Clowns to the Left of Me Jokers to the Right...
A simple diagnostic to determine where you fall on the ideological spectrum
By Lou Massett
I have been humming that Stealers Wheel lyric on and off for about fifty years. I hummed it especially loudly the year I began to suspect that I was, myself, one of the clowns.
I did not enjoy the discovery. Nobody does. That is why it is worth writing about.
We live in an unusually polarized moment. The temptation to run with the herd — to go with the flow, to sign the petition your friends signed, to repeat the outrage your side is currently outraging over, to nod at the sermon that flatters the pew you sit in — is not a new temptation. It is only louder. Algorithms have industrialized it. Cable news has professionalized it. Half the country genuinely believes the other half is a menace to civilization, and the other half returns the favor. You are, more or less, expected to pick a lemming line and get in it.
What is the solution to this polarization? How does one assess whether they too are becoming part of the problem or part of the solution? Wisdom demands a plan. And one of the oldest and best plans on offer belongs to a Greek philosopher who died 2,300 years ago, and to a Dominican friar who spent the thirteenth century patiently explaining what the Greek philosopher meant.
• • •
The middle is not the mush.
Aristotle argued, in the Nicomachean Ethics, that every moral virtue is a mean between two vices — one of excess and one of defect. Courage is the mean between cowardice and recklessness. Generosity is the mean between miserliness and prodigality. Justice, temperance, magnanimity — each of them sits somewhere between two ways of getting the thing wrong.
Aquinas took the Greek and Christianized it. Virtue, he said, is a habit disposing the soul to act well; and the well-acting is found in the mean, not in the extreme. The virtuous man is not the man who has picked the loudest position. He is the man who has learned, patiently, to hit the target.
This is not to be confused with moderation-as-mush. Aristotle did not say the courageous man is sort of brave. He said the courageous man is exactly brave — neither the coward hiding behind the rocks, nor the fool charging the machine gun. Aquinas did not say the just man is pretty fair, most days. He said the just man is the one whose will has been trained to give each what he is due. The mean is not the average of two errors. It is the target the two errors keep missing.
Which brings us to the diagnostic.
• • •
The two-part test.
If virtue is in the middle, then a reasonably honest person, once a year or so, ought to sit down and ask himself two questions:
1. On the political and religious positions I hold most strongly, who is to my left?
2. Who is to my right?
If you can name real, thoughtful, credentialed people on either side of you — people whose company you would tolerate at Thanksgiving, whose books are still on your shelf, whose sermons you would sit through without walking out — congratulations. You are somewhere in the neighborhood of the golden mean. You may still be wrong. But you are not radical.
If, however, you look to one side and nobody is there — if the people to your left are always the enemy, or the people to your right are always the enemy, and there is a wide open field between you and the horizon on that side — the diagnostic is telling you something. You are probably not the last sane man on the frontier. You are probably the frontier.
This is not the answer any of us want. It is the answer the test gives.
• • •
A confession.
I lived, from about the age of ten to the age of twenty-two, inside the Society of Saint Pius X — the SSPX. If you know Catholic acronyms, you know what that means; if you do not, the short version is that the SSPX is the flagship traditionalist movement founded by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre in 1970 in reaction to the Second Vatican Council. Its charter is the preservation of the old Mass, the old catechism, and — depending on which of its priests you are talking to — the old politics.
I did not consider myself a radical. I considered myself a serious Catholic. I would have told you, at eighteen, that I was in the middle of the Church and everyone else had drifted. This is what the radical always thinks. It is the diagnostic feature.
Some of the things that eventually made me sit down and take the test:
Item one. Over a spaghetti dinner in the twelth grade, my headmaster — Fr. Ramon Angles, the man responsible for the moral formation of a boys' academy in northeast Kansas — explained to me that Hitler had been badly misunderstood, and that, once you got past the propaganda, he had been a rather good man. I remember the way he said it. Sauce on his upper lip. Calm as a weather report.
