BEYOND CHARACTER?

 

This posting is an opportunity to give David Brooks the stage.  It does so by offering two quotes from his book, The Second Mountain,[1] in which he makes a meaningful distinction.  In sharing his words, it might sound as if he is diminishing a central element of an ideal person.  That is, that that person should have character.  The opinion he expresses is, as with all human qualities, that none of them indicate perfection or enjoy an unqualified standing within one’s estimations.  Life is not that simple.  So, what does Brooks have to say about the human quality of character?  

          Here is the first quote:

 

When I wrote The Road to Character [published in 2015], I was still enclosed in the prison of individualism.  I believed that life is going best when we take individual agency, when we grab the wheel and steer our own ship.  I still believed that character is something you build mostly on your own.  You identify your core sin and then, mustering all your willpower, you make yourself strong in your weakest places.[2]

 

In the few years that have transpired from this earlier mode of thinking, Brooks apparently has gone through a transformation of sorts.  And in doing so, he has not only experienced a change of heart, but also a change of understanding what life can be or should be.  No, he didn’t abandon the importance of character, but perhaps, one can say, augmented what it means to him and how it functions for him in determining what he should be about.

          In a few lines following the above quote, Brooks adds:

 

I now think good character is a by-product of giving yourself away.  You love things that are worthy of love.  You surrender to a community or cause, make promises to other people, build a thick jungle of loving attachments, lose yourself in the daily act of serving others as they lose themselves in the daily acts of serving you.  Character is a good thing to have, and there’s a lot to be learned on the road to character.  But there’s a better thing to have – moral joy.  And that serenity arrives as you come closer to embodying perfect love.[3]

 

In this blogger’s opinion, Brooks makes important definitional points.  One is that character is complex and comprises various attributes.  Some of them, if seen from an individualistic perspective, home in on what one can and should do irrespective of social conditions.  It gives one an air or burden of ascending above how those around one are doing.  That is, irrespective of the travails one observes, one should act according to principle and not merely respond to the daily challenges one encounters. 

And yes, there is that element of character, but it is not an unqualified attribute of goodness that Brooks previously ascribed to it.  Character also, and this is Brooks’ second point, is subordinate to moral obligations he terms “joys.”  And usually that means being concerned and motivated to see how others are faring in relation to what concerns them.  Here Brooks writes of “surrendering” to those demands and describing what important role one’s culture plays in disposing oneself to such thinking and feeling.

          Of course, as this blog argues, a culture ensconced in individualism, such as how the American culture holds as prominent the natural rights view, reaching or even recognizing Brooks’ “second mountain” – this surrender to an other-centered disposition – seems unlikely to take hold.  Hopefully, efforts such as Brooks’ book – and even, to some degree, this blog – can make a difference in people approaching and even climbing that “second” communal “mountain.”

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[1] David Brooks, The Second Mountain:  The Quest for a Moral Life (New York, NY:  Random House).

[2] Ibid, xix.

[3] Ibid., xix.

BEYOND SELF

 

This blogger can personally vouch for the truthfulness of what this posting reports.  When he was younger, as a young adult and supported by a culture that prevailed in those years – and he claims is still prominent today – he saw life as a journey to fulfil self-defined aims and goals.  The general direction was to attain success over what personal challenges were currently present on the way to achieving life-long ambitions. 

Some of those ambitions were about personal life – a successful marriage and parenthood – and some about how he advanced in general society – a successful career.  Many would argue that all of this was not determined by this younger person.  It was just what was prevalent among the American population, and he accepted it as what should be or what was normal for a person with his income and family background.  Therefore, little meaningful reflection was involved.

          That general perspective on how most people mature was more or less supported by general psychological and sociological models that enjoyed general followship at that time.  For example, there was Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs model that traced how one would be progressively motivated, assuming initial motives or needs were satisfied. 

People start with basic physiological needs and advance, with the satisfaction of interim needs, toward self-actualization.  Loving and belonging were only intermediate needs and for many not totally satisfied, meaning that most would be stymied short of experiencing the ultimate need for self-actualization.[1]  

          This blogger’s expertise is not along these lines; he is not questioning the validity of Maslow’s model.  Take this offering as merely a questioning exercise that suggests a different emphasis – from a self-centered focus to a more communal focus.  Initially, this blogger found Maslow’s model to be powerful.  But he has gone through a basic reevaluation of how one should lead one’s life and although he doesn’t dismiss Maslow’s view, he qualifies it. 

