Homeostatic Extremism: Or, “At least it’s an ethos!”

I found myself for some reason reading a random comment thread from Dominic’s site, and I find this remark:

The “wisdom position” is the position that posits two extremes, both presumably undesirable, then argues for a homeostatic “balance” between them. This is obvious in the case of “intelligence”: “wisdom” is intelligence preserved from its dangerous excesses by some manner of moral / experiential restraint, it’s all about not letting yourself get too carried away by dangerous ideas…

This seems to describe a widespread cultural phenomenon — the extremes are dangerous, truth is in the middle, etc. It seems to me, however, that in our postmodern age, we are beginning to see the phenomenon of a certain type of intellectual who inverts this scheme: the true danger is “balance,” and extremes are positive because they cut through the miasma of relativism.

Normally this type of person is a well-educated cultural conservative, someone who recoils from postmodern relativism while at the same time realizing that there is no direct way to go back to traditional authority. The average relativistic liberal will express “admiration” for people with “conviction” while still basically preferring relativism — the post-relativistic conservative has no route except admiration for “conviction.” Thus we find such people admiring the strong reassertion of traditional Roman Catholicism by Ratzinger, even though they themselves are not Roman Catholic, because “at least he’s standing for something.”

The true irony here, of course, is that an abstract desire for “conviction” as such, without regard for the content, is itself deeply relativistic — and relativistic in a much more dangerous and virulent way than the standard liberal relativism.