Moderation and Nonconformity

How would you reconcile these two ideas, in personal terms?

Philippians 4:5: "Let your moderation be know to all men..."
Romans 12:2 "And be not conformed to this world..."

Doesn't prudence require that you conform to the folkways of tradition? The problem with a theory of moderation is that by definition, you allow the extremes to define what is immoderate and thereby you choose to go between those extremes. But could it be that the moderate path is the unethical path whereas the extreme path-- the path of non-prudence and non-conformity-- is the ethical path? Thus, a moderate in Bull Connor's Alabama during the Selma march would neither condone police brutality nor efforts to introduce civil rights to (as they were called back then) negroes. Does moderation ever effectuate change?

Prudence may mean going along with one's traditions or it might not.
It would not have been prudent to join King's march on Selma but it was the right thing to do. It had advantages to the whole of civilization but not to one's own best interests. Prudence is not only appreciation of the situation at hand and doing what is appropriate to that situation but it also involves doing what is appropriate to the advancement of the society as a whole. That is where arete fits in with the notion of prudence. Perhaps a prudent person would have stayed home that day but would have applied himself or herself to advancing the causes that the marchers were advocating. I don't know.

My view is that non-conformity is a a spiritual and intellectual ideal-- to be "transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good and acceptable, and perfect will of God." I understand moderation however to mean temperament-- the shape of one's mind-- in trying to communicate truth effectively but amiably.

There is a strain in Christianity that is dangerously immoderate. I have noted in my lifetime the prevalence of Christian apocalyptic death cults. In the case of Jim Jones who poisoned almost 1,000 of his followers in in 1978, he started in a mainline liberal denomination, but during his years in the jungle became an atheist. However, on the other side of the political spectrum, as right wing as Jones was left wing, you have the cultist David Koresh who immolated 84 of his followers at Waco, Texas at the time of our honeymoon. Koresh preached pre-millennialism and saw his prophecies realized when the government overreacted. And then you have in 1997, 39 members of Marshall Applewhite’s Heaven’s Gate cult who killed themselves. Jones, Koresh, and Applewhite called themselves Christians, although obviously they were not. These false prophets tricked simple, trusting people and those people who died did so because they acted on an excess of blind faith and in the absence of constructive doubt and critical thought. Religious zealots truly scare me, and that motivates me to give my boys the mental tools to deal with such folk. The most dangerous people are those who take the words of Our Savior and dangerously twist them. In the 10th chapter of Matthew, Jesus says: "Think not that I come to send peace on the earth: I come not to send peace but a sword. For I come to set man at variance against his father …He that loveth his father or mother more than me; and he that loveth his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me." And, on the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5, Jesus says "If you right eye offend thee, pluck it out…And if your right hand offend thee, cut it off." While I don't think these challenging words are words of a fanatic, they surely have fueled fanaticism, causing some unstable minds to abandon their families or harm themselves.

I'm not sure that the answer is the pursue moderation for its own sake. This basically means that we let others decide the extremes of opinions while we walk down the middle of the road where the dead skunks lie. Philosophers going back to the Greeks of the Golden Mean have recommended a life of moderation. Our hero in Daniel Defoe’s 17th century novel Robinson Crusoe had his father cast pearls of wisdom before the swine: “He bid me observe it, and I should always find, that the calamities of life were shared among the upper and lower part of mankind; but that the middle station had fewer disasters and was not expos’d to so many vicissitudes as the higher or lower part of mankind.” But moderation is not always right. “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” said Arizona’s most famous liberal Barry Goldwater in a speech that was much criticized. “And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” That this was said at the high noon of the Cold War set off four-station alarm bells. But I think the basic proposition is beyond reproach. There are times when moderation is immoral and unethical.