In his former view, this blogger was ensconced in a behavioral – ala B. F. Skinner – view of motivation but has shifted to a more communal bias which highlights federated relationships with those people with whom he interacts.  Those relationships range from family and friends to people he encounters in everyday life.  Overall, he presupposes that those he encounters, at some level, are partners in this thing called social life.

          And he finds, in his readings and research, that the general popular literature has shifted in this direction as well.  More and more writers are opting for the utilization of a more communal language or perspective.  One such writer is the journalist, David Brooks.  In 2019, he came out with a book, The Second Mountain, which presents an other-centered message – one that places in importance the needs one has in establishing and maintaining strong interpersonal relationships, from one-on-one encounters to overall communal living.

Amazon, the bookseller, summarizes this book with the following:  “On the second mountain, life moves from self-centered to other-centered.  They want the things that are truly worth wanting, not the things other people tell them to want.  They embrace a life of interdependence, not independence.  They surrender to a life of commitment.”[2]  Yes, this depiction does not technically counter Maslow’s ultimate motivation, self-actualization, but perhaps further defines what that means. 

Actually, this blogger thinks this description was what Maslow was arguing since he, Maslow, describes this final motivational stage as being beyond ego.  It is toward who one truly is.  There is the notion that everyone is truly a social being and one can find a lot of professional counseling assuming this aspect of human nature.  If so, self-actualization would presuppose a recognition of this element of needing others and cater to satisfying whatever that element’s requisites are.

Perhaps the entire question boils down to a matter of degree.  How other-centered does one need to be in order to attain one’s happiness or contentment?  Brooks claims that his book is to, first, make the argument that people need to recognize this need, i.e., to serve a cause larger than oneself, and second, to instruct people on how to accomplish this aim.  And here is where his book gets its basic focus.

Brooks writes:

 

Our society suffers from a crisis of connection, a crisis of solidarity.  We live in a culture of hyper-individualism.  There is always a tension between self and society, between the individual and the group.  Over the past sixty years we have swung too far toward the self.  The only out is to rebalance, to build a culture that steers people toward relation, community, and commitment – the things we most deeply yearn for, yet undermine with our hyper-individualistic way of life.[3]

 

And this becomes conscious for a person as that person strives toward relationships not based on concrete rewards, but on satisfaction of some love interest for a vocation, a spouse and/or family members, a philosophy or belief (as with a religion), and/or a community.

          As with most human quests or ambitions, some people are very good – even outstanding – at satisfying these aims.  Most, though, can only achieve adequacy.  What is important is that the effort is made to be communal, collaborative, and cooperative with others who are engaged in striving for their conscious goals; that can include merely making it till tomorrow. 

What everyone can do is to set related goals according to high standards.  Yes, tomorrow is important, but lasting and meaningful relationships over time enrich and fill out a substantial life for oneself.  And, with high standards, if one falls short, Brooks argues, it will be because of one’s talents and abilities, not due to setting impoverished ideals.

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[1] For example, Saul Mcleod, “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs,” Simply Psychology, November 24, 2023, accessed January 13, 2024, URL:  https://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html. This site introduces an even higher need, that being “transcendence needs.”  Here, according to this source, “they represent the human desire to connect with higher reality, purpose, or the universe.”  Perhaps this is more in line with communal needs and ambitions.

[2] Amazon advertisement for The Second Mountain:  The Quest for a Moral Life, accessed January 13, 2024, URL:  https://www.amazon.com/Second-Mountain-David-Brooks/dp/0812993268.

[3] David Brooks, The Second Mountain:  The Quest for a Moral Life (New York, NY:  Random House), xvi-xvii.  If one goes back sixty years as this quote indicates, one is in the year 1964.  This blog claims that the nation shifted in its basic view of governance and politics to the natural rights view in the late 1940s.  Its palpable influence would take some time to hold sway in how people behaved and that might coincide with the late 1950s to early 1960s.

CONTRACT VS. COMPACT

 

This posting is a short follow up to the last posting, “Spending and Saving.”  In that prior posting, a simple economic factor was pointed out and related to what government’s role should be in the economy.  Here is not a restatement of that relationship, but a further analysis of a point that posting made.  That is, that the construct, parochial/traditional federalism, a dominant view that Americans shared in the years before World War II, was inadequate for the more modern times of American governance and politics.

