A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism

by Adam Gopnik

Liberalism is an evolving political practice that makes the case for the necessity and possibility of (imperfectly) egalitarian social reform and ever greater (if not absolute) tolerance of human difference through reasoned and (mostly) unimpeded conversation, demonstration, and debate.

“I am for freeing man from his chains!” the Marxist ideologue hails. “I am for faith and family!” the Christian warrior proclaims. “I am for an ongoing belief in the need for nonviolent incremental alterations of existing institutions and an all-around effort to be nicer to everyone!” the liberal tries to cry out—and then can only sigh. The slogan won’t even fit on a banner.

It’s a rhino of a sentence, yes, but each of its ugly clauses enfolds some huge advance in moral understanding and effective action.

Its foundation is fallibilism—the truth that we are usually wrong about everything and always divided within ourselves about anything we believe. Reform rather than revolution or repetition is essential because what we are doing now is likely to be based on a bad idea and because what we do next is likely to be bad in some other way too. Incremental cautious reform is likely to get more things right than any other kind.

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He is reputed to have said that, having seen the law at work, if someone had accused him of having stolen the towers of Notre-Dame, he would flee the country rather than stand trial.

people who think for a living are not thought machines but people. They change their views from day to day, mood to mood, and circumstance to circumstance

Montaigne is an emotional, not a contractual, liberal. He didn’t give a damn about democracy, or free speech, or even property rights. They were outside his experience or his sense of possibility. Even equality before the law he saw as impossible—not even aristocrats could get it in the regime under which he lived. That’s why he made the crack about the towers of Notre-Dame. But he had a rich foundational impulse toward the emotions that make a decent relation between man and state possible—a far-reaching skepticism about authority, compassion for those who suffer, and a hatred of cruelty.

Liberalism’s task is not to imagine the perfect society and drive us toward it but to point out what’s cruel in the society we have now and fix it if we possibly can. An acceptance of fallibility and, with it, an openly avowed skepticism of authority

These were modern emotions. Compassion for human flaws is a different emotion than forgiveness for sins. The second presupposes a church capable of offering forgiveness; the first presupposes only a community capable of common feeling.

Fixing the imperfect is enough to do even if we have no idea whatever what the perfect is like. We cannot hope to make mankind less inconsistent, but we can work together to make a world less cruel. We need to hold ourselves to the rhino standard, not the unicorn fantasy—to ask always what’s the best real possibility, not what’s the ultimate ideal imagining.

The idea of sympathy as the glue of good societies is one that began to have an especially intense life in the eighteenth century. Indeed, the idea of sympathy is at least as important to the birth of modern liberalism as the practice of science.

the most important liberal thinkers of the era were not the ones who embraced reason uncritically, but exactly the ones who took from the scientific revolution an enormous lesson in skepticism, who saw that one of the things that reasoning really showed was that reason had limits, that you couldn’t easily get from a fact to a value, and that you never really know,

Smith believed not that markets make men free but that free men move toward markets. The difference is small but decisive; it is most of what we mean by humanism.

It is the primacy that liberals still place on the kind of fallibility that Montaigne described as foundational to our humanity—the same flawed but not in itself sinful nature that Smith and Hume thought could become the glue of social sympathy—that makes liberals favor reform through what we could call “provoked consensus.”

The liberal idea of community is not one, as it is for many conservatives, of blood ties or traditional authority. It rests on an idea of shared choices.

including even a sense of sympathy for those caught on the losing...

by assuring that those who opposed it may have lost the fight but haven’t lost their dignity, their autonomy, or their chance to adapt to the change without fearing the loss of all their agency.

favor reform over revolution.

Liberals are not afraid of revolution. But liberals will remain reluctant revolutionaries.

the liberals who made our revolution believed in the model of Cincinnatus rather than Caesar. Cincinnatus was the Roman general who retired to his farm; Caesar conquered and became a dictator. This pattern, of renouncing violence once its immediate ends are met, is deeply imprinted in the liberal temperament. It’s why Grant and Eisenhower, victorious generals, took office in business suits (and often preferred other business-suited people to soldiers).

Liberals believe in fighting wars as hard as necessary; ending them as soon as possible; and rebuilding the defeated country as charitably as one can.

One of the things that distinguishes liberalism is the readiness to accept that social reform is always going to be essential. Each time we alter a society, new inequalities and injustices appear and are in need of remedy.

The left’s reproach to this view is that reform is never enough; the right’s reproach is that reform is never finished.

The secret truth is that what we are having most of the time is the same reform, over and over again, directed to new places and people: a removal of socially sanctioned cruelty.

Yet instead of simply emphasizing parliamentary or government action alone—reform through legislative and executive action or even political action as the goal of liberalism—our awkward rhino, our liberal sentence, spoke of “unimpeded conversation, demonstration, and debate,”

It’s obvious that liberalism depends on democratic institutions:

But it also depends on communities and changes that take place outside political institutions. The real source of reform is often far from any obvious political action. Morals and manners change politics more than politics change morals and manners.

In Greenwich Village in the 1950s, the small businesspeople, the locksmiths, bread bakers, and shoe repairmen—who are there simply to sell goods and services—become a network, carrying civic functions of connecting, protecting, observing, communing. This beautiful “ballet of the street” is what the great urbanist Jane Jacobs loved to celebrate; it’s an instance of an emergent system, right on the sidewalk.

