Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

Some Possible Grounds for Hope

I don’t see how we get out of this. There is nothing truer that can be said of this time. It is a perverse measure of its truth that we have been inundated with books and bromides that purport to show the opposite, that have hit upon the way out, the solutions, or better, the solution, the formulas for the miracle, all the how’s and all the why’s. How can so many people understand so much and so immediately, when so many of our torments are so unfamiliar? Isn’t anybody stunned into silence anymore?

So many words, so many numbers, so many “frames.” They are fortifying, I guess, and we certainly need strength. Let every-one come forward in the dark with their light. But I don’t see how we get out of this, not yet. 

The empty streets of the covid nights are so candid in their desolation. They are thronged with the people who are not there. They provide a peculiar serenity, in which one can be alone with one’s fear, and take it for a walk.

Philosophers since Seneca have known that fear and hope are twins. They are alternative ways of interpreting the opacity of the future. 

If hope were rational, it would be redundant. Hope picks up where reason leaves off, like changing guides at the frontier. Hope is the best we can do with uncertainty. It is an image of happiness that cannot quite be dismissed as an illusion. If it cannot be proven, neither can it be disproven. Its enchantment lies in its cognitive limitation. It comes to an end with knowledge. 

One of the characteristic errors of the American debate is to mistake the homiletical for the analytical — preaching for teaching. The objective of moral and social thought is not uplift. And as every religious person knows, castigation, too, can be experienced as uplift. It warms the heart to be told that we are all sinners, doesn’t it? Drop a coin in the charity box on the way out, you miserable excuse for finitude, and recover your contentment. It was never really damaged anyway. Of course this high-level complacency is abundantly found among the secular as well. They, too, like a warm sensation of their own shortcomings, as long as you do not overdo it. They, too, are lifted up by the sound of sermons, as in the editorial “must”: “We must restore trust.” Yes, we must!

For many years I travelled around the country, like an itinerant preacher, chastising American Jews for their ignorance of Hebrew, which is their language even if they cannot speak it. I was received cordially almost everywhere I went. But I became suspicious of this cordiality: after  all, I had come to discomfit them. And on the occasions when I did discomfit them — as when, after one of those lectures, a woman came up to me and testily said, “Sir, that was a wonder-ful presentation, but I did not feel affirmed!” — I smiled politely and triumphantly. (Actually, what I said to the woman was this: “Madam, I did not come all this way to affirm you.”) But those occasions were rare. The futility of my efforts was owed to the tragi-comic fact that feeling bad makes some people feel good. Criticism assures them of their meaningfulness, which is really all they seek.

“I don’t see how we get out of this.” Thank you for your honesty. It is not nearly as disagreeable as our circumstances.

If hope and history ever rhyme, in accordance with the poet’s wishes, it will be a soft rhyme, a weak rhyme, a half-rhyme. 

I don’t see how we get out of this. The country is poisoned. There is contempt everywhere; contempt and certainty. There are also wonderful people doing wonderful things for the weak and the needy and the scorned — a national plenitude of local kindnesses; but all these practices of solidarity have not yet altered the character of our politics and our culture, or banished our furies. Not just yet. The rampaging passions — otherwise known as populism — have not yet exhausted themselves. Perhaps it is just a matter of patience, except that patience is in ideological disrepute and was long ago retired by our technology.

The greater the suffering, the greater the dream of redemption. An apocalyptic is a man in extreme pain. He can imagine only an extreme cure. He is not concerned that he may cause pain to end pain. He hurts that much. But must the magnitude of the cure always be commensurate with the magnitude of the pain? What if there are cases in which the only genuine relief is gradual relief? This is insulting to the sufferer, who expects that his view of his suffering to be definitive. Yet our compassion, our love, does not require that we agree with him. A person in pain knows only one thing, but he will be saved with the help of people who know more things. For example: a person in pain hates time, which is abolished by the immediacy of his torments. He lives (to borrow Robert Lowell’s piercing word) momently. A person in pain experi-ences time as an eternity. (In this way he resembles a person in ecstasy.) But time may be his ally, insofar as it is the only condi-tion of his healing. Recovering from pain is a way of returning from eternity to time. Or, more practically, of taking concrete and steady and reasoned steps.

Of course there are sufferers who do not have time on their side. When we discover this about physical ills, we call it tragedy. But we have no right to invoke tragedy about social ills. The tragic sense connotes a certain helplessness about circum-stances, or more precisely, about other people’s circumstances. It promotes resignation. But whereas it may be legitimate for me to resign myself to my troubles, it is not legitimate for me to resign myself to your troubles. I can surrender myself, but I cannot surrender you.

To approach injustice from the standpoint of tragedy has the effect of relaxing the will and shrinking the sense of agency, and even of usurping ethics with aesthetics. How do you fight tragedy?

Was slavery tragic? In retrospect, yes. But in its time, no. In its time it was odious and disgusting and abominable. In its time it demanded resistance and abolition. Only evils of the past are tragic. The evils amid which we live are challenges — occasions of responsibility. Tragedy is precisely what we are charged to preempt.

Was the catastrophe in Syria tragic? Only because nobody stopped it.

“Interventionism” is now a dirty word. But it signifies more than a controversy — well, I wish it were still a controversy — about foreign affairs. Who ever did the right thing without intervening? Ethical action is always an intrusion, a refusal to leave a situation as one found it. Morality is a theory of meddling. What is intervention if not the Biblical injunction not to stand idly before the spilled blood of another? I do not recall any mention of costs and benefits in the verse. A government, of course, needs more than the Bible, more than high principle, to guide its actions. But does power exist only for the perpetration of evil? What about the costs and benefits of doing nothing? Or shall we acquiesce in the deformities of the world, except when there is money to be made?

“But it’s complicated”: the streets of the capital, the corridors of power that masquerade as the corridors of powerlessness when it suits them, echo with those allegedly extenuating words. It is always smart to say that a problem is complicated. As if it is the duty of government to pursue justice only when it is not complicated.

