Progressivism’s False Friend: A Selection from Adam Gopnik’s A Thousand Small Sanities (2019)
“In the past, it was typical of totalitarian movements, and particularly extreme reactionary right-wing ones, to insist that we can only evaluate a claim if we first know who is making it and where it comes from. This has produced such notions as the Nazi concept of Jewish physics. Einstein, being a Jew, couldn’t be right about the universe; the theory of relativity could be condemned in advance by knowing the essential racial nature of its maker. Those who attacked Frederick Douglass in the pre–Civil War period all insisted that he must be lying about his history as a slave because he was black. Modern art is bad because it is the expression of Jews; jazz is bad because it is the music of ‘Negroes.’ . . .
The new radical critiques all depend on forms of determinism and essentialism that have in the past always rightly been seen as reactionary and will still prove false friends to progressive causes. . . .
Essentialism tells us always to ask for the authority behind an idea or to demand the true origin of a person. What is she really? it makes us ask. Who said it? Where does it (or her) come from? When the questions we should be asking are: What relation does what’s being said have to what actually happens? Or, more simply: Is that true? . . .
Antiessentialism is exactly the place where the scientific turn of mind and the liberal turn of mind really do meet in a common antiauthoritarianism. All that the empirical sciences have given us rests on the radically new belief that an idea is best evaluated by never asking who thought it up and what authority they had to think it but by asking what facts support it and what facts might prove it false. . . .
Insisting on the origins of an idea as the test of an idea’s value is a quintessentially reactionary notion—in many ways, it is the quintessential reactionary notion. . . .
A fair criticism of the contemporary left is that it is as essentialist as it needs to be at some moments—and then as wildly antiessentialist as possible at immediately adjacent ones. Studying the left-wing attack on liberalism, we find a map of what might be called opportunistic essentialism. Kids are taught in progressive schools that all gender is fluid and constructed—except for that of transgender kids, which is an absolute and essential feature, locked in early, never to be questioned. All racial groups are constructions, too—except for that of whiteness, which can be rightly treated as an undifferentiated actual thing, an essence shared by its holders that warps their views and disables their thinking.”—Adam Gopnik, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism (2019)
