Revisiting Icarus

Even 3,000 years ago, the Greeks knew the wisdom of the center.

Since about 2015 it has become almost accepted wisdom in cultural and political spaces that the one place you never want to be is in the center on any given issue. You simply must advocate from the left or the right. Enforcement of this norm can be quite tyrannical, especially online. This article could probably reach 40,000 words if I were to pour over the many dog-piles that garnered media attention because someone entrenched in a political camp (left and right) dared to veer toward a more moderate position, or in some cases, simply appeal to the grayish nuance of an issue. More often than not, these people were expelled from their communities, or tarred with whatever label marked them as the opposing side. This wasn’t exactly what I would call “cancel culture,” because it usually didn’t result in any disastrous consequence for the person, but the potential impact on our culture was palpable nonetheless. The message has been delivered. If you approach an issue with nuance, if you try to stake a moderate position, at best you’re a “centrist.” And centrists are just wrong. 

A lot of ink has been devoted to why centrism is a dirty word, and some of the points made are valid. In The Guardian, Rebecca Solnit argues that centrism is just another form of bias, a bias that seeks to maintain the status quo. However, Ian Leslie’s “The Case for Centrism” counters that centrist positions are not necessarily an insistence that nothing change, but rather that change is gradual, incremental and combines the desires of both extremes. I also take issue with this notion that extremism on the right is worse than extremism on the left. While I do think the right is more prone to physical violence than the left, I have witnessed, in the last four to five years, too much life-ruining professional and economic damage committed by social media-driven campaigns from the left to buy this argument. Staking out a political position as an identity is, in itself, a dangerous proposition. What I’m being asked by people like Solnit is: “Would you rather get kicked in the face by a jackbooted Neo-Nazi, or lose the job that allows you to pay your mortgage because you told a blonde joke in an elevator?” How about I choose neither?

Don’t be a centrist, Matthew. 

But I’m not beholden to the term “centrist” and if centrism looks anything like what Solnit pointed out in her Guardian piece, I don’t want any part of it. My instincts tell me that “centrist” has been put through a carwash of gaslighting, strawmanning and reductionism, but that’s neither here nor there. If you want “centrist” you can have that pawn. That doesn’t mean there isn’t wisdom to be found in the center. 

“Things fall apart/the center can not hold.” - W.B. Yeats

I’ve written in the past about the tension between those who advocate for gradual social evolution and those who prefer violent social revolution. In her piece, Solnit quotes from Martin Luther King Jr., whose “Letter From A Birmingham Jail” decries the “white moderate” who conveniently advocates for gradual evolution when it comes to whether or not blacks should be able to sit at a lunch counter, or sleep in a motel. As I’ve stated before, there are some cases when gradual social evolution can not (and should not) work on moral grounds. Solnit, and other writers of her persuasion, love to quote from this excerpt in King’s essay just as much as “classical liberals” love to quote from the “content of their character” speech. Solnit loves this quote about white moderates because it appears to lay to waste the concept of a center and places MLK Jr. firmly in the “violent social revolution” camp, a position that allows Solnit and other staunch, online progressives to claim King as one of them: a radical. But Solnit fails to make a contextual distinction between the changes that need to take place in our society in 2024 and the changes that needed to take place in 1964. The latter was a case for human dignity, basic, natural rights, the need to address the generational trauma and psychological damage segregation was doing to nearly 15% of the American population. Yes, violent social revolution was the proper response in 1964. The question being answered then was “Am I a human being, equal to every other human being on the planet?” The questions being answered now are matters of compromise and practical policies that benefit the greater good. I’m sorry, but “Shouldn’t a white person be prevented from wearing a Mexican sombrero on Halloween?” is not the same question, and does not require the same urgent answer as: “Should every American be able to drink from the same water fountain?” The former question can be answered in a fair and socially compromising way. The latter can not. 

It’s important to remember that MLK Jr. was really calling out the white moderate who was saying “wait.” Because wait had come to mean “never.” The center does not mean “wait.” Staying still and staying in the middle are not the same things. One can be in the center and still move forward.

This is something Daedalus was teaching Icarus in the famous mythological story. For the vast majority of you who haven’t thought about Greek Mythology since you closed that little book by Edith Hamilton back in high school, the story of Icarus will probably still ring a bell. It’s the one where Icarus makes a pair of bird’s wings out of wax and uses them to fly. However, when he flies too close to the sun, the wax melts, the feathers begin to drip off, and Icarus plummets to his death in the sea below. The story was always taught in conventional school environments as a cautionary tale about the dangers of ambition. The higher you climb the harder you’ll fall. Many even connect it to the Biblical story of Nimrod and the Tower of Babel. But while the Tower of Babel is certainly a cautionary tale about unbridled ambition (with a built-in explanation for how the world’s languages came to be), that’s pretty much where the similarities cease. Focusing on Icarus’ ambition leaves off more than half the story. 

First of all, it’s important to note two things at the outset: 1) Icarus is accompanied by his father, Daedalus, throughout the entirety of the myth. And 2) Daedalus is a master builder and inventor, who creates the very maze, or labyrinth that imprisons him. The labyrinth is an archetype of the type of chaos and insanity from which there is no escape: the things we invite into our lives that entrap us. Not only does Daedulus build his own prison, he hands this madness down to the next generation, his son, who is imprisoned right beside him. 

But the genius that entraps man can also be the sort of ingenuity that liberates him, for Daedalus’ next invention is two pairs of wings he fashioned after observing the birds of the heavens. The father and son duo prepare to tie the wings to their bodies and fly out of the labyrinth to comparative freedom. I say comparative freedom because even outside the labyrinth there are rules. Just as there is no such thing as “free verse” poetry (free verse is still beholden to the tyranny of rhythm), freedom from chaos and insanity requires a degree of discipline and responsibility. Which is what Daedalus tries to tell his son as they are preparing their escape. 

If people remember Daedalus in the story at all, they’ll often only remember that he cautioned his son to monitor his altitude or risk flying too close to the sun. As the wings are made of beeswax, the heat from the sun will surely melt the wings and Icarus will fall into the sea. Less remembered is the fact that Daedalus also warned his son not to fly too low. If he glides too close to the waves of the Aegean Sea, the cold mist of the water will make his wings too heavy and he’ll crash into the water all the same. This is such a vital point of the myth it’s a shame so few remember it. 

Daedalus, the elder mentor of the story, was telling Icarus, the next generation, not to fly too high or too low, but to move forward in the world by flying in the center of the two extremes. 

Icarus said, “OK, Boomer.” And we all know the outcome of the myth. As the progenitors of democracy, perhaps the Greeks knew something about the folly of ignoring the wisdom of previous generations. Perhaps, too, they knew something about the dangers of veering too ideologically close to extremes in a pluralistic society. Stray too far in one direction and you’ll burn for it. Stray too far in the other and you’ll drown. If that’s not a case for the center, for staying measured and even-keeled, I don’t know what is. This is not the same as Rebecca Solnit’s view of centrism. That depiction of the center would have us still roaming around in the maze until we eventually got consumed by the Minotaur, a consequence of overabundance. The center that the Greeks cautioned us, is a center that moves out of confusion and death and continues to move while being cautious of the pathway. Far from being reactionary or complacent, the center is a manifestation of experience and judiciousness. It might not be wise to dismiss centrism as just a laundered version of right-wing, privileged, conservatism.