“No wise liberal has ever thought that liberalism is all of wisdom…. Liberalism isn’t a political theory applied to life. It’s what we know about life applied to a political theory”
Adam Gopnik, A Thousand Small Sanities
Readers of my posts thus far will certainly have noticed my tendency to juxtapose the wisdom of Barack Obama to the stunning unwisdom of Donald Trump.
Which raises the question: what is the political valence of wisdom as I’ve come to understand it? Or, more pointedly, does wisdom lean left?
As Robert Sternberg has argued, it is impossible to speak of someone or something as “wise” without invoking a set of underlying values, inasmuch as values “contribute… to how one defines a common good.” So my question here becomes: are the values that support my definition of wisdom—not to mention that of Sternberg and others—essentially left-leaning?
In 2019, “empathy” and its fellow traveler “social justice” are demonstrably liberal mantras. In a recent piece for Ireland’s The University Times, for example, Eliana Jordan writes: “Underpinning this obvious desire to make the world a more equal place, there is one single abiding principle driving every effort to make circumstances better for less privileged members of society: empathy…. Being ‘woke’ is actually [a] covert way of describing the empathy we’ve adopted in order to facilitate a more equitable culture.”
As for the left’s seemingly greater appetite for complexity, I am reminded of neuroscientist David Amodio’s much-discussed 2007 study of the political brain, which found that self-described liberals, in the face of conflict, “are more responsive to informational complexity, ambiguity and novelty,” as compared to self-styled conservatives, who are motivated by a need for “order, structure, and closure.”
But the comforting assumption that today’s left is somehow wiser than today’s right should give us pause, if only because the wokeness to which Jordan refers has given rise in some circles to a decidedly non-empathic cancel culture.
In contemporary political speech, we commonly equate “leftist” and “liberal”. In fact, I just did it. In American public discourse of the past decade, however, this equation has become just as problematic as the traditional division of our political sphere into “left” and “right”.
In a recent op-ed on the “conflict of worldviews” between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the four first-term Democrats known as “the Squad”, David Brooks argues that:
“No matter how moderate or left, Democrats of a certain age [read Pelosi’s] were raised in an atmosphere of liberalism. I don’t mean the political liberalism of George McGovern. I mean the philosophic liberalism of Montaigne, John Stuart Mill, Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass—people who witnessed religious and civil wars and build structures to restrain fanaticism.”
On first reading Brooks’ short piece, I was struck by how closely it hewed to my 4 components of wisdom. Let me take these in turn, referring as I go to Brooks’ touchstone throughout his op-ed, Adam Gopnik’s A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism.
In Sanities, Gopnik evokes the liberal values of “skepticism, constant inquiry, fallibilism, self-doubt,” going so far as to say at one point: “Liberalism is fallibilism” (231, 190f). Brooks personalizes this fallibilism point when he writes that philosophical liberalism “begins with intellectual humility. There is more we don’t know than we do know, so public life is a constant conversation that has no end.”
In Gopnik, the insistence on complexity tends primarily to be historical and meliorist, as when he praises reformists for recognizing “that tradition is a very mixed bag of nice things and nasty things, and that we can work together to fix the nasty ones while making the nice ones available to more people” (40). His injunction that human emancipation depends on being able “to see past categories and types toward actual people and their predicaments” (179) becomes, in Brooks, an insistence that each of us “contains opposites and contradictions.” “You flatten and dehumanize complex individuals,” Brooks writes, “when you see people according to crude dichotomies and assign them to tribal teams.”
Preferring “incremental reform to sudden revolution,” Brooks writes after Gopnik, “liberals place great emphasis on context” and on the good they can do in specific circumstances. Rich contextual (often historical) understanding thus becomes the basis of effective contextual action, typically in a reformist mode.
Finally, for Brooks, liberalism “loves sympathy, suspects rage and detests cruelty”; it “is about treasuring your opponents, not calling them racists or traitors.” Throughout his book, most notably in his reading of David Hume and the later Adam Smith, Gopnik praises philosophical liberalism for recognizing “the primacy of sympathy as social cement” (25).
What emerged from my reading of Brooks and Gopnik is that wisdom does not “lean left” so much as “lean liberal.” If wisdom has a party, it is the party of philosophical liberalism.
I look forward to writing in a future post on why the concept of wisdom is anathema to so many of my fellow academics, to say nothing of our culture at large. Let me simply suggest here that some of the apparent untimeliness of wisdom today stems from the untimeliness of the philosophical values that underpin it.
Liberal ideals, Gopnik writes, are “under constant assault today, from intellectuals and ordinary people alike” (82). Rightists criticize liberalism for overestimating the power of reason and for destroying a “lost organic community” that is, in fact, more myth than reality (129). Leftists take liberalism to task for putting too much faith in reform, and especially for its implication in “racism, sexism, cruelty, and the long centuries of exploitation and continuing despoiling of other people’s cultures, environments, and goods” (147). Indeed, one of the strengths of Gopnik’s argument is his level-headed recognition of what he calls the “other face(s) of the liberal order”—from gentrification and wage exploitation, to colonialism and institutionalized racism (20).
On a more philosophical level, Gopnik writes that “liberalism is doomed and may be crushed at any time by its inability to stop the stampede of unicorns we call the utopian imagination,” on the left as on the right (239). Unlike utopianism, liberalism “accepts imperfection as a fact of existence,” placing its faith in the “power of emergent systems, positive circles of change”—such as when community action and community policing combined to help sharply reduce crime in the South Bronx (31, 70).
A few pages into A Thousand Small Sanities, Gopnik writes a paean to John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor that nicely encapsulates his argument’s hopeful thrust. Mill and Taylor, he suggests, were not centrists but “radicals of the real, determined to live in the world even as they altered it” (12). Knowing that they were “imperfect, divided people” and armed with “the rueful knowledge of human contradiction that good people always have,” they recognized that all life—from the intimate to the political and social—was “an accommodation of contradictions” (12f.) Compromise is thus not a sign of moral collapse, but “a sign of its strength” (13).
Which brings us to Gopnik’s title and the book’s pertinence to this blog. Arguing that liberal reasoning “is an ongoing, surprising, vigilant action,” Gopnik arrives at liberalism’s “one central truth”: that big problems rarely get solved by big ideas, but rather through “the intercession of a thousand small sanities,” which are “usually wiser than one big idea” (227). “No wise liberal has ever thought that liberalism is all of wisdom…. Liberalism isn’t a political theory applied to life. It’s what we know about life applied to a political theory” (238).
In our age of unicorns, in which big ideas consistently outshine small sanities, literary work—and many facets of progressive culture—refocus our attention on the small things in life that truly matter and that push us to go beyond our imperfect natures to make the world a more just and empathic place. Even as the phrase itself seems hopelessly outdated, we should not give up on the values, the wisdom, of “liberal education.”
