A Drunk Trying To Ride A Bicycle

I remember one drunken night many years ago.  The end of the night came and it was time for me to hop on my trusty push-bike and head home and crawl into bed.  This of course raised an interesting question; was I at this stage in any state to ride a bike?  Of course at the time such questions were not in the scope of my consideration, and I bravely took to the saddle and attempted to get my feet into the toe-clips.  This effort took me around about 2 meters before I crashed into the gutter I had launched myself from, and I found myself struggling not to fall over and lose what little dignity I possessed.  So up I hopped again and managed to get a start.  This attempt was moderately more successful, and I wobbled across the street and crashed into the gutter on the opposite side of the road.  Undeterred, I mounted up again and finally managed a more or less straight line and an unsteady and leisurely progress back home.

I thought about this incident several years later when I read Martin Luther's analogy of the church as a drunk trying to ride a horse.  First said drunk must make an attempt to climb up into the saddle in what must be a great piece of visual comedy for all casual onlookers.  Attempt to get foot in stirrup, foot slips, drunk ends up flat on back in whatever the horse has managed to leave on the ground.  Drunk climbs up, more or less gets in the saddle this time, but promptly slides off the other side and hits the ground again.  Drunks climbs up from side he has just landed on, mounts his horse and promptly falls off onto the side he originally started from.

Luther was trying to illustrate how he saw the church blithely falling from one extreme of thought and behaviour over to the other extreme.  We don't however have to be religious in any way to see that the behaviour of a church, which is after just a bunch of people, is shown as an example of the thoughts and behaviours of humanity in general.  Societies can often lurch from one extreme to the other and the balancing act of maintaining the middle ground is as difficult for us collectively as it is for our mythical drunk to stay balanced on his horse. 

It may be in the end that seeking to make a fair and balanced society for the interests of all then is either a delicate balancing act, or more likely, it is an accident waiting to happen, a perilous lurch towards extremism always a dangerous possibility.  In Australia and the United States (and no doubt in other countries) we are seeing the right and left of politics becoming more extreme in their posturing and the middle ground is rapidly starting to disappear, and we are all feeling that dangerous sway in one direction or another. 

It is hard to avoid being embroiled in polarising debates, to avoid taking sides, and to objective and able to consider both sides of a debate and to remain neutral.  Some would say it is impossible to be 100% objective.  We all have our biases and our blind spots and our places we fall down.  The best we can hope for is to maintain a sober outlook, and to do our best to find the middle way through life, even when it seems to be just a slender thread.