“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”
It’s Lili’s turn to groan. “Churchill, really? Do you have a hard-on for Thatcher, too?”
Aleksandr laughs, clear and loud. “I have a healthy respect for her.”
“Your view of the world,” Lili continues, pushing back on the warmth his laugh stirred. “This free-market faith—this... neoliberalism. It still has an element of government intervention.”
“Yes, when justified and necessary, and always with the markets able to overpower it.”
“By markets, you mean people with money.”
“No, I mean the free market—acting as a constant referendum, a continually evolving collective agreement among all people. Isn’t that honestly more democratic?”
“I don’t think I can actually stomach how much Hayek you reference,” Lili says.
“He has his uses, however limited.”
“How can you be a neoliberal if you don’t like Hayek?”
“Lili,” he reprimands. “You need to stop worshipping or rejecting thinkers in their entirety. You’re too wedded to the idea of monoliths, holistic philosophies.”
“Intellectual consistency is important!”
“Soundness of thought, yes, but you don’t need to subscribe to one ideology for that.”
“Well—well, isn’t that somehow dishonest?”
“Why would that be dishonest?” Aleksandr frowns. His hand smooths over her skin, towards the hem of the sweater she’s wearing. “No one thinker has the answer.”
“You can’t just mix Marxism with neoliberalism.”
“Why not? Ideological purity is a disadvantage. We conflate it with focus.”
Lili sweeps her arms wide, trying to take control of the conversation. “At the end of the day, social democracy enables a decent life,” she says. “Berlin said that. That’s it, after all the arguing.”
Aleksandr raises an eyebrow. “You’ve read Berlin?”
It’s not condescending, he’s—genuinely surprised; gratified.
She nods.
“What do you think of his value pluralism?” he asks.
Lili has always been smart. She’s always had people—teachers, classmates, friends—show interest in her ideas, however momentarily. But Aleksandr’s interest—the way he looks at her, asks questions, then listens? She wants to keep it—hold onto it—more than she has most things.
“Honestly, it’s a little disconcerting.” It feels like a risk to say what she thinks and admit uncertainty, but she does it anyway: pushes back the knee-jerk reaction to provide some polished intellectualization just off-center of what she really thinks. “The sense that there’s no absolute truth—nothing, deep down, that we can all agree on. It sort of defeats the idea that we can ever arrive somewhere together.”
“Or perhaps makes it easier for us to coexist.”
She tilts her head. “How so?”
“Well, pluralism accepts the moral reality of different truths but rejects the idea that they can all be measured on a single scale. If there is no single good, then there is no single form of analysis, no single political logic that can master all ethics.”
Lili falls silent, considering.
It’s inconvenient when he’s intelligent.
“There’s this concept,” she says, after a few beats of thought. “Back when I was taking more history classes in undergrad. Bloch, a French historian, had this concept of ‘understanding’—the idea that to understand an event requires us to release any one framework and to accept the validityof several frameworks simultaneously. Supposedly brings much less immediate satisfaction but a greater enduring achievement. I guess that’s an acceptance of pluralism, the same sort as Berlin.”
