A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism

by Adam Gopnik

Order does not just mean obedience to authority, though at times it does mean accepting a subordinate role for ourselves for the good of everyone else. Order means disciplining our desires—in ways that liberals may not always like—to assure that social peace can continue.

“Power into will, will into appetite; And appetite a universal wolf,” devouring all. This is as good a capsule description of the history of Nazism or Stalinism as one can imagine: first the thirst for power, then the pure assertion of will, and then the world wolfed down, large and small alike. Shakespeare believed in charity and forgiveness, too—justice and order tempered by mercy and cheer. But the risk of the universal wolf unleashed when every station in life is contested worried him far more.

A love of order can be felt just as strongly by the impoverished as the insolent; in fact, Johnson thought, the impoverished need order more, since they have fewer means for buying themselves out of natural anarchy.

Conservative philosophy, in other words, is, as we say now, a thing and deserves a serious listen. Yet conservatism is in many ways an even more confusing term than liberalism, taking in everyone from upright patricians to down-home fundamentalist preachers.

Among right-wing critics of liberalism, the emphasis on social order is grounded in something still more primal: a reverence for the natural order of family and community.

in the absence of clan feeling, the nuclear family—we four—become ever more important as a kind of life raft in the ocean of existence. Perhaps too important. Upper-middle-class people overinvest in one or two kids rather than broadly investing in many generations, as most human beings throughout time have done, and this overinvestment, a frequent argument goes, is hugely destructive to society at large, since it makes them ferociously desperate to reserve the same places for their kids that they have been occupying, leaving no room for others to join in or up.

They say that liberalism is the natural enemy of community, and of the families and traditions that make communities stable, and that stable communities are essential to happy lives. The liberty and freedom liberalism emphasizes leave its adherents with an atomized existence, fragmented and unfulfilling and, in a certain sense, inhumane.

Order, in both the family and in society, is the concern uniting conservatives, and liberal reform its natural enemy.

I don’t actually think that limited or large government matters as much in distinguishing contemporary liberals from constitutional conservatives as we are told it does. All of us want just as large a government as suits the current needs of our values and programs. Statism may or may not be a sin, but if it is, it is a sin neither of liberal left nor liberalish right. Liberals want government to be large enough, for instance, to enforce gun control laws, but not intrusive enough to have anything to do with women and their reproductive choices.

What actually and effectively separates liberal and mainstream conservative parties and politicians, seen squarely, are certain ideas about respect and certain rituals of reverence—particularly respect for the military and reverence for religion. This is the outward show of order.

Disraeli put it himself, with prescient clarity, “In a progressive country change is constant; and the great question is, not whether you should resist change which is inevitable, but whether that change should be carried out in deference to the manners, the customs, the laws, the traditions of the people, or in deference to abstract principles and arbitrary and general doctrines.”

The conservative’s emphasis on social order and national myths leads him, even if he is a constitutional conservative like Disraeli or de Gaulle who accepts liberal institutions (indeed, they think that they understand liberal institutions better than the liberals who have perverted them), to object to the liberal’s perpetual use of government for reform. For the conservative, reforms produce the need for more reforms not because, as the liberal says, new problems emerge but because the reform has created problems, which would never have happened if we had just left well enough alone.

Burke, as we’ve said, spent half his political life endorsing the revolution in America and then another huge chunk of it prosecuting Warren Hastings, the British boss in India accused of cruelty to the “natives.” These were very much what we would now call liberal causes, directed on humane principles against oligarchic power. But when the French Revolution happened, Burke recoiled in horror, not principally at the mass killings during the reign of terror, which actually only really began after he wrote, but at the regicide of Louis XVI.

Burke wasn’t just offended by the violence done to many; he was terrified of the violence done to kings and queens, since it decapitated the very idea of social order.

Tom Paine was horrified at the killing of the king and queen because he knew how the murder would diminish the dignity of the French Revolution; Burke was horrified because of how it would diminish the dignity of kings.

The quarrel between constitutional conservatives and liberals can be bitter and profound—the difference between Carter and Reagan was enormous, and the perpetual argument between Burke and Mill is real—but it takes place within a general agreement that the rules of parliamentary democracy, even in the nascent state that Burke knew them, are essentially a sound way of sorting out their quarrels, with at least a minimal agreement that an oscillation of power between the two sides is inevitable.

another, far fiercer right-wing critique of liberalism. That assault finds in liberalism a fatal overreliance on reason.

There is liberal secularism, the indifference to faith that calls itself “toleration” but is really intolerance for anything that lies beyond liberal understanding, treating millennial-old beliefs as though they were as disposable as Kleenex, and with those unsure about the sudden new secular wisdom treated not as skeptics but as haters and bigots.

There is liberal cosmopolitanism, the indifference to national loyalty that makes liberals easily contemplate going elsewhere and, worse still, welcoming in the world through unsifted immigration.

There is liberal permissiveness, the disdain for simple moral ideas—as simple, say, as the one that says that all children should have a father and a mother to bring them up—that thrills those cosmopol...

there is liberal relativism, the insistence that you have your way and I have my own, and if yours involves having sex with cocker spaniels, ...

Secularism, cosmopolitanism, permissiveness, relativism: these are things that liberals boast of as positive values, while their catastrophic effects on ordi...

Some version or another of this kind of communitarian complaint is at the heart of the more benign interpretations of the crisis of what’s called populism, the rise of Trump, and the success of Brexit.

The obviousness of the clownishness, the supposed irrationality of the Brexit choice, are exactly what makes them attractive—lets rub the elite’s noses in the awfulness they dread, and they who have ignored our truths might at last share a little in our misery.