          In this clarification, the term parochial is central.  To cite Wikipedia, one finds the following:

 

Parochialism is the state of mind whereby one focuses on small sections of an issue rather than considering its wider context. More generally, it consists of being narrow in scope. In that respect, it is a synonym of "provincialism". It may, particularly when used pejoratively, be contrasted to cosmopolitanism.[1] 

 

It is a term this blogger originally was introduced to in his growing up years within the Catholic tradition. 

He went to parochial schools for 13 years.  What little questioning he expressed at the time solicited a sense that parochialism referred to the local church and local concerns – much in line with what Wikipedia states.  What he was to learn and appreciate was how central this idea was to American culture until, as the last posting pointed out, the realities of a national and now global economy made this provincialism untenable.

          It particularly applies to views of governance and politics in the US, since for various reasons, localism was held to be central to the American experience.  The federalism that grew in the US was originally based on the local settlements that sprung up on the eastern seacoast of the North American landmass.  Each was the product of settlers joining together and formulating a polity based on what was considered a sacred agreement.  The word, compacts, applies to these agreements.

          More specifically, as Daniel Elazar explains, these agreements were a type of compact, that being covenants.[2]  In that they resembled Judeo tradition, covenants established a union in which whatever members did, they were part of that union.  The signees of the agreement called on God to witness the agreement which solemnized it. 

As the American people became a bit more secular – to a degree the product of the Enlightenment – this element was put aside, making the newer agreements straightforward compacts. A comparison that illustrates this turn is that the Declaration of Independence (1776) is a covenant, and the US Constitution (1787) is simply a compact.  In both cases, the purpose was to hold those agreements in solemnity.

The distinctions one can make between or among the founding documents (including, for example, state constitutions) and the terms one uses to classify them have consequences.  And to illustrate, a legal matter comes to mind.  To further distinguish what is being described in this posting, it introduces yet another term, that being contract.  Here, a historical turn – an unfortunate one – muddles the waters.  And sure enough, the French have a role.  No, French influence is not at odds with fortune, but in terms of constitutional principles, it does have another tradition.

The origins of this difference can be traced to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and how he envisioned the ways and reasons people organized to form polities.  In doing so, they give up some natural rights – the ability to behave as they wish – to practically allow them to live under a set of laws or restrictions.  This language casts a different sense from what the Judeo tradition called for.

With a social contract, one deals with a quid pro quo – something for something (personal rights for societal arrangement).  This stands in distinction to a more communal sense of the Judeo model.  But if applied to the Constitution, it casts that agreement with a more contractual sense and diminishes its compact-al or communal orientation.

On a practical level, for example, with a social contract – the more contractual approach – the courts, usually at the hands of conservative jurists, have elected to interpret the Constitution and laws in a literal fashion, like one interprets a contract.  This is called textualism.  It holds other ways to interpret – such as historically, traditionally, structurally, prudentially, morally or based on precedent – as being illegitimate to some degree. 

In this singular way, one can see how this other view – the natural rights view – has drained, from the American experience, the bonding force of a communal constitutional framework.  The consequences have been numerous and have most recently included the palpable sense of a politically polarized citizenry.  As the last posting concluded, a form of federalism – a compact approach – would benefit the American people by reintroducing a more communal sense – with hopefully less parochialism – to its constitutional view.

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[1] See “Parochialism,” Wikipedia (n.d.), accessed January 9, 2024, URL:  Parochialism - Wikipedia.

[2] This blog has repeatedly cited Elazar.  For a more recent citing, see “Compact Theory of the U.S. Constitution,” Center for the Study of Federalism (n.d.), accessed January 9, 2024, URL:  https://encyclopedia.federalism.org/index.php/Compact_Theory_of_the_U.S._Constitution.

SPENDING AND SAVING

 

In a perhaps tortured posting, “Is That a Bubbling Noise?,”[1] this blogger attempted to present an overall view of economic motivations as they relate to downward trends in a national economy.  Brave readers can look up that effort (use the URL in the citation) and work their way through that text.  This current posting will simplify things by making a related point.

          That earlier effort relied on the work of Richard Posner[2] as does this one.  Here, he, in turn, relies on John Maynard Keynes.  Citing that economist’s book, The General Theory, Posner points out that there are two economic options people have when they act economically.  They can consume or they can save.  For most such actions, that means people spend or save their money.

