In Defense Of The Middle Ground
Have you ever wanted to rebut someone’s argument before actually hearing the argument? The other day the YouTube algorithm offered me a TED Talk—or what I thought was TED Talk; it’s from TED, but actually an animated short—titled, “Can you outsmart the fallacy that divided a nation?” with the description “Explore the middle ground fallacy, which assumes that the truth is always a compromise between two extreme opposing positions.”
According to Wikipedia, which calls the same thing the “argument to moderation”, it’s defined as “the fallacy that the truth is always in the middle of two opposites.”
As someone who finds himself, in the last 10 years or so, increasingly using moderation/the middle ground as my starting point with any emerging story or issue, but had not heard of this concept, I immediately bristled. But the good news was that there’s a pretty easy out here: Both TED and Wikipedia use the word “always.”
Of course a more moderate position isn’t always correct. The example on Wikipedia—if someone claims the sky is blue, and someone else says it’s yellow, that doesn’t mean the sky is green—is a trivial case.
But okay, maybe I could watch the thing, too. Like I said, it turns out to not actually be a TED Talk, just from the same organization.
So I guess this is some sort of kids’ video, and it takes a single issue that is very easy to be on the correct side of nowadays1 but, at the time, less easy (not hard, but less easy).
Given the apparent audience—although quoting Eugene Debs in the first 10 seconds makes me wonder—a simplistic approach is not something I’m going to get too worked up about.
More problematic is the conflation of a political compromise with the actual holding of the views matching the compromise, while ignoring the underlying views that force the other side to come towards you. The fallacy pertains to the truth of a statement, not the correctness of a policy outcome.
Maybe an older, longer video about the same subject will give us more to chew on.
This speaker, Jon Jureidini, immediately refers to the supposed error as “a useful mental shortcut that often does good for us.” Seems like calling a labelling a concept that is useful more often than not a “fallacy” is rather sensationalist.
I don’t even disagree with that initial framing. My own first take after thinking about Wikipedia’s definition, but before watching either video, was “No, it’s not always correct, just correct often enough to be the most reasonable default barring new or other information.”
But it turns out that a) this guy makes the same mistake as the other video, conflating compromising actions and underlying views. Plus, after saying that the middle ground can be a “useful mental shortcut”, where does Jureidini find exceptions? On ideologically-charged questions, naturally. Climate change2 and Israel–Palestine3 for two.
Jureidini, like the makers of the first video, is misapplying the fallacy.
In fact, the middle ground fallacy seems to be an accusation someone will—can?—only make from an ideological starting point. Citing it doesn’t actually address the argument it’s being applied to; it just accuses the proponent of not being sufficiently committed to the accuser’s cause, righteous or not.
Even when you get to the point where the evidence suggests one of your ideologically-grounded opinions might be true—how do you best achieve the resulting desirable outcomes? You almost certainly will have to come to some sort of the dirty C-word, because not everyone is going to agree with you.
The actual question is, does a given compromise move you toward or away from your ultimate goal? The little cartoon didn’t propose what would have been a better course of action in 1820. Was the problem really with the compromise, or was it with the pro-slavery maximalists who made compromise necessary?
Was the problem really with the compromise, or was it with the pro-slavery maximalists who made compromise necessary?
Or how about today’s most emotionally charged political question? With abortion, on one extreme, you have an infamous essay arguing not only that abortion should be allowed for the entire duration of a pregnancy, but that infanticide is also okay; on the other, you have Monty Python’s satirical “Every Sperm Is Sacred.”
In matters of politics, do you have to pick a middle ground between those two positions? Obviously. Duh.
Or illegal immigration: You can let everyone stay, or kick everyone out.4 I am fairly certain that 99% of people believe that the correct policy is somewhere in between.
In most cases, the exact middle ground is probably wrong, but somewhere between two extremes is obviously correct.
So, how seriously do I take the “middle ground fallacy”? Not very. It states the obvious while almost never actually applying to the argument at hand, and even more rarely refuting the argument.
Although slavery still exists in many 21st century societies and, define the word loosely enough, some will argue it still exists in the United States.
Too often for my comfort, the “alarmists” turn out to have anti-capitalist agenda, or (to be so charitable as to render this complaint meaningless) at least oppose the perceived excesses of modern capitalism. And no, I’m not, um… denying that “deniers” might have their own ideological blinders.
This one is more obvious.
On both these issues, abortion and immigration, I’m drawing no sharper a line than Jureidini does by insisting that a one-state solution (of one flavor or the other) is the only answer to the Israel–Palestine conflict.