A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism

by Adam Gopnik

Everywhere we look, throughout Europe as much as in America, patriotism is being replaced with nationalism, pluralism by tribalism, impersonal justice by the tyrannical whim of autocrats who think only to punish their enemies and reward their hitmen. Many of these have gained power by democratic means, but they have kept power by illiberal ones.

Historically and still today, both the far left and the far right hate liberals more even than they hate their opposite extreme, with whom they share—even if they don’t recognize it—a common ground of absolutism. Dogmatic Catholics can speak more readily to dogmatic Communists than to lifelong compromisers. Competing absolutisms respect each other more than either respects those who are allergic to absolutes as an absolute principle.

We can’t have an idea of individual liberty without an idea of shared values that include it.

It’s a myth, as a new generation of scholars has shown, that liberalism is obsessed with individualism, a myth that liberalism doesn’t have a rich imagination of common fates and shared values. Adam Smith, though today he’s been appropriated to right-wing think tanks and even right-wing neckties—Milton Friedman always wore one—thought in terms of cities and of how they share sentiments before he thought of individuals and how they price goods.

(The admixture of Christian piety and liberal principle can, historically, be an extremely potent one, as neither group should forget, though both do.)

Taylor and Mill believed in complete equality of the sexes before anyone else did, just as he believed in the absolute moral evil of slavery while others in Britain were still temporizing. (He did as much as anyone to make the American Civil War won by the right side by enlisting the mill workers of Britain to reject processing cotton from the Confederacy, at some cost to their own immediate interests.)

Compromise is not a sign of the collapse of one’s moral conscience. It is a sign of its strength, for there is nothing more necessary to a moral conscience than the recognition that other people have one, too. A compromise is a knot tied tight between competing decencies. Harriet Taylor’s love for John Mill was bounded by John Taylor’s pathos and by his love for her. And, since no two moral consciences can go just alike, they have to only be imperfectly synchronized. Close enough is good enough—for now.

The great relationship of his life would be proof of his confidence that true liberty meant love—relationship and connection, not isolation and self-seeking. What we want liberty for is the power to connect with others as we choose. Liberalism is our common practice of connection turned into a principle of pluralism, teenage texting raised to the power of law.

Most political visions are unicorns, perfect imaginary creatures we chase and will never find. Liberalism is a rhinoceros. It’s hard to love. It’s funny to look at. It isn’t pretty but it’s a completely successful animal. A rhino can overturn an SUV and—go to YouTube!—run it right over, horn out.

So, the critical liberal words are not liberty and democracy alone—vital though they are—but also humanity and reform, tolerance and pluralism, self-realization and autonomy, the vocabulary of passionate connection and self-chosen community.

Liberalism ends in the center not because that’s where liberals always think the sanity is, but because they recognize that there are so many selves in a society that must be accommodated that you can’t expect them to congregate in a single neighborhood at one end or another of the city. The meeting place, the piazza, in an Italian village, is placed in the center of the town because everyone can get there. The ancient Greeks thought of this meeting place as the “agora,” which meant the market but meant more broadly the place where citizens met for unplanned meetings. Tyrants of all kinds, Persian and Spartan, feared the agora in the most literal way, and tried to eliminate it from their cities.

there appeared the two foundational documents of modern liberal humanism, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and Mill’s On Liberty. Darwin’s was a new articulation of the history of life and humanity’s place within it, implicit but obvious, and Mill’s was the articulation of a new understanding about the nature of authority and the individual’s claims against it.

Liberalism, in the specific sense that I wanted to explain to my daughter, is an attempt to realize liberty, not merely to invoke it or make it the subject of an incantation.

That the search for radical change by humane measures, far from producing a dry, atomizing, and emotion-less doctrine in which all social relations are reduced to the status of a contract, makes liberalism one of the great moral adventures in human history. Far from being fatuously materialistic, merely gross, and profit driven, the rise and triumph of liberal ideas is the most singular spiritual episode in all of human history.

Liberalism is a fact-first philosophy with a feelings-first history. Liberal humanism is a whole, in which the humanism always precedes the liberalism. Powerful new feelings about a compassionate connection to other people, about community, have always been informally shared before they are crystallized into law. Social contacts precede the social contract.

Liberalism is realistic about the huge task of remaking worlds. But it is romantic about the possibility of making marginally happier endings for as many as possible within this one.

Because freedom of debate, even more than freedom of speech, is central to the liberal ideal, a liberal credo without counterarguments becomes just another dogma.

the right-wing arguments—for authority against liberal relativism and for the integrity of communities against liberal cosmopolitanism—were ones I have come to know well through a lifetime of reading, most often found in authors who I loved like brothers, or uncles—sometimes crazy uncles—from Samuel Johnson to G. K. Chesterton.

Liberalism is as distinct a tradition as exists in political history, but it suffers from being a practice before it is an ideology, a temperament and a tone and a way of managing the world more than a fixed set of beliefs. (At least this means that poets and novelists and painters, a Trollope or a George Eliot or a Manet, can be better guides to its truths than political philosophers or pundits.)

I wanted you to meet Bayard Rustin, the great black and gay man who organized the march on Washington in 1963 and who, at the end of his long life, summed up his credo elegantly in the three simplest of distinctly liberal dance positions: “1) nonviolent tactics; 2) constitutional means; 3) democratic procedures.”

