(Photo credit: Unsplash/NIAID)
Summary
- In biology, states of balance—or a middle between two extremes—often lead to optimal outcomes.
- In politics and policy this principle is also often true. Extreme rightwing and extreme leftwing approaches to governing have both resulted in harm for society.
- Adopting balanced, middle-of-the-road policies ensure the broadest good for the greatest number of people.
A universal principle
In one of my roles in communications I often translated dense scientific studies into accessible write-ups for a lay audience. It was while parsing one such study that I came to an important realization about biology that seeped into my broader understanding of the world: that balance—the middle between two extremes—is the ideal state for living systems and also societal ones. This is especially important to consider now given the divisive times we live in where online emotions are metastasizing into real-world violence.
The study in question, Persistent serum protein signatures define an inflammatory subcategory of long COVID, found that those who suffer from long COVID have immune systems that seem stuck in overdrive. One of the immunologist who led the study explained to me that even though our immune systems fight disease, they can turn on the bodies they’re supposed to protect when there is too much immune activity. When we have too strong of an immune response, our body’s overactive defense system begins attacking its own cells and organs, and this leads to autoimmune diseases like lupus and arthritis.
As a nonscientist, I never fully considered how too much of a good thing (such as a body’s immune response) could, in fact, be bad, and that maintaining a delicate balance ensured the optimal conditions for life. A weak immune response would leave you vulnerable to disease; an overactive one could also cause illness. There are other examples of this in human health:
- Doctors recommend diets rich in fruits and vegetables, but relying exclusively on them would deprive your body of vital nutrients found in protein. In extreme cases, it could kill you.
- Green tea is brimming with antioxidants, but drinking too much can lead to anemia.
- Exercise strengthens the heart and muscles, but not allowing yourself recovery time will lead to burnout and injury.
Even in the natural world, it seems possible to have too much of a good thing. But swinging drastically in the other direction is also harmful. A diet consisting solely of meat, for example, would lead to heart disease. The extremes on either side have negative consequences—in biology, with respect to human health, but also in life more generally as we’ve seen in politics. It’s as though this were a universal principle nudging us towards balance, or a middle ground, to achieve an optimal state. Returning to our immune system, this balance would be just enough immune response to fight off disease but not enough to trigger an attack on our own cells.
Why moderate, balanced politics is better for society
Focusing more on the world outside our bodies, in politics and policy the harmful outcomes of imbalanced states (either too far left or too far right) can be easily imagined, and in some cases have already been realized. Take for example the issue of public safety. The left and right espouse differing views of how society should police crime and public disorder. Conservatives want tougher penalties and harsher sentences; progressives, more social services to provide support for desperate people turning to survival crime. But both of these solutions by themselves would fail to fix the problem.
Locking people up in jail without addressing the root causes of crime would only bloat our prison system with inmates and fail to disrupt the pipeline to criminality that often begins in young adulthood. Providing only social services and never punishing those who commit crimes (especially chronic offenders), on the other hand, would lead to lawless chaos that would eventually compel people to seek vigilante justice.
There is such a thing as toxic compassion, where compassion without limits prevents accountability. This would lead to devastating consequences in a rules-based society, as we’ve seen with the decriminalization of drugs in Oregon through Measure 110. This well-intentioned policy was so disastrous in real life that it was eventually reversed. Both punishment and support are needed to maintain a balance, or middle ground, between two divergent philosophies. The same measured approach should also be applied to immigration, economic policy, and taxation.
Given the current geopolitical instability and combustible social divisions in North America, it’s clear now that any political system (left or right) taken to the extreme without guardrails is harmful. A shift to the middle and a balanced approach is, I believe, the best solution to restoring a prosperous, productive society that in turn would help dial down the online and real-world volatility.
Some may see this as a boring compromise lacking in conviction—to never truly believe in and live by principles that are faithful to an ideology. In Toronto, when I covered municipal politics as a journalist, we called it the “mushy middle”—listless and lacking vigor, politicians who sometimes vote left and sometimes vote right. But thanks to the wisdom of time and experience, I now call it sensible, measured, and smart. It’s an approach guided by reason, not emotion, and evidently even endorsed by biology.
If Mother Nature lives by this universal rule, perhaps so should we.