Tragedy, remember, is designed, in its most influential definition, to excite “pity and fear” so as to bring about “the proper purgation” of those emotions. It is a performance that exercises certain feelings so as to annul them. Never mind that those feelings may be put to good use outside the theater. Tragedy is an entertainment.

Catharsis is the enemy of action. It leaves one spent and sated. It is the orgasm of conscience. I wondered about the relation of catharsis to politics as I joined the protests at Black Lives Matter Plaza. I was not worried about “performativity,” since the public expression of opposition is an essential element of opposition. I was worried about the problem of spiritual stamina, about the durability of the energy in the streets, about the overestimation of excitement, about the preference for the adventure of protest over its pedantic translation into policy. The politics of the streets can make do with catharsis. We will see.

Concrete and steady and reasoned steps taken patiently and resolutely over time for the purpose of mitigating and eliminating the sufferings of others: in a word, liberalism. 

The most widespread cliché of our time is “polarization.” Everyone laments it, and many scholars and commentators regard it as the most dire of our ills. It has provided work for a generation of social scientists. That we are living in an age of spectacular social division is undeniable, and the excesses of this discord are sometimes lunatic and criminal. But a little intellectual pressure needs to be put on this obsession with our lack of harmony. Is it worse than covid, or discrimination, or poverty? Of course not. There are those who argue that it will be impossible to address those monumental wounds in our society unless we overcome polarization. Barack Obama squandered the first two years of his presidency, when he had a majority in both houses of Congress, on lyrical exhortations to bipartisanship. But there is nothing freakish, or surprising, or unAmerican, about partisanship, even extreme partisanship. It is the stuff of which politics is made. But then one must take politics seriously — more, one must think highly of politics, and even revere it, and recognize that its ruthlessness is not inconsistent with its nobility; which is to say, one must come to value power.

The words “value” and “power” look strange together, don’t they? The juxtaposition certainly makes many liberals uncomfortable. They have been mildly embarrassed about power for many decades, probably since Vietnam. But if you are not serious about power you are not serious about change.

If despair is born of powerlessness, then power is a reason for hope. It sounds harsh and unlovely, but there is no other way to protect human dignity and its political home, which is democracy.

Political ideas are not poems. They do not exist to deepen our grasp of reality. Their objective is to modify reality. For this reason, political thinkers may be held accountable for the consequences of their thoughts. Anyone who lacks the stomach for consequences should stick with poetry. (For the purpose of a rich life, however, it beats politics.)

When the mad and beautiful Phil Ochs was asked for his verdict on the 1960s, he replied: “They won the war, but we had the best songs.”

Polarization is one of the effects of partisanship and partisan-ship is one of the effects of human association. 

To acknowledge reality without becoming complicit in it. To correct the world without destroying it. Those were the accomplishments of James Madison. His genius, and it was nothing less, was for being an optimist and a pessimist, an idealist and a realist, at the same time. He got the balance right, while the globe is littered with the ruins of political experiments that got it wrong. The equilibrium was revolutionary, especially on the question of the place of conflict in human affairs.

A revolution of equilibrium: the American innovation.

A reading from The Federalist Papers, 10. Please rise.

The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the differ-ent circumstances of civil society. A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good. So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts. But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. The regulation of these various and interfering inter-ests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government.

Here endeth the reading.

So be of good cheer: it was always nasty. To borrow the famous phrase of Madison’s successor in the formulation of the Ameri-can philosophy, the better angels of our nature are not the only angels of our nature. The American system was constructed on the assumption that conflict is ineradicable. The foretold conflicts concern both principles and interests, and the expectation is that they will be brutal. “The causes of faction cannot be removed,” is Madison’s conclusion. Out of this dourness he designed a democracy.

It should be added that the conflicts that constitute a permanent feature of society are not — as we, in our psychologizing habits, often prefer to think of them — misunderstandings. 

There is no clarification, no revision of language, that will make them vanish. A misunderstanding is an apparent conflict, a temporary conflict. It can be resolved with some exploration and some patience, and an apology. But a contradiction between worldviews cannot be resolved; it can only be respected, and then managed. And if the opinions are sincerely and thought-fully held, neither side has anything to apologize for.

Error is a form of innocence. There are many worse things in life than being wrong. (This is the courtesy that Americans seem no longer able to extend to each other.)

Respect is more valuable, and more arduous, than reconciliation.

The alternative to “polarization” is not consensus. There will be no consensus. Madison already warned against “giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests.” In the American tradition there is no fantasy of unanimity. Social agreement is not our eschaton. The American hypothesis is that consensus is not necessary for cooperation, that social agreement is not necessary for social peace. 

The horror of uniformity is the democratic idea itself.

In his painstaking attempt to describe an “overlapping consensus” for a democratic system that must accept “the fact of pluralism,” John Rawls admitted that “we do not, of course assume that an overlapping consensus is always possible, given the doctrines currently existing in any democratic society.” It is a bleak moment in his heroically optimistic enterprise. I think it passes too swiftly. He was a philosopher and he insisted upon a philosophical conception of justice, and for this reason he dismissed what he called a “mere modus vivendi.” He accused Madison (and Hobbes and Locke and Hume and Kant) of philosophical failure by contenting himself with the ideal of compromise between interests. Rawls thought that such a purely improvisational system is too fragile. Indeed it is; but it may be the finest we can do — one fragile compromise after another fragile compromise until the end of time. The problem is not only that we are not a nation of philosophers; it is also that in a pluralist society there is nothing “mere” about a modus vivendi. Madison should not be treated as the first transactionalist. It is dangerous to delegitimate compromise philosophically. Indeed, many unphilosophical activities hide philosophical principles and teach philosophical lessons. There are worse failures than theorylessness.

I am always a little shocked, and pleasantly so, by the Founders’ ease about interests. They were unembarrassed by human partiality. And from the grubby they rose to the sublime.

The United States Constitution is the greatest tribute to, and the greatest rebuke of, Hobbes. 

