Author: Paul Axton

My daughters often buy me books for Christmas and usually are quite successful in their selection, but this year I received a book by Adam Gopnik which, while written with the panache of a New Yorker staff writer, continually reaches points of incredible banality. Typical is the stirring conclusion: “The most you can say is that experience suggests that treating both the proposition that love is good and the proposition that the facts can be found as true tends to make more people happy.”[1] Or there is this riveting inanity defining liberalism: “A belief that life should be fair – or fairer, or as fair as seems fair.”[2] Gopnik’s daughter tries to gently point out the shallowness, as she and her father are cycling on their island retreat. They come upon a sign at a yoga studio: “In this house we believe that: Black lives matter – Women’s rights are human rights – No human is illegal – Science is real – Love is love – Kindness is everything.” His daughter says, “Dad, there’s your entire book!” Gopnik does not miss that she has reduced his entire effort to “one-sentence attitudes that comic book liberals like me are supposed to share.” However, he doubles down, and acknowledges the sloganeering captures the “liberal imagination.”[3]  I cannot disagree with the slogans, but it was hard to believe his conclusions (which literally appear on the wall of a yoga studio) serve as his deepest life principles. I kept reading the book thinking, there had to be more depth to come. I was wrong.

At the same time, I was reading Flannery O’Connor’s, The Violent Bear It Away,[4] and I realized Gopnik was the perfect stand-in for the protagonist in O’Connor’s novel. The teacher or Rayber, believes in science, reason, fellowship, and experience, but these are exposed as banalities by his nephew, Tarwater. Tarwater, due to his isolated upbringing under his great-uncle suffers sociopathic compulsions, and eventually murders his cousin (Rayber’s son). Rayber, who would save Tarwater from his great-uncle, imagines taking Tarwater to the Natural History Museum, exposing him to science and the ways of reason, will cure him of his evil tendencies: “He intended to stretch the boy’s mind by introducing him to his ancestor, the fish, and to all the great wastes of unexplored time.”[5]

Gopnik suggests exposure to Darwin, Mill, and Adams, and other exemplars of liberal principles, found in science, capitalism, and the bent toward a practical materialism, are sufficient for a rule of life. Both Gopnik and the teacher are committed to the lesson of experience and the notion that the individual creates values, based on their experience. On the basis of experience, Gopnik says, “people make up their values . . . they aren’t handed down from the past on high.”[6] Likewise the teacher imagines, “By virtue of kinship and similarity and experience, [he] was the person to save him (Tarwater) . . .”[7] Meeks, a travelling salesman, imparts the same wisdom, “He said he himself had graduated from the School of Experience with an H.L.L. degree. He asked the boy if he knew what was an H.L.L. degree. Tarwater shook his head. Meeks said the H.L.L. degree was the Hard Lesson from Life degree. He said it was the quickest got and that it stayed learnt the longest.”[8] Rayber attempts to extract the boy from the grip of his uncle’s fanaticism by similar appeal: “’There are certain laws that determine every man’s conduct,’ the schoolteacher said. ‘You are no exception. Experience is a terrible teacher.’”[9]

The boy and his great-uncle mock the ineffectual Rayber, though he is a regular topic of conversation. The problem is, they cannot remember him, or put flesh on their memories of him. “He had made a habit of catching his great-uncle in contradictions about the schoolteacher’s appearance. ‘I forget what color eyes he’s got,’ the old man would say, irked. ‘What difference does the color make when I know the look? I know what’s behind it.’ ‘What’s behind it?’ ‘Nothing. He’s full of nothing.’”[10] The man is so vague and empty, he cannot hold down an enfleshed image.

Imagine trying to build a life around Gopnik/Rayber philosophy. Certainly, as the boy says about the teacher, “He knows a heap. I don’t reckon it’s anything he don’t know.” As the old uncle explains, the problem is not in the knowing. “’He don’t know it’s anything he can’t know,’ the old man said. ‘That’s his trouble. He thinks if it’s something he can’t know then somebody smarter than him can tell him about it and he can know it just the same.’” Rayber is incapable of recognizing his own self-deceived understanding, as knowledge is the cure to everything. Likewise, Gopnik does not admit the possibility of an evil, the very nature of which is self-deception. The old man describes this as the danger of being dispossessed of the self.[11]

