Amherst College and the Myth of the Good Liberal

A deeply progressive commitment lies at the heart of Amherst’s educational philosophy: one in which talented students of all backgrounds are brought together to be educated in pursuit of the common good. As students, we enter these hallowed halls eager to be given the tools to make good on our liberal commitments. We learn, we struggle, and we grow — graduating, hopefully, as better thinkers, better human beings, better democrats.

I continue, however, to grow suspicious of Amherst’s peculiar brand of liberalism — of  a kind of comforting story we tell ourselves about who we are that runs counter to the reality of our character as evidenced by our words and deeds. It is this “story” — the one we would like to write about ourselves, or tell ourselves in the mornings as we ready ourselves to face the day with bright eyes and a clear conscience — that invests us with a deep sense of innocence and nobility.

We tell ourselves that our position at Amherst evidences our place among the politically enlightened. We tell ourselves that we have done the work — that we have wrested our minds from the narrowness of Republican rhetoric and progressive elitism — that it is we who, by and large, have unquestionably committed ourselves to upholding the principles of American democracy, of social justice, of being, in essence, good liberals.

What we would like to believe is that we are nothing like the backward conservatives of the South, nor like those callous coastal elites who’ve turned their backs on the wider body politic. But an ugly underbelly belies our vaunted commitment to social justice. We, at the same time as we proudly proclaim our progressive values, have been using our privileged status as Amherst students to do exactly what elite classes have been doing for all time: using our already considerable wealth to beget more wealth, dishonoring our obligations to the communities surrounding us, and still finding a way to imagine it all as good and noble.

I should be clear here that my aim is not to moralize. That work is best left to those who feel comfortable casting stones as though they, themselves, do not live in a glass house. Rather, I intend simply to make the ugliness of our political condition more plain — and I must be forthright in that the contradiction between what we do and who we take ourselves to be evidences a frightening reality: We are all, I suspect, painfully aware that our positions at Amherst have sent us barreling towards a deep complicity in some of our country’s greatest crimes: racism, imperialism, and economic devastation. We know that many of us will end up as greedy workers at finance firms, callous political officials, or deeply indifferent bureaucrats. Our deep investment in portraiting ourselves as innocent, then — in picturing ourselves as good liberals, even as we continue to bask in our own privilege — should best be viewed as a desperate attempt at self-soothing. We grasp at innocence, at nobility, because we have fallen into the fiction that it is only through this incessant clinging to purity that we can sidestep our inevitable complicity in the ongoing crimes of our country.

The reality of our self-contradictory stance, however, only accents the need for further investigation on this matter. It highlights the demand for all of us to ask ourselves a deeper, more frightening question: might it be the case that the contradiction between who we are and how we act evidences the shallowness of our commitment to genuine justice and democracy? What if it were the case that our investments in our own innocence and nobility were themselves products of a deep refusal to orient ourselves toward our fellows in a manner that affirmed the full scope of their humanity? What if, to invoke the words of James Baldwin, it were our very innocence itself which constituted the crime?

I have written elsewhere about the troubling paradox revealed by the contradiction between our so-called liberal beliefs and our more conservative actions. I argued therein that this paradox was more owing to the inadequacy of our education than to any character flaw on our behalf — that we would be the good liberals we think we are if only given the necessary resources. The argument itself, however, still implies a certain kind of belief in the fundamental innocence and nobility of Amherst students. an innocence, I must say, that I no longer believe in.

I have come to suspect that our dual investments in innocence and nobility arise out of our desire to elide the work of taking a long, hard look at ourselves in the mirror — of recognizing how our positionality has warped our moral sense. What we would like to believe is that in coming to hold certain progressive commitments — beliefs in diversity, equity, and inclusion — our work is done. We can sit back and wash our hands of the whole affair. But there is, indeed, a more terrifying reality looming ever-so-subtly behind our vaunted purity: We might not be much better than those backward Southern conservatives, nor nobler than those callous, greedy elites — that we, too, might share in the blame for our nation’s present political crisis.

It bears mentioning that facing this reality is an endeavor fraught with precarity. In recognizing our guilt, we must still never come to view ourselves as irrevocably damned. That, too, would be an abdication of responsibility. The world still invites us to grow, and the injustices of our situation demand that we conjure up ever-more-creative responses to the problems we face.

We must continue on in recognition of the fact that it is only in glass houses that the light of the sun is able to shine through — that it is only in coming to understand the reality of our guilt, of our deeply fraught political positions, that we might come to release ourselves into a better, more humane way of life. The political crises of our country only accent the moral imperative for a deep reckoning with who we are — with the fact that we may be no better than the conservatives or elites we continue to deride. The only guilt or shame to truly be felt is that derived from the tragedy of never taking up this task. It is only in accepting the problem at hand that we might begin to solve it, only in recognizing the more frightening aspects of our history, of who we are, that we can begin to walk into a better tomorrow.