The Middle Way Society is an international society, hitherto based in the UK, to develop understanding of the Middle Way and support its practice. The ‘Middle Way’ we’re concerned with is not just a Buddhist concept, nor is it just a matter of moderation or of the Aristotelian Mean. Instead it’s a principle of judgement that can be applied at any point, consisting of the avoidance of both positive and negative absolutes. ‘Absolutes’ are totalising positions that involve an implicit assumption that at some point we have the whole story, thus preventing us from more closely examining our experience and considering differing ways of interpreting it. We can be absolute just as much in dismissing what doesn’t fit our assumptions as in prematurely accepting what does. Somewhere in between is the ‘middle’ – that area of experiential values in which our openness to new experience is maximised.
From the very beginning of the society, our podcasts have played an important part in furthering our aims (alongside our other activities, such as talks, blogs, online discussions and face-to-face retreats). Few people either explicitly recognise that the Middle Way is an option, or include it in their repertoire of possible ways of thinking, even though they may use it implicitly in some situations. Just understanding it in the abstract is unlikely to fully convey why it is important and how widely it can be used. So the podcast is a way of reaching out to people, connecting with the interests they already have, and pointing out that those interests can often already be seen as expressions or practices of the Middle Way. We’re not aiming to make converts to an ideology so much as to make connections between people, ideas, organisations and practices that are often seen in entirely separate compartments, by showing how the Middle Way is often already part of their outlook and aspirations.
The people we’re aiming to connect with are both the interviewees and the audience. The interviewees are most often authors, academics, or established practitioners in some field where their approach can connect with the Middle Way, but also sometimes ordinary members of the Society. Some of the ‘experts’ are philosophers, but others are psychologists, neuroscientists, artists, theologians, scholars, political activists, environmental economists, sociologists, mindfulness teachers, psychotherapists, or teachers of embodied disciplines such as Tai Chi. The breadth of people that we have on the podcast is due to the fact that it is not their topic that is important so much as how they go about thinking about it. We are interested in thinkers that face up to the uncertainty of the embodied human condition, and recognise that facing up to uncertainty is not just a matter of a theoretical affirmation of provisionality. Rather it is a practice that we need to keep working on, and that involves our habitual bodily, emotional and imaginative states as well as our intellectual beliefs.
This approach is ‘philosophical’ in the sense of applying a particular general method of thinking, but much of the time does not involve material that is conventionally ‘philosophical’ in its subject matter. If a philosopher is lover of wisdom, and wisdom is a practice rather than only a theory, we are practising philosophy, and aiming to show that practice at work in our encounters with a wide variety of people on the podcast.
Our approach is also ‘philosophical’ in the way it provides a platform for encounter with alternative ways of thinking from the ones we may begin with. The consideration of alternatives itself is part of the practice of the Middle Way. However, we do also make sure the Middle Way is explicitly mentioned at least somewhere in each podcast, usually through the custom of asking each interviewee, towards the end of the discussion, how they think what they have been talking about relates to the Middle Way. The ways in which these responses are both diverse yet also offer an underlying pattern is one of the most insightful results to come from the podcasts. To show this, Barry collected these responses from the first set of podcasts into episodes 29 and 30, ‘What is your understanding of the Middle Way?’.
The wide variety of topics discussed in the podcasts also obviously provides a variety of ‘hooks’ by which the audience can be provided with a way into the Middle Way. Some people are more interested in practical as opposed to theoretical discussion: for example, we’ve had a practitioner of focusing and an organiser of mindfulness in schools. Some people are situated firmly in a particular tradition, such as Buddhism (e.g. with Sangharakshita), Christianity (e.g. with Don Cupitt), or Secular Humanism (e.g. with Philip Kitcher), and need to hear a version of the Middle Way related to familiar terms. Some might be drawn by interest in a particular school of psychotherapy or practice – for instance, our most popular podcast by far has been the one with Steven C. Hayes, co-founder of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). Although many of the podcasts have an academic edge, some of the most moving ones are more about personal stories. Some of our personal favourites are the interviews with Arno Michaelis (a racist skinhead turned peace activist) and Bjorn Ihler (a survivor of the attack on Utoya Island in Norway). Nothing brings home the importance of the Middle way quite as much as direct accounts of how absolutising mental states have been gradually overcome, and thus how people’s lives have been turned around. Another twist on such a story was offered by Sir Harry Burns, former chief medical officer for Scotland, who was able to illustrate from his personal experience how a sense of meaning helps us to cope with adversity, applied directly in his subsequent work in public health.