          Further, Keynes identifies motivations or concerns for each option.  In terms of consuming, a person might seek enjoyment, generosity, shortsightedness, ostentation, extravagance, and/or they might simply miscalculate.  As for saving, there is a desire or concern for precaution, calculation, independence, foresight, improvement, enterprise, independence, and/or pride or avarice.  Surely, readers have at one time, or another, felt each of these motivations or inclinations.  

They can reflect or recall how they behaved at such times.  If money was involved, did they consume or did they save?  Ideally, when should one consume (which this blogger will call spend or spending) and when should one save?  Perhaps if one generalizes and thinks aggregately, the question becomes:  when should people spend and when should they save?  Well, Posner states, for the good of the economy, they should save in times of prosperity – the good times – and spend during times of recession – the bad times. 

Spending during times of recession helps by increasing economic activity.  Saving during times of prosperity helps put at bay inflationary forces.  But that’s not how they behave.  By placing oneself in one or the other condition, minimal reflection tells one why counter behaviors prevail. 

During good times, people are apt to have secure employment, enjoy higher levels of confidence, and more apt to see little risk in indulging or satisfying material or experiential desires.  Of course, the opposite exists during the bad times when confidence is likely to be challenged and risks are augmented, at least psychologically if not in reality.

While the actual economics of these trends and their cyclical character can be quite complex for civics students in secondary schools, this broad explanation of spending and saving can be readily understood so that they can at least appreciate the counterintuitive nature of these factors. 

And included in those factors is that their individual behavior will not tip the national scale one way or another; they are just one among hundreds of millions of people.  This is important because students need to consider how people, not individuals, decide these questions and decide what their behaviors will be.

It also introduces the need for governmental interference with how the economy will behave.  How?  By governments providing counter incentives – e.g., by manipulating interest rates so that people spend less in inflationary times and spend more in recessionary times.  But in doing so, government policy defies pure laissez faire economics or small government politics.  Posner, who in the past was considered a conservative (small government advocate), questions maintaining limited government responses to economic challenges. 

He writes, for example, in response to such economic nightmares as the 2008 recession (which he calls a depression) the following:

 

And it was a failure of government and of the economics profession rather than of business, as business foresight is rationally truncated …

            In sum, rational maximization by businessmen and consumers, all pursuing their self-interest more or less intelligently within a framework of property and contract rights, can set the stage for an economic catastrophe.  There is no need to bring cognitive quirks, emotional forces, or character flaws into the causal analysis.  This is important both in simplifying analysis and in avoiding a search, likely to be futile, for means by which government can alter the mentality or character of businessmen and consumers.[3]

 

And these realities further spelled the doom of how Americans viewed governance and politics.  Up until the Great Depression of the 1930s, the parochial/traditional federalist view dominated in how Americans understood those concerns.  In the minds of most Americans, America was a rural, agricultural society.

Then, after the depression, came World War II with huge central government expenditures which brought an end to the depression and undermined how Americans had understood their government and the politics it practiced.   More specifically, that war brought to an end the unrealistic notion that America was a society of small, local communities. 

It became obvious that any such view was doomed.  Parochial/traditional construct over-relied on local governance to meet the governmental and the economic needs of the population and almost overnight it was considered old- fashioned and inadequate.  Its basic tenets were developed during the colonial period and held up relatively strongly regarding the nation’s economic realities until the Great Depression. 

Yes, that was true to lesser degrees as the years progressed, and the economy became more and more national and then global.  Surely, the events of the Great Depression and even of World War II made that obvious.  In its end, it became not only dysfunctional but dangerous vis-à-vis the nation’s ability to survive or maintain its health. 

Today, that view is totally inadequate and what took its place, the natural rights view, falls short as the Posner quote indicates.  The natural rights approach lends itself to laissez faire thinking, limiting the role of government to basically police powers.  Posner, by just looking at the basic behaviors of spending and saving, demonstrates how inadequate natural rights thinking is.  While that view has not prevented an active governmental role in the economy, it has undermined that role’s legitimacy.

So, that leaves the American people with a challenge.  How can they retain (in some cases reestablish) the cooperative, collaborative, and communal qualities of federalism, but adopt a view that realistically accommodates the economic world that exists today?  This blog’s proposal is for the nation to adopt what it calls liberated federalism.  The blog’s purpose has, to date, been to offer an overall rationale that supports that construct.  And that will continue to be its aim.

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[1] Robert Gutierrez, “Is that a Bubbling Noise?,” a posting, Gravitas:  A Voice for Civics, a blog, September 24, 2019, accessed January 6, 2024, URL: https://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/2019_09_22_archive.html.

