I am by nature a liberal. But I read conservative authors to keep myself honest.
Anthony Kronman is such an author, whose recent book True Conservatism chides liberals for valuing equality at the expense of excellence.[i] Surely, he reasons, we want excellence in doctors and carpenters. Why shouldn’t we expect similar excellence in simply being human? Everyone should have equal opportunity to develop human excellence, but as a matter of social policy, we should cultivate that excellence and expect it of people.
Do we have an obligation to foster a society where human excellence is the goal? Religions, certainly, would seem to say yes. The Jewish version is the adage by Hillel, “Where humanity is lacking, strive to be humane.”[ii]
The most immediate liberal objection is the cultural bias inherent in defining “humanly excellent.” We can more easily agree on what counts for excellence in doctors and carpenters (they themselves have criteria for what they do). But who is to say what counts as human excellence?
We can reframe the question by asking how human beings are unique among animals. What is it that the evolution of human beings has uniquely outfitted us to do?
I know of several impressive answers to that question.
The first is by Aristotle, who calls human beings rational animals. Only humans can reason their way through thick cobwebs of arguments to arrive at logical conclusions. It would follow that schools should teach the ability to reason wisely; that politicians should demonstrate the art of rational debate and deliberation; and that individuals should dedicate themselves to lives of thoughtfulness.
Aristotle further believed in a uniquely human form of happiness, not momentary hedonism but “morally virtuous action guided by reason,”[iii] which he thought would produce the long-term sense of well-being that Greeks called eudaemonia. Human excellence lies in “the hunt for the life that is truly worth living”?[iv]
But there are other options. Human reason is an extension of our ability to manipulate language, which philosopher Ernst Cassirer saw as a complex system of symbols. For him, we humans are not so much rational, or even eudaemonia-seeking, animals, so much as we are symbol-appreciating animals. A society that values excellence would imbue its members with an appreciation of symbols — not just language, but mathematics and the various arts as well, for these too are symbolic systems that stretch our human imagination.
But what about religion, a symbol system whose purpose is to seek the eternal, the transcendent, a “cosmic connection” in which we see the world as “shot through with joy, significance, inspiration.”[v] Hence a third view, represented most forcefully by Mircea Eliade, who pioneered the discipline called History of Religions: Human beings, he says, are religious animals. We should create societies where the search for transcendent meaning is foremost; and where the legitimate religious expression of that human urge for ultimacy can thrive.
And finally, the view of Karl Marx, who brilliantly redefined human beings as the species that works.Marxism (untethered from Communism) is the commitment to guarantee everyone a form of work that satisfies because it is rewarded and fulfilling. The search for social excellence would transform work itself as part of that “life worth living.”
Liberals might still object that these definitions of human excellence are by white men who are part of the classic philosophical heritage which denied equality to women, condoned slavery, and colonized native peoples worldwide. And there is some truth to that. Aristotle taught Alexander the Great who “colonized” a good deal of the entire known world. Eliade once flirted with his native Rumania’s nationalist but anti-Semitic Iron Guard. Marxism was concretized in Communist states that suppressed everyone around them. As a Jew who fled Germany and denounced both hero-worship and racism, Cassirer seems the least implicated, but until Hitler came along, he certainly was part of the European intellectual establishment.
Still, shouldn’t the claim for human excellence be judged on its own merit?
A related charge is that advocating excellence as the ultimate human goal sounds elitist, especially in a society with chronic inequality and rampant poverty. But these human ills are heinous precisely because they run counter to the right of every person to aspire to the excellence for which being human is intended.
What can possibly be wrong with a national agenda that demands 1. rational conversation as a path to ongoing happiness; 2. the right to be at home in the distinctively human symbol systems of language, mathematics and the arts; 3. access to religious systems that provide transcendence and religious meaning; and 4. work that is rewarded and rewarding? In fact, I see no reason why any of this need be a specifically “conservative” doctrine. Liberals too should claim as their own.
Susan Neiman is a moral philosopher whose Jewish parents imbued her with the leftist doctrines that were commonplace among Jews who hailed from eastern Europe. Her recent book, The Left is Not Woke, attacks the woke doctrines that are currently popular on campuses and distinguishes them from true liberalism, the point of view that traces its roots to the Enlightenment, esteems rational discourse, and seeks to better the lives of human beings everywhere.
Defining human excellence as I have may not be compatible with wokeness, but it is perfectly in keeping with Susan Neiman’s liberalism, which is my brand of liberalism too.
True liberals should demand this kind of excellence. We should insist on a national conversation on how to reframe our institutions, government, and culture to embody and to emphasize a life worth living — the virtuous, peaceful, and universal sense of human dignity toward which human equality of opportunity should aspire.
[i] Anthony T. Kronman, True Conservatism: Reclaiming Our Humanity in an Arrogant Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025).
[ii] Avot 2:6. Literally “Where there are no men, strive to be a man.” Avoiding the sexist “men” is difficult here. But I think I have captured the idea correctly.
[iii] A nice turn of phrase I borrow from Riin Sirkel, review of Øyvind Rabbås, Eyjólfur K. Emilsson, Hallvard Fossheim, and Miira Tuominen (eds.), The Quest for the Good Life: Ancient Philosophers on Happiness(Oxford University Press, 2015). https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-quest-for-the-good-life-ancient-philosophers-on-happiness/.
[iv] Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins, Eds., Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), Introduction, p. 14.
[v] Charles Taylor, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment (Cambridge and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2024), p. xvi.
Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman, Ph.D. 