The Limits of Liberalism

Books teach us that culture matters. This truth, as the late Democratic New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan observed, is fundamentally conservative. But liberals would also do well to take account of it. Any attempt to improve society through political means must recognize the limits and restraints cultural traditions and mores place on change. Writers have been exploring the relationship between individual and collective claims of right and cultural mores since Homer. Nowhere is the tension more directly confronted, however, than in “The Misanthrope” by French playwright Moliere. In this influential seventeenth century play, the main character, Alceste, seeks to do away with the ridiculous social customs which defined French upper-class society. Alceste refuses to play the traditional social games in his attempts to woo the woman he desires. He gives none of the requisite superficial compliments that would ensure his love’s requital because he views them as stupid and insincere. His holier-than-thou attitude earns him no friends.

Yet what frustrates the audience of “The Misanthrope” so much is that Alceste is perceptive. The moneyed classes of Renaissance France had absolutely ridiculous customs. Alceste anticipates the erosion of French high society that would come in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. That it would take another 250 years for the culture to change is instructive, however, because what Alceste fails to recognize is that for all his awareness of the superficiality of courtship, he is as much subject to the same social conventions as everyone else. Everyone else in the play is, as Alceste comments, ignorant of the pettiness of the society they perpetuate. In Alceste’s view, nothing they say is true or real. But the only person foolish enough to attempt to bypass society is Alceste. By the end of the play, Alceste has completely alienated himself from his society and has lost his lover to a less self-righteous man. Alceste thus ends up being more unaware of the demands and structure of culture than anyone else.

One can find a similar exploration of the individual’s relation to society in Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina.” In that novel, the heroine seeks to overcome the social constraints which bind her to a man she does not love and to a life she does not wish to lead. Although she views herself less as a crusader for truth than Alceste does, Anna has a desire to escape or, indeed, overcome society. Her desire to change her circumstances pits her individual happiness and condition against the oppressive and tumultuous nineteenth-century Russian culture. As with Alceste, we sympathize with Anna. Unlike Alceste — and this is a tribute to Tolstoy’s genius as a writer more than to anything else — we do so until the end. We fall in love with Anna and take her struggles on as our own. Her feminism becomes ours and her unhappiness makes our faces red. We are as conflicted about her lover, Vronsky, as she is. Yet, we also see the futility of her attempts. The recklessness of her decisions is laid bare for us. We know that she cannot live the life she desires, in part because she does not always know what she desires. As with Alceste, Anna seems driven by a dissatisfaction that is always shifting, never clearly defined.

It is in the complexity of Anna’s and Alceste’s situations and tragedies that we can learn something of our own predicaments. Moliere and Tolstoy give accounts that call into question the possibility and reality of progress. They challenge the ways we seek to change the world. But they also tell compelling stories about people who seek to make society better. Anna and Alceste are constrained by their cultures. Always seeking to escape or improve society, they fail to recognize the inevitability of their complicity in its foibles. In Alceste and Anna, we see the feminist who seeks to end the objectification of her friends and the environmentalist who asks us to stop driving so much. Books warn us not to be too arrogant or ignorant in our progressive campaigns. But they also affirm the enduring appeal of such campaigns.

Contrary to what many ideologically-driven readers assert, the political lessons found in literature cannot be easily categorized. Moliere neither supports Obamacare nor condemns it. What reading Tolstoy and Moliere does is reveal the limits of our liberalism and pave the way for it to become smarter. Reading does this because, in the words of literary critic Lionel Trilling, “Literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.”

We should read books not because they will tell us how to draft immigration legislation but because our political sensibilities could use an infusion of the qualities Trilling identifies. We should read books because they force us to consider the limits and abilities of human efforts to change the world.