A philosophy and a system of government that proposes to accept the collisions of society and leave the cacophony alone is a prescription for tough-mindedness. Or more accurately, tough-mindedness in the cause of the tender mercies. We are called upon to be not only sensitive but also effective.

Too many worriers about “polarization” are so sentimental, so nostalgic, so exquisite in their sensitivity to the injuries of democratic combat, so anxious that taking a side might be a human failure. Yet an open society is a rough society. Polemic is one of the central methods of persuasion. “Deliberative democracy” is not the work of professors, even if it is the invention of professors.  

We are a society that makes a cult out of honesty and then wants to be protected from it. 

In an open society, inoffensiveness may be a delinquency of citizenship.

Democracy is wasted on the timorous. The emboldening of ordinary men and women is its very purpose.

A reading from The Social Contract, Book I. Please remain seated.

Properly understood, all of these clauses [of the social contract] come down to a single one, namely, the total alienation of each associate, with all his rights, to the whole community…Instantly, in place of the private person of each contracting party, this act of association produces a moral and collective body, composed of as many members as there are voices in the assembly, which receives from this same act its unity, its common self, its life, and its will…For if the opposition of private interests made the establishment of societies necessary, it is the agreement of these same interests that made it possible….Either the will is general or it is not, It is the will of the people as a body, or of only a part…There is often a great difference between the will of all and the general will. The latter considers only the common interest; the former considers private interest, and is only a sum of private wills…In order for the general will to be well expressed, it is therefore important that there be no a partial society in the State…..

Rousseau adds a footnote: “In order for a will to be general, it is not always necessary for it to be unanimous, but it is necessary that all votes be counted.” Not always! There is here a dream of social and political seamlessness, which is achieved by the dissolution of the individual in the community, the collectivity, the state. It was appropriate that the animadversion about unanimity, the mild concession to the stubbornness of difference, be a footnote, because in the holistic ethos of Rousseau’s state it really is just a footnote. These passages, and the notorious remark, also in Book I, that “whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be constrained to do so by the entire body, which means only that he will be forced to be free,” provoked a renowned historian to describe Rousseau’s ideal as “totalitarian democracy.” 

He aspires to a perfect union, but we aspire to a “more perfect union.” The difference between democracy and totalitarian-ism is the difference between the belief in perfectibility and the belief in perfection. (I do not concur that Rousseau was a totalitarian, exactly; but his democracy repels me. I am an American.) He holds that the individual must “alienate” his rights, but we hold that the individual’s rights are “inalienable.” If you wish to understand the philosophical and political excruciations that France has endured in the wake of the murder of Samuel Paty, may his memory be a blessing, you could do worse than begin with the distinction between these notions of alienation and alienability.

There they do not wish to recognize difference. Here we wish to recognize nothing else. Or so it sometimes seems.

Is a nation a community? The communitarians among us would like to think so. It is certainly the case that a sub-national idea of community would leave us a state of states, a community of communities, a bubble of bubbles, a collection of monocultures paradoxically justified by multiculturalism. This would amount to a degradation of the pluralist promise, according to 

which we can live together and apart. In order to cohere as a nation, we must extend ourselves beyond our particularities, beyond our cloisterings. A homogeneous nation has no need of universalism, but a heterogeneous nation is proof of its beauty. 

Of course there is no such thing as a homogeneous nation. It was one of the necessary fictions of nationalism, and minorities have been paying dearly for it ever since. There is always someone unlike ourselves within our borders, and even if there were only one such person, he or she would still be the test of our decency. (And he or she may think it is me.) 

Perhaps a nation should not be a community. Perhaps it is enough that it is a nation.

In 1813, in a case in New York called People v. Philips, which considered the question of whether a Catholic priest could be forced to provide information that was obtained in the confessional, a lawyer named William Sampson told this to the court: “Every citizen here is in his own country.  To the protestant it is a protestant country; to the catholic, a catholic country; and the jew, if he pleases, may establish in it his New Jerusalem.”  An epochal declaration, a genuine liberation from the Old World. But what he described is both a blessing and a curse. It is pluralism carried to the limits of psychosis  For even if we are all of those countries, we are not any of those countries. We are a whole that does not devour its parts, but we are still a whole.

Who in his right mind would wish to live only among his own? Give me goyim, please! Traditions wither in isolation. Only the infirm of identity seek more of themselves.

It is the stupendous irony of a multiethnic society that it exposes the limitations of particularism. 

In 1966, the brilliant Jewish historian Gerson D. Cohen gave a commencement address at the Hebrew Teachers College in Boston that he called, with a hint of wickedness, “The Blessing of Assimilation in Jewish History.” Reading it now, when a soft kind of separatism is enjoying a new prestige, is exhilarating. “A frank appraisal of the periods in which Judaism flourished will indicate that not only did a certain amount of assimilation and acculturation not impede Jewish continuity and creativity, but that in a profound sense, this assimilation and acculturation was a stimulus to original thinking and expression, a source of renewed vitality.” Our borders give us our shape, but their porousness contributes to our substance. A border is not a wall, it is the opposite of a wall, and the confusion of a border with a wall is a prescription for social and cultural disaster. 

In the name of authenticity, people imprison themselves. And when they do so, these loyal sons and daughters, they usually insult their ancestors, who were less afraid of influences.

The recent history of American society can be told as a story about the vicissitudes of the idea of integration.

Differences are not discrepancies, except from the haughty standpoint of somebody else’s norm. They do not have to be brought into line. But we are not wanting in arguments for difference. Everybody screams their difference, which makes them all so tediously alike.

Permeability ought to be a source of pride in mature individuals and mature societies. 

A possible ground for hope: the individual. In a country in which people are masterfully manipulated by disinformation and demagoguery, in an electorate that increasingly consists of mobs and herds and gangs, in a society in which citizens are encouraged to seek intellectual strength in numbers, it is past time to remind ourselves of the dignities and the powers of the ordinary man and woman, of the autonomy of adults, of the ability of individuals to think for themselves and rise above the pernicious nonsense that their individuation is what ails them. 

