Author: Andrew Sullivan

Spurred by voters in Portland, Oregon who defeated a bill that would have provided for the fluoridation of their drinking water, Mark Oppenheimer decries the trend of “left-wing Puritanism”. He relays this telling anecdote:

Last month, at a birthday party for a three-year-old, I was hit with the realization that most of the parents around me were in the grip of moral panic, the kind of fear of contamination dramatized so well in The Crucible. One mother was trying to keep her daughter from eating a cupcake, because of all the sugar in cupcakes. Another was trying to limit her son to one juice box, because of all the sugar in juice. A father was panicking because there was no place, in this outdoor barn-like space at some nature center or farm or wildlife preserve, where his daughter could wash her hands before eating. And while I did not hear any parent fretting about the organic status of the veggie dip, I became certain there were such whispers all around me.

His broader argument about the meaning of liberalism:

I am only suggesting that we resist thinking of Puritanism as the only, or optimal, parenting style for liberals, for two reasons.

First, thinking that Puritanism—whether a preference for organic foods or natural fibers or home-birthing—is somehow constitutive of a liberal politics is rather insulting to liberalism. Most of the middle-class “liberal” parents I know have allowed lifestyle decisions about what they wear, eat, and drive to entirely replace a more ambitious program for bettering society; they have no particular beliefs about how to end poverty or strengthen the labor movement, and they don’t understand Obamacare, or really want to. It’s enough that they make their midwife-birthed children substitute guava nectar for sugar.

But more important, realizing that Puritanism does not equal liberalism liberates us to think of another way to be liberal: by rejecting the kind of stress that comes from Puritanism. They say hygienic reform; I say the 30-hour work week and not stressing if my children eat Kix. Liberalism, as the political philosopher Corey Robin has recently argued, should be above all about freedom. The best reasons to want a labor union, or universal health care, or Social Security are to be free of worry, want, and privation, and to be out from under the hand of the boss. It makes no sense to re-enslave ourselves with fear, worry, and stress. That is not liberal but reactionary.

Arit John adds a point of contrast:

[C]onservative parents have generally become relatively more open-minded. Lenore Skenazy was famously called the worst mom in America after admitting that she let her 9-year-old ride New York’s subway home alone. But really, she’s just instilling her kids with self reliance and pull-yourself-up- by-your-bootstraps-grit. Skenazy’s Free Range Kids movement supports events like “Take Our Children to the Park and Leave Them There Day,” which is both self-explanatory and (potentially) horrifying. And yet none of her children has gone missing or been taken away by the authorities.

All those liberal worries about about obesity, high blood pressure, germs, autism and industrial chemicals, is leading to a lot of stress, which may in the end be more harmful than anything. Your bickering about the virtues of antibacterial hand lotion might give your kid a complex.

Reviewing historian Richard Gamble’s In Search of the City on a Hill, Ben Wetzel traces the history of the now-famous phrase:

[Gamble] argues that the phrase “city on a hill” (found in Matthew 5:14) originally described the mission of the church, but that over time the secular state has come to exert a near monopoly over the image.

Gamble begins the book with surprising observations about [Puritan leader John] Winthrop’s famous discourse, A Modell of Christian Charity.  Much is unknown about the circumstances surrounding the sermon’s composition.  Indeed, since no one onboard the Arbella (the ship that transported the Puritans from England to Massachusetts) ever left any record of the message, and since Winthrop himself never mentioned giving the speech in his journal, Gamble concludes that it is possible that the governor never delivered the discourse at all.  In any case, Gamble points out, Winthrop could hardly have been envisioning the United States, whose tenets of toleration, individualism, and democracy the governor would have found appalling.

Proceeding in time, Gamble traces the fate of the “city on a hill” throughout American history.  Jonathan Edwards, for example, used the image in the 1730s to describe his Northampton congregation, but did so usually to chastise his church for failing to uphold true godliness.  When Edwards used the image, however, he was not alluding to Winthrop’s vision, because A Modell of Christian Charity was not published until 1838.  Few observers in the 1830s noted its appearing, and none thought they saw the origins of the American mission in its contents.  Indeed, over the next century, writers who quoted from the document almost never drew attention to the “city on a hill” passage at all.

That changed dramatically by the late 20th century:

[I]t was not an academic but a politician who first used the phrase in a more public setting.  And his name was not Ronald Reagan.  Instead, John F. Kennedy (reading a speech prepared by his aide Ted Sorenson) declared to the Massachusetts state legislature in 1961 that he “had been guided by the standard John Winthrop set before his shipmates on the flagship Arbella three hundred and thirty-one years ago, as they, too, faced the task of building a new government on a perilous frontier.”  And then: “‘We must always consider’ [Winthrop] said, ‘that we shall be as a city upon a hill–the eyes of all people are upon us.'”  Clearly, as Gamble points out, the Irish-Catholic Kennedy’s conception of the “city on a hill” was a far cry from what Winthrop would have envisioned in the seventeenth century, let alone what Jesus was describing in the gospel of Matthew.

