A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism by Adam Gopnik

A single word can’t easily contain a complex concept, and a concept cannot easily (if ever) contain a reality. A linguistic referent (word), to supply any value, must include an essential aspect of the referred chunk of reality. So we can go on at length, and often fruitfully, about the most important concepts we live by: love, freedom, God, imagination—and liberalism. The list could continue at length. The discussion goes on indefinitely and yet fruitfully. Might one conclude that any concept that receives a definitive definition [sic] is little better than a tautology and of little value? 

That a word or concept has a history does not make it mean what it once meant. Trees have roots; human beings don’t. What they have instead are histories. Histories are ways of thinking about the past and the present, which allow us to imagine new futures.

Liberalism is as distinct a tradition as exists in political history, but it suffers from being a practice before it is an ideology, a temperament and a tone and a way of managing the world more than a fixed set of beliefs. (At least this means that poets and novelists and painters, a Trollope or a George Eliot or a Manet, can be better guides to its truths than political philosophers or pundits.) 

To return to the point, defining “liberalism” is a fraught task, one that can only prove one more iteration in a continuing effort. But so be it, and if one had to deal with only one book to delineate (contemporary) liberalism, I doubt that one could find a more compelling work than Adam Gopnik’s A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism (2019).  Gopnik doesn’t approach this formidable topic as a political philosopher might, but as the skilled journalist that he is. (He’s been writing for the New Yorker since 1986.) Gopnik portrays liberalism primarily through its history, and its history primarily through its practitioners. And in doing so, he writes in almost aphoristic prose. Indeed, it’s a temptation to simply lay out a series of quotes from the book in lieu of a review. (I far exceeded my Kindle allotment of highlights.) Gopnik treats “liberalism” as he might the subject of one of his New Yorker profiles, bobbing in and out of personal vignettes and summary analysis.

Liberalism ends in the center not because that’s where liberals always think the sanity is, but because they recognize that there are so many selves in a society that must be accommodated that you can’t expect them to congregate in a single neighborhood at one end or another of the city. The meeting place, the piazza, in an Italian village, is placed in the center of the town because everyone can get there. The ancient Greeks thought of this meeting place as the “agora,” which meant the market but meant more broadly the place where citizens met for unplanned meetings. Tyrants of all kinds, Persian and Spartan, feared the agora in the most literal way, and tried to eliminate it from their cities. 

 . . . .

Humanism precedes liberalism. Connection comes before action. A readiness for self-inspection precedes an effort at self-improvement, and a confidence in our neighbors precedes faith in citizenship. Thinking about liberal order or the liberal future in terms of laws and legislatures is far too limiting. Park designers, sociologists, and beyond have more to tell us about building open societies.

Thus, the lead characters in this book are a pair of couples, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, and Mary Ann Evans (who wrote under the pseudonym “George Eliot”) and George Henry Lewes. We learn from the tale of these two couples that liberalism and feminism often go together. In addition, Gopnik delves into the liberalism of civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, who organized the great civil rights march of August 1962, where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Bayard worked for liberal causes as a black, gay man, making the importance of liberation and dignity inherent in liberalism especially high values in his life. Another exemplar of liberalism in life and action is Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave who became one of the great Americans of the nineteenth century and whose oratory could match that of Lincoln for its power and persuasion (and whom Lincoln came to admire).  Another, surprising choice (to me anyway), is Charles De Gaulle, the leader of Free France during the Second World War and later president of the Republic. Gopnik notes that while De Gaulle had some very conservative-leaning beliefs and attitudes, his defense of liberalism—a very lively topic in France from before the Revolution (1789) to the present—proved crucial for France.

Modern liberalism—as distinct from earlier and more general meanings of the term as “generous” or “learned”—begins with a psychological principle, a human principle. Its foundation is fallibilism—the truth that we are usually wrong about everything and always divided within ourselves about anything we believe. Reform rather than revolution or repetition is essential because what we are doing now is likely to be based on a bad idea and because what we do next is likely to be bad in some other way too. Incremental cautious reform is likely to get more things right than any other kind. 

And while Gopnik does an excellent job of singing the praises of liberalism, neither does he ignore its critics. Here, too, he draws upon worthy exemplars, such as Samuel Johnson and G.K. Chesterton. And of more recent vintage, political thinker Patrick Deneen, whose Why Liberalism Failed (2018) became a bit of a sensation (well, among those who read such topics), receives a fair hearing. And, as Gopnik notes, liberalism always seems caught in the middle, so the Left criticizes liberalism also. While the conservative critique says, “too much, too soon, not sure I'll work” the left argues “too little, too late, gotta have a whole new plan.” On the left, Gopnik spotlights “Red Emma” Goldman, the native of Russia who emigrated to the U.S., was eventually deported, and then went on to the Soviet Union, where she, unlike so many others, saw through the façade of Lenin’s Potemkin Village. She supplied poignant critiques of her fellow leftists and liberals.

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 internally to the traditional communities and nations it betrays; the left wing pays attention, as well, and sometimes more often, to the evil that liberalism does externally to its distant victims in the foreign countries it exploits. [N.B. Yes, too many critics conflate liberalism with capitalism, sloppy move. sng]

Gopnik reports that this work arose from musings with his teenage daughter when the results of the 2016 presidential election became clear. How? Why? What went wrong? What do good and wise people stand for? What do we aspire to? Without unduly disparaging respectable figures on the right or the left, Gopnik demonstrates more than argues that despite liberalism’s reputation for a bland, middle-of-the-road, melioristic attitude, it is a rich source for establishing a good life for individuals and their communities. In Gopnik’s liberalism, there is as much of Edmund Burke as there is of Adam Smith (a misunderstood liberal: "Smith believed not that markets make men free but that free men move toward markets. The difference is small but decisive; it is most of what we mean by humanism.") or of John Stuart Mill. In fact, the inability of liberalism to strictly define itself (or care to) is its power. (Compare liberalism to the endless Marxist battles around theorizing). Liberalism is protean, yet with the essential elements of liberty, dignity, and compassion, its many threads can be tied together into the beautiful and useful cloak under which we can best conduct our lives.

But let Gopnik have the last word:

What is liberalism, then? A hatred of cruelty. An instinct about human conduct rooted in a rueful admission of our own fallibility and of the inadequacy of our divided minds to be right frequently enough to act autocratically. A belief that the sympathy that binds human society together can disconnect us from our clannish and suspicious past. A program for permanent reform based on reason and an appeal to argument, aware of human fallibility and open to the lessons of experience. An understanding that small, open social institutions, if no larger than a café or more overtly political than a park, play an outsized role in creating free minds and securing public safety. A faith in rational debate, rather than inherited ritual, and in reform, rather than either revolution or reaction. A belief in radical change through practical measures. A readiness to act—nonviolently but visibly and sometimes in the face of threatened violence—on behalf of equality. A belief that life should be fair—or fairer, or as fair as seems fair: people’s lives should not be overdetermined by who their parents were or how much money they might have inherited or what shade of skin their genes have woven. A belief that the individual pursuit of eccentric happiness can be married to a common faith in fair procedure.