The Pity Party (6 page)

Liberals remain, however, unreconciled to the moral universe of capitalism, defined by Adam Smith's famous observation, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”
¹⁹
Liberals doubt the reliability and decency of the market's purported capacity to alchemize private vices into public virtues. “Selfishness is without doubt the greatest danger that confronts our beloved country today,” FDR declared in 1937.
²⁰
That liberal judgment may be safely regarded as perennial rather than situational, however. Half a century later, journalist Pete Hamill repudiated the Reagan era's “currently fashionable ideologies of greed and selfishness,” which accept and even celebrate self-interest.
²¹
Liberals insist that such acceptance and celebration is completely irreconcilable with an otherwise attainable social unity.

The renunciation of selfishness is, of course, neither an original nor a distinctively liberal notion. “For what is a man profited,” asks the New Testament, “if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” Liberalism's brief against selfishness
is
set apart because the caring virtues are preached by and to modernity's constituents, who doubt that the idea of losing one's soul means anything in particular, or even anything at all, but are convinced it must not mean anything politically.

Liberalism is equally opposed to the psychological dividedness wrought by the theory and practice of capitalism. According to Smith, knowing that our dinner is provided us by self-interested men, “We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.” We never, that is, acknowledge the self-concern that animates all our marketplace activities. We constantly address the welfare of the guy or woman next to us, but always under the pretense that we really care about them rather than about feathering our own nests. Liberals find the pervasive falsity of this nation of Eddie Haskells intolerable. They aspire to a society where we can appeal sincerely from our own humanity and to others' because of our natural empathy, which leads to the mutual recognition that, in Paul Waldman's words, we're all in this together, and that none of us is on our own or out for ourselves.

The belief that harmony among humans might be attained more easily and simply than has long been supposed also makes compassionate liberals moderns, in that they reject the need for a moral and teleological unity in favor of an agreement to disagree. On this basis liberals reject, and equate, all premodern and totalitarian conceptions of moral and teleological unity. Many liberals, including the two most recent Democratic presidents, are fond of Judge Learned Hand's celebrated maxim from a 1944 speech: “The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right. . . .” Thus chastened, that spirit strives to understand the minds of others and weigh their interests alongside one's own without bias.
²²

More recently, the
New York Times
interviewed its columnist Anthony Lewis, when he retired in 2001 after a fifty-year career that saw him become, in the newspaper's words, its “most consistently liberal voice.” Asked about any “big conclusion” he drew from what he had seen and written over those years, Lewis offered that “certainty is the enemy of decency and humanity in people who are sure they are right.”
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This formulation reinforces the idea that liberals stand on moral bedrock. Lewis is like the woman who insisted that modern astronomy had it all wrong: the world, in fact, was a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise. Challenged as to what the tortoise stood on, the woman said, “You're very clever, young man, but it's turtles all the way down.” Liberals believe it's decency and humanity all the way down: these fundamental moral imperatives rest on nothing even more fundamental.

Though “altruism” is often used as a synonym for “compassion,” it's important to note that the posited natural affinity among men is not exactly altruistic, a word derived from the Latin for “other.” We're naturally compassionate, both in the sense of how we feel and how we respond to those feelings, for
our
sake rather than for the sufferer's. Even the Golden Rule, Rousseau argued, “has no true foundation other than conscience and sentiment.”

[W]hen the strength of an expansive soul makes me identify myself with my fellow, and I feel that I am, so to speak, in him, it is in order not to suffer that I do not want him to suffer. I am interested in him for love of myself, and the reason for the precept is in nature itself, which inspires in me the desire of my well-being in whatever place I feel my existence. From this I conclude that it is not true that the precepts of natural law are founded on reason alone. They have a base more solid and sure. Love of men derived from love of self is the principle of human justice.
²⁴

Rousseau's contemporary, Immanuel Kant, mapped a different path to the same destination. In
Critique of Practical Reason
he argued that morality was concerned with being worthy of happiness, as distinguished from being happy. We could be worthy of happiness, have justified self-regard, only by living in ways we would like to see made general, which requires understanding as penetratingly as we can how it would feel to be on the receiving end of our actions. This is the logic of Rawls's argument for organizing an economy as we would if we expected to be among its poorest members. This perspective is reflected, as well, in an argument Barack Obama made in
The Audacity of Hope
:

I believe a stronger sense of empathy would tilt the balance of our current politics in favor of those people who are struggling in this society. After all, if they are like us, then their struggles are our own. If we fail to help, we diminish ourselves.
²⁵

It follows that if we succeed in helping, we augment ourselves.

For Rousseau, then, the inducement to respond, in feelings and acts, to the suffering of others is the direct, compassionate response hardwired in humans and other creatures. We care and share because it makes us feel better, there on the spot. For Kant, the crux of the matter is self-regard, which is a little trickier: if you empathize
in order
to have a good opinion of yourself then it's hard to be completely candid and still
have
that good opinion. You've done a worthy thing, but for a less than worthy reason.

Few of us, however, are likely to be that unsparing in the secular quest to find ourselves by losing ourselves in the service of others. This is so, particularly, since acting in admirable ways reinforces the emotional gratification of compassion. It feels good to alleviate the distress I feel when confronted with your suffering, and doubly good to respond to it in a way that leaves me with a higher opinion of myself, no matter how earnestly I might try to push that consideration to the edge of my field of vision. In the David Mamet movie
House of Games
, Mike, a con man, offers his philosophy of life—“Everybody gets something out of every transaction”—to a psychiatrist who's trying to understand how and why swindlers ply their trade. But what does the mark get, the psychiatrist asks, the one who had insisted on giving money to Mike after he contrived, shrewdly but blatantly, a suffering situation? “What he gets is he feels like he's a good man.”