[2] Richard A. Posner, A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2009).

[3] Ibid., 111-112.

LIBERALISM’S LACK OF EXPLICITEDNESS?

 

Adam Gopnik offers an insightful description and explanation of the origins of liberalism – tracing that origin to the 1860s and the contributions of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor[1] (see previous posting, “Romantic Liberalism” [2]).  Through his review, Gopnik establishes that essential to liberal thought and speech (their critical words), they go beyond “liberty” and “democracy” and include “humanity,” “reform,” “self-realization,” “pluralism,” and “autonomy.” 

These terms reflect the establishment or the strengthening of a self-selected community with its governance – the creation of which is not accidental but due to reflected action.  That describes a federated arrangement in which a people come together and establish, by common consent, the polity that will govern them. 

And in addition, that polity will govern with a sense of shared purpose, that being “eliminating cruelty and sadism and needless suffering from the world.”[3]  But how specific are these ideas that one associates with liberalism or how well are they combined to show one the way to a better society? 

Here, Gopnik takes a bit of a turn in his explanation and feels it necessary to describe the role that town centers played through the centuries in how liberalized life became possible.  More than merely being symbols for this view or belief of common folk having a say in governance, town centers or the Italian piazza played a central role through the centuries.  It is not by accident that these centers became targets of such authoritarian powers all the way back to the times of the ancient Persians and Spartans. 

These centers often served as markets as they provided the practical reason for townspeople to gather, but they functioned beyond providing provisions.  They became centers for sharing concerns and voicing demands and wishes.  They also provided face-to-face contacts among the townspeople where empathy could develop and strengthen.  In terms of Western democratic tradition, the Greek agora played that important role.

More currently, a good deal of liberalism, as a thought-out construct, can be traced to the Enlightenment of the seventeenth century, but its definitive character, according to Gopnik, seems to have been established in the 1859-1872 period and he gives a good deal of credit to Mill’s contribution, On Liberty (along with Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species).  Historically, along with these written sources, there were also the historical events of the American Civil War and the establishment in France of the Third Republic.

Gopnik explains:  “Darwin’s was a new articulation of the history of life and humanity’s place within it, implicit but obvious, and Mill’s was the articulation of a new understanding about the nature of authority and the individual’s claims against it.”[4]  And given the events of the mid to late 1800s, people were more apt to reconsider the culturally determined place that average people should take in the political landscape. 

The North winning the American Civil War with its emancipation of slaves prodded democratization beyond American borders.  It encouraged it in Britain, for example.  It reenergized democratic forces in France.  And it threatened authoritarian voices in Germany under the leadership of Otto Von Bismarck while enhancing the socialist message of Karl Marx.

This indicates a bit of diversion and, as such, reveals a lack of a pointed message.  That would be a message with a definite plan for a perceived future that would put into effect the favored democratic governance.  Instead, what emerged was an idealistic vision based on broad democratic principles.  In turn, this allowed these varied reactions just mentioned and reflected its lack of rulemaking or definitive direction. 

Gopnik writes:  “It tends to hold implicit and explicit ideas about community, reform, violence, sexual roles, and more.  Liberalism … is an attempt to realize liberty, not merely to invoke it or make it the subject of an incantation.”[5]  In the opinion of this blogger, this reflects a looseness in definition or theoretical rigor.  And this lack of definitiveness plagues liberal advocates to this day. 

It allows for such offshoots as those mentioned above or for the natural rights view that disdains any social or legal restraints on human behavior on just about any level of social concern – from laws to norms to habits.  As this blog has repeatedly claimed, this last view took dominance in the US in the years following World War II and has grown in its influence ever since.

With that transition, the general sense of duty and obligation of citizenship – which was described in the last posting and is part and parcel of Mill and Taylor’s promotion of liberalism – has eroded.  In its stead, a contractual – quid pro quo – view has taken hold and dismissed a compact-al – partnership – view that had been dominant in the US from America’s colonial period to the mid-twentieth century.

And this blogger believes that that transition has been highly instrumental in generating the increasingly polarized politics that the nation is currently experiencing.  Surely the argument of this posting could be more solid in its reasoning, but it is offered as an interpretation.  That is, liberalism as experienced today has become radicalized.

Whether liberalism, in its essence, has gone through various forms from its inception, readers have a good dose of latitude to judge.  As for this blogger, he would like to see a re-establishment of Mill and Taylor’s apparent bias toward federated ideals and away from radical liberalism.