It is easy for metropolitans to shrug and say it was not of our liberal doing, but if we want to take pride in what liberalism has accomplished, we have to take responsibility for what it does. Free societies crush community? Hmmm. Should we not, perhaps, then query the meaning of free?

What makes the radical right-wing communitarian complaint distinct from the left-wing attack on liberalism—which blames capitalism for all this human pain, first and last—is that it almost always places the blame for the loss of identity on the loss of authority. And it blames liberal ideas (from secularism to relativism) more than it tends to blame free-market economics

The solution is not socialism, seen as another failed liberal idea, but nationalism, the natural order of mankind.

These more extreme authoritarian attacks on liberalism come in three basic kinds. Let’s call their believers for simplicity’s sake—and with the obvious understanding that they cross over and hybridize in many intricate ways—triumphalist authoritarians, theological authoritarians, and tragic authoritarians. The first attack liberal weakness; the second, liberal materialism; the last, liberal hubris.

Triumphalists offer the most familiar kind of right-wing authoritarianism, so much that we often just identify it as what right-wing authoritarianism is. It’s based on the belief that the most crucial dimension in life is weakness and strength, and that liberals are incurably weak.

For the triumphalist authoritarian, the test of our tribe is its dominance over the other tribes.

The ideology of authoritarian triumphalism is always hostile to what liberals call the rule of law. Triumphalists truly don’t believe in equality of treatment or in fair play. They believe in domination—whoever wins, rules.

At this point, it’s conventional to put in a few warning words about the causes of the recent rise of populism and gangster-style authoritarianism in Europe and America.

the simpler and scarier and more important truth is that one or other kind of triumphalist authoritarianism has been the default condition of government for almost all of human history. A king or boss or chieftain comes to power through success in war, or inherits power from some ancestor who won his war, or finds a demagogue’s way to power.

we should accept the truth that it can always rise, that the lure of a closed authoritarian society is one permanently present in human affairs, and that the real question is not what makes it happen but what, for brief periods of historical time, has kept it from happening.

Triumphalist authoritarianism is invariably rooted not in an actual program of national renewal but in a raw sense of humiliation, even if the humiliations can often seem, in retrospect, tiny.

The second kind of authoritarianism is less powerful in contemporary practice but far more formidable intellectually. We can call it theological or sometimes theistic authoritarianism. Its practitioners say that yes, we need authority, but authority shouldn’t come from human beings. The great leader is a false prophet. What we need is the authority and glory of God.

Of all the kinds of order there are in the universe, divine order is the most beautiful and most essential.

Theological authoritarians hate liberalism not because liberals are weak but because they seem so strong, so arrogant and complacent in their denial of divine truth.

Theological authoritarianism in actual power today is largely confined to the Muslim world.

Consider, instead, the most attractive and seductive model of theological authoritarianism, as we find it in the works of the best religious writers of the past century. The early twentieth-century English—and latterly Roman Catholic—writer and lecturer G. K. Chesterton was one of the most original, and by far the wittiest, of the religious dissidents from the liberal imagination.

this more intelligent strain of religious dissent from liberal norms does insist that the undue hopes liberalism invests in programs of reason and reform are an inadequate measure to the actual range of human longing.

Though the illness they announce is always new and will be fatal if not treated, the prescription never changes. It is always, essentially: “Gimme that old-time religion, especially the kind with a high white hat.”

The continuous complaint is that liberalism is atomizing. Liberalism honors the individual before the divine. Liberalism is inherently and duplicitously and incurably divided against itself: it pretends to honor freedom and liberty and instead enforces enslavement to the market and to material pleasure.

A liberal might say that to know who I am is, as with a musical comedy hero in act one, to know what I want—what I’m driven toward, what I desire. Taylor’s point is that to know who I really am is to know where I am—how I’m placed within a social context that I didn’t make and can’t control.

less visible but in its way more profound right-wing creed, not necessarily theistic or even religious, which we can call tragic authoritarianism. It is the authoritarianism of one of my intellectual heroes, a man we’ve already encountered and who I love: the eighteenth-century journalist and philosopher, Samuel Johnson. He thought that life was too sad to be cured by politics. Even good government ended in death. It is also a form of the attack on liberalism one finds as well in the so-called Straussians, followers of the Jewish American classical philosopher Leo Strauss. To this type, the past is not a place to be outstripped and discarded, surpassed and condescended to. The past is in a real sense the only place we have.

The tragic authoritarian’s chief enemy is not liberal secularism as such but liberal progressivism. Tragic authoritarians think that liberalism is neither too soft nor too hard but too blinkered and self-satisfied. Liberalism is guilty of enormous hubris.

Liberal reason, in this view, is the perpetual enemy of community. Liberals use reason to reason you out of your identity.

Some version of de Benoist’s critique is also at the core of the beliefs of the hugely popular (and scandalous) French novelist Michel Houellebecq, surely the writer of the moment in Europe, if anyone is. In the novel that made him famous, Les Particles Élémenataires, Houellebecq proposed that a society with an unchecked devotion both to liberalism in the economic sense and libertinism in the erotic sense would eventually lead to one of more or less compulsory oscillation between, well, fucking and finance, where bankers would literally break their backs in the act of having sex for the hundredth time that day. The satire seemed ridiculously heavy-handed and overwrought—

Houellebecq’s most recent (and most infamous) novel, Submission, about an Islamic takeover of France, is supposedly an anti-Islamic warning story. Yet in fact it is an admiring account of Islamic militancy, seen as a plausible alternative to the vitiated forms of modern liberalism. All the most eloquent spokesmen in the book are religious minded and in favor of theocracy. The struggle of the twentieth century, the narrator explains, was between two failed humanisms—the hard humanism of communism and the soft humanism of liberal capitalism, each in its way “horribly reductive.”

What can the liberal say in response to all of these assaults?