The religious extol the uniqueness of souls, the secular extol the uniqueness of selves. In this way they issue the elevating challenge that their integralist currents, religious and secular, retract.

You cannot take your country back until you take your mind back. 

 

I used to like bowling alone. Not always, but sometimes. Anyway, there is nothing like company to make you feel lonely. Loneliness is a social emotion.

Individualism is a far larger dispensation than egotism, which is not to be confused with it. Egotism is a debasement of individualism, in the way that selfishness is a debasement of selfhood. The problem of individual self-love is as nothing compared to the problem of collective self-love. 

The moral superiority of the community to the individual seems dubious to me. Belonging does not insulate anybody from transgression. Worse, there are depredations that we commit together than we would not commit alone. The haters among us, the killers among us, they may be members and they may be loners. They may speak for themselves and they may speak for their group. And communities may be kind or cruel. It’s a wash. The human heart is busy everywhere.

In Hebrew, the root for “hope” is the same root for “gather together,” as in “Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together to one place.” As the authoritative concordance notes, 

sperare and congregatio. I have often pondered this mysterious etymology. It suggests that hope is premised upon the end of a dispersal. But what has been dispersed that must be brought together — the community or the individual? If it is the former, if united we stand and divided we fall, then hope is to be found in the reconstitution of community. If it is the latter, then the dispersed self is what bars the way to hope, and the reconstitution of the self will confer the sought-after encouragement. I am reminded of a work of clinical psychology that appeared in the 1960s called The Psychology of Hope, which concluded with a chapter on “the therapy of hope.” In his account of what he calls “a therapeutic tour de force,” the author describes a clinician who “explicitly and deliberately employed communication of his high expectations of patients as a therapeutic procedure.”

The critics of individualism, the whole army of them, propound a doctrine of demoralization. They have no faith in the actual person, or worse, they detest her. This is uncharitable, and also inaccurate about human capabilities. Given the irreversible fact of individuation, it can be spiritually damaging. 

There is another option: that divided we stand. Madison’s motto!

The Covid-19 virus came along to illustrate what genuine isolation is. Monads in masks now yearn nostalgically for their allegedly atomized life before the pestilence. They miss all the communal meetings and social minglings that were said to have been lost. Except of course the political ones, which have all thrown epidemiological caution to the winds.

In a period of national emergency, and the Trump years were such a period, the ubiquity of politics, its penetration into the deepest recesses of life, its saturation of experience, is understandable. If you believe that your cause or your country is in peril, you will become a sentry and a soldier. There is integrity to such an intensity of commitment, though the question of whether your analysis is correct, whether reality warrants your panic and your politicization, is an important one. But liberals and conservatives both used to believe, as an axiom of both their worldviews, in the limits of politics, in fair weather or foul. Then foul weather arrived and their wisdom collapsed.

Instead of decrying “polarization” and dreaming of the disappearance of division, we might turn our attention to the overpoliticization of human existence in America. There is no longer any domain of life from which politics is barred. People who deplore the destruction of privacy by Silicon Valley acquiesce in the destruction of privacy by politics. Perhaps the one prepared them for the other, and softened them up for the tyranny of publicity and the public. People who engage in politics for the defense of dignity acquiesce in the destruction of dignity that attends the destruction of privacy. 

The first casualty of our overpoliticization was our culture, just about all of it. Art is now politics by other means, full stop. What fools we are to rob ourselves of what we do not have enough of, and for the sake of what we have too much of.

“All art is political,” says Lin-Manuel Miranda. Bullshit.

The most chilling instance of our overpoliticization, of course, is the ideological repudiation of science. When told by the government that their lives were in danger, millions of Ameri-cans said only, don’t tread on me. There is no longer any Archi-medean point outside these political self-definitions.

As for the progressive bedroom, and the infiltration of intimacy by political standards for sexual behavior: make love, not history.

What would a post-“polarized” America look like? I have a visionary inkling. It would consist of men and women who are not only who they vote for and not only who they agree with. They would hold political convictions and defend them, but they would be known also, and mainly, by other beliefs. They would accept the political dissonance but make themselves a little deaf to it, out of respect and for the sake of comity. They would have friends whose views they despise. They would not look forward to family gatherings as an occasion for gladia-torial combat about the issues of the day. They would give up their erotic relationship to anger, and to rectitude. They would renounce their appetites for last battles and last judgements. They would refuse to let even their own extremely correct views interfere with the fullness of living. They would march, and then they would come home. They would mobilize, and then repair to those realms in which mobilization is beside the point. They would not display their politics as proof of their goodness, because they would take note of the good people on the other side. (There are sides, of course, where no goodness can be found, but they are not many.) They would forgive.

Joy in the struggle for justice: outside the contested epiphanies of mysticism, is there a more astonishing spiritual accomplishment? It is joy in the face of misery, after all; joy amid injustice, but deployed against it. When I watch films of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, I am always dumbfounded by the joy, which somehow never got in the way of strategy. What powers of soul! 

In ancient Greece there was a sect of philosophers known as the Elpistikoi: the Hope-ists, or in another translation, the Hopefulists. We know nothing about them. They are mentioned only once, in Plutarch, in a discussion about “whether the sea or the land affords better food.” According to a certain Symmachus, “they believe that what is most essential to life is hoping, on the grounds that when hope is not present to make it pleasant, then life is unbearable.” Or in another translation: “in the absence of hope and without its seasoning life is unendurable.” Seasoning, indeed: Symmachus compares hope to salt. This is a utilitarian case for hope, which is undeniable, because in the absence of any verification we cling to hope entirely for its effects. But it is also more: for the hopefulist, life was not bearable or unbearable, but unbearable or pleas-ant. The hopefulist does not wish only to make it through the night. He wants a pleasant morning, too, and pleasant days. 