One of the things that we have genuinely learned is that the existence of invisible thoroughfares of voluntary and unplanned and private arenas of argument and debate are essential preconditions for liberal societies.

Violent crime, which was a plague that shaped—and deformed—American public argument for decades, suddenly and precipitously began to decline in the early 1990s and has continued declining ever since, reshaping the civic order.

The causes of this miracle, though, mirror the insights of all those novelists and essayists and sociologists and philosophers and historians about how the liberalism of shared values and communities can rescue itself when it falls into crisis.

Today, sociologists have made a very compelling case that community policing, married to community action, is the real engine behind the crime decline. Community groups (the Habermasian coffeehouses in this case) began policing their own neighborhoods, and police became more aware of the community pressure points, stopping crime where it started before it happened and using predictive data more efficiently.

As people made small incremental changes in their neighborhoods, virtuous circles of sympathy emerged—because the subways seemed safer, more people rode the trains, making the subway safer still—and the entire social system changed.

The liberal idea of community is not the traditional one. Where conservatives believe in the renewal of traditional community, liberals believe as well in the flight from family and tradition into new kinds of communal order, which is why utopian communities and, for that matter, Bohemian neighborhoods have played such a large role in liberal history.

Return to our awkward liberal sentence. Why “demonstration” and why “mostly unimpeded”? I mean of course demonstration in the broadest sense—nonviolent social action that moves a discussion from the coffeehouse to the avenue. In our day, these include social media storms and YouTube protest videos and, occasionally, cable television programming at night. But I also mean demonstration in the very literal sense that became familiar in the sixties and continues today: large numbers of people taking to the streets in nonviolent protests to show the depth of their desire for reform.

What is liberalism, then? A hatred of cruelty. An instinct about human conduct rooted in a rueful admission of our own fallibility and of the inadequacy of our divided minds to be right frequently enough to act autocratically. A belief that the sympathy that binds human society together can disconnect us from our clannish and suspicious past. A program for permanent reform based on reason and an appeal to argument, aware of human fallibility and open to the lessons of experience. An understanding that small, open social institutions, if no larger than a café or more overtly political than a park, play an outsized role in creating free minds and securing public safety. A faith in rational debate, rather than inherited ritual, and in reform, rather than either revolution or reaction. A belief in radical change through practial measures. A readiness to act—nonviolently but visibly and sometimes in the face of threatened violence—on behalf of equality. A belief that life should be fair—or fairer, or as fair as seems fair: people’s lives should not be overdetermined by who their parents were or how much money they might have inherited or what shade of skin their genes have woven. A belief that the individual pursuit of eccentric happiness can be married to a common faith in fair procedure.

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These values are rooted in a simple moral idea about human capacity—a moral idea about the source of meaning in the individual imagination. This just means that people make up their values, that they aren’t handed down from the past or from on high. This humanist ideal is what intersects and animates liberalism with moral energy. The opposite of humanism is not theism but fanaticism; the opposite of liberalism is not conservatism but dogmatism. Fanaticism is therefore the chief enemy of humanism, and fanaticism in political life is the chief enemy of the liberal ideal.

Liberalism believes in the imperfectability of mankind.

That is as close as liberalism gets to a utopian vision: a future society that is flawed, like our own, but less cruel as time goes on.

Smith and Hume, Lewes and Eliot, Mill and Taylor, Rustin and Montaigne, Olmsted and Putnam share a belief in social conversation as an antidote to authority and a belief that reforming the world takes work but is worth it.

And yet the constellation of ideas and values and processes and principles that they embodied and helped make, despite creating more plural and peaceful and prosperous societies than any other social practice known to history, is under constant assault today, from intellectuals and ordinary people alike.

THERE ARE the ideas of liberalism, defined anew: an ongoing and evolving campaign for mostly egalitarian reform achieved through open discussion and debate, often rising from small dissenting communities to create pluralist institutions—liberal institutions.

why, then, is liberalism so set upon, so broadly unpopular in so many ways? Two ferocious critiques, one from the left and one from the right, exist to explain it. And, yes, being a liberal means being perpetually engaged in a two-front war,

I said before that liberalism is rooted in a belief in reform and reason. The right-wing critique of liberalism is largely an attack on its overreliance on reason; the left-wing one, mostly an attack on its false faith in reform.

The right-wing assault also tends to focus on the evil that liberalism does internally to the traditional communities and nations it betrays; the left wing pays attention, as well, and sometimes more often, to the evil that liberalism does externally to its distant victims in the foreign countries it exploits.

The left says it does this mostly in pursuit of profit and on behalf of the capitalism that liberalism shelters (even as it smiles and pretends it does not); the right, that it does this in pursuit of perverse principles and on behalf of the monster state that liberalism idealizes (even as it frowns and pretends to love only freedom).

Nothing’s more central to the liberal ideal than a belief in debate, a belief that airing differences actually gets you somewhere new.

There is no shortage of cogent arguments against liberalism from the right as much as from the left.

Indeed, the primary argument is simple and compelling: the most important need human beings have is for order. Order not merely in their daily lives but in their world.

Liberalism, with its emphasis on reform, is an instrument of rapid change, the conservative says. And change disorders order.