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 an ongoing belief in the need for nonviolent incremental alterations of existing institutions and an all-around effort to be nicer to everyone!”

Modern liberalism—as distinct from earlier and more general meanings of the term as “generous” or “learned”—begins with a psychological principle, a human principle. 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.

we’ve come to recognize liberalism as a more encompassing emotional temperament.

That a word or concept has a history does not make it mean what it once meant. Trees have roots; human beings don’t. What they have instead are histories. Histories are ways of thinking about the past and the present, which allow us to imagine new futures.

More important, philosophers and their big ideas are, as often as not, the efflorescence of their time rather than the cause of it. A big idea usually is the condensation of many breaths more than it is the wind that blows history forward.

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 are core liberal emotions even more than concerns about checks and balances between the executive and legislative branches.

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 two strange Scots turned this kind of skepticism about the power of reasoning to do it all into a positive principle of social sympathy.

Hume, following Shaftsbury, thought that sympathy was the primary human faculty, our key gift. It’s the emotional mucilage that brings men and women together and keeps them together. Sex may make us want someone else’s company, but that’s an animal desire: it’s our ability to feel for someone, rather than to just, uh, feel them, that makes us human.

Smith added something new to the picture. He clinched in practice what Hume saw abstractly. His favorite words, active and productive, are not at all Hume’s words. Smith, though he didn’t have much of one by romantic standards, liked life. What Smith took from Hume’s demonstration of the limits of reason, the absurdity of superstition, and the primacy of the passions was not a lesson of Buddhist-Stoical indifference but something more like a sense of Epicurean intensity—if we are living in the material world, then let us make it our material.

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.

They believe in reform rather than revolution because the results are in: it works better. More permanent positive social change is made incrementally rather than by revolutionary transformation.

Frederick Douglass, in his once-famous Fifth of July oration, delivered on July 5, 1852, could combine a militant rejection of slavery with a bow to the moral possibilities inherent in the Constitution to annihilate it—and this wasn’t just a rhetorical gambit designed to win support for his cause: “In that instrument, I hold there is neither warrant, license, nor sanction of the hateful thing; but, interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT. Read its preamble, consider its purposes. Is slavery among them? Is it at the gateway? or is it in the temple? It is neither.”

Liberal reform, like evolutionary change, being incremental, is open to the evidence of experience.

it is the compulsive appetite for reform that makes conservatives laugh at liberals, and ought to make liberals laugh at themselves from time to time. Reform our language, our pronouns, our cafeteria menus, our forms of addressing each other. Reform sexual acts so that they demand step-by-step consent. Some of this is ridiculous or can be ridiculously enforced.

All reform, always? This seems implausible, surely? 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.

Eliot was, with her friends Trollope and Charles Dickens, one of the three greatest novelists of the greatest period in the English novel. (Thackeray, who would have formed a fourth in their own time, has tended to fall away since.)

He saw that science proceeded not from the accumulation of facts but from a readiness to be surprised. “We must resolve that when we ask Nature a question, to listen patiently to her reply; should that reply perplex us, we must ask again, putting the question in another form; and should again, and again, the same reply be elicited, we must accept it, be it ever so destructive of our theories and anticipations.”

Lewes and Eliot between them, someone has said, a little pretentiously but not wrongly, defined the liberalism of the oikos, the Greek word for home, whereas Trollope’s is the liberalism of the polis, the city.

But it wasn’t all sewers and moral support for Lewes. He was also the first to use a term, and discover a concept, that remains one of the key analytic weapons in the liberal arsenal. This was the idea of “emergence”—the great solvent of all determinisms. Lewes’s discovery of emergence was simply the discovery that the rules of a system can be completely different than the rules of the elements that form it.

That all behavior is emergent was their coauthored lesson.

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. Once again, humanism precedes liberalism.

He showed not only that clubs and coffeehouses precede parliaments, but that a parliament can only be as strong as the coffeehouse beside it.

Was there a way to think about rational communication among people that didn’t depend on believing that the cosmos was itself rational or that people in some sense always were? Habermas’s answer was that the world might not be reasonable, and people certainly weren’t, but that public spaces could help them become so.

An argument used to be made that mass incarceration played a role in the decline, in removing those who committed violent acts from society. But any close study of the facts shows that this played, at most, a minor role, and in any case, as incarceration decreases, crime continues to go down.

Like any appealing term, social capital and the public sphere and even commonplace civilization risk becoming mere catchall phrases. Plenty of time can be spent criticizing them as bland evasions of real political conflict. After all, the difference between Northern and Southern Italy isn’t just happy amateur opera singers versus gloomy suspicious men under the spell of omerta. The differences in economic possibility, in feudal agriculture and criminality and industrialization, play a part.

Humanism precedes liberalism. Connection comes before action. A readiness for self-inspection precedes an effort at self-improvement, and a confidence in our neighbors precedes faith in citizenship. Thinking about liberal order or the liberal future in terms of laws and legislatures is far too limiting. Park designers, sociologists, and beyond have more to tell us about building open societies.

The conservative idea of community is a way of preserving tradition; the liberal idea of community is one of assembling confidence and energies for reform. Building social capital, or civic society, is a way of having self-government outside government, not just a way of reaffirming familiar values.