Positive Middle Path

I chilled out a lot since I was younger; and the reason is that I’ve seen many things that I care about addressed by other people. There are enough people fighting racism, and there are enough people working to cure drug addiction. I do not see the need to get involved in either effort.

There are however problems that not enough is being done about. One is violence against women; another is conversion to better energy technologies. I have been a part of efforts to address both.

Now to be fair there are any number of liberal causes that are wrong. There are people attacking international capitalism. International capitalism is the reason that 1 billion people in China have risen from abject poverty to decent lifestyle in four decades. There are people who think that people in business are bastards. I have known a number of businessmen who were good people, and none of my bosses were ever bad to me.

I seek what I call the positive middle path. It is to see what each party is right about and combine it while doing away with what each party is wrong about. It is valid to pursue economic opportunity and technological progress; it is not valid to blindly plunder nature. It is valid to strive for women to have safe life inside the home and fulfilling life outside the home; it is not valid to deny women beauty and love or to teach them to be horrible human beings.

Most of my friends are on the Left, and their concerns matter to me. However I’ve also known good people on the Right as well. Once again, I seek the positive middle path. I don’t mean any middle path, as the middle can be found in all sorts of undesirable places. I mean the positive middle path that combines what the sides are right about and confronts what they are wrong about.

I want to see both economic prosperity and sane treatment of the environment. I want to see both better treatment of women by men and better treatment of men by women. There is no contradiction between such things; it is the task of human intelligence to make both possible.

It is toward solving problems like these that human intelligence must direct itself.