Sometimes, though, philosophy does provide the content as well as the method. The philosophers who’ve appeared on the podcast have had a range of approaches, though we’ve tried to connect them all to the Middle Way in some sense. An understanding of the Middle Way seems to come most readily to philosophers with an interest in embodiment, systems thinking, and pragmatism: so perhaps some of the most sympathetic philosophers Barry has interviewed have been Evan Thompson, Richard Shusterman, and Barbara Gail Montero. He particularly enjoyed interviewing Alison Gopnik, who was able to bring out the philosophical significance of the open ‘lantern consciousness’ of babies.
However, perhaps some of our most interesting and original interviewees have come from the fields of psychology and neuroscience. We’re proud to have interviewed people like Elliot Aronson, pioneer of psychological dissonance, Daniel Siegel, one of the leading theorists of integration, Daniel Goleman, psychologist of mindfulness, and Ellen Langer, sometimes known as the ‘mother of mindfulness’. Iain McGilchrist, the cross-disciplinary writer on brain lateralisation, is not only twice a podcast interviewee, but a patron of the Society. Some of the most interesting new work has come from Igor Grossmann, a psychological researcher who has found empirical evidence of the basis of wisdom, and Marc Lewis, a neuroscientist who has challenged medical models of addiction.
Robert M. Ellis is the philosopher who first had the idea for the society, having been developing Middle Way Philosophy in a series of books over the course of some 20 years. However, it is Barry Daniel (interviewed in his own right here) who took on running the podcast from the beginning of the society, in 2013. Occasionally other members, such as Susan Averbach, have also been involved. It is Barry who has the people skills that make him particularly suited to interviewing. However, Robert has been an interviewee several times, for example on Political Philosophy or about his recent book on the Christian Middle Way. At other times he has been involved as part of a dialogue or group discussion: for example recently in dialogue with Jeremy Lent. This type of podcast is intended to be more exploratory and to illustrate the dialectical aspect of the Middle Way: that greater wisdom can emerge from alternative perspectives challenging each other, as long as they are sufficiently in agreement about the overall framework for resolving differences.
Barry describes running the podcasts over the past five years as a “wonderful learning experience”. For him it has been a good form of autonomous learning, providing him with an eclectic but synthetic understanding of a wide range of topics. In about a third of the interviews, the basis has been a book that he needed to read beforehand, which has been a great prompt to extend his reading. He also feels he’s learned a great deal about the Middle Way and how to articulate it from the experience.
The chief challenge, as always in philosophy (in a broad sense) is that of how to navigate disagreement. In practice, not all differing assumptions can be explored within a single interview, and to make an interview work there needs to be a balance between reassurance and challenge. Barry feels that he has sometimes erred too much on the side of reassurance, and would like to develop his ability to challenge interviewees more fully. On the other hand, on those occasions when Robert has been involved, he has sometimes been too challenging. Finding that point of balance in each situation is an aspect of the practice of the Middle Way itself, working with our limitations.
After 142 podcasts, we feel that the ethos of what we’re doing is reasonably well established, and that it’s been a most rewarding experience. Time is one limitation, and in the future we would like more other people to be involved in interviewing and editing. Some podcasts have been less successful, usually when the interviewee had little sense of the Middle Way, or had misunderstood our intentions in some way. However, the positive highlights of our backlist offer some remarkable moments of inspiration and illumination – some with cutting edge thinkers from around the world, but others with quite ordinary people.
Robert M Ellis
Robert M Ellis is a philosophical writer, who has earned a living by teaching and tutoring a variety of subjects. He has been developing Middle Way Philosophy since 1997, initially from a Ph.D. thesis, and has published a number of books on the subject, including the 4 volume Middle Way Philosophy series (2012-15), the introductory book Migglism (2014), The Christian Middle Way (2018) and The Buddha’s Middle Way (due out in July 2019). He has a past history as an ordained Buddhist practitioner, and apart from philosophy, critical thinking, psychology, politics and the arts are also all very important to him.