Is hope a pleasure? I suppose it depends on what one fears. There may be terrors that hope cannot dispel. Or does hope rise to match them in scale? Hopelessness, in any event, appears when ignorance has passed. Ignorance is the soil of hope, which may be a chapter of its own in the legend about ignorance and bliss. 

Not so, say the economists, whose subject is now the whole of life. Hope, they say, is an assessment of probabilities. But the more the probabilities are known, the less need there is for hope. If the probabilities could be entirely known, we would all be enlightened and hopeless. I am not sure I like the sound of that. But hope is not an assessment. It is a prayer — perhaps the only prayer that the godless, too, can pray.   

Symmachus, lying in the Ionian sun, picking at salted delicacies, voluptuously hoping. 

And back here, in the winter wastes, two possible grounds of hope: a new vaccine and a new president. We are not yet getting to the end.

Steadying

For some time now it has felt like history is itself the pandemic. In our country and elsewhere, it has been in overdrive, teeming with evils, flush with collapses, abounding in fear and rage, a wounding contest between the sense of an ending and the sense of a beginning, between inertia and momentum, with all the terribilities of ages of transition. What is going has not yet gone and what is coming has not yet come. We have become connoisseurs of convulsion. At sea is our new sea.

For better and for worse, axioms and assumptions are dying everywhere around us. Such vertiginous hours always come with both clarities and confusions — there is no promise of illumination. The guidance we need in our circumstances will not be provided by the circumstances themselves: they are too many and too contradictory and too volatile; passion increasingly unconstrained and power increasingly unconstrained. As the sense of injustice grows, injustice seems to keep pace with it. There is a piercing sensation of flux, of uncontrollable effects and unmanageable consequences. The masks on our faces are emblems of an entire era of vulnerability. The most important thing, therefore, is that we keep our heads. A disequilibrium of history demands an equilibrium of the mind. Steadiness in the midst of turbulence is not complicity with the existing order. It is precisely in such binges of history that we must teach ourselves to sort through the true and the false, the good and the bad, the continuities and the discontinuities, the right statues and the wrong statues, the humane and the utopian.

Everything will be different: this is a ubiquitous sentiment. In all our upheavals — social and epidemiological — so much seems to be wrong and so much seems to be slipping away that one may be forgiven for enjoying a fantasy of total change. All these horrors, all these outrages, all these marches, and the world stays the same? So the first thing that needs to be said in the effort to keep our heads is that everything never changes. More, the idea that everything will change usually plays into the hands of those who want nothing to change. The cycle of revolution and reaction has never been the most effective engine of progress. Nothing suits the interests of the old regime like utopianism. The thirst for change will not be slaked by the cheap whiskey of apocalyptic thinking. The only certain outcome of the apocalyptic temper is catharsis, and one way of describing the decline of our politics in recent decades is that it has increasingly become a politics of catharsis, in which crisis is met mainly by emotion. (Populism is just mass emotionalism, and the emotions are often ugly ones.) Apocalypse is not an analysis, it is the death of analysis. It sets the stage only for salvation, but salvation must never become a political goal. This is especially true in a democratic society, where the only saviors are, alas, ourselves.

Thus it is that the struggle against injustice imposes upon us a paradoxical psychology: it demands both impatience and patience. Impatience about injustice, patience about justice. This is hard to do. It looks too much like, and in many cases it may well be, complacence. It is certainly difficult to preach incrementalism to the injured. So why not be impatient about justice, too? There are historical and practical reasons why not. History is stained by tales of instantaneous justice, by the consequences of the rush to perfection, by the victims of the victims. The ethical calculus of means and ends is never teleologically suspended, if just causes are to remain just. Nor is it a quantitative calculus: when I first studied the modern history of the Jews I drew a variety of conclusions from the Dreyfus affair, and one of them, which was an important moment in my moral education, was that Zola and his comrades appropriately threw an entire country into crisis for the sake of one man. Similarly, due process is not a legal formality, a procedural exercise that slows the way to a satisfying climax; it is the very honor of a liberal society.

More concretely, the establishment of justice involves not only revisions in opinions but also revisions in institutions. A dreary point! But anyone who denies the institutional dimension, in all its exasperating machinery, is not serious about the change. Paroxysms, unlike laws, vanish. This was the year in which the campaign for racial justice found support in virtually all the sectors of American society, with the exception of the White House — an unprecedented national epiphany that cannot be dismissed as “performative”, because culture matters; but the road from protest to policy is long and winding. It is not a betrayal of the ideal of social justice to tread carefully and tenaciously, with a mastery of the scruples and the methods that would make a reform defensible and durable. Tenacity is what patience looks like in the middle of a struggle.

I will give an example of the complicated nature of the mentality of change. One of the consequences of recent social movements in America — #MeToo (which came also to my door, with its lesson and its recklessness) and Black Lives Matter—has been to reveal how poorly we understand each other. Or more precisely, they have exposed the extent to which the failure to understand others may be owed to the failure to understand oneself — the limitations of one’s own standpoint, the comfortable assumption that one appears to others as one wishes to appear to them, or to oneself. This is nonsense, though sometimes you learn so the hard way. There are limits to our epistemological jurisdiction. The failure to observe these limits is solipsism, and we all begin as solipsists, awaiting correction by social experience.

Our epistemological jurisdiction stops at the encounter with another person. She is another epistemological kingdom, not more perfect but certainly different, with something important to add, and a perceptual contribution to make. I may like to think that I am what I present myself to be, but I am also what she sees me to be, because she sees me as I cannot, or will not, see myself. I am never in control of my self-representation and never complete in my self-awareness. We always show more of ourselves than we think we do, which is why we may learn from the responses of others. We spill beyond our intentions and our conceits, and what we gain from this overflow is criticism.

But criticism, too, must be assessed critically – there is no exemption. The enlightenment that one acquires from the judgments of others is owed only to their accuracy. It is certainly not warranted by the belief that a person’s identity or socio-economic position or experience of hardship confers an absolute authority, a special relationship to truth, a vatic privilege. What a simple world it would be if pain were a sufficient guarantee of credibility. But it is not – indeed, the opposite is the case, pain is myopic and sees chiefly itself, which is one of the reasons it hurts. Finally we are all left with the modesty of our grasp. No whole classes of people are right and no whole classes of people are wrong.