To inculcate liberalism, or a “hatred for cruelty,” an admission we are not perfect, a “belief that sympathy can save us from clannishness,” a belief in “permanent reform based on reason and an appeal to argument,” and to be “open to the lessons of experience,” is Gopnik’s plan of salvation.[12] Certainly, no one can disagree that being nice, having public parks, trying not to be violent (though Gopnik hedges on this one), not judging people by race, parentage, or income, are worthy ideas, but being kind does not constitute a worldview. It is insufficient in the encounter with evil and radical goodness. Gopnik explains, “These values are rooted in a simple moral idea about human capacity – a moral idea about the source of meaning in the individual imagination.”[13] He does not consider the possibility that individual imagination may be inadequate, deceived, or captive to a particular time and place. He does not consider, as the old man explains, that he might be dispossessed of himself.

Gopnik may be among the best representatives of the modern perspective, which is not a political point of view (Republican or Democrat) but the liberalism which is the prevailing creed of our time. Most agree, cruelty is bad, conversation is good, egalitarianism and tolerance are to be valued, but to imagine this constitutes a world or takes account of reality, is to mistake the problem (human imagination) for the solution.  

 In the novel, Rayber is bowled over by the impudent boy. “The boy had overtaken him, given him a thunderous blow on the head, and then disappeared. And with his disappearance there had come such an overwhelming feeling of release that Rayber had waked up with a pleasant anticipation that his guest would be gone.”[14] Best to ignore and get rid of the evil, rather than to acknowledge the challenge the boy poses to his world. It is not only his nephew though, but his son, Bishop, who challenges his world. He had tried to drown the boy, due to his disability, but had failed. Meanwhile, “he sent him to a school for exceptional children and he had made great strides. He could wash himself, dress himself, feed himself, go to the toilet by himself and make peanut butter sandwiches though sometimes he put the bread inside.”[15] The boy was independent enough that Rayber could mostly ignore him, but then he would once again be confronted with reality: “the moments would still come when, rushing from some inexplicable part of himself, he would experience a love for the child so outrageous that he would be left shocked and depressed for days, and trembling for his sanity.”[16] He is unnerved by his son’s complete innocence (in his value system he should be drowned), so that he is afraid of his love for a boy who is worthless in regard to reason, science, and knowledge. “His normal way of looking on Bishop was as an x signifying the general hideousness of fate.”[17] If there were an “image of God” he understood, his son fit that likeness, but this reality represented by his son was one that his world could not afford:

The little boy was part of a simple equation that required no further solution, except at the moments when with little or no warning he would feel himself overwhelmed by the horrifying love. Anything he looked at too long could bring it on. Bishop did not have to be around. It could be a stick or a stone, the line of a shadow, the absurd old man’s walk of a starling crossing the sidewalk. If, without thinking, he lent himself to it, he would feel suddenly a morbid surge of the love that terrified him—powerful enough to throw him to the ground in an act of idiot praise. It was completely irrational and abnormal.[18]

How can this irrational, “idiot” love have a place in a world where, in Gopnik’s terms, “reasoned conversation” is supreme?[19] The extremes of goodness and evil, love and hatred, cannot be accounted for. Rayber’s hatred for his nephew, and his unwillingness to include his son in the realm of his values, consist of the same stunted imagination. Both challenge a world of liberal values: material concern, reason, science, and the power of imagination. His nephew is positively evil and his son worthless in regard to the potential of imagination. They do not really qualify as human, in the Gopnik/Rayber world.

Rayber’s uncle recognizes that his nephew’s worldview is such that he cannot love what does not fit his standards: “And once, only once, the old man had leaned forward and said to Tarwater, in a voice that could no longer contain the pleasure of its secret, ‘He loved me like a daddy and he was ashamed of it![20]” The old man and the disabled boy are both beyond the pale of Rayber’s values. As O’Connor explains, “Bishop looked like the old man grown backwards to the lowest form of innocence.”[21] In this narrow world of modern liberal values, the grotesque, the disabled, the fanatics, the zealots, have no place. They should not be, and only when we progress beyond such malformations can liberal values and imagination take hold.

