A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism

by Adam Gopnik

liberal democracy, that magical marriage of free individuals and fair laws—

It enraged the great Frederick Douglass, a sincere Christian, that far more Christian ministers were arguing for slavery than against it. The difference was that, on Douglass’s side, the right side, there was usually a secular, political liberal or two lurking. (The admixture of Christian piety and liberal principle can, historically, be an extremely potent one, as neither group should forget, though both do.)

A smart woman who had been obliged to be someone’s idea of a wife, she had sat at too many dinner tables and watched women dealing with the dumb little dictators: “The most

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.

Theirs is one of the most lyrical love stories ever told, for being so tenderly irresolute. Recognizing that intimate life is an accommodation of contradictions, they understood that political and social life must be an accommodation of contradictions too. The accommodation was their romance.

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.

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.

All living things, Darwin taught us, are compromises of a kind, the best that can be done for that moment between the demands of the environment and the genetic inheritance it has to work with. No living thing is ideal. A rhinoceros is just a big pig with a horn on it.

People idealize unicorns and imagine unicorns and make icons out of unicorns and write fables about unicorns. We hunt them. They’re perfect. The only trouble with them is that they do not exist. They never have. The rhino is ungainly and ugly and short-legged and imperfect and squat. But the rhinoceros is real. It exists. And it is formidable.

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.

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.

In that period, there appeared the two foundational documents of modern liberal humanism, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and Mill’s On Liberty.

The greatest monument of modern liberalism began precisely in that hour, too, as a gift from nascent French republicanism to triumphant American republicanism. We have allowed the Statue of Liberty to be subsumed into the narrative of American immigration, and understandably so given that for many millions of American ancestors this French thing was the first American thing they saw. But it was first imagined, in that pivot year of 1865, as a tribute to the shining light of the republican ideal at a time when it still seemed impossible in France. It was an imaginary dream figure celebrating the vindication of liberty in America with an eye to its eventual vindication in France: you’ve married her; we will, too, some day. She is a figure of that crucial long decade, in which modern liberalism is mostly forged.

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.

For liberals use the word liberty the way the word love is used by songwriters—

Liberalism is a fact-first philosophy with a feelings-first history.

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.

freedom of debate, even more than freedom of speech, is central to the liberal ideal,

A liberal credo without characters and action is not only hard to love, it is also impossible to see.

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.”

Charles Darwin writes coolly, with seeming descriptive objectivity, that “we thus learn that man is descended from a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World.”

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.

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!” the liberal tries to cry out—and then can only sigh.

Yet what liberalism has in its favor are the facts. Liberals get nothing accomplished—except everything, eventually. In Western Europe, in America, certainly in Canada, in Australia, too, vistas of general legal and social equality far outstripping anything previously known to mankind, and largely achieved by peaceful and parliamentary means, have been won. That these new vistas of equality are under assault now does not alter the scale of the accomplishment.

(Homosexuality has flourished elsewhere—it is part of the human condition—but has never been specifically protected and even nurtured before as it is now even in the public high schools of New York.)

But it was specifically liberal activism. It wasn’t trying to change everything at once. It was trying to fix what was wrong now.

Incremental cautious reform is likely to get

Our ancestors might at various moments have thought of a liberal as someone with a very specific number of positions on set topics, but we’ve come to recognize liberalism as a more encompassing emotional temperament.

the first liberal, the founding father if we have one, is the great sixteenth-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne. Montaigne, who lived from 1533 to 1592,

Nonetheless, if Montaigne was not the first to feel the things he wrote, he was the first to write the things he felt. He saw, in the late Renaissance, that we are double in ourselves: we condemn the thing we believe and embrace the thing we condemn.

The essential point of Montaigne’s great, foundational essay “On Cruelty,” in which he considers the emotions of a deer being hunted, is that when it comes to cruelty, we should second all other reasoning to the essential fact of the stag’s suffering.

Reasoning past suffering is not reason at all.

But he had a rich foundational impulse toward the emotions that make a decent relation between man and state possible—a far-reaching skepticism about authority, compassion for those who suffer, and a hatred of cruelty.

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.

Our father forgives us for our trespasses; we forgive each other for our faults. It’s why Montaigne says that God can’t be virtuous; only people can.

We don’t know what is good, but we do know what is bad. Cruelty is bad. Starvation is bad. State murder is bad. This kind of liberalism extends the French humanist tradition,

Fixing the imperfect is enough to do even if we have no idea whatever what the perfect is like.

We need to hold ourselves to the rhino standard, not the unicorn fantasy—to ask always what’s the best real possibility, not what’s the ultimate ideal imagining.

We don’t just think abstractly about somebody else’s suffering; we can actually feel it as they do.

And we can organize ourselves around human suffedring to express compassion

It’s why we’re more moved by a picture of a single drowned Syrian child—and even moved, we hope, to action—than by a chart showing the number of deaths in Syria.

the absurdity of superstition,

The absurdity of absurdity

In both books, he suggests that it’s normal for human beings to want to live in a prosperous society, but that it’s also normal for them to want to live in a broadly just society.

Who, he wondered, could live happily in a society where all of the wealth has been confiscated and kept in a few hands?

Hume’s serenity remained, to his dying day, as unbroken as his “infidelity.”

His atheism remained intact with his aplomb.

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. But the choices, and the sharing, are essential to it, including even a sense of sympathy for those caught on the losing side of an argument. Someone proposes a more equitable world—enfranchisement for working people, blacks, or women, or civil rights for homosexuals—and then makes the resulting reform last by assuring that those who opposed it may have lost the fight but haven’t lost their dignity, their autonomy, or their chance to adapt to the change without fearing the loss of all their agency. In this way, liberalism is the most truly radical of all ideologies: it proposes a change, makes it happen, and then makes it last.

The nameable goals of the socialist and even Marxist manifestos of the nineteenth century—public education, free health care, a government role in the economy, votes for women—have all been achieved, mostly peacefully and mostly successfully, by acts of reform in liberal countries. The attempt to achieve them by fiat and command, in the Soviet Union and China and elsewhere, created catastrophes, moral and practical, on a scale still almost impossible to grasp.

Liberals are not afraid of revolution. But liberals will remain reluctant revolutionaries.

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.

Amendments are among the proper nouns of liberalism.