Adrián Astur Álvarez reviewed A Thousand Small Sanities by Adam Gopnik
Review of 'A Thousand Small Sanities' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
I had to sit with this one for a few days. Adam Gopnik is my favorite writer from the New Yorker roster, his collection of essays, Paris to the Moon, has been so inspirational to me personally, that it has influenced my life choices (more on that in another review), but I found this book so soooo annoying. Why is that? All he does is carve out an articulate vision of liberalism and frame our contemporary moment in a way to temper the tug of war extremism he senses in the air. All he does is lay out the usefulness and longstanding practicality of incremental reform in the history of government. And yet... I got so annoyed!
Maybe this is me coming to terms with the fact that I am not liberal, but a far more radical political animal (probably shouldn't be a surprise). Maybe it is the tone of …
I had to sit with this one for a few days. Adam Gopnik is my favorite writer from the New Yorker roster, his collection of essays, Paris to the Moon, has been so inspirational to me personally, that it has influenced my life choices (more on that in another review), but I found this book so soooo annoying. Why is that? All he does is carve out an articulate vision of liberalism and frame our contemporary moment in a way to temper the tug of war extremism he senses in the air. All he does is lay out the usefulness and longstanding practicality of incremental reform in the history of government. And yet... I got so annoyed!
Maybe this is me coming to terms with the fact that I am not liberal, but a far more radical political animal (probably shouldn't be a surprise). Maybe it is the tone of dismissiveness I got from Gopnik's description of liberalism. Maybe it is simply my own discomfort at letting go of my own political narratives around the bigoted right in American politics and the ineffectual liberalism standing off against the barrage of threats to our democratic institutions.
It's just... even though Gopnik makes a very reasonable argument, I sense we are not in a time of reason but a time of passion and our institutions of liberalism are in no way fated to prevail. The world is faster, slow and steady gets left in the dust, while decades (or more) of authoritarianism has the potential to take the lead. The era of small reform may (hopefully) return but these new drafts require systemic shifts that micro-adjustments are ill-equipped to handle. The changes we need feel more severe and more immediate than Gopnik seems to want to admit to.
So is this book valuable? Absolutely. It is a higher order of discussion about current American politics than you get from most places. Is it a great start for a conversation? Yes. Is it convincing? No it is not. Unless our polite dinner table conversation is happening over a bottle of fine Chateauneuf-du-Pape and a serving of roasted 1 percenters (save me a leg), I'll hold off on conversations about incremental reform.
