A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism

by Adam Gopnik

sanity.

The first premise should be pluralism and tolerance;

Liberalism is fallibilism.

The atrocities can come from within the liberal order—and so does the urge to correct them.

Liberalism without vision is, indeed, merely comfortable, but radicalism without realism will always be blind

We need look no further than to the man I think of as perhaps the greatest of all Americans, Frederick Douglass.

Douglass passed from slave to celebrity in about a year and remained one for the rest of his life. He is one of the small list of people who have been, or are, in effect, the face of their movement.

Douglass himself was deeply affected by Lincoln’s example of the power of liberal party politics to make real change happen.

The liberal tradition, of which Lincoln is the great saint, and the radical tradition, of which Douglass is the greatest American instance, are entwined, entangled, braided one into the other.

Douglass was a prophetic absolutist and a political constitutionalist,

His heroism lay in being able to embody radical prophet and liberal politician in a single arc of purpose and in one mind and body. Both lives matter.

For this—and if I stop my bike to point this out, sapiently, you are right to laugh, but still, listen—is a classic is/ought problem.

Sometimes this is called the fact/value distinction,

The value of equality is independent of the fact of physiology.

Liberal reasoning is an ongoing, surprising, vigilant action.

That’s what makes liberalism, to my mind, uniquely demanding. It doesn’t give you the answers in advance. It makes you take the test, over and over.

passionate, patriotic, and public-minded.

Some parts of social life—medical insurance, pensions for the elderly, subsidies for the arts and parks—demand a model operated by all on behalf of all, that is, by the government, in Lincoln’s wonderful definition of why governments exist, “to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but cannot do, at all, or cannot, so well do, for themselves in their separate, and individual capacities.”

Liberals should never be arrogant, but they should never be apologetic either.

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.

A thousand small sanities are usually wiser than one big idea.

It didn’t happen all at once but by incremental measures.

Liberty’s light beams out from her lamp, in the great republican statue in particular, in its particularities, its particles—infinite gradations of radiance, a flood of illumination at once encompassing and specific. Liberty in liberal imagery is a field of energy, which makes us see all that’s there around

Tolerance brings you an absence of massacre and countermassacre; pluralism allows people to live in peace and plan for their children. It means that Orthodox Jews can live alongside faithful Muslims in one neighborhood in Brooklyn, without often coming to blows and, with a secular police presence, never going to war. Making love rather than war turns out to be a sound idea for social policy.

liberals have become planetary. We think in a global way. We feel at home in the world. This is an extraordinarily positive idea for so many—it’s an extension of liberal cosmopolitanism.

But rooms reside in places, and a liberal love of place is simply what we mean by patriotism.

He proposed a patriotism of place and person rather than of class and cause.

You get America right by remembering Newark as it really was.

but the proximate cause of Trumpism is not economic anxiety in Akron. It’s rooted in profound racial resentments and in attitudes that you can trace right back, demagogue by demagogue, to the aftermath of the Civil War. The history of modern times is not the history of settled, complacent liberal societies occasionally subject to populist shocks caused by their own weaknesses and inconsistencies and economic crises—just the opposite.

Liberal cities and states are the tiny volcanic islands risen on a vast historical sea of tyranny.

The plague, as Albert Camus understood, merely goes dormant for a while and then breaks out again.

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.

Liberalism isn’t a political theory applied to life. It’s what we know about life applied to a political theory.

That what we don’t know is larger than what we do know, but that what we do know is just deep enough to trust.

Liberalism is blessed and continues to produce those thousand small sanities in often invisible social adjustments and improvements, moving us bit by bit a little bit closer to a modern Arcadia.