A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism

by Adam Gopnik

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

All of us want just as large a government as suits the current needs of our values and programs.

What distinguishes religions from philosophies and points of view and all the other ways people cope with the difficulties of the world—the only reason to use that specific word rather than some other—is that the religious accept the fact of supernatural intervention at some historical moment.

Nothing could be further from the truth than the idea that the values of liberalism are simply wanly recycled from religion. Replacing sacred truths with common sympathy and shared sentiments or with self-evident propositions; believing in the fallibility of all human beliefs; insisting on skepticism about all claims; making incremental social improvement and the removal of suffering a higher goal than eternal salvation; placing more emphasis on the well-being of the next generation and on the “horizontal” axis of life than on achieving eternal bliss through the “vertical” one—these distinguishing traits of the liberal temperament are not the traits of any existing religion. They are new ideas.

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.

A liberalism that underrates the human need for stable order and symbolic identity and looks past the common truth of mortality too exclusively toward the horizon of mere market-bound materialism is one that will soon become a unicorn itself.

Liberal prosperity and pluralism are great, sure—all you have to do is discount the racism, sexism, cruelty, and the long centuries of exploitation and continuing despoiling of other people’s cultures, environments, and goods. Liberal reform is pious—until it runs up against the limits of what it won’t, or can’t, reform, which is the governing system of exploitation and oppression.

Bakunin had been right in 1867 when he predicted that “liberty without socialism is injustice; socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.”

Overlapping identities enlist overlapping systems of subordination, in ways that can’t be caught by simple addition: someone can be black and lesbian and working class, but one can’t just add one oppression onto another. These different oppressions interact in specific ways.

The urge to commit atrocities is standard to all human systems; the institutionalized urge to amend them is not.

IN THIS HOUSE WE BELIEVE THAT: BLACK LIVES MATTER WOMEN’S RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS NO HUMAN IS ILLEGAL SCIENCE IS REAL LOVE IS LOVE KINDNESS IS EVERYTHING.

Liberals should never be arrogant, but they should never be apologetic either. Scientific reasoning can’t give you values. But once you choose your values, it can give you lots of useful truth.

We know how to provide national health insurance without overrationing medicine or bankrupting the society—it happens every day in Canada and France and Germany. We know how to end gun violence—Australia did it, neatly and essentially overnight. We certainly know how to end an epidemic of crime without incarcerating everybody. Really know. More people ought to know it, too. Higher education should not belong to an elite, and the education of the public should not be seen as an elitist activity.

Someone once said that we all have the philosophy of our insomnia, meaning that the things that keep us awake at three in the morning are the things we really care about.

Liberalism is a political temperament and a credo that seeks social conciliation—one that cherishes compromise not as a reluctant last post but as a positive engine of forward movement. But the liberal is condemned and always will be to be the most embattled of all kinds.