Middle beyond Meddle and Muddle
Benjamin P. Taylor shared his thoughts in a post recently about a situation well-known to everyone when asked to act as a middle person and ‘sort things out’ by intermediating between people. As a middle person, you must meddle in other people’s affairs with the aim ‘to keep everyone happy… until you burn out’. The middle place is perceived as weak, a space of vulnerability.
In this context, he mentions Barry Oshry (2012) who wrote about the ineffectiveness of middle managers. Oshry defined the middle as a location ‘between a rock and a hard place’. The middle layer is the intermediary solving dissonances between lower and higher levels in organisational structure (vertically) or between departments (horizontally). The task of middle managers is to resolve disparities between parties but only as a subjected partner, a backup service unit. For instance, intermediaries lack the power to ask questions about the root causes of dissonance.
For many who took part in the discussion following Benjamin’s post, the challenge is to ‘stay out of the middle’. For Jarie Bolander the middle is a muddled ugly place, where ambiguity rules accompanied with an absence of responsibility for a wrong decision. The muddled middle is an ideal habitat for politicians, lawyers, and bureaucrats, as well as for all other breeders of mediocrity. He accordingly calls for ‘squeezing out the middle’.
The problem is that in complex conditions (between multiple incommensurable claims) it is not possible or at least not wise to ‘stay out of the middle’. There is no outer space. One can stand out of the middle only to find themselves stuck in either a polar opposition or in ignorance of legitimate claims — both propel one in precisely the opposite direction to neutrality and synthesis. The middle is the most neutral position in complex conditions because it involves part of each position in discord. The imperative of complexity is therefore to stay in the middle.
A short digression might be helpful to shed light on the dilemma about the middle ground (should it stay, or should it go?). Modern Western culture is operating with indirect relations between its members, such as on the market, in representative democracy, bureaucracy, and in organisation, money, information technology, artificial intelligence… Intermediation is everywhere. Since Hume, Smith, Hayek, Popper… secondary relations are recognised as the most neutral integrative principles in open democratic societies.
The private lives of individuals, parents, professionals, or friends likewise unfold by intermediation between contradictory poles of existence. Moreover, mainstream science itself rests on the concept of systems. Systems operate at a middle level of relations that link systemic components vertically and horizontally as a whole. However, the middle level is of secondary importance for the system, while the components between which it intermediates, are primary.
In contrast, the middle is equally important for explaining complex issues to parties in dispute (this immediately resolves the threat about the absence of responsibility in the middle). Yet, how to empower the middle level in relation to polarities? I think the middle level will, if nothing else, empower itself progressively by its own integrative achievements. Something that is established on strong correlation between very diverse progressive constituents (e.g. strong coalitions between diverse progressive partners) is best suited to pass the evolutionary test of social complexity on how best to mediate between order and disorder.
Therefore, ‘stuck in the middle’ is foremost about being stuck in a system, not about being stuck in complexity. ‘Stuck in the middle’ is a result of thinking with a system logic. When stuck, the middle person or middle management acts as a conservative intermediator instead of as a progressive mesoscopic agent — not by resolving conflicts directly but by enforcing the mentality of the middle between opposite views.
The challenge is indeed to ask, as Benjamin concludes, ‘how can I help THEM to sort that out?’. A paragraph in ‘Complex Society’ seems to resonate in the same tone: “In ancient Greece, Xenos is a stranger guest-friend, somebody from the outside who can intermediate in disagreements between people who host him. Xenos approaches contradictions by recognising disagreeing claims as each being supported with valid arguments, and so each is legitimate, but also in several aspects incomplete, contaminated with ignorance. He demonstrates that a concrete disagreement involves not only a strongly divergent but also a weakly convergent potential that assures at least provisional bridging. Xenos cannot invent a solution for disagreements. He only provides necessary conditions, hospitality of the middle-ground where bridging can take place in a more holistic setting only by the opponents themselves.”
In summary: the middle is obviously not the same thing when observed and practiced from different perspectives (micro-individualist, macro-systemic, meso-complex…). In my view, the middle is discussed most appropriately from the mesoscopic standpoint. There remains a lot to learn about the middle and its integrative potentials for organising social life, in particular during the unfolding of transformative processes.
* Postscript about ‘the muddled middle’: the middle is always ambiguous in comparison to the clarity of polar positions. This is not a shortcoming, just the opposite; it is an appropriate adaptation to uncertainty (uncertainty because the middle is caught between radically different demands). In a similar way, the philosopher Max Black remarked that the impressionist painting of a foggy London street is often the most adequate representation of reality. A complex situation can be best understood between opposite claims precisely by looking at that which they are missing, what they ignore or treat as less important, or secondary, present only in deep shade or as a distant echo. A muddled situation, therefore, does not prohibit a clear way of thinking in the absence of clarity and certainty.
