Watching the English

by Kate Fox

Moderation Another deep-seated, unconscious reflex or ‘default mode’. I’m using the term ‘moderation’ as shorthand for a whole set of related qualities. Our avoidance of extremes, excess and intensity. Our fear of fuss. Our cautiousness and our preference for comfortable domesticity, familiarity, security and convenience. Our ambivalence, apathy, woolliness, middlingness, fence-sitting and conservatism – and to some extent our tolerance, which tends to be at least partly a matter of benign indifference. Our moderate industriousness and moderate hedonism (the ‘work moderately, play moderately’ principle most of us really live by, rather than the ‘work hard, play hard’ one we like to quote). Our penchant for order and our special brand of ‘orderly disorder’, with its choreographed shedding of designated inhibitions. Our tendency to compromise. Our sheer ordinariness. With some notable exceptions, even our alleged and much-vaunted eccentricities are mostly ‘collective’ and conformist. We do everything in moderation, except moderation, which we take to ludicrous extremes.