Dealing with Triangulators: How to Call out Their B.S.

Reasonable people can disagree about who should be on the Mount Rushmore of Philosophers.  But I think we all can agree on two people: Plato and Aristotle.  Plato used reasoned discourse to seek out our best angels.  He wrote beautifully and inspired us all to keep our heads in the clouds – or, more specifically, to leave our caves, walk into the sunlight, and open our minds to the essence of beauty, freedom, love, justice, and goodness.   I, for one, could not argue with Alfred North Whitehead, who taught that the “safest general characterization of the philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”   To be sure, however, Plato doesn’t stand alone.  Far from being a lone wolf, he is known for having one of the world’s most brilliant philosophical teachers (Socrates) and one of the world’s most brilliant philosophical students (Aristotle).

Aristotle built on his teacher’s brilliance and grounded it in all the right ways.  He equally respected common sense, empirical thought and the rigors of logic.  It is difficult to know whether to praise Aristotle more for his depth of thought or his breadth of thought.    If you are a lover of religion, your favorite Greek philosopher is probably Plato.  But if you are a lover of western philosophy, political theory, or science, my guess is that Aristotle is your man.

So what do you say we use a little Aristotelian thinking to call out some bullshit? 

Book 2 of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics spoke about the “virtues” and preached the doctrine of the golden mean.  The virtues are identified as being placed in between two vices – one indicating too much of some disposition and the other indicating too little.  For example, one such virtue is “courage,” which is the mean between foolhardiness and cowardliness.     Another is “temperance”, the mean between gluttony and self-denial or asceticism.  A third is “generosity,” the mean between wastefulness and miserliness or uncharitableness.   You get the idea.

But that’s only half of the point.  You’ll also note that the so-called “virtues” are identified more with one side of the divide than the other.  In other words, they represent a clear departure from the norm in one direction.  When it comes to the quality of risk-taking, for example, we praise people for their “courage” because people generally have too little of that quality.  So even though we don’t want people to be foolhardy, we’re generally more concerned that they’ll be cowardly.  Similarly, when it comes to self-restraint, we praise people for their “temperance” because most of us have too little of the relevant quality.  So even though we don’t want people to be completely ascetic, we’re more concerned that they’ll be gluttonous and name our virtue to guard against that outcome.    In each case, one vice seems to be more directly contrary to the virtue than its corresponding vice on the other side of the divide, at least for most people. 

With that as background, let’s take a look the contemporary rhetorical device – or should I just shorten that word and say “vice”? -- known as Triangulation.   Triangulators claim that their position represents the voice of reason because it is situated between two extremes:  namely, the respective positions of their ideological opponents.   Most of us know this device from politics.  Bill Clinton was associated with it when he was both a Presidential candidate in 1992 and then again when he was President.  He loved to take on the “left” in his own Party and thereby represent himself as the reasonable man between crazy leftists, on the one hand, and whacko-bird Republicans on the right.  Those weren’t his exact words, but they may as well have been.  In fact, they convey pretty much the same picture all the political triangulators try to paint. 

Personally, I see the Triangulation device used outside of politics as well.  When I read books about religion, I often see writers promote their own reasonableness by contrasting their position with two so-called extremes.  Maybe their extremes are represented by the religious fundamentalists, on the one hand, and the thoroughly secular (aka “amoral hedonists”), on the other.  Once they set up these strawmen, our heroes, the Triangulators, swoop in right down the middle and save the day!

Thank you, Mighty Mouse.   Thank all you Triangulators, or “centrists,” as you like to call yourselves, for your humor, your sanctimony and your illogic.

I find Triangulation funny because the perpetrators of it play the same pathetic card over and over again and in that sense remind me a little of the Three Stooges.  I say “a little” because, as one commentator pointed out, those boys constantly turned to the same damned bits -- “slaps, eye pokes, head conks [and] nose honks.”   Still, at least they had some variety.  Triangulators seem to be one-trick ponies.  “I’m the reasonable man.  I’m the centrist.  Everyone else is on one extreme or the other.”  Yawn.

