In the middle

Last week, my darling husband and I attended a lecture by Roald Hoffman, the 1981 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry.  The topic was indigo (the dye) and it's cultural and historical significance.  After the lecture, my good friend Eileen sent me his interview transcript from NPR's series, "This I believe" (June 16, 2006), which I re-post here.  It's a succinct explanation, similar to my own philosophy of life.  I think many of us can be very reactionary at times, and I think that perspective often backs us into a corner or ends up working against us.

I believe in the middle. Extremes may make a good story, but the middle satisfies me. Why? Perhaps because I’m a chemist.  Chemistry is substances, molecules, and their transformations. And molecules fight categorization - they are poised along several polarities. Take morphine. Anyone who's had an operation knows what morphine is good for. But it’s also a deadly addictive drug. Take ozone - up in the atmosphere, a layer of ozone protects us from the harmful ultraviolet radiation of our life-giving sun. But at sea level, ozone is produced in photochemical smog, it chews up tires and lungs.
Chemistry - like life -- is deeply and fundamentally about change. It’s about substances, say A + B, transforming, becoming a different substance -- C + D ... and coming back again. At equilibrium -- the middle -- all the substances are present. But we're not stuck there. We can change the middle; we can disturb the equilibrium.
 

Perhaps I like the middle, that tense middle, because of my background. I was born in 1937 in Southeast Poland, now Ukraine. Our Jewish family was trapped in the destructive machinery of Nazi anti-Semitism. Most of us perished ... my father, three of my grandparents, and so on. My mother and I survived, hidden for the last fifteen months of the war in a schoolhouse attic by a Ukrainian teacher, Mikola Dyuk. We were saved by the action of a good man, that school teacher. Sad to say, much of the Ukrainian population in the region behaved badly in those terrible times. They helped the Nazis kill us. And yet ... and yet, some, like Dyuk, saved us, at great risk to their lives. I couldn’t formulate it then, as a child, but I knew from our experience that people were not simply good or evil. They made choices. You could hide a Jewish family or you could choose not to. Every human being has the potential to go one way or the other. Understanding that there was a choice helps me live with the evil I experienced.

Being a chemist has allowed me to see plainly that things – politics, attitudes, molecules -- in the middle can be changed, that we have a choice. Being a survivor I can see that choices really matter, all part of this risky enterprise of being human. The middle is not static -- my psychological middle as well as the chemical equilibrium. I like that. Yes, I also want stability. But I believe that extreme positions – all reactants, all products, all people A bad, all people B good, no taxes at all, taxed to death – are impractical, unnatural, boring ... the refuge of people who never want to change. The world is not simple, though God knows political forces on every side want to make it so. I like the tense middle, and I am grateful for a life that offers me the potential for change.

Hoffmann is a gifted speaker, and you will not be disappointed if you ever have the opportunity to attend one of his lectures.