The Middle Child’s Origin Story

“I would not give a fig for the simplicity that lies this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity that lies on the other side of complexity.” 

– Oliver Wendell Holmes

I’m writing to share that I’m launching a newsletter, but the subject may surprise you. While you may know me from my work in the food industry, now that I’m retired, I’m heading in a different direction. I’ll be writing about society, politics, and what we can do to cut through the noise and come to informed conclusions and intelligent solutions. 

My goal isn’t to convince you that a particular side or position is the right one. Instead, I’d like to embark on a neutral journey together, replacing the civics courses that ceased to be taught in schools about thirty years ago with dialogue and a space to share ideas about what’s happening in our country and how to solve it. 

I’m calling it “Politics for Middle Children,” because so many of us today find ourselves caught in the middle of heated political debate, and feel the need to negotiate between two increasingly polarized parties. By the same token, my political philosophy follows a kind of “middle child” approach, in that no one strategy is perfect. 

One of my core assumptions is human beings just aren’t capable of creating systems that last forever. Whether you believe in evolution or original sin, you’re bound to arrive at the same conclusion: humans are flawed, because we’re just not that smart. 

Further, we can’t come up with working solutions until we recognize that fact. Chaos theory holds that our world is governed by a set of laws, but those laws are readily affected by initial conditions. Differences in those initial conditions make it impossible to effectively predict long-term outcomes. Thus, while we can improve things, we’ll never do it perfectly or forever. There will always be unintended consequences of our actions, and the world will always continue to change around us. 

Thus, it’s just not possible to develop quick and easy policy solutions that will permanently resolve our issues. You can make things appreciably better in the short run, but you must be prepared for that inevitable time when your solution ceases to work. 

To that end, I believe ideologies of any sort are all a little foolish at some level, and rather than replace them with an ideology of my own making, I turn to pragmatism: What’s the problem? What’s the desired outcome? How do we get there? And once resolved, how do we move on to the next issue at hand? Further, when our solution stops working ten, twenty, or 100 years down the line, how do we fix it? 

Our Founding Fathers took a similar approach. While the Declaration of Independence was designed to be a permanent statement of the country’s mission, the Constitution was intended to undergo constant change, alongside the shifting circumstances of a brand new and ever-evolving nation. But we have since gotten away from that approach. That’s why we still have the electoral college and a variety of other institutions set forth in the Constitution that weren’t expected to last for eternity. 

And we have parties on the left and on the right that staunchly cling to their ideologies, and those in the middle that feel so lost, confused, or frustrated that they—or perhaps, if you’ve read this far, we—don’t get involved anymore. This newsletter is for us: middle children discouraged by the tug of war between left and right.

Here, we’ll take a different approach—one that’s not dictated by labels like “Democrat” or “Republican,” but by what we know about human nature. 

For example, the concept of the evolutionary brain holds that, while our brains have become more complex over time—making humans capable of rational thought, as well as extremely high degrees of creativity and altruism—we are also motivated by a primitive sense of fear, the kind that kept us safe from predators all those years ago. That complicates things, along with the reality that we live in a completely different environment than the one we evolved to thrive in. We’re designed to live in smaller groups, in remote areas where most of us would never travel today. There was far less stimulation and stress in those environments than there is in our hyper-connected world. And the difference between where we evolved to be and our current reality makes us dysfunctional and prone to bad decisions. 

Moreover, because our biological makeup is such that our intelligence taps out at a certain point, we’re constantly struggling to answer questions that we aren’t really equipped to answer. It’s enough to make a day spent cave painting sound pretty appealing. But if we can recognize that we’re not capable of arriving at a perfect solution, and that seeking continuous improvement is a better path forward, we can avoid a little pain and make more progress. 

How Did I Develop My Perspective? 

Back in the 1930s, My father attended the University of Chicago, the birthplace of the phrase “secular humanism,” and tried to develop a corresponding philosophy around human behavior and development that could be used to create social policy. My mother was an atheist, primarily because her parents were religious and both died young—even though they prayed they wouldn’t. Their perspectives led to some robust arguments around the dinner table.

And because neither of my parents cared much about religion but my grandparents did, I was raised in four different Christian denominations, each of which told me it was the be-all, end-all truth. Since all of them couldn’t be right, I got interested in the concepts informing—and undermining—their perspectives, studying comparative religion, quantum mechanics, cosmology, and different philosophies. 

Along the way, I realized that all of them reached a certain level of complexity before becoming incomprehensible. Why? Because human knowledge is finite. It can only explain so much. 

And each time I dug into an issue of my own in work and in life, I found myself back at square one. What should I do? How do I solve the problems necessary to get things done?

My process became far more iterative than anything prescribed, and I began trying things out, revising my plan with each attempt. I soon realized there was a point at which the ongoing discussion of solutions became counterproductive. I learned the only way to move forward is to act and improve as you go. Often, once I found a solution that worked, the world would change, and I would just start over again. It’s a strategy that’s been quite successful for me.

Now, I want to put that lens on current social issues. 

Why Am I Doing This? 

I believe the greatest thing America is missing today is intellectual and social humility. None of us knows all the answers, and it’s just not possible to impose our beliefs on everyone else. I can’t think of one human institution that has survived the years entirely intact—even the Catholic Church looks a lot different than it did in 30 CE. 

With that said, I’m not here to change your mind. What I intend to do is help us all arrive at our own opinions with more—and better—information. To question current belief structures, both individual ones and those of the systems in which all of us participate. 

Why Now? 

The world has reached a key inflection point. Fifty years ago, the only way humans could destroy themselves was with a nuclear war. Today, there’s about ten different ways, from AI to pandemics, the collapse of our food system, and climate change. Avoiding blowing ourselves up—either literally or figuratively—will require tighter cooperation, both domestically and internationally. Thus, if I can contribute anything positive, now’s the time to do it. 

What You’ll Find Here 

Like the No Labels movement co-chaired by Maryland governor Larry Hogan and former US senator Joe Lieberman, I want this to be a space to share information and consider realistic solutions, to negotiate and compromise to move forward. 

To do that, we’ll go back in history and explore times when the American political system was functioning well, why that was the case, and why so many aspects of our political system are faltering today. We’ll consider the information necessary to make intelligent decisions and avoid being whipsawed by all the noise out there, from television’s talking heads to social media threads. 

I’ll keep it high level, without the details that can confuse the issues at hand, while drawing on examples from seemingly unrelated areas, like anthropology, zoology, and psychology. 

I’d love to have your input, too, fostering a conversation through which we can come up with new ideas on how to approach the problems at hand. In short, we’ll address our subjects like the most well-adjusted middle child you can imagine. 

I hope you’ll stick with me, and share this newsletter with colleagues and friends who may be interested as well. They can sign up below. 

Next up: a deep dive into the founding documents, what still works, what doesn’t, and how we might address it.