I’ve been reading Adam Gopnik’s book A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism, which is about the meaning and history of liberalism as a political movement. I think many of the ideas that Gopnik discusses are relevant to the EA movement as well:
Moral circle expansion: To Gopnik, liberalism is primarily about calling for “the necessity and possibility of (imperfectly) egalitarian social reform and ever greater (if not absolute) tolerance of human difference” (p. 23). This means expanding the moral circle to include, at the least, all human beings. However, inclusion in the moral circle is a spectrum, not a binary: although liberal societies have made tremendous progress in treating women, POC, workers, and LGBTQ+ people fairly, there’s still a lot of room for improvement. And these societies are only beginning to improve their treatment of immigrants, the global poor, and non-human animals.
Societal evolution and the “Long Reflection”: “Liberalism’s task is not to imagine the perfect society and drive us toward it but to point out what’s cruel in the society we have now and fix it if we possibly can” (p. 31). I think that EA’s goals for social change are mostly aligned with this approach: we identify problems and ways to solve them, but we usually don’t offer a utopian vision of the future. However, the idea of the “Long Reflection,” a process of deliberation that humanity would undertake before taking any irreversible steps that would alter its trajectory of development, seems to depart from this vision of social change. The Long Reflection involves figuring out what is ultimately of value to humanity or, failing that, coming close enough to agreement that we won’t regret any irreversible steps we take. This seems hard and very different from the usual way people do politics, and I think it’s worth figuring out exactly how we would do this and what would be required if we think we will have to take such steps in the future.
Would you recommend the book itself to people interested in movement-building and/or “EA history”? Is there a good review/summary that you think would cover the important points in less time?
Yeah, I would recommend it to anyone interested in movement building, history, or political philosophy from an EA perspective. I’m interested in reconciling longtermism and liberalism.
These paragraphs from the Guardian review summarize the main points of the book:
Given the prevailing gloom, Gopnik’s definition of liberalism is cautious and it depends on two words whose awkwardness, odd in such an elegant writer, betrays their doubtful appeal. One is “fallibilism”, the other is “imperfectability”: we are a shoddy species, unworthy of utopia. I’d have thought that this was reason for conservatively upholding the old order, but for Gopnik it’s our recidivism that makes liberal reform so necessary. We must always try to do better, cleaning up our messes. The sanity in the book’s title extends to sanitation: Gopnik whimsically honours the sewerage system of Victorian London as a shining if smelly triumph of liberal policy.
Liberalism here is less a philosophy or an ideology than a temperament and a way of living. Gopnik regards sympathy with others, not the building of walls and policing of borders, as the basis of community. “Love is love,” he avers, and “kindness is everything”. Both claims, he insists, are “true. Entirely true”, if only because the Beatles say so. But are they truths or blithe truisms? Such soothing mantras would not have disarmed the neo-Nazi thugs who marched through Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 or the white supremacist who murdered Jo Cox. Gopnik calls Trump “half-witted” and says Nigel Farage is a “transparent nothing”, but snubs do not diminish the menace of these dreadful men.
I’ve been reading Adam Gopnik’s book A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism, which is about the meaning and history of liberalism as a political movement. I think many of the ideas that Gopnik discusses are relevant to the EA movement as well:
Moral circle expansion: To Gopnik, liberalism is primarily about calling for “the necessity and possibility of (imperfectly) egalitarian social reform and ever greater (if not absolute) tolerance of human difference” (p. 23). This means expanding the moral circle to include, at the least, all human beings. However, inclusion in the moral circle is a spectrum, not a binary: although liberal societies have made tremendous progress in treating women, POC, workers, and LGBTQ+ people fairly, there’s still a lot of room for improvement. And these societies are only beginning to improve their treatment of immigrants, the global poor, and non-human animals.
Societal evolution and the “Long Reflection”: “Liberalism’s task is not to imagine the perfect society and drive us toward it but to point out what’s cruel in the society we have now and fix it if we possibly can” (p. 31). I think that EA’s goals for social change are mostly aligned with this approach: we identify problems and ways to solve them, but we usually don’t offer a utopian vision of the future. However, the idea of the “Long Reflection,” a process of deliberation that humanity would undertake before taking any irreversible steps that would alter its trajectory of development, seems to depart from this vision of social change. The Long Reflection involves figuring out what is ultimately of value to humanity or, failing that, coming close enough to agreement that we won’t regret any irreversible steps we take. This seems hard and very different from the usual way people do politics, and I think it’s worth figuring out exactly how we would do this and what would be required if we think we will have to take such steps in the future.
Would you recommend the book itself to people interested in movement-building and/or “EA history”? Is there a good review/summary that you think would cover the important points in less time?
Yeah, I would recommend it to anyone interested in movement building, history, or political philosophy from an EA perspective. I’m interested in reconciling longtermism and liberalism.
These paragraphs from the Guardian review summarize the main points of the book: