Dialogue at Vendome this week (July 10th) and synopsis of the book A Thousand Small Sanities

Hello Dialogue Artists,

In just a few hours we'll meet again at Vendome (6:00 PM Wednesday July 10) for our next dialogue. I'll append here part of my own contribution to the event.

Arthur

Book Synopsis: (Adam Gopnik) A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism (2019)

This is a useful resource for those who want to rejuvenate discussion of the common good. Adam Gopnik is a staff writer for the New Yorker and lives in New York City.

Liberal democracy is under attack from both the Left and the Right, and those who hold liberal values must respond wisely and well to the challenges. What are liberal values? What IS “liberalism”? Why does the Right hate liberalism? Why does the Left hate liberalism? How might liberals respond to their detractors? Gopnik summarizes contrary views from Left and Right in a way that shows the merits of those views. In other words, the book can leave the reader more respectful of the views of others (on the Left or Right). This seems essential for any useful discussion of public affairs: respect for views different from our own.

John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, two of the bright lights of nineteenth century liberalism, had begun a relationship that led to their marriage in 1851. They had been meeting at the rhinoceros cage in the zoo, perhaps to escape notice (Harriet was married to someone else at the time). Gopnik takes the rhinoceros as a symbol of liberalism – powerful yet certainly not sleek. Much prettier would be a unicorn, which Gopnik suggests could be a symbol for ideals that don’t work out in practice. Liberalism seeks progressive reform based on the rough and tumble of public discussion, and on experience with the consequences of political decisions. This lumbering forward, achieved in the marketplace of ideas, is as ungainly and as powerful as a rhinoceros.

And yet the rhinoceros could easily become extinct. Liberalism is powerful yet frail. Its institutions were achieved at the cost of a long struggle that would have appeared hopeless just a few centuries ago. Today those same institutions are in danger of permanent extinction if they are not cherished and protected. From the left and from the right, those institutions are threatened. All too often we (whether we identify with the political Left, Right, or Centre) take them for granted, which greatly increases the danger.

To be clear about what liberalism means, the author provides “The Rhinoceros Manifesto:” “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 differences through reasoned and (mostly) unimpeded conversation, demonstration, and debate.” You can see why he compares liberalism to a rhinoceros!

He also emphasizes liberalism’s origins in empathy (or sympathy), invoking Montaigne’s essays and that French writer’s concern with cruelty and the suffering it produces. Empathy (to make my own word choice here) informs liberalism at its roots.

Then in his chapter “Why the Right Hates Liberalism,” the author gives us a glimpse of some views from skeptics and detractors. “The Right” is far from homogeneous, and Gopnik goes into very useful detail on some of its variations, but I’ll stick to the gist for this synopsis. Whereas liberalism emphasizes reform, the Right emphasizes order. Without an orderly process and clearly defined goals, chaos and disaster await us. We must have order and authority. Accomplishing a military mission, building a reliable and safe automobile, you name it – order and efficiency are indispensable. Liberalism – with its permissiveness and its emphasis on hearing many different opinions before taking action - runs the risk of ruin. Surely this is self-evident.

And even as we listen to this view from the Right and recognize its merit, we do not lose sight of other truths, for example: We must be receptive to opportunities for improving how we have been doing things, especially when changing circumstances call for it. Reality is complex. Later in the book, Gopnik points out that our system of capitalism and free market economies has produced both gross inequalities and unparalleled prosperity. He uses this as an example of how “Two things can often be true at once. Two things are always true at once.”

Thus, in response to the Right’s emphasis on order (and authority), the liberal responds “Yes, but….” If order and authority are carried beyond the point of diminishing returns, we could get something that looks like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union under Stalin. And once we start thinking about it seriously and deeply like that, we are already engaged in the very process that gives liberalism its strength. We are part of the rhinoceros.

In his chapter “Why the Left Hates Liberalism,” he reminds us of the insights of Marxist thought, which had seen through the self-congratulatory liberalism that served so well to obscure capitalism’s exploitation of the working class. The liberal would have us ignore that savagery, say the critics from the Left, and ignoring savagery is totally unacceptable.

Through the lens of his thesis, Gopnik lets us see historical figures like Emma Goldman. Born in Russia (1869) and emigrated to the United States (1885), she eventually became an anarchist implicated in an assassination attempt, and an anti-war activist and advocate for resisting the draft. She was arrested (1917) and later deported to Russia. She initially supported the October Revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power, then became an outspoken critic of the Soviet government when she saw how they suppressed all opposition. In this role as critic of the Soviet Union, she remained an anarchist and eventually found refuge in liberal Canada, where she died in 1940. Gopnik admires Emma Goldman but points out that in fact she had become “a liberal in spite of herself.” She failed to recognize this and never saw the contradiction of finding her home and refuge amid liberal institutions while remaining a critic of liberalism. “Liberalism without vision is, indeed, merely comfortable,” he writes (and Emma would surely have agreed with that), “but radicalism without realism will always be blind ….” (and Emma didn’t escape that blindness).

Another riveting historical account we see through Gopnik’s lens is the story of “perhaps the greatest of all Americans,” Frederick Douglass, who was a radical prophet and a liberal politician rolled into one historic personage. Having risked his life to escape slavery, Douglass “passed from slavery to celebrity in about a year and remained one for the rest of his life.” A charismatic orator and brilliant intellectual, he was at first disgusted by Abraham Lincoln’s political timidity. Both Douglass and Lincoln hated slavery, but Douglass accepted violence as a means of ending slavery. Lincoln initially wanted to compromise with the South. Eventually something astonishing came to pass. The outcome of the Civil War was to include a staggering death toll and Lincoln needed to strengthen political resolve. In his own brilliant oration, the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln decapitated the antiwar arguments.

“We still do not appreciate,” Gopnik writes, “how much the greatness of the Gettysburg Address as a forensic argument lies in the way Lincoln made the two causes – nationalism and emancipation – seem one. The nation was born in the view that all men are created equal; slavery denies that view. If we lose the war, then it shows the world that a nation with that premise cannot survive unfragmented. Therefore, fighting for the Union is the same thing as fighting for its first principles.”

Douglass gradually became an admirer of Lincoln. “Lincoln, for his part, came to understand that Douglass’s moral vision was impeccably correct – and a critical undergirding for Lincoln’s increasingly militant views. At the second inauguration, Lincoln sought out Douglass at the White House reception and greeted him not as ‘Mr. Douglass’ but as ‘my friend.’” After the war and after Lincoln’s assassination, Douglass moved away from militancy. He was “deeply affected by Lincoln’s example of the power of liberal party politics to make real change happen.”

Influenced by empathy – genuine concern for the well-being of others - liberalism has the power to make real change happen, while maintaining its openness to reform and its capacity for self-correction. Its most dogmatic critics from both Left and Right typically lack those essential capabilities. We are in a high-risk historical passage. The attacks on liberalism could extinguish the light. Neither its many achievements, nor its ongoing transformative potential, nor the security provided by its institutions should ever be taken for granted.