The Idiocy of Partisanship and the Moral Utility of Goldilocks
One of childhood’s earliest lessons is the importance of moderation and the imprudence of extremes. This is evident from the earliest moments of our socialization, during which imbalanced behavior yields tangible consequences. When you tease too much, it comes across as mean-spirited and you play alone at recess. When you protest too loudly in the grocery store, your mom drags you out by the ears kicking and screaming, and suddenly her “no” at you getting a chocolate bar seems preferable to the public humiliation you have wrought upon yourself. Even before such socialization imparts this wisdom onto us, our nerve endings do. You touch a hot stove and a bright-hot pain pierces your fingertips, singing your skin and stinging for days after. You quickly learn the importance of oven mitts.
Too much of anything is bad. Heat, snide remarks, and incessant grocery store petulance. Even too much water is negative—the life-giving cure to everything according to WebMD! I remember being horrified in middle school when my teacher regaled a tale of a woman who had entered a contest for a free cruise which required its participants to drink the most water. This woman had won the competition, but in drinking inordinate amounts of water and flushing out all of the sodium in her body, had lost her life. The horror story illustrated to me the importance of moderation in every facet of life, even seemingly benign ones. It also made me ponder my teacher’s questionable motivations for sharing this with us at all. She also told us that sunsets were nothing more than a cause of pollution (a claim I have never substantiated for myself). Nonetheless, I began to eye every glass of water with a healthy smidgen of caution.
I am not alone. The morale of moderation is archetypal. It is embodied and preserved in one of our most infamous and beloved fables, the tale of Goldilocks, whose titular character learns it while breaking and entering. In the tale, she essentially learns that the optimal condition for anything, such as soup, is it being “just right”—not too hot, nor too cold, but a happy medium. The term “the goldilocks zone” is even used by scientists who scour the galaxy in search of potentially life harboring planets. The successfully life-bearing planet under this model cannot be too hot or too cold, too close to the sun nor too far. This zone, as well as the valuable moral lesson from which its name derives, refers to life’s optimal conditions as being “just right,” not too much of anything.
It is strange then, that our political systems fail to embody the same lesson we expect children to take to heart. More so than strange, it is maddening to see people lazily revert to tribalism and ideological extremes when arguing politics. It is one of the main reasons I so quickly fell out of love with my political science major in college. I loved the infinite possibility, application, and interpretation of political theory, but dreaded the stilted, bureaucratic minutia of anything “electoral” due to its clinical, over-simplified categorizations of D vs. R. These categorizations are internalized by radical people who feel unconditional support of an entire movement’s stances, due to their belonging on that “team,” take precedence over their critical discernment of each individual issue. Partisanship, particularly that which encourages the choice between two ever-diverging extremes, encourages and relies upon this idiocy.
For context, I enjoy ideological combat. Adversarial interactions are a cornerstone of personal and societal progress. However, the partisan American electoral model encourages boring, predictable, and lazy ideological combat that much more resembles the senseless, tragic banality of gang violence than elite demonstrations of cool rationality—similarly resorting to one’s preferred color in justifying its provocation, red or blue. This extreme or that. Meanwhile, the cautious moderate is virally mocked on twitter for their meekness or berated in more professional vernacular by jargon-riddled think pieces for being an inept and inadequate citizen, all for not acquiescing to a flawed and reductive system. Meanwhile, moderate candidates never get platformed. They simply aren’t outrageous enough, not in this attention economy! What a time we live in, for discernment to not only be discouraged but mocked. I think these so called “smart people” that order our world need to brush up on Goldilocks.
