Sometimes the Center Means following the Stream

 Following the stream to its source, or to its destination.

I've always been in love with rivers. In Fifth Grade we studied U.S. geography, and I spent hours pouring over the physical map of the country, following rivers. If I had a canoe, I thought, could I cross the country with just that? Well, it would take some uphill paddling, but turns out you could make it if you started with the Mississippi, turned onto the Missouri, and then up the Platte to one of its sources high in the Rockies. Well, you get the picture. 

What about going downstream? I think of the children's' story "Scuffy the Tugboat," where the little boat starts in a bathtub, but finds his way into a stream and then a river, and finally ends up in the sea.

Either way, you come to know this river that you know otherwise just by crossing the bridge to the other side.  And this is also a way to understand something well, to avoid an extremist view (view from the end of a limb--but that's a different metaphor.)

This isn't just about political centrism.  It has to do with all aspects of life, where we do well to situate ourselves in a spot where we know what's going on and why.

Using the Example of the Jewish Fall Feasts and their relation to Christianity.

My current example has to do with the Jewish observance of Yom Kippur, which has fascinated me for many years. This is a feast first mentioned in the Book of Numbers in the Hebrew Scriptures, where Moses calls for a day of fasting and mortification on the 10th day of the 7th month--ten days after the celebration of the new year on the first day, which is now known as Rosh Hashanah.

I've wondered what happened to Yom Kippur in the strain of Judaism known as Christianity. Clearly, the early Christians did observe Jewish feasts, so why not this one.  I pictured this as a stream that suddenly disappears into the earth, although it has not gone away in Jewish observance, so it's a bit unfair to suggest that it has disappeared. Only in Christian tradition has this taken place.

It took some digging, but it turns out this stream actually continued in Christian practice, being known as the autumn fast. Even Paul refers to this--or Luke, actually, in his account of the turbulent voyage on the way to Rome. Later, Pope Leo the Great claims it to be from ancient times. In my childhood this tradition continued as the fall Ember Days. 

For those nostalgic for the glorious past, when the old liturgy reigned and Ember Days stood proud on the calendar four times a year--in Advent, Lent,  before Pentecost and in the fall, I will assure you that these were not exactly a great addition to our liturgical year. They were there, on the calendar, and we were required to abstain on a Wednesday along with the Friday--or maybe it was just fasting on the Wednesday and Saturday, along with Friday of those weeks. No one made much of an ado about it. In fact, the word "liturgy" was not used in ordinary circles, and you just went to mass. You knew the season changed when the vestments changed color, but that was about it. Worship was much more a question of whether you managed to be present during the three main parts of the mass, which meant you could squeak in by the offertory and leave after communion.  

However, what did start happening during those years was a renewal of the liturgy. Ember Days did not figure in, but a renewed emphasis on the three days of Triduum and the original liturgies of those sacred days was reintroduced. No Ember Days at Pentecost either, but in more recent years, a renewed Vigil of Pentecost. There were new, more authentic and meaningful liturgies of baptism, confirmation, reconciliation, the anointing of the sick, and of Christian funerals and weddings. 

It's as if the stream that had continued from the Jewish tradition had been amplified by new tributaries, giving new life to liturgy.

Now this does not mean that the current of the Ember Days needs to be left out. I am excited at the idea of reincorporating the fall fast and thanksgiving into our year, since it fits so well with the way our lives move into this new season. We have no Church observance to help us with this, even if we do add autumn colors to our environment and begin our new year of Christian education. It has all kinds of possibilities. A fast could mark the beginning of this new season, and thanksgiving, a fitting way to enter fall. 

Ember Days as an outlet for the stream begun in Numbers and continued with Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur gives and example of how exploring the course of something from its source to its endings can expand our understanding of everything in-between. Discovering the endings can help us understand the center.

Both Sides

I've been reading Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Climate Change, by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway. This new edition of the 2010 publication features a Foreword by former Vice President Al Gore, author of An Inconvenient Truth.

Scientist who fought the growing evidence that cigarette smoke was instrumental in causing lung cancer argued that we should all consider "both sides" of the question--this, after data had piled up very convincingly on the anti-tobacco side.  The authors point out that both sides are not equally correct. You can't insist on fairness when one side is simply wrong.

At a press conference on August 15, 2017 , then-President Trump responded to questions from reporters about his reaction to violent protests in Charlottesville, VA, "you also had people, that were very fine people, on both sides." This response has become the classic example of moral equivalency, or "both-sides-ism."

How can we look at this through the mountaintop image of Centrism? It’s very simple: there is not just one “other side” with a mountaintop (contrary to what the bear climbed up to see.) That’s what you’ve got when you’re down in the valley. From the top, it’s a 360° view in 3D. You see the whole picture. There are not two sides to the whole picture, but just the whole puzzle fit together.  Even if the whole view is not completely visible for some reason, there is not “the other side,” but the rest of the picture.   In almost every situation there will be further intricacies to explore, but not a different side.

This is what Centrism is all about: the full circle view.

 

 

 

Or, the Google Maps View

 

Going on with what it means to be a Centrist; today we don’t need mountaintops to provide the view from above.  We’ve got Google Maps!  Gone are the old atlases, and the paper maps we used to pick up at a service station when visiting a new place. (Or there was the visit to AAA for travel maps, of which I still have a box. I also have rolls of section maps with detail of the county I used to live in.  I love maps.)

