Uncompromising Principles, Moderated Souls | The American Spectator

A thoughtful reader wrote of last week’s article, “I am looking to learn from his practical solution to the conflict between the competing virtues he contemplates.” Another expressed a similar desire for some application to here-and-now questions.

Application is indeed the nub. In the end, we want to apply our principles and bring good into this world, rather than abandoning to the heavenly realm or the cold comforts of unapplied abstractions.

All that does require that we speak first about the principles and clarify them. Without that clarity, we don’t know in the end what it is we are applying. So, study and contemplate one must, but always with the sure knowledge that that is only the beginning of the work.

The Talmud transmits the record of a debate that took place in the early part of the second century.

Rabbi Tarfon and the Elders were reclining in the loft of the house of Nit’za in Lod, when this question was asked of them: Is study greater or is action greater? Rabbi Tarfon answered and said: Action is greater. Rabbi Akiva answered and said: Study is greater.

In the end, the entire group accepted that study is greater, but only because it leads to action. Study on its own is not the ideal. Implementation is the goal.

But what is the problem for which we seek a practical solution? This is the third article in a series that began exploring the principle of balance. The problem that it addresses is imbalance, the tendency to be unaware of the point at which any particular trait ceases to be a virtue because of either a deficit or an excess.

Specifics help. Look to our constitution’s federalism. It is a brilliant balance that avoids both the deficiency of centralized power that led to the Confederation’s inability to govern and the excess of centralized power in Britain, which led to the tyranny that moved us to declare our independence.

This is just one example of a balance in which several virtues are in play. Preserving individual freedom and having enough concentrated government power to defend ourselves against threats to our existence are both political virtues. Is our goal to set these two virtues at odds with each other, a fight to the death in which one always wins, and the other always loses? That is self-evidently silly. Virtues are meant to be integrated within our character, all being needed to express the fullest good.

Patience is a virtue, as is courage. Do we aim in our lives to say that one is always privileged over the other? Without the patience to determine where courage is truly called upon, we could easily reduce our courage to a display of egotistic belligerence, losing the far greater good that patience could have yielded us of goodwill and trust. Without the courage to take a necessary stand, patience will stay our hand from an action that could have saved blood and treasure. Churchill called World War II the unnecessary war, because with a little courage, the dictators could have been stopped with very little difficulty. Instead, the patient policy of appeasement made war necessary on terms so advantageous to the dictators that only with the greatest difficulty did the world avoid a new dark age.

Three weeks ago, Thomas Paine’s thought was quoted in this space: “Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice.” Paine is on the same page as Maimonides, who codifies the rule of moderation and balance as a law of character — a concern of God’s law, which addresses the privacy of our soul as well as the public sphere. One who governs his character is able to see the stability of principle and to bravely act upon it, even in the face of intemperate opposition.

To know that our extremism is truly in defense of principle and is not just a rationalization for our own imbalanced behavior, we must be aware of our own inner workings and of the need for continual self-government.

This is the realm of first principles, of philosophy at its best, integrated with religion. Our constitution, as John Adams reminded us, depends on a moral and religious people and can work for no other. Biblical religion directs us to the model of our humanity, the image of God, from whom all virtues spring and in whose providence each finds its place.

Think of the musings in that scroll ascribed to King Solomon, Ecclesiastes:

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die;
A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal;
A time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn, and a time to dance…
A time to love, and a time to hate;
A time for war, and a time for peace.

This in no way contradicts the conclusion of that scroll, where he says that the whole of man is to fear God and keep His commands. Laws are not relative if they are to serve as laws, any more than principles are capable of compromise if they are to remain principles.

Rather, the two factors of moderation and steadfastness show us the whole, united truth, as it proceeds from the One in heaven on its way to be applied here on earth as we govern our lives and our polities. As Paine seemed to grasp, our task is of the “both/and” type:  both total dedication to uncompromised, unmoderated principles worthy of that dedication — “Our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor;” and simultaneously, moderation of temper, for in this world which God charge us to carry out His mission, we need continuous discernment and adjustment of our own focus to see which of all the principles most urgently apply in the here and now.

Fighting Nazism and Communism, Americans felt the call of a united effort, knowing anything else would fall short. There was solid bipartisan agreement to put up the fight, to accept the regimentation of wartime, what Churchill called War Socialism.

Other times require internal rebalancing. Victor Davis Hanson calls what Trump has led a true counter-revolution: Having seen America jettison meritocracy in pursuit of racial pandering masquerading as equity, MAGA and its allies take up the principle of color-blindness without compromise. We actively oppose any scheme of legal or cultural discrimination based on immutable factors such as race or sex.

But, as Hanson points out, even here we need moderation. There is a significant movement of mostly younger white men, those who have been most disadvantaged by the DEI program of racial and sexual discrimination. Oppressed and justly angry, they have let that anger master them and infect their character, reconstructing a white male identitarianism no different from DEI. Both of those extremes are deviations from Martin Luther King’s robustly worthy ideal of judging all people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.

The role of these articles is to cultivate the kind of character we need to transcend such reactionary regression. Our goal is rather to implement competently the great ideals, flowing from Jerusalem and Athens, that inspire the American experiment. We accept all virtues, seeking only the discernment to know which most needs application in each moment and the virtue to apply ourselves courageously to that task.

This is the unique strength of the republican character. It sees a greater wholeness than any one person alone can grasp. Because we can talk out our differences, the others in our nation need not be enemies. We fight the good fight to establish our fellow citizens as those who complement us and make us whole so that we can truly see e pluribus unum.

The true American character transcends faction and temperament. It welcomes the debates which make us stronger and enable us to pass through every dark valley secure in our purpose and whole in our faith.

READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin:

The Measure of a Free People

Socrates, Maimonides, Lincoln, Churchill — and Us

Extremism and Its Virtue