As for the sanctimony of the Triangulators, that should be obvious by now.  Their stock in trade is to pretend that only their position is reasonable and everyone else’s is extreme.    To be fair, it is common for them to claim, in essence, that they represent the silent majority, so in that sense, they don’t come across as elitist so much as thoroughly disrespectful of the possibility that maybe, just maybe, some of their ideological opponents might actually have a valid point.  Almost by definition, how can an “extremist” ever have anything valid to say? 

As for the illogic of the Triangulators, that is what I would like to concentrate on for the remainder of this post.  You see, it is critical that all of us understand their little game and call them on it.  Triangulation is similar to what logicians call the fallacy of the excluded middle.  Under that fallacy, a person takes a shot at one position (call it “Z”) and says that because Z is wrong, then their position (“A”) must be right.  Implicitly, they assume that there are only two possible positions that can be taken on an issue and that every other possibility (call them “B through Y”) does not exist.  That’s why this is called the fallacy of the excluded middle – the proponent of the position excludes the possibility of all possible moderate or “middle” positions.  

Similarly, the Triangulators, instead of suggesting that there are two possibilities, suggest that there are precisely three – one extreme position, its polar opposite, and their own.   But as Aristotle pointed out, when it comes to each disposition of character, there is actually an entire continuum of possibilities.  Most people tend more toward one extreme than the other, and virtue rests in moving away from the norm and toward the road less taken – but not all the way down that road.  In other words, there may be a few people who represent the “Z” spot (the completely foolhardy whacko-bird who never met a risk he didn’t take) and many others who represent the “A” or “B” spots (we know them as total wimps), but virtue lies somewhere around “S” or “T” – clearly courageous, just not to the maximal degree.  Triangulators would never admit to such nuance. 

Let’s apply this lesson to the man that so many people are talking about right now, Howard Schultz.  He wants to be President despite having no political experience and an unwillingness to run for the nomination of either mainstream party.  He is claiming that both parties have become extreme, the one on the right and the other on the left, and the nation needs a voice of reason like his, who represents the silent majority.  Only a “centrist” like Schultz, the argument goes, can provide the common sense reform that America needs, as is demonstrated by his willingness to take on the heartless economic inequalities perpetrated by the Republicans without embracing the socialist, pie-in-the-sky proposals of the Democrats. 

Clearly, Mr. Schultz has not read his Aristotle.  If he had, he would have addressed a fundamental question: is our society’s central problem from an economic standpoint that wealth is distributed too unequally or that people are overly willing to threaten the hallowed market mechanisms that should be left well enough alone?    If Schultz believes that the problem is the latter, he should say so.  He might even want to become a Republican and challenge the incumbent President based on the argument that even though laissez-faire economics generally works best, there are a few market failures that this Administration is failing to address and needs to.   If, by contrast, Schultz believes that we have an economic inequality crisis, than damn it, say so!   Stop straw-manning all the efforts on the political left to try to rectify that inequality by labeling them extremist.  Praise these Democrats’ goals, and promote whatever approach to those goals makes the most economic sense.  I guarantee you that the Democratic voters will take you seriously ... and that you would fit in well within the Democratic tent. 

By running as an Independent, Schultz is making the statement that he is indifferent to whether Trump (and his feed-the-rich economics) or some Democratic progressive (with their emphasis on equality of outcomes and not merely equality of opportunity) is elected.  Ralph Nader essentially admitted as much when he ran for President in 2000, and he purported to be guilt-free when his candidacy threw the election to George W. Bush and gave us the Iraq War and a generation of indifference toward climate change.  So far, from what I can tell, Schultz has been unwilling to declare his preferences between the two political parties, or even to state his indifference.  He would prefer instead to play the Triangulation Game and to repeat over and over again that he won’t be a spoiler, he’ll be the winner.

Honestly, if you truly think Howard Schultz has a chance to win the election, you should go to the E.R. and tell the medics that you’ve had a stroke.  But what Schultz and his Triangulation Logic might accomplish is to give Donald Trump a second term as a minority President.  Try to imagine six more years like the last two.    Or better yet, just ask yourself, if Aristotle had a ballot, what do you think he would he do with it?  I am planning to vote with him, not with Schultz or with Trump.