Back in 2008, I was in an online Master’s degree program for Mental Health Counselors. At some point in the program, we had had to fly to Minneapolis Minnesota to stay for two weeks in a Hilton Hotel. We used the Hilton as a college campus, with different rooms hosting different classes. Every morning, we would gather in a banquet hall with about 300 other international adult students to participate in a hands-on learning experience like the brick-and-mortar programs were offering. But we had only 2 weeks to pack into what they could do in 2 years.
It was both fun and stressful, as a good Master’s degree program should be. But the people designing the program knew how to bring those lessons to heart with the students very quickly.
During one otherwise unremarkable lecture, the professors asked us all to stand up near the wall in a row and arrange ourselves from tall to short. We happily obliged, getting out of our chairs and figuring out who was taller than who, then acting accordingly. Anyone who knows me knows I was at the tail end of that line, with only about 10 people to my right, and the greater majority of taller people to my left. The line of students wrapped three-quarters of the way around the banquet hall. “Now,” the professor requested: “form 2 groups, tall and short.”
There was a bit of moving around and swapping places in the middle of the line, and after a few minutes some brilliant student called out to the profs: “I don’t know which side I belong in! I’m 5’8!” The Prof’s assistant said, “Too bad, you have to pick a side.” Discussion broke out about how nothing in humanity is only two groups. If you only focus on the extremes, the middle disappears. However, there is always a gradual slide from one extreme to another, and most people are in the middle.
“This proves the point that you can’t have 2 categories of height. You can’t have 2 categories of anything in humans, really. You have to have the middle, because that’s where most people are.”
Next, they asked the same group of us to line up differently, this time in order of skin tone, from pale white all the way to dark brown. I didn’t wind up at the tail end that time, but I certainly wasn’t in the middle. The professors said “Can we declare the exact skin tone where people stop being white?” The room went dead silent, all of us fearing the racism that was ready to come out somehow.
“The point,” they said “Is that you can’t. There is too much variety.” Discussions broke out around outliers, scatterplots, and means. But the point was absorbed: most people fall somewhere in the middle between any two extremes.
The lecture continued about the lack of real polar opposites of different subjects: gender, class, race, fitness, and how they always bring to mind the extremes. The two ends of the line of us didn’t make us different people in different groups; in both height and skin tone, we were a spectrum of differences. The point they wanted us to absorb was that if you focus on the two ends of extremes, everything in the middle disappears and becomes meaningless.
As Heather Cox Richardson says, most people, politically, are also closer to the middle than they are on either extreme. There are biased people calling themselves Democrats, and social program supporters who call themselves Republicans. The media (which, btw, is run by people who would gain by manipulating elections) would like us to believe that there are only 2 extremes and nothing in between, and that taking one step toward the middle is somehow a dishonorable thing to do. It’s easy to pit two extremes against each other, so they hollow out the middle.
However, throughout history, the data supports that the majority of us are somewhere in the middle between two extremes.
Please never forget this.