It is unclear if Reagan learned of the phrase directly from Kennedy or picked it up elsewhere, but in any case the Great Communicator made the image his own in the last third of the twentieth century.  As with Kennedy, Reagan’s use of the “city on a hill” was largely devoid of any specifically Christian content.  Instead, as the high priest of America’s civil religion, Reagan deployed the image as a stand-in for a vague Americanism.  Although some critics of the president, such as New York governor Mario Cuomo, argued that there was a good bit wrong with the “shining city,” for the most part the phrase had been adopted by both parties and emptied of any prophetic content by the end of the twentieth century.

Reviewing the latest installment of the political theorist Isaiah Berlin’s letters, John Gray discovers a man cramped by the university life:

For some readers the most surprising revelation to emerge from these absorbing letters may be that Berlin was in no sense a natural academic. He loved Oxford and relished college life. At the same time he loathed the routine responsibilities that go with being a university teacher. Partly this was a matter of temperament. Celebrated as a lecturer, he hated public speaking. He writes of the ‘fearful time-eating occupations’ of the average university day as ‘devouring one’s substance’. (How he would react to the unending bureaucratic chores of the current academic regime can be left to the imagination.)

Berlin’s revulsion from academic life had another source, which was biographical rather than temperamental.

When he returned to Oxford after having worked as a British official in Washington, operating at the epicentre of global events, he found the academy a dispiritingly small world – so much so that for a time, when unsettling self-doubt made him almost a ghost in Oxford, he could hardly imagine how he would make the remainder of his life there. Yet he turned down other careers, opting instead to change his intellectual self-description from philosopher – ‘I couldn’t be another ordinary Oxford philosopher,’ he used to say – to historian of ideas.

He did not actually give up philosophy, but used intellectual history as a vehicle for a philosophy of his own – a liberalism that refused to sacrifice individuals for the sake of grand visions of human progress, whose roots were not in the English life he knew and loved, but sprang, as Berlin wrote to Nicholas Nabokov in June 1970, ‘from the heart of the Russian intelligentsia, like everything else that I believe’. As much as anything else, it was this distinctively Russian liberalism that led him to take up arms in the intellectual battlefield of the Cold War.

John Crace, meanwhile, finds the correspondence evidence of the social climbing that Berlin’s detractors have long noted, writing a mocking imitation of the letters:

Dear Important Person,

Thank you for your illuminating monograph on Tolstoy which perfectly reflects my own anti-existentialist interpretation of his character; one that I iterated some years ago, I recall. I wish I could say more, but I have a busy few decades of intense social-climbing ahead, starting with an irksome but necessary trip to America to have dinner with the new president. It will mean I have to miss Joan Sutherland‘s magnificent Lucia at Covent Garden, but I will be back for Callas.

You ask me for my thoughts on the Cuban question. I regret they are at present unformed as I have spent the past month wrestling with the seating plan for the All Souls Dinner. Freddie will not be happy unless he is at high table. I know I ought to be able to find a way of making this happen, but sometimes the Kantian “ought implies can” is fallible. I have also not had time to commit my apercus on the construction of the Berlin Wall to print; it is, of course, a great honour to have such a landmark named in recognition of one’s achievements, but I am not sure I have done quite enough yet to be worthy of such a legacy…

Devotees can watch a long interview of Berlin by Michael Ignatieff here. Recent Dish coverage of Berlin here and here.

In a long, moving essay on race in America, in which he details his own fraught encounters with the police and prejudice, the black poet Ross Gay reflects on the cumulative force of suspicion and fear in the lives of black Americans:

Isn’t it, for them, for us, a gargantuan task not to imagine that everyone is imagining us as criminal? A nearly impossible task? What a waste, a corruption, of the imagination. Time and again we think the worst of anyone perceiving us: walking through the antique shop; standing in front of the lecture hall; entering the bank; considering whether or not to go camping someplace or another; driving to the hardware store; being pulled over by the police. Or, for the black and brown kids in New York City, simply walking down the street every day of their lives. The imagination, rather than being cultivated for connection or friendship or love, is employed simply for some crude version of survival. This corruption of the imagination afflicts all of us: we’re all violated by it. I certainly know white people who worry, Does he think I think what he thinks I think? And in this way, moments of potential connection are fraught with suspicion and all that comes with it: fear, anger, paralysis, disappointment, despair. We all think the worst of each other and ourselves, and become our worst selves.

He ultimately appeals to mercy and forgiveness as the only way forward:

It seems to me that part of my reason for writing this — for revealing my own fear and sorrow, my own paranoia and self-incrimination and shame — is to say, Look how I’ve been made by this. To have, perhaps, mercy on myself. When we have mercy, deep and abiding change might happen. The corrupt imagination might become visible. Inequalities might become visible. Violence might become visible. Terror might become visible. And the things we’ve been doing to each other, despite the fact that we don’t want to do such things to each other, might become visible.

If we don’t, we will all remain phantoms — and, as it turns out, it’s hard for phantoms to care for one another, let alone love one another. And it’s easy for phantoms to hurt one another. So when the cop and I met that night, how could he possibly have seen the real me for all the stories and fantasies that have been heaped on my body, and the bodies of those like me, for centuries? And how could I see him?