A Purim Meditation

Liberal and Romantic

Costumes and masks help us perform and internalize a truth that we know, but don’t always appreciate: we are conflicted selves. What we show to the world and what we keep to ourselves are two very different things. And the reason for this isn’t simply “self-censorship” or fear of being cancelled. The primal cause of our inside-outside split is authentic ambivalence, internal division. Values like love and justice, kindness and truth, liberty and goodness each make claims on us, tugging us in different directions. Outwardly we can only express one stance at a time, but the parliament of drives that Nietzsche describes is busy. The problem is not false consciousness or being fake. The problem is that we are permitted only one mask at a time, and yet our wardrobes are stocked with hundreds of other masks we might have picked up. Our lives are contingent; coherence of identity accrues to us through repetition and habit. We come to believe the roles we play and forget how our lives might have turned out if we had had different parents, different friends, different roommates, different jobs, etc. The genotype of the soul is far more expansive than its phenotype.

The idea that the self is malleable is a kind of liberal idea, suggesting life is about choosing a project, rather than about being chosen or commanded by something from without. But, there are elements to existence that are not chosen. And it is these which romantics and tribalists insist on when countering the liberal myth of the unencumbered self. Paradoxically, the more we take off and put on various masks, the more we discover just which features cannot be removed. Some appreciation for our essence emerges out of our experiments in selfhood.

In the children’s book, “It’s Not Easy Being a Bunny,” P.J. Funnybunny spends his life trying to live with other animals only to realize that he’s a bunny, and can’t renounce his fundamental bunny-hood. But the romantic conclusion—you are what you are—is only reached through a liberal frame—maybe being a bunny isn’t what defines P.J. Maybe P.J. would have more fun with the skunks or the possums. On Purim, we are afforded a ritual opportunity to act-out this “what if.” In the children’s story, the tension is resolved through amor fati. P.J. chooses an identity that is also not up to him. We feel comic relief.

But in the adult version, it’s not always clear what our essence is, and what our choices are—what should be up for emendation and what should serve as a constraint or guardrail on our autonomy.

On both the political left and right, Rawls, a consummate defender of liberalism, is criticized for his subordination of goodness to justice, that is, for his claim that autonomy matters more than whatever we might do with it. Commenting on Rawls, Fukuyama, in his new book Liberalism and Its Discontents, says, that there is no Rawlsian principle by which we can judge the life of the hard-working person who comes from nothing, and is doing multiple jobs to pay for community college, to be better than the life of the weed smoker who lives off the largesse of an inheritance and spends his days playing video games. Both are expressions of autonomy. Moral goodness is real, and moral judgment is possible. Autonomy can’t be the be-all and end-all.

But for many generations, we lived in a world where autonomy was quashed and choice viewed with suspicion. Politically, we wear one mask, while culturally, we experience a dissonance. Either, we live in an illiberal society where choice is repressed. Or we live in a liberal one, in which a desire for purpose and belonging and meaning are relativized to oblivion.

Rather than solve these questions as a matter of policy or philosophy or ethics, Purim gives us a chance to experience the other side. For liberals, it’s a chance to appreciate the truth of romanticism, for romantics, a chance to experience the appeal of romanticism.

The biggest problem facing classical liberals is the stubborn reality of nationalism. As Jews, we experience this intensely. The Purim story is a story in which Persian nationalism turns the Jewish people into an enemy. But it’s also one in which Jewish nationalism is wielded for the purposes of self-defense and self-determination.

Nations, like selves, are at once constructed and unchosen. To choose what we are, while also discovering good constraints on our choice is a great task.

This Purim, I hope to achieve a state in which the line between the liberal and the romantic in me is blurred. In that state, it will be neither my choice alone nor God’s or Nature’s, but both, that are harmonized.

Happy Purim!

Zohar @ Etz Hasadeh