The ineradicability of ambiguity from human relations, the ignorance of ourselves that accompanies our ignorance of others, the whole fallible heap, creates an urgent need for tolerance and, more strenuously, for forgiveness. Historians will record that in the early decades of the twenty-first century we became an unforgiving society, a society of furies, a society in search of guilt and shame, a society of sanctimonies and “struggle sessions” American-style. They will admire our awakening to prejudice but lament the sometimes prejudicial ways in which we acted on our progressive realizations. In this respect America should become more Christian. (There, I said it.) For all our elaborate culture of self-knowledge, for all the hectoring articulateness of our identity vocabularies, we are still, each of us, our own blind spots. We should welcome every person we meet as a small blow against blindness.

The partiality of perspective: this is the great teaching of the contemporary tumult. The problem is that we have not only begun to acknowledge our partiality, and the partiality of others, we have also begun to revere it, and this is a mistake. We are gagging on all our roots. If pain does not provide access to truth, neither does particularity. The worship of particularism is one of the great impediments to social justice, and in its exhilarating way it coarsens us all. In our moral and social thinking, our obsession with otherness has concealed that the foundation of moral and social action is sameness. The “other” is exotic, but there is nothing exotic about the homeless man on the street: he is the same as me, a human being, except that he is hungry and I am not. The difference in our circumstances is not a difference in our definition. When I hand him a few dollars I am not extending myself toward an alien being; I am practicing species solidarity. I am not discovering his humanity; I am responding to it. I am acting, in other words, universally, and none of the social problems that afflict us will be solved unless we recover the universalist standpoint that sees beyond the visible divisions, and is not trapped in, or enraptured by, the specificities of our tribes. Pluralism secures the right to turn inward, but it also broaches the duty to turn outward. By surrounding us with other partialities it legitimates our own partiality, but it also reveals that there is more to the world than what is merely ours.

A great deal has been written in recent years about the discovery of our commonplace biases and the techniques for overcoming them. Much of this literature is psychological, but some of it is political, and its aim is to confine us proudly within our limits and call them wonderful. In the name of authenticity, we are instructed that the partiality of our perspective is all we will ever have, and that the aspiration to impartiality is an aspiration to power, or a justification of power. Every view is a view from somewhere. Nobody escapes his or her position. We are all marooned in our respective glories. Objectivity, according to this advanced opinion, is an epistemological plot of the elites.

This inculcates a kind of localist arrogance that is fully the match of the globalist kind. Such “perspectivism” was one of Nietzsche’s lasting provocations, and in American philosophy it was ringingly championed by Richard Rorty, who was the only man I have ever known to use the word “ethnocentrism” positively. He denounced objectivity in favor of solidarity, and his children are everywhere, in all the movements; and a similar war on truth flourishes, for less sophisticated reasons, also in the offices of prime ministers and presidents. The outlook for intelligence, as Paul Valery used to say in an earlier era of confusion and peril, is not heartening. Truth in America is a refugee, an undocumented immigrant. Philosophers and political operatives have joined together to proclaim the fictive nature of fact. About this there is no “polarization.” It is not only policy over which we differ: we differ also over the description of reality. (And even if science is not all we need to know, is there any plainer measure of stupidity than the mockery of science?)

All these communitarianisms of the mind are absurd. If all one can express with one’s beliefs is solidarity with one’s community, then how is it possible to disagree with one’s community, and what is the origin of dissent? If it is impossible for people of different backgrounds, or classes, or races, or genders, to understand each other, why are they disappointed or angry when they are not understood? If people who are white or male or rich cannot claim to comprehend people who are black or female or poor, how can people who are black or female or poor claim to comprehend people who are white or male or rich? Of course the world does not work this way, according to this Empedoclean epistemology, for which like can only know like. The startling reality – it is one of the tremendous features of human existence – is that, within societies and among societies, across nations and cultures, we manage to be intelligible to one another. If you don’t get it, you can get it. As a strategy for thwarting human communication, Babel was a bust.

This everyday mental commerce, this regular passage through these permeable frontiers, sometimes needs the assistance of translation, and always needs the assistance of imagination, but it proves that the inherited perspectives may be enlarged and that the despair of a greater commonality is a self-inflicted wound. Perfect objectivity may never be attained, but that is no excuse to act like merry peasants. “Positional objectivity,” as Amartya Sen has described the only plausible mitigation of our parochialism, will get us very far. Moreover, chafing against one’s limits is a condition of ethical sensitivity: if I were to be content with what my own life has taught me, I could not recognize sufferings which I have not lived and against which I have a responsibility to act. All that I need to know I cannot learn in my town, even if I can learn a great deal there. We have moral obligations in unfamiliar situations.

I am not a woman and so I must imagine rape. I am not a black man and so I must imagine chokeholds. I am not a Syrian and so I must imagine that charnel house. I am not a Uighur and so I must imagine those camps. (But I am a Jew and so I expect others to extend the same imaginative respect to the fate of my people.) If victims were the only ones who understood oppression, who would help them? Often they insist that they must help themselves, which is correct, and evidence of their irreducible dignity, but there are limits to what they can do, and their “auto-emancipation” does not absolve the rest of us from the work of their emancipation. This work involves shaking ourselves loose from the mental dullness that is the product of our distance. As Judith Shklar once observed, “it will always be easier to see misfortune rather than injustice in the afflictions of others.”

Objectivity, in other words, is the sturdiest ground of justice, and the despisers of objectivity are playing with fire. Feelings are a reedy basis for reform. After all, the other side also has feelings – which is how we wound up with the revolting solipsist in the Oval Office. In a democratic society, reform comes about by means of persuasion, and the feelings of others may not do the trick. I may not feel what you feel. I will not be convinced that you are right by the fervor of your feeling that you are right. I need reasons to agree with you, that is, appeals to principles, to rational accounts of preferences, to terms and values larger than each of us which, unlike feelings, we may share.

