Unknowing is inescapably an exercise in moderation. I’m talking here about political moderation. In other respects, unknowing encourages us towards an immoderate lifestyle. One which embraces mischief and counters convention. In an age of populism and polarisation, though, an inclination to political moderation is unknowing’s contribution.

But moderation is a term that is fraught with ambiguity. What I’m referring to in invoking moderation is a disciplined eschewal of the easy certainties of extremism. What I’m not advocating is a lazy gravitation to the centre of wherever mainstream political debate is located.

As the last decades have demonstrated, the Overton window can be re-situated at the extremes, and positions previously recognised as moderate recast as outside the mainstream or even treacherous. In my lifetime, this has happened to the advocacy of, for example, social democracy, the maintenance of friendly relations with our European neighbours and solidarity with the Jews as an oppressed people. The years of Conservative rule have overseen a dismantling of the social contract behind the welfare state and a return to conditions of employment which evoke the Victorian era or the 1930s. Centrist opinion has colluded in the normalisation of such policies. A disciplined moderation might have named the assault on hard-won rights as an extremist aberration.

Moderation can be radical. It might seem uncontentious to argue that everyone who works should enjoy a living wage or that a wealthy economy should be able to provide a decent home for all its citizens. These were noble and mainstream aspirations in the post-war period. Their realisation today would take a sustained reshaping of the state by politicians courageous enough to challenge the ideology that has, in the past four decades, made it seem natural to marketise everything.

Moderation is a commitment to a journey with no destination. We understand the rough direction and we have an intuitive sense of when we step off course. But sometimes our mind is scrambled into not taking these moments seriously. And, before we know it, we find ourselves unmoored in a world in which human decency is a deprecated value. Where the public realm, and increasingly our private sensibilities, are appropriated for corporate gain. Where the meaning of our lives becomes nothing more than to play our bit parts in enabling the anonymous accumulation of capital. And where the only alternative offered is an outlandish politics of identity that glories in its own sense of righteous opposition and never once engages in the hard graft of achieving meaningful change.

If unknowing is necessarily an exercise in moderation, the reverse is also true. Aurelian Craiutu, who has written a compelling exploration of modern political moderation, says moderates cultivate a conscious relaxing of their own cognitive attachments:

The moderates versed in the art of self-subversion develop a systematic habit of questioning and nuancing some of their views, and are not embarrassed to acknowledge that what they once thought to be right turned out, in fact, to be wrong.

Jerry Taylor, an American advocate of moderation, also emphasises this willingness not to know things too rigidly:

The best we can do is to police our inner ideologue with a studied, skeptical outlook, a mindful appreciation of our own fallibility, and an open, inquisitive mind.

For those who hold emancipatory values, moderation can engender a degree of impatience. Emancipatory movements often elevate equality above other values, such as freedom. Taylor maintains that moderates hold the values of freedom, community and equality but recognise the tensions between them and hold an absolute commitment to none of them.

Moderation is a stance that enables democracy to happen. Moderates do not indulge in a fantasy that democracy is perfect. Rather, it creates an arena in which political disagreement can occur without descending into violence. Instead of demonising those who disagree with them, as is the fashion of our era, moderates welcome the civil expression of difference. As Craiutu puts it, democracy calls for strong ethical bearings but not sanctimony:

While it is important to strive for moral clarity, we should never assume that we possess it, because that would give us a false and dangerous sense of self-righteousness. Moral clarity is not a moment of instant enlightenment, but a normative goal that we should work for our entire life to achieve.

Moderation is a lot harder than ideological certainty. It demands that we cultivate not just civility but psychological awareness, appreciation for complexity and a certain playfulness.

But it is a playfulness that does not extend to the contemporary notion of the malleability of truth. Two of my heroes of moderation are Vaclav Havel and Albert Camus, both of whom knew totalitarianism and opposed it with moral courage. Both insisted on an idea of truth that is under attack in our postmodern intellectual climate.

As a dissident playwright in Communist Czechoslovakia, Havel was an astute analyst of the oppressive nature of the denial of truth. Through his example of the greengrocer who displays a sign saying “Workers of the world, unite!”, he described how the Communist state elicited from people rituals of support – expressions of compliance that they might not believe deep down, but which they were content to offer for the sake of a quiet life. If enough people complied, the state derived its power by persuading people effectively to live a lie. Havel instead advocated – and practised – living in truth as the means to recapture the power the totalitarian state held over its citizens. He was imprisoned for his integrity (though eventually became president of a democratic Czechoslovakia).

Camus, who witnessed the Nazi occupation of France and the outbreak of the Algerian civil war, deplored how revolutionary projects so often ended in tyranny and disaffection. He was prone to drawing attention to complexity and moral ambiguity which did not endear him to others on the French left. As his biographer, Robert Zaretsky, has described, his commitment to truth was informed by his appreciation of Greek tragedy – in particular, its portrayal of those tragic moments in life and art that are immune to resolution.

In a letter to a fictitious German friend during the Second World War, Camus pointed to the moral resilience in truth-seeking that such moments demand of us:

Simply that you readily accepted despair and I never yielded to it. Simply that you saw the injustice of our condition to the point of being willing to add to it, whereas it seemed to me that man must exalt justice in order to fight against injustice, create happiness in order to protest against the universe of unhappiness.

The relativism of our post-truth society may blind us to those situations that demand moral clarity. Postmodernism began as a critique of the grand narratives that enabled totalitarianism. But its application in politics risks becoming that from which it sought liberation: a forceful reconstruction of reality through domination. As Marci Shore has argued, the postmodern turn represents a form of nihilism to which Havel’s assertion of living in truth represents a resistance. That people collude in living a lie, does not make the truth go away:

No amount of propaganda or blind ritual or ‘bad faith’ can dissolve the ontologically real distinction between truth and lies.

Both Havel and Camus in their advocacy of intellectual modesty recognised the paradox that truth is unattainable and always contingent on circumstance. But this did not deter their pursuit of truth as the ultimate purpose of a human life. Zaretsky quotes Camus from another letter:

Only, truth … that is the uninterrupted seeking of it, the decision to tell it when one sees it, on every level, and to live it, gives a meaning, a direction to one’s march.

This strikes me as a more life-affirming stance than the nihilism and fearfulness of polarisation.

In holding convictions lightly, moderation is closely related to pluralism. It is an antidote to the singular attachments of identity politics. People generally tend to have multiple affinities, but come to emphasise some singular aspect of themselves – often in response to feeling it to be under attack. Movements of identity politics manipulate these feelings – exacerbating our sense of jeopardy, valorising victimhood and causing us to lose sight of our multiplicities that connect us with diverse communities. Succumbing to this is demoralising in every sense of the word. As Mark Lilla put it in The Once and Future Liberal:

Many identity communities are not even real communities. They’re just a loose group of individuals, narcissistically exploring some trait in their self that others around them happen to share. Many identity-based communities are not defined by internal compassion but by external rage.

In contrast to the rage of ideological certainty, moderates cultivate a quality the American commentator, David Brookes, identifies as equipoise:

It’s the ability to move gracefully through your identities — to have the passions, blessings and hurts of one balanced by the passions, blessings and hurts of several others. The person with equipoise doesn’t feel attachments less powerfully but weaves several deep allegiances into one symphony.

As another great moderate, Michael Oakeshott, has it, the best answer to ideological polarity is to cultivate enjoyment of life in all the pluralism of our interests and the diversity of the world around us.