Somewhere in the Middle: Between Good and Evil
It’s rare that one side in a political debate is entirely right and the other entirely wrong.
In 2011 Facebook was celebrated for its ability to engage and mobilize millions in what was called the Arab Spring. These “Facebook revolutionaries,” as they were sometimes called, were going to change the Middle East for the better. Ten years later, Facebook is being demonized for subjecting teens, mostly young girls, to relentless online abuse. But it’s mostly the same technology to engage and mobilize.
So, who’s right – Facebook’s detractors or its defenders? Or, just perhaps, the truth is somewhere in the middle.
It’s a weakness of our political discourse, and of rhetoric in general, that we are often pushed to accept one side or the other. On election day we may have to do it, but even this presumes we’ve had a healthy debate on the issues, the proposed policies and the abilities of the respective candidates to deliver what they promise before we must cast a ballot one way or another.
We know the other leading controversies of the day: On immigration, it’s either “This country was built by immigration” or “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” On public safety it’s either “Defund the police!” or “Blue Lives Matter.” Or, “Voter suppression” versus “Election integrity.”
Somewhere in the middle – government leaders who originally supported calls to “defund the police” because of police brutality later faced blowback from residents concerned about rising murder rates (and reduced policing which has led to fewer arrests for lesser crimes), while some politicians who originally supported defunding the police have backtracked and claimed they only meant reallocation of resources, not literally stripping police departments of all their funding. Reallocation of resources is common in both government and industry.
Somewhere in the middle – that would be people who know that America has more than one million new legal permanent residents and new citizens combined every year, and has done so for many years, but who worry about the moral hazard when millions bypass what is already among the most generous immigration policies in the world, if not the most generous.
Somewhere in the middle – people who recognize that it can be difficult to register to vote and get to a polling place on Election Day, or even prove that they’re citizens, but who also know that the critical chain of custody for ballots is lost when mail-in ballots are widely used or that non-governmental groups are allowed to harvest ballots.
So-called “cancellation culture” has emerged in recent years, certainly part of the so-called Culture Wars. The basic defense for keeping controversial speakers off campus, or cancelling book deals with certain politicians, has been that the First Amendment freedoms only apply to the government in its relationship with the citizenry, but not when private entities come down hard on individuals. That is true – you and I have free speech vis a vis the government, but not on the job. Yet freedom and due process are not just constitutional provisions – they are values we ascribe to ourselves in a democratic country. Right-wingers in the 1960s were condemned when they told anti-Vietnam War protesters to “Love (America) or leave it.” Yet look at just this one example of how the world has been turned upside down when it comes to freedom of speech: Dorian Abbot, a geophysicist from the University of Chicago, was recently disinvited from giving a prestigious address on climate science at MIT after it was discovered that he supported “merit-based evaluations” of prospective students, not one based on group rights, in an article for Newsweek magazine that he’d co-authored. The article finished with a comparison to Nazi suppression in Germany in the 1930s, a time when Jews were thrown off campus and even the laws of physics were bizarrely challenged by some because it was “Jewish science.” Abbot’s reference to Nazi Germany was wildly inappropriate, but a debate on the value of merit-based college admissions and promotion versus one based on diversity, equity and inclusion requires that both sides of the argument be fully aired. What’s the correct position on this debate? Probably something in the middle.
As proof that the cancel culture exists Abbot was cancelled, yet as proof that not all of the Academy supports the new regime thousands have signed up for a Zoom conference featuring Abbot’s speech that will be hosted by Princeton University on October 21. This suggests that the Academy’s position on dealing with offensive speech, great and small, is itself somewhere in the middle.
You can read more about the Abbot affair, as of October 14, here. It is worth noting that as of this date almost all reporting has been on conservative news sites – is this agenda setting by the Right, or is it a boycott by “the liberal media?” Probably a bit of both, i.e., the truth is somewhere in the middle.
Substack, where subscriptions always are free.
Thanks for the writeup. I think the middle path is one of the hardest for us to comprehend. Often times it is just easy to go with the binary mode (good/bad, left/right..etc).