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[1] Adam Gopnik, A Thousand Small Sanities:  The Moral Adventures of Liberalism (New York, NY:  Basic, 2019).  The factual claims of this posting are based on the information this source provides.

[2] Robert Gutierrez, “Romantic Liberalism,” a posting, Gravitas:  A Voice for Civics, a blog, accessed January 3, 2024, URL:  https://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/2023_01_24_archive.html.

[3] Gopnik, A Thousand Small Sanities, 14.

[4] Ibid., 14.

[5] Ibid., 17.  Emphasis added.

ROMANTIC LIBERALISM

 

This blog introduced to its readers the work of Adam Gopnik back in January 2020.[1]  His book, A Thousand Small Sanities,[2] gives, early in its text, a history lesson of how “liberalism,” as a political form of thinking, got started.  He traces the roles that John Stuart Mill and his intimate partner, Harriet Taylor, played.  Skipping their adulterous relationship, their interchange in terms of basic political discourse led to a more formal construct about what political speech and behavior should be and became known as liberalism.

          More specifically, along with a strong stand against slavery back in the 1860s, they also advanced ideals such as claiming the equality between the sexes, i.e., that women were entitled to equal standing in society – including the right to vote.  While racial emancipation was a more accepted ideal at that time, this couple were among the initial advocates for women’s rights and for extending to them the franchise.  And before one ascribes to them the title of extremists or radicals of their time or of some ideology, Gopnik claims they were centrists.

          Gopnik shares the following:

 

What they were was realists – radicals of the real, determined to live in the world even as they altered it.  Not reluctant realists, but romantic realists.  They were shocked and delighted at how quickly women and men began to meet and organize on the theme of women’s emancipation, but they accepted that progress would be slow and uncertain and sometimes backward facing.  They did more than accept this necessity.  They rejoiced in it because they understood that without a process of public argument and debate, of social action moved from below, the ground of women’s emancipation would never be fully owned by women nor accepted, even grudgingly, by men.[3]

 

And how does this concern relate to federation theory, the topic of this blog?  It helps explain how the national – in this case, the British – partnership truly expanded as this newer stream of argument, liberalism, took hold among change agents of those years.

            Perhaps, as Gopnik suggests, their personal romance played a functional role in their thinking over the issue of emancipation and extending the franchise.  They introduced, on a more conscious level, the romantic element of how fellow citizens should, according to their view, engender a more useful mode of thinking and feeling. 

And what one might at first blush consider contradictory, if one’s views of others is based on some level of love, how one views them “jives” with liberty.  That is, it simultaneously beckons people to be themselves but also to be concerned with and to take care of how one is seen by others.  Moreover, this leads to a very essential dispositive stance in a federated arrangement of a partnership; that is, to be disposed to compromise. 

“Compromise is not a sign of the collapse of one’s moral conscience.  It is a sign of its strength, for there is nothing more necessary to a moral conscience than a recognition that other people have one, too.”[4]  It’s a sense which ties legitimate disagreements beyond the competing interests under debate.  And in that, one can envision a sense of liberty removed from the natural rights – “I can do what I want as long as I don’t deprive others of the same right” – view. 

For as with this more federated view, one is removed from this unattached individualism that the natural rights view promotes.  How?  It is tied to a view of liberty that acknowledges the obligations and duties true love demands.  Yes, this sense of limitation is not mandated by law, but by emotional ties, that loving relationships entail.

Gopnik leaves his readers with an analogy that this blogger wants to share, for it is a bit unexpected.  That is:

 

Most political visions are unicorns, perfect imaginary creatures we chase and will never find.  Liberalism is a rhinoceros.  It’s hard to love.  It’s funny to look at.  It isn’t pretty but it’s a completely successful animal.  A rhino can overturn an SUV and – go to YouTube – run it right over, horn out.[5]

 

And with that comparison, this posting sets up the next one; it will look at some of the implications from Mill and Taylor’s thoughts.

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[1] Robert Gutierrez, “Turn Left,” a posting, Gravitas:  A Voice for Civics, a blog, accessed December 30, 2023, URL:  https://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/2020_01_19_archive.html.

[2] Adam Gopnik, A Thousand Small Sanities:  The Moral Adventures of Liberalism (New York, NY:  Basic, 2019).

[3] Ibid., 11.

[4] Ibid., 12.

[5] Ibid., 13.