A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism

by Adam Gopnik

Whenever you look at a group with secure clan identity, there’s always conformity and a radical course of culling out those who don’t belong.

liberal reply to the communitarian complaint as it comes at us from conservative politicians and philosophers: liberalism actually builds and reinforces common bonds as much as any political practice can. Indeed, it depends on them.

The first argument is an argument from experience. Those societies that glorify militarism almost invariably lose wars.

The great liberal philosopher Karl Popper long ago pointed out that in a closed or authoritarian society it is also almost impossible for there to be the rich practice of any science, or any real growth of knowledge, since knowledge depends on the free play of criticism—the one thing such authoritarian societies can’t indulge.

Tolerance is a treaty among faiths more than an imposition on faith.

But to read either John Locke or John Milton in their famous writings on tolerance is not to read contract-minded documents pointing out that you can make more money if you have fewer religious wars. It’s to see the intrusion of a new emotional value. That value is horror, horror at religious violence.

What is meant by secularism is usually, simply the proliferation of different religion faiths; a lot can look like nothing to eyes searching for only one.

The Chestertons and Deneens of the world, insisting that liberalism destroys values, tend to overlook the overwhelming liberal assertion of the primary human value of pluralism because to them pluralism is simply not a value.

It seems difficult for people of an authoritarian cast of mind to really accept that there are other people who don’t need authority to be happy—just as people who are haunted by mortality are persuaded that everyone else must be too and that no one can live in recognition of their own impending doom and still believe in constructive work and a meaningful life.

Liberals believe that the authoritarian choice between a world with certainty and a world of chaos is a false one. Between anarchy and authority lies argument. Authority is hollow if it is not reinforced with argument—actual argument, not the repetition of axioms—and argument is empty if it is not based on evidence and a search for shared facts. That was Locke’s antidote to religious warfare: arguing out the rights and wrongs in an open setting. Argument is always the antidote to fanaticism.

Nations, peoples—true nations, true peoples—the great reactionaries tell us, can only be held together by will, shared identity, the assertion of raw power, and the presence of pure faith, not by measured argument.

The left-wing critique of liberalism is chiefly an attack on liberal faith in reform.

Year Zero, the idea of beginning time itself over and starting the calendar anew, is a Jacobin concept—a founding radical concept.

people called liberals were distinct from those called radicals or socialists because liberals were still—as they are to this day, in the French sense of the term—above all aligned with the free market against state control.

they were opposed to each other, as they are to this day, about almost every significant question of what was wrong, what to do about it, and how best to get it done.

Basically, radicals ever since have accepted Marx’s analysis of bourgeois society, while liberals have rejected it.

What liberals call free speech or a free press is invariably paid speech—and William Randolph Hearst or, these days, Rupert Murdoch can pay for a lot more of it than a sweatshop worker can. The ground of liberalism in open debate sounds cozy until you price it; the coffeehouse is closed to anyone who can’t pay for the pastry.