Without objectivity, without the practice of detachment that makes genuine deliberation possible, without tearing ourselves away from ourselves, justice in our society will mean only what the majority, or the crowd, or the media (all of them fickle) want it to mean. We will gag on our roots. We will continue to despise each other, some scorning the weak and others scorning the strong. Our system of disagreement will continue to be degraded into a system of umbrage, in which a dissenting opinion may be dismissed as “tone-deaf”. Empathy, where it exists, will be remorselessly selective and most often reserved for one’s own kind. (Down with himpathy! Up with herpathy!) We will remain stalled in our excitability. But none of the questions that we are asking as a society can be answered with a scream or a scowl.

Some of what I have written here will please progressives. Some of it will please conservatives. I call it liberalism.

“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” Legend attributes that swaggering pronouncement to Keynes, and it has become the canonical formulation of the anti-dogmatic mentality, the credo of the open and empirical mind. It has always irritated me, and not because I have a complaint about the admiration for factuality. These days the facts are the front lines in the battle for reason in America. The power of the state has been pitted against them.

Keynes was an economist, and I have no doubt that the relation that he posits between facts and opinions is entirely appropriate for purposes of administration – say, setting an interest rate. As conditions change, policies must be adjusted. Only a fool would think otherwise. If you are not fascinated by the question of what works, stay away from government. (Or join up, because these days nothing gets done.) Practicality is always reactive; its timeline is short. Pragmatism waits on the news. There is even a current in modern American thought for which democracy is itself an exercise in unceasing pragmatism, in trial and error unto the generations. Its definitive statement can be found in the conclusion to Holmes’ renowned dissent in Abrams in 1919. Immediately following his famous observation that “the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market,” which was an important moment in the infiltration of the non-economic spheres of American life by the vocabulary of economics, Holmes went on to declare about the Constitution that “it is an experiment, as life is an experiment.” Whatever the merits of such a philosophy of existence, the sense of the provisional championed by Holmes is admirable for the mental patience that it imparts, and for its revulsion from absolutism.

Yet Keynes’ statement seems to be reaching for more than a merely managerial responsiveness. It appears to be making a more general claim about the dependence of beliefs on facts. There are many kinds of belief, of course. But there are some kinds of belief that do not originate in the facts, that are not hostage to changes in the facts, that exist prior to the facts and provide the framework within which the facts are understood and assessed. I cannot agree that moral opinions and philosophical opinions, if indeed Keynes had such opinions in mind when he made his remark, require such a tight association with fact. Even the belief that beliefs must be based in facts cannot be based on facts. There are views I hold about right and wrong, about the individual and the group, about ethical obligation, about the duties and the limits of power, about the nature of truth, about the nature of beauty, and about spiritual meanings that will not be revised by the morning paper, whatever it brings. Before tomorrow’s bad news, I already know that the world is an unkind place and that there are a variety of ways to interpret its cruelty, and I have, to the best of my abilities, in ways that I can explain, already chosen an interpretation.

It is possible, over time and by means of careful reflection, taking your experience into account but not only your experience, to arrive at a view of life, a worldview, and to hold it continuously, through thick and thin, regardless of who the president is, without embarrassment at the steadfastness with which you maintain it, so long as you give reasons and present them for critical examination. There is no shame in intellectual constancy. It is nothing like dogmatism, if it is thoughtful. And the caprices of external events, even when they are cataclysmic, need not throw one into philosophical crisis. Especially in times of cataclysm, one should aspire to what Rebecca West called “an unsurpriseable mind.”

I remember a conference, not long after the earthquake of 2016, where I was holding forth on the characteristics of populism. When it came time for questions, an acquaintance of mine, a fiendishly intelligent woman with a saturnine look on her face, a distinguished international civil servant, raised her hand. “After what just happened,” she asked, “how should we revise our views?” It was not the first time that I heard this question in the aftermath of the Trump ascendancy. I disliked the question. It represented a fundamental misunderstanding about the formation of belief. We should not revise our views, I replied. The election did not prove that our views are wrong. It proved only that our views are unpopular. (And the well-named popular vote did not prove even that.) All that a poll can establish is the popularity of a belief, its distribution across a population. It has no bearing whatever upon its substance. What we believe may be wrong, but not because many people disagree with us. This is precisely the problem with Holmes’ idea of verification, with his contention that truth will be established in the competition in the market: success in the market has nothing to do with truth. The interminable history of human illusion shows that the “marketplace of ideas” is like every other marketplace. It reflects only appetites and interests; it is easily manipulated; it is quantitative.

I may have been a little sharp in my reply to the questioner. My disrespect for her notion of intellectual flexibility must have showed. Politicians, of course, must evaluate ideas politically, but this was not an exchange about politicians. A losing side may need to revise its tactics, but beliefs are not tactics. There is nothing illegitimate or disqualifying about a minority position. A democracy, indeed, should be judged by how it treats its minorities, not least its intellectual minorities. There is honor in minority life. There is honor also in defeat, if one stands for something more than victory. If you stand for principle and you lose, you are equipped to fight again. Sometimes there is good company in the wilderness. In wondering whether defeat should inspire second thoughts about first things, my rattled interlocutor was skirting the problem known as the tyranny of the majority, which was long ago identified as one of the supreme abuses of democracy. When I assured her that the results of the election did not constitute a refutation of her views, I did not mean to lull her into a feeling of righteousness about what she – and I – believed. I wished only to draw a line between disappointment and crippling doubt.

