On Facebook a friend jokingly told me I’m “a very moderate conservative liberal.”

That prompted me to think about the word “moderate.”

As an adjective it can mean “not extreme, excessive, or intense.” As a noun it can mean “a person opposed to extreme views and actions, especially in politics or religion.” As a verb it can mean “to become less violent, severe, intense, or rigorous” or “to act as moderator; preside.”

Which lead me to think about the word “moderator.”
It is a noun that can mean:
1. a person or thing that moderates.
2. a person who presides over a panel discussion on radio or television.
3. a member of an online message board or electronic mailing list with privileges and responsibilities to approve or reject messages and uphold the terms of service.
4. a presiding officer, as at a public forum, a legislative body, or an ecclesiastical body in the Presbyterian Church.
5. Physics. a substance, as graphite or heavy water, used to slow neutrons to speeds at which they are more efficient in causing fission.

The last couple of meanings bring to mind an interesting family connection. My great grandfather, Rev. Edward Mack, was Moderator of the General Assembly of the PCUS (Presbyterian Church of the United States) in 1939. His oldest son, Dr. Edward Mack, PhD was a chemist who worked on the Manhattan Project in WWII, a project related to the Physics definition of moderator. I want to explore how those two definitions interrelate.

Radioactive materials, such as uranium, are inherently unstable at the atomic level. That means periodically the nucleus of a uranium atom, made up of protons and neutrons, will break apart. This is called nuclear fission.
When fission occurs, a huge amount of energy is created and two new nuclei are formed, with fewer numbers of protons and neutrons in each nucleus, and usually one or more free neutrons that go flying away. When you have a large enough and concentrated enough mass of uranium those free neutrons can collide with another uranium nucleus and cause it to fission. If this happens often enough and fast enough, a huge amount of energy is released.

That’s a very simplified description of how a basic nuclear bomb works.
Nuclear bombs are great for blowing up things and potentially making large swaths of the planet uninhabitable, but not very useful for anything else. For other things, like generating heat to create steam to power generators to create electricity, you must be able to control the rate at which fission occurs.

That’s where moderators come in. In a nuclear reactor you have lots of fuel in the form of rods or pellets spaced closely enough to promote fission in each other, but not close enough (you hope) to create an explosion. In between these fuel rods or pellets there are rods of a material that absorbs the free neutrons. When the rods are all the way in, uranium atoms still decay and generate free neutrons, but the neutrons are stopped before they can spark another uranium atom to decay.

The moderator rods can then be used to control the amount of fission occurring and therefore the production of energy. Pull the rods out a little bit, and you get a little energy. Pull them out more and you get more energy. Pull them all the way out and you have an atomic free for all – an explosion.
Now think about the other kind of moderator, the person who moderates a discussion or public forum. They are really doing the same thing. The participants are like uranium, periodically spewing out particles of information that might trigger an explosion among the discussion participants. The job of the moderator is to control the exchanges between participants so that an explosion does not happen.

Now think about Facebook. It’s essentially unmoderated conversation. For the vast majority, there’s no problem. But for the minority of people that are “radioactive”, if they are not moderated, they will cause an explosion.
The sad thing is there are people that know this and revel in their ability to create explosions, to create discord. They feel like they are doing something, but that something is like an explosion, good for destroying things, but not very useful in any constructive manner.

From a political angle, moderates are the people that keep extremists from blowing up society. The problem in America right now is 1) moderates are afraid to speak out for fear of being attacked by extremists, and 2) moderates have no mechanism to be moderators. Social media is largely unmoderated, and political parties create extremists.

Think about that last statement – political parties create extremists. They really do. The point of political parties is to bring people together around a set of ideas, but to ensure victory in elections, they must demonize the opposition. If you are a Democrat and you think Republicans must all be idiots, then you are an extremist! If you are a Republican and you think Democrats must all be idiots, then you are an extremist!

You may not be blowing people up or shooting them, but you are just as dangerous as any ISIS supporter, more dangerous perhaps, because you don’t even realize the havoc you are creating in your society.

I know we cannot ever get rid of all extremists, but I wish we had a way to marginalize them enough to make them ineffective.

We need to have more people willing to act as moderators in the nuclear reaction that is society, people who can accept the free neutrons the radioactive extremists throw out, can accept them, absorb them, and keep the extremists from igniting a society destroying conflagration.

We had one of those once, about 1861-1865. It set back society at least 150 years. If it happens again, we may never recover.

We need moderators. We need to control this radioactive extremism before it reaches critical mass.