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There is a middle ground which has always left me cold. I am comfortable at the extremes -- everything or nothing. I've been comfortable with steamed towels and fully reclining seat beds in first class, driven 100,000 automobiles and eaten at some of the most expensive restaurants in New York (all of that was on someone else's dime, lest you think I am or ever have been rich, I am not, nor have I ever been). I was comfortable at that extreme, but I've also ridden in the cattle car that is Southwest Airlines and consumed $.39 Tina's burritos three times a day in the squalor of the trailer park I was living in at the time. I was also comfortable with that. More so in fact since any sustained life of luxury must eventually confront the backs on which it is made possible(*Let's not kid ourselves, me eating $.39 burritos in a trailer park in California is still very much luxury.*). The point isn't the things I have done so much as the simple fact that I am most comfortable at extremes.
It's things in the middle that make me uncomfortable, make me want to run for the hills. Business class, Chipolte, suburbs, The Gap. The middle smacks of mediocrity. It's build in to the language -- medium gives us mediocrity (*mediocritatem*); middle, middling. Interestingly, all manner of words surrounding mediocre and middle don't acquire their modern, negative connotations until the late 16c.
It's possible this sort of dualist thinking, this flip-flopping from one extreme to another is a personality flaw of mine. It's also possibly not even mine, but something culturally inherited as it turns out, so much of what we consider ourselves, our beliefs, turn out to be.
Some cultures venerate the middle way. The Golden Mean. The Middle Way. Definitions of what exactly is meant by the middle way differ somewhat around China and the rest of Asia. Buddhists see it as the path by which we gain insight by transcending all the various opposing statements about existence. The middle way is the way by which we avoid the pain of life's confusing, seemingly endless duality.
In China, where Confucianism has a long storied history, the middle way seems to mean something more like the path on which one finds balance. Sometimes it's not translated as the middle way, but as the Doctrine of the Mean. Ezra Pound liked to call it the "unswerving pivot".
It's possible I'm twisting some possibly suspect translations of ancient texts, themselves culturally tied to the time in which they were composed to fit my own ends(*Hmm, probably I should apply for a job in academia*), but if *all* knowledge is culturally imprisoned then it seems to me that nihilism is the only answer and, while on my bleaker days I find myself feeling a bit nihilistic, by and large I refuse to give in to that line of reasoning.
All of which is spineless qualification of why I think the middle way consist not of actually staying on a middle path, but of balancing one's center between extremes. The farm house to retreat from the city. The midnight burrito snack when the sustenance of [Alinea][1] has long disappeared.
To be sure, that's not what Confucius wrote. Nor does it seem to be what the author of The Doctrine of the Mean(*The authorship of the The Doctrine of the Mean is somewhat debatable, though it seems most scholars ascribe it [Zisi, a grandson of Confucius][2].*) meant exactly. From my research it seems that most western scholars (the only ones I can read since I don't read Mandarin) say that the doctrine of the mean means what you would expect -- adhering to moderation, avoiding extremes.
You don't have to step so far outside of Western culture to find this celebration of moderation. Stoicism touch on this too in a variety of contexts, suggesting that we avoid becoming accustomed to luxury lest we become incapable of appreciating anything else.
If all you drink is $100 bottles of wine, that $2 bottle will taste like shit. But if most of the wine your drink is cheap then the occasional $100 bottle will be a revelation.
Again, that's me, not stoicism which, so far as I know, never turns the watch out for the acclimatizing of luxury idea on its ear to consider the acclimatizing effects of poverty. In other words perhaps we ought to really splash out from time to time so we do not become too inured to self-imposed poverty.
Of course if your poverty is not self-imposed then you have no choice, which is perhaps at least some of the reason any philosophical system concerned with transcendence of daily existence will necessarily to value austerity over luxury -- to do otherwise would be to severely limit your audience(*which isn't to say that I think it's all a conspiracy to keep poor people happy with their lot and less likely to agitate, though certianly there are elements of that in nearly every philophical system since every philosophical system is born out of cultures and civilizations with stratfied power structures and a vested iinterest in maintaining them. The Tao to Ching being one possible exception to that general rule.*). Better to stick with something that will make the greatest number of people feel better about themselves and their lives. Hence the middle way it would seem.
But what if the center, the middle way, the point of balance is actually found by hopping back and forth between extremes?
I don't know that it is, I only know that I feel comfortable at the extremes, but never either one for too long.
[1]: https://content.alinearestaurant.com/html/index.html
[2]: http://www.chinaknowledge.de/History/Zhou/personszisi.html
[3]: http://www.chinaknowledge.de/Literature/Classics/zhongyong.html
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