A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism

by Adam Gopnik

Paine, however, spoke up defiantly and liberally, and at considerable personal risk, against the execution:

“My language has always been that of liberty and humanity, and I know that nothing so exalts a nation as the union of these two principles.… What today seems an act of justice may then appear an act of vengeance.

I had rather record a thousand errors on the side of mercy than be obliged to tell on...

This pattern, of renouncing violence once its immediate ends are met, is deeply imprinted in the liberal temperament. It’s why Grant and Eisenhower, victorious generals, took office in business suits (and often preferred other business-suited people to soldiers).

Liberals believe in fighting wars as hard as necessary; ending them as soon as possible; and rebuilding the defeated country as charitably as one can. The necessity of war making, including revolutionary war, is part of the liberal tradition: liberalism isn’t pacifism and tries to learn the lesson of pacifist follies. But the cult and celebration of violence,

The unforgivable sin of American slavery was imprinted in America’s founding. But this historical fact, too, leads us to a basic liberal fact, or principle, even: liberalism seeks and eventually sees or admits its own failures. Liberal reform, like evolutionary change, being incremental, is open to the evidence of experience.

So, yes, liberals believe in the possibility of reform. But liberals also believe in the necessity of reform.

The civil rights movement triumphs in its immediate objectives, if not its long-term goals, but even its limited success reminds us that women’s freedom is hardly fully achieved. And as women’s freedom is achieved, we ask about sexual minorities, and so on.

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.

Finally, liberal reform drives toward egalitarian ends—ones in which equality of opportunity is evidenced by equality of outcome.

Dr. Johnson says better that some be unhappy than that all be equally miserable.

But liberals believe that reducing social distances is an inherent good because a society can’t be truly pluralist if it is class divided.

The movement for gay marriage in America, if someone could write its history properly, is almost a textbook case of Trollope’s idea of how political reform happens at its best: an impossible idea becomes possible, then becomes necessary, and then all but a minority

The American Congress is now, and has always been, crippled by the power of big money and brutally antidemocratic traditions, including the existence of a Senate that gives tiny rural states power equal to big urban ones. But big reforms have happened all the same—though not without conflict, backsliding, difficulty, and even violence. Still, working-class people and women have the vote, African Americans have civil rights, speech is more or less free—the “mere” reformist project has worked, again and again.

The story of liberalism is in part the story of how those institutions got broadened by ever more universal suffrage. But it also depends on communities and changes that take place outside political institutions. The real source of reform is often far from any obvious political action.

Taylor and Mill were liberals of principle, Lewes and Eliot were liberals of process. Taylor and Mill wanted to articulate new ideals of progress; Lewes and Eliot, as Darwinians, wanted to understand how change happens in complex systems.

“The one idea which History exhibits as evermore developing itself into greater distinctness is the Idea of Humanity—the noble endeavor to throw down all the barriers erected between men by prejudice and one-sided views, and by setting aside the distinctions of Religion, Country and Color, to treat the whole Human race as one brotherhood.”

If freedom wasn’t rooted in women being able to claim their private lives for themselves, they didn’t have

Freedom begins in the bedroom and in the mind. That was why she was, for all her hesitation about suffrage, unimpeded in her enthusiasm for women’s education and pressed for the establishment of a women’s college at Cambridge.

“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.”

Liberalism is much like the scientific method

Lewes and Eliot were more prescient of our own preoccupations: reform had to pass through the living room before it could move to Parliament.

Remaking the London sewers required a process of reasoned reform—not merely good principle but evidence and argument and engineering, all unfolding not in a eureka moment in Parliament but over decades of effort underground. The principle of public good and the process of public works became the same.

in a manner that derives from Darwin, with how individuals change as their environments alter. The complex process of building public sanitation was inseparable from the abstract principle of the public good. People made pipes, and pipes made better people.

Lewes’s ideas on emergence,

As she wrote in Middlemarch, she wanted to “pierce the obscurity of those minute processes which prepare human misery and joy, those invisible thoroughfares which are the first lurking places of anguish, mania, and crime, that delicate poise and transition which determine the growth of happy or unhappy consciousness.”

“invisible thoroughfares,”

Learning to live and work in peace with other people with whom you don’t share genes or a creed is the foundation of modern freedom.

The coffeehouses and salons of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, he argued, helped provide the foundation of the liberal Enlightenment—a caffeinated pathway out of clan society into cosmopolitan society. Democracy was not made in the streets but among the saucers.

Facebook has the potential for beimg another seat for democrao and liberalism

Reason, like musicals, emerges from the meeting of many minds.

ironically, the results of lower crime, particularly the repeopling of cities by the affluent, are now seen as new social problems. (Liberals know that, when we solve a social problem, what we most often see is the new social problem that the solution creates.)

Today, sociologists have made a very compelling case that community policing, married to community action, is the real engine behind the crime decline.

William Bratton the cop from Boston

“demonstration”

I also mean demonstration in the very literal sense that became familiar in the sixties and continues today: large numbers of people taking to the streets in nonviolent protests to show the depth of their desire for reform.

That liberal is Bayard Rustin, the guy who enumerated those three vital dance steps. Rustin was a gay man and about as open as one could be in the early postwar era. He walked a tightrope: black and gay, socialist and liberal, committed to nonviolence

Rustin taught King the rudiments and then the rules of nonviolent protest and resistance that would propel the civil rights struggle. King was a kind of astonishing prodigy of protest.

Adam Clayton Powell—a not terribly admirable but very powerful Harlem congressman—threatened King, in a complicated power play, with revealing that he and Rustin were lovers. This was entirely absurd (King’s tastes did not that way run), but it scared the daylights out of King because the accusation of homosexuality was so toxic at that time

When people say that Rustin was the mastermind behind the 1963 March on Washington (Dr. King basically arrived to give a speech in the place that Rustin had assigned for him), what they mean can seem nebulous. He thought of it? No, what he did was to organize it.

Dr. King, as Rustin once memorably said, “did not have the ability to organize vampires to go to a bloodbath.”

“We planned out precisely the number of toilets that would be needed for a quarter of a million people, how many blankets… how many doctors, how many first aid stations, what people would bring with them to eat in their lunches.

He knew that the tension between the move toward equality and the move toward self-expression is not a contradiction in liberalism. It’s the claim liberalism makes: that we can express ourselves while expanding the right to access

Ever widenimg circles of inclusion Tom Shaw

The point of the liberal act is to expand freedom while also expanding equality.

Keeping your balance is the point,

Rustin, like Montaigne or Mill or Eliot, was many things at once. He spoke of himself by turns as a liberal, a radical, a socialist, and a world citizen. But his commitment to liberal institutions and practices was absolute.

Rustin a double and inseparable cause. If anyone deserves the title of radical of the real, it is him.

What is liberalism, then? A hatred of cruelty.

(With this, though, a recognition that great movements of reform have, as often as not, begun in churches as much as clubs.)

Liberalism believes in the imperfectability of mankind. It is a perpetual program of reform intended to alleviate the cruelty we see around us.

The liberation of women, the emancipation of slaves and then of the racially oppressed, the recognition of the rights of sexual minorities—these are all the unique achievements of liberal states, engineered by liberal activists, all things that have never happened before in history.

The right-wing critique of liberalism is largely an attack on its overreliance on reason; the left-wing one, mostly an attack on its false faith in reform. The right-wing assault also tends to focus on the evil that liberalism does

order.

Perhaps preservation?