But with Google Maps, as with GPS, there’s a caveat.  Following step-by-step directions to a destination is like living down at the base of the mountain: you’re only seeing the area close to you.  It’s like driving on your road through the valley, wondering how this river drainage fits with the next one.  To get the big picture, one has to spread out the map.

This Is what Centrism offers: the big picture.

You have a great little newspaper/news site that is pretty balanced, you think, and gives you all the news you need. Or maybe you just bounce around, picking the news you want to read. First of all, you have to trust that source. We all know people who don’t trust entire  sets of news outlets.

Trusting your source is essential, just as trusting your GPS is.  Ever been taken on a wild goose chase by a GPS? (I’ve ended up out in the wild at least once; another time got stuck going in circles in Turlock, California. ) GPS is great, but it’s even better to know as much or more than it knows before you start.

Same goes for your news source. If you know the basics of the situation before you listen, you can avoid being led astray by the innate bias of any source. This isn’t God’s voice thundering on the radio waves, but that of a human who might have been influenced by someone who knows less that you do, if you’re being your real, intelligent self.  That human might EVEN have an ax to grind, an ideology to promote, a wacky theory to air.  If you don’t know, you have to trust that voice; but do you?

Again, we’re not talking about the Middle of anything here. Think of the GPS again. The middle is wherever you are right now.  Everything fans out from there, and you can enlarge your screen to  see father out.

You can find graphs showing the relative left- or right-orientation of various media sites. I’ve shown these to various people, and there is a definite tendency to see your own views as moderate, no matter what they are. To gun-loving conservatives, PBS is way to the left; to a universal-health-care progressive, the Wall Street Journal is right-wing.

The Middle is relative to where you are coming from, in every sense of the word.  The Center is the big picture. It’s what you get when you drop the news site and go to the history book. Yes, book, and, ideally,  a book from someone who has put in time and research in order to get the facts in order.  And even there you will find bias, so it might take more than one historian.

Finding the Center is not a quick fix. Not just Googling an answer. Rather, it takes time to see how all the parts fit together. If you like puzzles, it’s fun!

What Is Centrism?

August 7, 2022

 

For Climbing to the Center, I picture communities situated in valleys surrounding a high mountain. The valleys channel various tributaries of a river they all join downstream, but here, are separate rivers with very separate populations. One may support coal miners; another, orchardists. One is home to artists and hippies, another to retired folk. In one, German farmers raise onions and potatoes; in another, the crop may be marijuana.

People upriver are looked on askance, maybe objects of derision. More distant neighbors are less known, more of a mystery, and certainly not of great concern. Our own place among the mountain’s brood is not clear. It’s our mountain.

I lived in a valley in Colorado, where peaks above 14,000 feet stood about us in three directions. I was one to hike the trails, but claimed no interest in reaching a summit.  That was until one day, when a climber friend invited us to summit Mt. Sneffels. Reaching the top was a game changer. Suddenly I saw where we all stood, how it all fit together—which river ran into which other, where we sat among the other peaks, who our neighbors were. 

It was a lot of work and perilous climbing to the peak: boulders to climb over, narrow trails with sharp drop-offs, steep and unrelenting. At one point we had to step across a crevice where a misstep could have sent one hundreds of feet to the rocks below.

This is a metaphor. I’m talking about what it means to be a Centrist.

The term has been defined in various ways over the years, and from Wikipedia to The Atlantic and beyond. Wrongly so, I believe.

Here are some of the ways Atlantic forum writers have described Centrists:

·      The compromising centrist

·      The apathetic centrist

·      The ambivalent centrist

·      The impossible centrist

These titles are fairly self-explanatory, I think, but a reading of the article will clarify.

Writers from the Atlantic have also weighed in on centrism over the years, and their assessments give some idea of the, in my opinion, misconstruing of centrism.

·      “They’re popular,” wrote Matthew Cooper.

·      “They’re trouble,” according to Ross Douthat.

·      “They couldn’t care less about bipartisanship,” says Clive Cook.

But, says Molly Ball, they are principled advocates for a bipartisan republic (she calls them moderates). This comes closer to what I believe centrism is about, and what I aspire to as a centrist. And yes, I believe Philip Bump is onto something when he says, “It’s a vanity term.”

No, I don’t feel it’s vanity to stand out from the crowd, “to be part of a group not beholden to prefabricated opinions.” Add to that, the latest ideology.

So, seeing centrism as a mountaintop, and considering what it takes to get there, is a centrist merely a compromiser (I will just climb up to that shoulder, but don’t ask me to go onto the boulders)?  Is she apathetic (I don’t care if I make it to the top, because frankly I don’t care what’s on the other side of the mountain.)?  Is he ambivalent (Hmmm, not sure what I’m seeing out there, but maybe it doesn’t matter?)  Or impossible—too much to hope for (nobody can climb up there?)

I believe centrism entails a choice, an energetic commitment to find answers that work, to slog through the mud of indecision and brushwhack the confusion of conflicting ideas and fight the well-worn, easy downward paths of ideology, and to climb to a point where the truth of the situation can be seen clearly.

That’s what this blog will be about. In one way or another, I hope to write about situations that illustrate this principle in daily life.

I don’t claim they are the only ones, and hope readers can supply their own, or simply consider whether these examples have merit.