Item two. Bishop Richard Williamson, later a Consecrated bishop of the Society and, at that time, a senior figure in its American district, counseled my sister — a young woman being knocked around by her husband — to remain in the marriage. It would be, he explained, good for her husband's soul, and good for her son's soul, that she stay. That her own soul might be developing a bruise the size of Rhode Island did not come up.
Item three. Our pastor in Syracuse defended, in conversation over coffee and donuts, the position that slavery was not intrinsically immoral (he was raised in the South).
Item four. There were one class conversation my senior year in which one of my classmates asked if killing abortion doctors was a valid option.
These four are a sampler. There were more. I could tell you about the Nazi paraphernalia at the in Fr. Angles’ office. I could tell you about his screenings of Triumph of the Will to my school mates. I could tell you about the priest who explained to a room full of high-school boys that the Statue of Liberty was a French prostitute. I could tell you about all the people who believe the United States founding fathers were evil Freemasons. But four is enough. The point is not the cataloging. The point is the diagnostic.
• • •
Who was to my right?
Nobody.
That is the important sentence. There was no group of Catholics to the right of the SSPX in the world I moved in. There were sedevacantists, technically — Catholics who held that the See of Peter had been vacant since 1958 — but by SSPX lights the sedevacantists were the further extreme, and my movement did not associate with them, precisely because that is where the frontier stopped. To our right was cliff. And the truth is, the SSPX are like people in the Trans community. They want to believe they’re in communion with the Papacy when it is clear as day they are not, just like Transvestites want everyone to believe they are male or female when they obviously are not.
Which meant, if Aristotle was right, and if Aquinas was right, that I had lived my adolescence at or very near the edge of a moral cliff, and thought I was in the middle of the map.
The diagnostic will do that to you. It is rude that way.
• • •
What the test is not.
Two clarifications, because someone will ask.
First: the test is a heuristic, not a theology. It does not tell you that the truth is halfway between two positions. Sometimes one side is right and the other side is wrong, and the mean is not "half-right." The test tells you only this: if you find yourself alone at the far end of the spectrum, examine your conscience. Not because the far end is always wrong. But because being alone at it is a lot more likely to be pride than it is to be prophecy, and you have a duty to know which one is which.
Second: the test cuts both ways. There were people in my SSPX childhood who were, unambiguously, the radicals to my right. There are people in the mainstream Church today who are, unambiguously, the radicals to my left — people to whom the sacraments, the moral teachings, the priesthood, and the papacy itself are, at best, negotiable heirlooms. If you are one of them, and you have never had a serious conservative Catholic to your right whose sermons you were willing to sit through, the test lights up for you the same way it lit up for me. Nobody escapes on the technicality of belonging to a well-behaved side.
• • •
What virtue actually looks like.
Aristotle called the man who had learned to hit the mean phronimos — the man of practical wisdom. Aquinas rendered him, in Latin, as the prudens — the prudent man. Neither of them meant the timid man. Neither of them meant the fence-sitter. They meant the man who has trained his soul, over years, to see the actual shape of the situation in front of him, and to act toward the good of it — not the good of his tribe, not the good of his outrage, not the good of the sermon he was hoping to preach.
That kind of virtue is harder than being a lemming. It is much harder than being a joker to the left or a clown to the right. It requires the periodic humility of taking the diagnostic and admitting what it says.
I would rather be stuck in the middle. I would rather be uncomfortable there than comfortable at either edge. I would rather ask, once a year, is there anyone to my right, is there anyone to my left, and if not — what am I doing here? — and be told, gently, that the answer is pray more, argue better, and get off the frontier.
That is the golden mean. It is not lukewarm. It is not both-sides-ism. It is the target that the two vices are trying to hit and missing on either side.
If the diagnostic lights up on you, the way it eventually lit up on me — welcome. You are not alone. Most of us have been the radical in the room at some point. The trick is to notice, and to take one step back toward the middle. And then, next year, to run the test again.
• • •
Stealers Wheel, as it happens, were never a religious band. But they did put the whole doctrine to music.
Jokers to the left of me, clowns to the right — stuck in the middle with you.
May we all be so stuck.