Taken on its own account, the only reason liberal compassion hasn't solved modernity's, or even humanity's, deepest problems is that our natural sentiments, humane and decent, have been thwarted rather than liberated. There are, however, four reasons to doubt that the necessary and sufficient cure for the problems of compassion is more compassion.

First, if the natural sociability of man, attainable simply by letting compassion express itself, is true and beyond question, then it constitutes
the
solution to the political problem, successfully reconciling what we want to do for ourselves with what we need to do to get along with others. But perhaps it's not true or beyond question. Liberals, otherwise adamant about the importance of open-mindedness, do not on this point (and the many others that derive from it) suffer skeptics gladly. “Though liberals do a great deal of talking about hearing other points of view,” William Buckley complained, “it sometimes shocks them to learn that there
are
other points of view.”
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Thus, formulations like those put forward by Anthony Lewis and Learned Hand make sense only if understood to be truths existing beyond politics, as opposed to propositions that can be contested within it. To argue, as did Lewis, that certainty must be rejected because it abets indecency and inhumanity is to contend that decency and humanity alone can justify a high degree of certainty. The only logical alternative, encouraging skeptical challenges to the idea that being the enemy of decency and humanity is indeed deplorable, would defeat Lewis's purpose. It follows that while people must not be sure they're right about anything else, it's wicked or stupid to be unsure whether to favor decency over indecency, and humanity over inhumanity. It is this stance that, as Buckley suggested, leaves so many conservatives with the sense that arguing about liberalism with liberals is as futile as presenting a devout worshipper with syllogisms constructed to refute his faith's central revealed truth.

Similarly, if the spirit of liberty is not too sure that it's right, then one of the things it can't be too sure about is . . . the axiomatic rejection of being too sure one is right. Though the sincerity and humility Hand expressed are undeniably attractive, his diffidence takes a hatchet to the tree branch it sits on. Skepticism that encompasses skepticism
about
skepticism, in other words, leaves open rather than rules out the possibility that doubt and deference may sometimes be the wrong course and dogmatism the right one. If, on the other hand, the spirit of liberty is absolutely sure that it's right not to be too sure
any other
contention is right, it opens a different door to the same room: the existence of one undeniable postulate means there might be others.

This hall-of-mirrors theoretical problem becomes a practical one when liberals apply the imperative to be tolerant and nonjudgmental to concrete situations. The outcomes of those exercises in applied ethics adhere to no intelligible standard, yet somehow are always congruent with the political imperative to promote cohesion within the liberal coalition while anathematizing its adversaries. The expansive souls that make us identify with others often appear to wander in response to a political orientation instead of randomly, which leads them to feel their existence in some sufferers but not others. In the liberal melodrama of clearly designated victims and oppressors, “delinquency, or even the downright nastiness, of victims is an index of the extent of their suffering,” according to Minogue, while those “who fit into the stereotype as oppressors . . . are not seen as the products of their environment, for that would incapacitate the indignation which partly fuels the impulse of reform.”
²⁷

No one, that is, finds it necessary to inquire about the effects of childhood deprivations and historical grievances when passing judgment on Wall Street carnivores or white supremacists. This command leaves liberals, sure they must not be too sure they're right, conflicted when figuring out how to be tolerant of the intolerant, as when non-Western cultures oppress women and ethnic or religious minorities. It also means practitioners of the politics of kindness lose little sleep over those whose suffering is the collateral damage of liberal policies, such as whites denied educational or career opportunities because of affirmative action programs.

Second, liberals want to have it both ways in another, related sense: they want the modern bargain of agreeing to disagree, but also keep trying to graft a moral and teleological unity onto it. Since modernity precludes one based in religion, and the experience of totalitarianism rules out trying anything like it again, the efforts to come up with something else are unfailingly vapid.

In 1949, for example, Arthur Schlesinger's
The Vital Center
called for liberals to make their cause “a fighting faith.” Freedom will survive, he wrote, “only if enough people believe in it deeply enough to die for it.” Schlesinger was much better, however, at conveying the urgent need for a compelling faith than he was at describing its tenets. The “savage wounds” inflicted by modern life on the human sensibility can be healed “only by a conviction of trust and solidarity with other human beings.” When trying to describe the basis of that trust and solidarity, Schlesinger does no more than implore us to accept a “new radicalism” that seeks to “reunite individual and community in fruitful union.”
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President Jimmy Carter tried, and failed, to improve upon this fighting faith in the worst address of his life, 1979's “Malaise Speech.” It warned that America faced “a crisis of confidence” reflected in “the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.” Because we've discovered that “owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning,” we realize that national salvation requires taking “the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values.” Carter's entire account of that path was a six-point program to reduce our dependence on imported oil.
²⁹

Then–first lady Hillary Clinton tried, and failed, to do better than Carter in the worst address of
her
life, 1993's speech on the politics of meaning. It asserted that “we realize that somehow economic growth and prosperity, political democracy and freedom are not enough—that we lack meaning in our individual lives and meaning collectively, we lack a sense that our lives are part of some greater effort, that we are connected to one another.” The solution?