A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism

by Adam Gopnik

The other force is the positive engine of difference, by which the oppressed can assert their own commonalities and by which those marginalized find their own voices, unashamedly at the intersection of their own identities, not some other.

The liberal response to left-wing radicalism has, historically, always been rhetorically weak—even though, historically, it has also been demonstrably correct.

It is much easier to convert smart people to a view of the necessities of massive social renewal than to the exigencies of small-step social reform.

liberals feel the same way about leftists: they convert kids readily, while the objections we liberals can offer always feel as feeble as a dad telling a teenage girl that she should be very careful riding in cars with other teens who drink.

There is a tragic rule of twenty-first-century life, a rule of double amnesia: the right tends to act as though the nineteenth century never happened, while the left tends to act as though the twentieth century never took place. The right acts as if the socialist responses to capitalism—economic planning, the welfare state, even Keynesian economics—were the result of crazy abstract ideas of statism imposed on a pliant population by power-mad intellectuals, not, as they actually were, initial responses to mass immiseration and the daily show of extreme poverty and the relentless anxiety that industrial capitalism had produced. The left treats the obvious and inarguable lessons of the twentieth century about radical revolutions—lessons about the failure of revolution in the absence of free speech and open debate, of parliamentary procedures and small-scale experiments in change—as though they had never been learned and learned in the hardest of hard ways.

The liberal response to left-wing views, old and new, is, first, that economic injustice is self-evidently amendable within the liberal order, if we have the will to do it. Second, that while the new radical assault on liberalism suggests a passionate politics, it still doesn’t propose a practical politics—one that seems likely to win elections rather than impress sophomores at Sarah Lawrence. (That is said without disdain; I have subsidized a sophomore at Sarah Lawrence.) And finally—in a way that may seem more tediously abstract but actually is a day-to-day effect on our thinking—that the new radical critiques all depend on forms of determinism and essentialism that have in the past always rightly been seen as reactionary and will still prove false friends to progressive causes.

Determinism is the belief, encountered already, that an insidious hegemonic network of enforced linguistic habits and instilled prejudices in our culture blind us from seeing the true nature of power relationships—not just slant us or partly shape our responses but really blind us, prevent us from seeing how the oppressed get oppressed.

The idea, for instance, that language creates a trap for our cognition or puts a straitjacket on it, forcing us into one worldview or another, is one of the oldest and most frequently (if futilely) dispelled of modern ideas. The argument over pronouns is a good example of the tendency on the left to turn a question of courtesy into a question of cognition.

As a matter of cognitive fact, however, we should not think that any words, including pronouns, can compel thoughts we don’t want to have.

We say that working people are distracted by those wealthy propagandists by social issues. But one might just as well say that their attention is being drawn to the social issues—to the truth that if they align with progressives who might give them Medicare for all, they will also be giving them power to legalize gay marriage and transgender bathrooms and other deeply antitraditional choices.

Essentialism is the idea, descending from Plato and coursing through the bloodstream of Western thought, that we arrive at reliable knowledge only by figuring out the true nature of something, which is fixed, eternal, and durable. The essence of a thing is that thing. Essentialism makes us ask what-is questions: What is time? What is space? What is human nature? Or more locally: What is a woman? What is black? What is the essence of the Jew?

Against this view are the nominalists, triumphant in the natural sciences, who tell us that these what-is questions lead nowhere. A scientific theory of gravity does not ask, what is gravity? Rather, it tries to explain through a testable theory exactly why and how and by what specific rules apples fall from trees—and then appends the name of gravity as a shorthand label to the result.

Gravity doesn’t have an essence; not even ducks have an essence.

A fair criticism of the contemporary left is that it is as essentialist as it needs to be at some moments—and then as wildly antiessentialist as possible at immediately adjacent ones.

This is far from an abstract or academic argument. It has everything to do with how we think and talk about freedom and authority in our daily conversation. Essentialism tells us always to ask for the authority behind an idea or to demand the true origin of a person. What is she really? it makes us ask. Who said it? Where does it (or her) come from? When the questions we should be asking are: What relation does what’s being said have to what actually happens? Or, more simply: Is that true?

The idea that one should trace the source of an argument backward, to its origins, rather than play it forward to the evidence for its claims is the root doctrine of reaction. I have tried in these pages to be skeptical about tying liberalism and science too tightly together. Liberalism preceded modern science, and humanism preceded both

an idea is best evaluated by never asking who thought it up and what authority they had to think it but by asking what facts support it and what facts might prove it false.

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In the past, it was typical of totalitarian movements, and particularly extreme reactionary right-wing ones, to insist that we can only evaluate a claim if we first know who is making it and where it comes from. This has produced such notions as the Nazi concept of Jewish physics. Einstein, being a Jew, couldn’t be right about the universe;

Insisting on the origins of an idea as the test of an idea’s value is a quintessentially reactionary notion—in many ways, it is the quintessential reactionary notion.

Those with good fortune can try to share it, or those with good fortune can decide to hoard it. Between the hoarders and the sharers is a huge historical gap, which defines what liberalism is. It’s the space where liberalism begins.

What is meant by white privilege is not so much a historical description of the way in which discrimination has happened but a description of the way in which life proceeds now.

The honest liberal hastens to add that what’s now called identity politics has in fact always existed. In the familiar liberal picture, descended from the New Deal, the pressure groups, as they used to be called, were placated one by one, often in ways far more absurd and self-canceling than they are now.

Thinking about public arguments and public debate leads us—there’s no escaping it—to another stormy issue, that of free speech and its discontents. There’s no issue on which liberals and leftists still disagree more profoundly—more radically, if you like—than on the issue of how free speech is and how free it ought to be.

The liberal view of free speech comes down to us from that bedrock document, Mill’s 1859 “On Liberty.” When it comes to free speech, Mill wants us to ask something simple: Is this practice causing me any real harm? Not potential harm to my feelings, not social harm to my idea of right, not damage to the great precepts of religion or to my stuffy uncle’s sense of propriety or to my inner sense of safety. Unless the speaker is actually about to cut your throat, you have to let him work his jaw.

For liberals, free speech is a nearly sacrosanct principle and should be curbed only at the absolute extreme. Freedom to criticize without fear is essential to the search for new knowledge,

For the left, on the other hand, free speech is always a subject of power and its invocation frequently a mask for it. The liberal assertion of free speech must never be seen as a value outside the larger context of power: who gets to speak, and how speech is heard, and how pained or threatened the listeners of that speech may feel. Mill’s idea of free speech is what we now call elitist or class-bound. He assumes a pleasant argument among gentlemen, or at most gentlemen and gentlewomen. He does not adequately imagine the way that speech is bought and sold to keep the persecuted in their place. He does not know what it really feels like to hear hatred directed at your person or your group. Free speech is fine; freed people are better.