Here is what I do, sir. When the facts change, I interpret the facts according to the methods and the assumptions in which I have the most intellectual confidence. If I can vouch for the integrity of those methods and assumptions, which in my case are liberal methods and assumptions,I will be reluctant to give them up – especially in a dizzying world, where the people with moorings will be better able to explain and to lead. I recognize that moorings come in many forms – evil, too, comes with intellectual frameworks; but those frameworks will be most effectively challenged and repudiated by those who have a different one of their own. As for the facts, I am all for them; but I am not sure they can do all the work that needs to be done. Will bigotry be vanquished by data? A hatred cannot be dispelled for being non-factual. Sooner or later we have to engage at the level of moral and philosophical principle. We must make ourselves competent in kinds of discourse that are not only empirical. We must not forget how to believe.

This journal begins its life in a time of breakdown and bewilderment, of arousal and expectancy. It is called Libertiesbecause of all the splendid echoes of the word – liberty, liberal, liberate, liberality, even libertarian, even libertine. (The question of the place of pleasure in human life is one of the fundamental questions.) It is both a grave word and a joyous word. The plural is a tribute to the plurality of freedoms that we enjoy as a matter of right, and also to the plurality of freedoms that the citizens of a growing number of countries are being ruthlessly denied. Above all, it is meant to announce that, in this universe of fascists and commissars, the objective of these pages will be, by argument and by example, in politics and in culture, the rehabilitation of liberalism.

The slander of liberalism is one of the spectacular idiocies of our age. The errors and the failures of the liberal order, at home and abroad, need to be acknowledged, but they do not need to be exaggerated. The pride of liberals deserves to be much greater than their guilt. A glance at history abundantly demonstrates this, as the issues of this journal will explain. But the historical events that provoked the social, economic, and moral achievements of the liberal order have receded in time, and the experience of time itself has been accelerated, so that historical memory can no longer be relied upon for the work of explanation and nothing is obvious anymore. The work of explanation, guided by reason and humaneness and the study of the past, needs to start again. There is nothing nostalgic about such a project. The restoration of liberal ideas and practices – a social equality based not on venerations of identity but on universal principles; an economic equality based not a delusion of dirigisme but upon a rigorous regulation of capitalism; a faith in government as one of the great creations of human civilization and the protector of the weak against the strong; an affirmation of American power in the world because of the good that American power can do in the world – is entirely forward-looking. To curse liberalism is to curse the future.

It is no longer trite or tautological to say that a democracy is a place that behaves democratically. Within our democracy, and within other democracies, there are many leaders and movements who behave undemocratically or anti-democratically – who view democracy expediently, as an instrument for the acquisition of power and nothing more. For this reason, the philosophical grounds and political benefits of democracy also need to be re-clarified. In 1938, on a lecture tour of the United States, Thomas Mann observed to his American audiences that democracy “should put aside the habit of taking itself for granted, of self-forgetfulness. It should use this wholly unexpected situation – the fact, namely, that it has again become problematical – to renew and rejuvenate itself by again becoming aware of itself.” He was speaking, of course, with the ruefulness of his German experience. Our situation is not as bleak and bitter, but an authoritarian temper is flourishing in our midst too, in the West Wing and the streets and the media and the platforms. We, too, have become self-forgetful. “No,” Mann told the crowds from coast to coast, “America needs no instruction in the things that concern democracy…Europe has had much to learn from America as to the nature of democracy. It was your American statesmen and poets such as Lincoln and Whitman who proclaimed to the world democratic thought and feeling, and the democratic way of life, in imperishable words.” It is bruising to read those sentences. We no longer offer such instruction to the world, or even care about the condition of freedom beyond our own borders.

The question of how to live is more than the question of how to vote. The liberal idea was never just a political idea. It is, more generally, a grand belief in human capacity, and in the obligation – exclusive to no group and no tradition – to cultivate it. When Henry James wrote about “the liberal heart”, he meant a large heart, a generous heart, a receptive heart, an expansive heart, an unconforming heart, a heart animated by a wide variety of human expressions. Such an ideal of heartfulness pertains not only to politics but also to culture. The war against callousness cannot be won without the resources of culture. There is no more lasting education in human sympathy than an exposure to literature and the arts.

The dwindling position of the humanities in American society is one of its most catastrophic developments. This journal, an independent journal, will take a side in this struggle. It will champion sensibility as well as controversy, and attend to culture with the same ardor with which it attends to politics. But it will refrain from aligning cultural criticism with political criticism, in grateful awareness of the multiplicity of the realms in which we lead our lives, and in awareness also of the insidious history of the synchronization of culture with politics. Pardon the counter-revolutionary thinking, but culture must never become politics by other means. Of course this is precisely what culture is becoming, thanks not least to the zealous synchronizers at the New York Times. (And at The New Yorker, which is what PM would have been if it had the money.) The autonomy of art threatens nobody and enriches everybody. The social and political origins of artists vitiate the freedom of art about as much as the social and political origins of thinkers vitiate the freedom of thought. When art is weaponized, it is compromised. Racial justice does not require the racialization of all things. And culture harbors no dream of consensus. An aversion to controversy is an aversion to culture, just as it is an aversion to democracy.

Not least because it will appear only four times a year, this journal will not be in the business of rapid response to the emergencies and the imbecilities with which we are currently inundated. We will crusade, but slowly. There is a deeper reason for this counter-cultural pace. It is that the investigation into bigger ideas and larger causes takes time. If the sorting out of our intellectual pandemonium should not be conceived under the aspect of eternity, neither should it be conceived under the aspect of the news cycle. American journalists have brilliantly responded to an assault on their integrity and their legitimacy with a golden age of investigative journalism, but they cannot be expected to do more: the exposure of lies in a regime of untruth is as exhausting as it is essential. (How many synonyms are there for “madman”?) So in these pages we will be indifferent to the chyrons. There will be no quick takes and immediate reactions and emotional outbursts, nothing driven by velocity or by brevity. At this journal we are betting on what used to be called the common reader, who would rather reflect than belong and asks of our intellectual life more than a choice between orthodoxies. We are not persuaded that it is a losing bet. With a melancholy sense of the fragility of what we cherish, and with a bestirring sense of how much injustice there is in the country and the world, we wish to bring an old intellectual calling into a new era and see what together we can learn. Nothing quickens the mind like hope.