Back when I was growing up in southern Mo., there was a saying: “moderation in all things”. I supposed it came from the Bible but can’t seem to find it. I know that is the tone of Bible teaching, e.g. don’t get drunk, yet Jesus supplied wine for the guests, and Paul told his protégé to take a little wine once in a while, it would be good for him. I think it is a good approach to life and quite often the physical world works that way too (“law” of averages).
This week I have on my engineer cap and am trying to resolve, of all boring things, how condensed liquid flows along the bottom of a horizontal condenser from the inlet to the outlet. Some say it will be pushed along and the level will increase from inlet to end. Others say the level will build up in the inlet and decrease as it drains to the end (these type things never became a problem until we got enough computing power to calculate them). Actually if we can get the computer to do the math properly, both theories are right in the extreme, the liquid is pushed along and builds up at first, then drains by gravity as the vapor becomes mostly condensed, so there is a hump of liquid toward the middle.
Often it is the case that extreme views on both right and left are only partly correct and the truth lies somewhere in the middle. So when I hear that both Obama and McCain are drifting toward the middle, I say “Hurray that is where the Truth is”. Sometimes we just have to “do the math” to find it. Defining an extreme view and sticking to it, no matter what the math says, may be thought to be “tough” or “macho”, but it usually turns out to be wrong, possibly destructive, and not very smart.