Book Review: Adam Gopnik's "A Thousand Small Sanities"

Is liberal democracy dead? A considerable amount of literary, journalistic, and scholarly attention has been expended in trying to answer that question in an era of rising partisanship, demagoguery, and the increasing prominence of no-longer-ignorable global issues like climate change and mass-migration. New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik adds his two cents to the discussion, saying that the rumors of liberal democracy's death have been greatly exaggerated, but that without a resurgence behind the embattled system of governance from the grassroots and up, we could very well lose it if we're not careful. In this vein of trying to rekindle a popular embrace of a governing concept that is increasingly being attacked for its reliance on compromise and incremental change from both the left and right wings, Gopnik takes readers on a journey through history to rediscover liberalism in A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism (2019).

Everyone knows about the philosophers of the Enlightenment, figures like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Voltaire, John Locke, Montesquieu, Immanuel Kant, and more, whose ideas about individualism, reform, scientific reason, self-government, and the inherent natural rights of life, liberty, and property inspired our Founding Fathers to include such ideas in our Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights.

However, liberalism as it presents today is not the exclusive domain of the latter 18th century thinkers. Gopnik reaches all the way back to the 16th century to the present to show readers that other, less well-known figures also constitute the complex tapestry of attitudes, ideas, and principles that make up liberalism, from unofficial founder Michel de Montaigne to John Stuart Mill, Harriet Taylor, G.H. Lewes, George Eliot, Frederick Douglass, Robert Putnam, and anarchist-turned-liberal Emma Goldman. Their contributions included critical ideas about community, compassion, the dual nature of humanity, pluralism, and a belief in an ongoing project of "radical change through practical measures" achieved via an intense commitment to the parliamentary procedures established by governmental institutions with an aim towards minimizing societal cruelty (Gopnik, 2019, p. 80).

At the end of the day, is liberalism perfect? No, not at all.

Critics from both the right and the left have plenty to critique about liberalism. From its closest ally the left-wing comes a profound frustration with incremental change, in liberalism's reluctance to engage in full-scale, system-overturning revolution to address entrenched, systemic injustices like income inequality, classism, racism, sexism, neo-imperialism and colonialism, and environmental degradation. Meanwhile, the right-wing decries liberalism's attack on traditional communities, values, and modes of authority and order, its hedonism made visible in its promotion of materialism over spiritualism.

Liberalism's response? "What liberalism can say on its own behalf is that no system of power in human history has tried so hard to inject a corrective conscience into its institutions," Gopnik writes (Gopnik, 2019, p. 195). Instead of being godless, materialistic and atomizing, liberalism has introduced into society new modes of community and spiritual wellbeing outside the traditional nuclear family, and prefers that a "thousand small sanities" quietly chipping away at injustice in a Sisyphean-perpetuity gradually achieve critical mass within society in order to finally realize large-scale, positive change (Gopnik, 2019, p. 239). In this way, liberalism is advantageous in being derived from real-life experience necessitating cooperation, compromise, empathy, and toleration of diverse groups within larger societies, in a recognition that "good change happens step by step" and not via a harmful "stampede" of society by a utopianism bent on immediate, revolutionary change (Gopnik, 2019, p. 238-239).

All in all, this doesn't make middle-of-the-road liberalism any less frustrating for those like myself exasperated by liberalism's cling to slow reform of a very imperfect system, but Gopnik's treatise makes it more understandable. Liberalism doesn't favor one group over another, but tries to accommodate all, with all the confusing dualities and conflicting local, state, and federal legislative and political impulses this entails. In the conclusion of A Thousand Small Sanities, Gopnik makes an urgent appeal to embrace again this liberalism, not one that seems to blindly accommodate large scale injustice, but one that continually recognizes and works against injustice while bringing America's diverse populace together as much as possible starting at the local, grassroots level through activism and public education. In this way, Gopnik writes, we can push the American project ever closer towards utopia.

An admirable sentiment, but are we willing to put in the work? That is the question.

Works Cited:

Gopnik, Adam. (2019). A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism. New York: Basic Books.