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.
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: