‘There are no atheists in foxholes, and no liberals in bar fights…’
As with so many things in my life, I happened across Adam Gopnik’s book A Thousand Small Sanities via The Adam Buxton Podcast. Dr. Buckles evoked Gopnik’s non-fiction novel as an example of a work that views the world from both sides of the political spectrum. As someone who has come to feel increasingly politically homeless over recent years, I am intrigued by anything that attempts to highlight how fractured western society has become, and how someone should navigate the increasingly choppy waters in which we find ourselves. A Thousand Small Sanities does strive to bridge the gap between the right and the left, but it does so through the narrow prism of liberalism…
Part mission statemen and part manifesto, A Thousand Small Sanities endeavours to remove the stigma around liberalism and demystify the core beliefs that make up the modern liberal. Whether Gopnik succeeds on either account is up for debate. I went into Gopnik’s book with only a vague idea of what liberalism actually is, and over a full-length novel, the author never really achieves success in offering a concise, coherent definition that a layperson could easily understand. He seems to argue that kindness and understanding within the confines of incremental change to our already existing systems is the key tenet of liberalism, but that could also be argued of almost any major political belief. I’m sure even those on the right consider themselves to be kind and understanding, it simply manifests itself in a different way.
Having said that, Gopnik’s prose never feels exclusionary and he does a good job in addressing the main criticisms of liberalism whilst mostly avoiding the self-satisfied smugness often associated with its followers (even though the framing device that he uses – a conversation with his precocious and eloquent daughter – sometimes slips into self-parody).
To say this is a subject that I know very little about, it is testament to Gopnik’s breezy writing style that I was never bored or frustrated whilst reading A Thousand Small Sanities. But did I learn anything? Probably not.