I remember first hearing the story of Icarus as a child, and you might too. But like me and many others, you may also misremember the message.
The takeaway we're usually sold, is that Icarus is a warning against flying too close to the sun. Don't get too ambitious. Don't overreach, because hubris gets punished.
The real story gives us more to learn from.
We start, in Ovid's telling, with Daedalus, a master craftsman trapped on the island of Crete with his son Icarus. Daedalus had fallen out of favour with King Minos after building the labyrinth that housed the Minotaur, so they needed to escape, ideally both in one piece.
Daedalus has a plan. He constructs two sets of wings from feathers bound together with wax; one for himself and one for his son. Before they fly, he gives Icarus a warning:
Don't fly too low, because the sea spray will soak the feathers and drag you down. And don't fly too high, because the heat of the sun will melt the wax.
You may remember now what happens next.
Icarus, once airborne, finds the experience of flight intoxicating and climbs higher than he was told to. The wax melts, the wings come apart, and he falls into the sea that now carries his name.
The reason the story gets flattened down to just the sun and the hubris in its retelling is that only one half of the warning produced the memorable ending.
But Daedalus didn't give his son a single danger to avoid. He gave him two, positioned on either side of a narrow ideal, and told him to hold the middle.
Aristotle gave us a name for things like this in his work, the Nicomachean Ethics: 'Golden Mean'. A golden mean is the idea that true ideals are often not polar opposites as we're frequently drawn to imagine.
Virtues, rather than being the opposite of vices, usually stand at a mid-point between vices.
Per Aristotle, to avoid cowardice it is not as simple as just doing whatever the coward wouldn't. Because the opposite of cowardice isn't courage, it is recklessness.
Courage is the trained capacity to feel and act appropriately given what's actually at stake in a particular situation. This isn't a fixed point -- it's a shifting one. And that distinction matters.
Recklessness often looks like courage, in the sense that both are travelling in the right direction relative to fear. In the same way stubbornness can be mistaken for conviction and harshness can be mistaken for honesty. And it's not always immediately apparent that you've overshot the mark.
In fact, the only way to distinguish them is often to remain on guard even as the dust settles.
Once an excess has taken on the reputation of the virtue it merely resembles from a distance, a person can be entirely sincere in believing they have become brave, or honest, or principled, while they have simply arrived at the opposite failure from the one they were avoiding.
By the grave of the king
Hamlet is one of my favourite Shakespeare's plays, though I must sadly concede this is because, like many, I was simply forced to read it at a formative age.
In Hamlet, the titular prince's father has been murdered by his uncle Claudius, who then marries Hamlet's mother and takes the throne.
Hamlet believes he knows the truth, yet spends most of the play not acting on it, turning the question over from every angle, weighing whether he has sufficient certainty and justification to kill the new king and avenge his father.
But later in the play, Hamlet kills Polonius, the father of Laertes. Laertes, incensed, returns from France, raises a mob, and storms the castle demanding immediate vengeance, without pausing to establish a full picture of what actually happened.
Shakespeare shows you both sons and their failures, responding to the loss of a father. Hamlet overcorrects into paralysis. Laertes overcorrects into recklessness. Neither finds the narrow ground between them: the virtue of temperance.
This plays out on larger scales too.
'The Terrors' of the French Revolution began in 1789 as a response to royal excess. The court at Versailles was spending extravagantly while people starved, and the system of inherited privilege had grown intolerable.
But within years of the revolt, the revolution produced the Committee of Public Safety, with Robespierre at its helm. Robespierre actually argued in speeches that virtue without terror was powerless, and thus, a necessary instrument for a republic to defend itself. And so terror came to reign.
Tens of thousands were executed without due process, by people believing they were virtuous and simply correcting the sins of the prior age.
The nation simply swung from one pole to another -- from one vice to another -- mistaking their overcorrection for moral virtue.
And, of course, we see echoes of this today.
The far-left crusades of the 2010s directly fed the anti-woke rage of the 2020s. We overcorrected massively, with the excuse that as long as we do the opposite, all actions are permissible.
There were BLM riots, and so there must also be anti-immigrant riots. Someone once burned a bus so I must now burn your house, don't you see?
Extremes are too easy
The problem, ultimately, is that it's easy to run from evil. Easy to reject what we see as a vice and run the complete opposite way, without having any fidelity for how far we should run. Our fear or exposure to one end of the spectrum blinds us to clearly seeing the other.
The middle ground of virtue isn't easy to find. That's because it is always moving. It requires a constant evaluation of where we stand; a judgement of the extent to which the world has shifted under our feet and asking if we have simply grown accustomed to a different flavour of evil.
The golden mean was never a formula you could locate once and then stop thinking about. It has to be found again, each time, in each situation, because the ground beneath it keeps shifting. The comfort of an extreme is that it never asks this of you. Which is exactly why they are so easy to mistake for virtue.
