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
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