoming a good person living in harmony with the universal order than it is concerned with simply doing good acts. Agent-centred. Embodiment. The Taoist concept of Wu Wei is sometimes compared to the golden mean. Wu Wei is the idea of effortless action; it is acting without force. Wu Wei speaks to being in harmony with the Tao, or the universal order of things.

One of the more obvious iterations of the concept is the Buddhist notion of the middle path. Siddhartha Gautama, slightly older than Aristotle by a hundred years or so, was said to have delivered the message in one of his first teachings after he became the Buddha, or the ‘awakened one’. Due to the overlap, I wondered myself if Aristotle was inspired by Siddhartha’s teachings, but there’s no evidence that Buddhism made its way into any of his works, though the influence is surely possible.

Siddhartha, born to a King, renounced earthly possessions after observing what is called the four sights: age, sickness, death and asceticism. The first three as not super fun, and the last as a desirable path for him to follow; a divergence from his royal upbringing.

So now I bet you’re wondering how a man who renounced all his possessions to live his life as an ascetic was in any way an advocate for the middle path, but I’ll get to that. The Buddha himself, who achieved enlightenment after a period of asceticism, rejected severe practices of self-denial, marking it as ‘fruitless’ in the path of enlightenment. Basically, it’s not going to make you reach nirvana, or escape samsara (the cycle of life and rebirth). Instead, he promoted the middle path, or living with mild asceticism through discipline, and navigating the spectrum of indulgence and deprivation intentionally.

Okay I promise I only have one more religious example because I know that referencing organized religion is a) not necessarily indicative of a wider pattern of moderation within organized religion and b) risks reducing the moral concept of the middle path to a religious or spiritual framework, and it’s more than that. Religions just happen to love talking about morals. 

So, I just want to take these next two paragraphs to complain for a second about extreme asceticism. I respect the intention, and in moderation we can certainly include asceticism in our lives without becoming ‘fruitless’ in our pursuit of morality. Most commonly we see it in the process of fasting. All that is fine and good, done safely and with consideration. Instead, what I want to complain about is the comparison between deprivation and moral superiority, where we designate a dominative stance on top of our high horse. Baselessly, I might add. My prime example would be vows of poverty.

Christian poverty vows, a form of asceticism, relinquishes all ownership of earthly possessions to mirror Jesus. Risking coming across totally wrong, I do not think there is any moral merit in suffering. Do I think living in excess is fair or justifiable? No, not necessarily. But scarcity is not necessary to connect to the divine, the Buddha agrees, and so does Aristotle. This connection is risky, as it accredits an undesirable consequence of economic greed as being fruitful in a path toward God or karmic purity, or whatever you term the embodiment of a morally just goalpost. We begin to associate this deprivation with something to be desired. Perhaps to make folks docile to prevent questioning the status quo, I’m not sure. But it also extends beyond the way we engage with money.

We begin to assume deprivation is what is socially desired, and in some ways it is. We call emotional self-deprivation self-sabotage or more commonly, we find it in people pleasing. We surrender our means of self-nourishment for the sake of others, which in moderation and with the consideration of collective wellbeing is exactly what we should be doing. But sacrificing your wellbeing for the comfort of others is not morally significant, in fact, it is the opposite. In doing so, you are depriving the world of a nourished you, the more nourished you are, the more you have to give to others.

Now I’m going to take a second to really clear something up before we keep going. I worry sometimes when we speak about drawing these lines, better known as boundaries, that we feed into the zeitgeist of the modern age of individualism. We as people tend to lean into these extremes based on social stimuli, we people please because it makes us likeable and palatable, we feel insecure, taken advantage of and resentful, so we become individualistic and inconsiderate. There is a balance here.

We can tend to others, centre community, and remember that we are capable of a better world when we tend equally to ourselves. We are responsible to ourselves and our communities in that way. It is not morally apprehensible to take care of yourself, but it is when it is done with disregard for the rest of the world. I will not pride my comfort over the safety of others, but I will not weigh another’s comfort over my own safety. Do you know what I mean?

It's a balancing act, really, and there’s no easy way to weigh it out. Alok Vaid-Menon, an American writer and performer said in an interview I watched years ago something about ‘the choreography of being human’. This is not verbatim, but I think about the word choreography often. We are in relation with the world, with ourselves, we misstep, we learn the steps again, I think Alok was onto something in saying this, though they said it with such grace I’m not sure if it even stuck out to them. How do we walk this middle path? How can we be there for ourselves and others? I think in part it comes with practice, like most of life does.

I’ve found in my time since stumbling upon all these iterations of what we deem to be moral living, that what feels the most right to me is this sense of moderation, though it is uniquely difficult to live outside of polarity. We must engage with intention, which is hard in its own right. But I know we’re capable of it. If we hope to live courageously, we must centre ourselves between cowardice and disregard, to be generous, we must pinpoint the centre of frugality and impulsivity. It’s careful work, being human that is. We cannot find virtue in our deprivation, abandoning ourselves or our wellbeing for others, and we cannot find virtue in abandoning others for ourselves. We are connected, and for Aristotle, we must devote our engagement with the world to the development of character which fosters careful consideration and moderation.

So why am I saying all of this? It’s certainly not to suggest that this is the only way to be a moral person in the world, but instead to suggest that there is something to gain from the interpretation of virtue as the middle path. This means that we can shift our idea of being a ‘good person’ to being a person that conducts oneself in a way that recognizes nuance in our lives, and that allows us to provide for ourselves and others sufficiently. It is tricky to figure out where that line is, and I will never suggest that it exists anywhere for certain. But I will hope that we are able to find virtue in balance rather than deprivation or excess, taking and giving only what is necessary to fulfil the nurturing of the subject, tending to others just as much as ourselves, and expanding the scope to involve totality in moral conversation.