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To answer Roy’s question, I understand that balance is harder to teach than an extreme, partly because it is harder to measure and enforce. Moderation is scarier to those who crave security – and that group almost always is the majority. However, we are currently immodest (extreme) in the way we define and discuss modesty. Until we understand that basic point, we won’t be able to change it – and illustrating how it means more than a dress code is an important part of beginning to understand, imo.
Thinking about moderation .. Where I was raised as a teen, I was viewed as the most conservative person most of my school peers had ever come across. When I moved to Provo to attend BYU, I was viewed as a very liberal person with outrageous views. As I traveled back and forth between those two cultures, I found myself amazed that I could change nothing about my dress, mannerisms, or behavior, and yet I could illicit vastly different perceptions and responses from those two cultural groups.
Modesty standards only work within the culture for which they are written. When a person changes cultures, they need to adjust their standards to fit the new cultural norms. In some cultures, women do not wear pants. In others, women go nowhere without an escort. Some cultures require women to cover up to the wrist and ankle. Some require heads and faces to be covered. Some expect a little more skin than is the U.S. norm. Every culture has many rules for women. I don’t have to like that fact, but if I expect to function within that society, I had best learn the norms and dress accordingly. Modesty is finding the cultural norm and dressing in a mainstream, slightly conservative fashion for that culture. Modesty is more of a moving target than we care to admit.
Because I try hard to be modest in my views, striving to understand differing perspectives and consider their merits individually, I am seen as extremely conservative by some people, wishy-washy by others and extremely liberal by others. Modesty is not nearly as easy as extremism. I call it the muddle in the middle, and it is the heart of the middle way Confucius taught. It is seeing extremes and choosing to walk between them, understanding the draw of the extremes and even valuing the good aspects of all extremes but walking one’s own path with elements taken from every other path encountered. It is straight in that it doesn’t jump from one path to another, and it is narrow in that I might be the only one able to walk it, but it also is unimaginably broad in that it is expansive enough to lead anywhere I need to go and can encompass the “rightness” of others walking their own middle ways.
It also is the only way I have found for me personally to have peace and charity.
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