In a weak attempt to ameliorate the boy, Rayber says they are a alike, but the boy accuses his uncle of being deluded: “’I can do something. I ain’t like you. All you can do is think what you would have done if you had done it. Not me. I can do it. I can act.’ He was looking at his uncle now with a completely fresh contempt. ‘It’s nothing about me like you,’ he said.”  Rayber would receive and leave the world as he found it, but the boy – as strange and crazy as he is – has no such intent: “I can pull it up by the roots, once and for all.”[22] The boy’s world was wrecked from the beginning, as he was literally born in the midst of the car wreck which killed his mother, but out of this experience, “He had always felt that it set his existence apart from the ordinary one and he had understood from it that the plans of God for him were special, even though nothing of consequence had happened to him so far.”[23]

It is this wrecked sort of outsider and his strange world that Rayber/Gopnik cannot abide. Such weird grotesqueries must be submitted to the normal, reasonable, stable world of the enlightened. This world has no room for enchantment, depth of spirit, or for acknowledgement of radical evil or radical love. Gopnik/Rayber certainly acknowledge love – with Rayber praising its practical value in the life of his sister, and Gopnik meaninglessly acknowledging “love is love,” but there is a different order of love that is dangerous: “It was love without reason, love for something futureless, love that appeared to exist only to be itself, imperious and all demanding, the kind that would cause him to make a fool of himself in an instant.”[24] The love for a child that is “worthless” or an old man that is insane or love for a world which ultimately cannot contain such love. “It began with Bishop and then like an avalanche covered everything his reason hated. He always felt with it a rush of longing to have the old man’s eyes—insane, fish-coloured, violent with their impossible vision of a world transfigured—turned on him once again. The longing was like an undertow in his blood dragging him backwards to what he knew to be madness.”[25] He could not afford the price of radical love as it reeked of inexplicable spiritual madness.

The choice is between the stable orbit around a human imagination grounded, as Gopnik describes, in “reason, good conversation and debate,” and committed to “egalitarian social reform” and “ever greater tolerance” (though obviously “not absolute”)[26] or the enchanted possibilities of a world lit with an inexplicable grandeur, open to radical love and enabled to grapple with radical evil. One is an engagement with flesh and blood reality, and the other cannot bear the weight of reality. Flannery O’Connor is posing both possibilities, without making her case, beyond the fact of an inexplicable love and evil. Much like Rayber, it seems Gopnik cannot afford a world beyond “a thousand small sanities.”  Insanity may be lurking in anything more. O’Connor describes this absolute faith in sanity as constricting: “He kept himself upright on a very narrow line between madness and emptiness, and when the time came for him to lose his balance, he intended to lurch toward emptiness and fall on the side of his choice.”[27] Only a flat world, devoid of extremes of love and evil, allows balance, choice, and human imagination to reign supreme.

O’Connor expresses the other choice in the voice of a small child, an “evangelist” in a Pentecostal meeting who confronts Rayber:

“Do you know who Jesus is?” she cried. “Jesus is the Word of God and Jesus is love. The Word of God is love and do you know what love is, you people? If you don’t know what love is you won’t know Jesus when He comes. You won’t be ready. I want to tell you people the story of the world, how it never known when love come, so when love comes again, you’ll be ready.[28]

Extreme love is unacceptable to Rayber, its insanity and crudity threatening and beneath his consideration, so he runs into the night.

(Sign up for the upcoming class, “Lonergan & the Problem of Theological Method.” The course will run from the weeks of February 16th to April 11th.  Register here https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)

[1]Adam Gopnik, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism (New York: Basic Books, 2019) 216-217.

[2] Ibid, 80.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Flannery O’Connor, The Violent Bear It Away (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Kindle Edition, 2007).

[5] Ibid, 39.

[6] Gopnik, 81.

[7] O’Connor, 33.

[8] Ibid, 17.

[9] Ibid, 53.

[10] Ibid, 16.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Gopnik, 80.

[13] Ibid, 81.

[14] O’Connor, 39.

[15] Ibid, 32.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Gopnik, 24.

[20] O’Connor, 20.

[21] Ibid, 32.

[22] Ibid, 53. Unfortunately he probably means he intends to kill Bishop, as his act of “uprooting” though even this evil works a kind of grace.

[23] Ibid, 12.

[24] Ibid, 32.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Gopnik, 23-24.

[27] O’Connor, 33

[28] Ibid, 36-37.