The Liberalism of George Smiley

Spy fiction is not ordinarily the place one goes to find moral wisdom. It tends to be a sordid place where bad people are opposed by slightly less bad people, where “there is as little of worth on your side as there is mine,” to slightly paraphrase the greatest spy protagonist of them all, John le Carré’s George Smiley. And yet in a moment when the illiberal and totalitarian is ascendant in the west, it may be that spy fiction has a unique sort of wisdom to offer us.

I first began to find wisdom in Le Carré several years ago. A group of what some have since called “the woke right” sought to infiltrate and take over an organization I served as a board member. Specifically, I was frustrated by the ways in which conventional liberal forms of engagement did not seem to work with the ‘woke right’ individuals in the way I had hoped. I needed to find other ways of responding which preserved the health of the community I valued, but I didn’t know what those might be.

This was the problem: Small-l American liberals are used to conducting themselves in a certain way within civic life. We trust each other. When we have a decision to make, we give our reasons and make our claims and allow others to do the same, listening with patience and weighing the merits of their argument. Through all of this, we trust that all the involved parties are sincere in their desire and relatively transparent in communication. These are the building blocks of liberal society, of course–a commitment to making arguments, seeking persuasion, and finding ways of patiently enduring with one another amidst differences.

The trouble is that when illiberal people enter liberal society or even just smaller liberal institutions, those same liberal virtues become weaknesses to be exploited. If two parties are in conflict and one party is sincere, transparent, and pursuing persuasion while the other is cynical and purely concerned with acquiring power, the former’s liberal virtues are precisely what will make them an easy mark for the illiberal cynic. If the former is presuppositionally committed to forthrightness and honesty while the latter has explicitly announced that lying and deception are acceptable political strategies, it is not hard to anticipate how that conflict will go. This is how liberal institutions are colonized and transformed into skinsuits to be worn by their illiberal colonizers. The trust of liberal stakeholders is abused by the illiberal insurgents and, quite often, by the time the liberal stakeholders realize what is happening to them, it is too late to make the changes needed to save the organization. In the end, illiberal insurgents take over the organization, often leveraging the stated values of the other side in order to weaken and discredit them.

This creates a problem for those of us who value reason, persuasion, and tolerance. It suggests that in any fight between liberals and illiberals, the liberal is fighting with one hand tied behind their back. So how can institutions and broader liberal society be preserved in a time when so many have lost all interest in making claims, hearing arguments, and pursuing truth together within the bonds of reason and the common good?

The place I found help, in an unlikely form, is the unimpressive figure of George Smiley.. Smiley’s genius rests simply in this: Over the course of the many novels in which he is featured we can see how one can intelligently and shrewdly resist illiberalism without simply becoming the thing one is fighting.

Before saying more, a bit of background on Smiley might be helpful for those who have not read le Carré: George Smiley was created by le Carré as a sort of bizarro James Bond–where Bond is flashy, sexy, and loud, Smiley is patient, utterly unremarkable, and quiet. Bond always gets the girl. Smiley can’t even keep the attention of his notoriously unfaithful wife Anne.

One never associates the word “meditative” with James Bond. But it is the essence of what makes Smiley compelling–the sense that he is always a step ahead of everyone else in understanding the latest plot against the western world, and discerning the motivations and desires of all the parties he is studying at any given time. The most consequential thing Smiley does in any of the novels written about him is sit quietly and think. Le Carré’s genius is in his ability to make such a character so compelling.

Smiley appears in nine novels by le Carré as well as a tenth novel written by le Carré’s son. His first appearance is in le Carré’s first novel, Call for the Dead, published in 1961. His final appearance comes in the closing pages of A Legacy of Spies, published in 2017 in which le Carré gives the man a final monologue in which he essentially explains what it was all for, why he lived the life he lived. The most famous Smiley novel, of course, is Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which was turned into a film starring Gary Oldman, John Hurt, and Colin Furth in 2011. In an earlier era, the BBC also produced a miniseries based on the novel, starring Alec Guinness as Smiley with Patrick Stewart making a brief and utterly silent appearance as Karla, Smiley’s archnemesis and the head of Soviet intelligence during the Cold War. (Readers will need to be somewhat credulous about the timeline of Smiley’s life, in a way not unlike the credulity needed while reading the Aubrey-Maturin novels: If one simply accepted all the dates le Carré gives for Smiley’s life, he would be over 100 years old by the time of the events in A Legacy of Spies.)

So what marks Smiley’s genius and makes him such an adept opponent of illiberal ideologies? It begins with this, I think: He is able to recognize and name the methods used by his opponents.

Illiberal ideologies operate in a certain sequence: They begin with recognizing social problems which usually are quite real and even devastating. In our own day we have seen this in ways that can be both left- and right-coded.

The problems facing Afro-Americans in the United States, for example, are quite real. To take but one example, the Department of Justice report on the Ferguson police department contains many quite alarming details regarding the treatment of Black people in Ferguson in the days leading up to the death of Michael Brown. And Ferguson is not the only place where Black Americans have encountered gross injustice due to their race.

Likewise, the obstacles to flourishing for many young men in America today are significant. Attaining economic stability, securing good work, and family formation are all far harder for many young men today than they were even for me, an older millennial who graduated college in the aftermath of the sub-prime market crash.

Once the problem has been defined, liberals turn to our normal methods of addressing them: relying upon conversation, persuasion, and, when necessary, democratic organizing in order to promote reform. The democratic liberal critique focuses on a specific injustice and it regards neighbors as actual partners in a common civic project and possible partners in specific projects of reform and repair. A liberal can have enemies, of course, but also a good liberal always retains hope that enemies can be persuaded to join in pursuing the good, as they understand it, and that former enemies can become friends in the good with one another.

Illiberal ideologies go in a different direction. They work by identifying a class of people who serve as a villain, as the group responsible for creating those conditions. Both the far right and far left have sometimes been willing to ascribe this fault to Jews, of course, but other culprits have likewise been identified and blamed: “the basket of deplorables,” in one case, and “woke” HR departments in another.

Once the enemy is named, the illiberal project becomes quite straightforward. If the real problems evident in society can be laid at the feet of a single enemy, then if you can destroy that enemy your social problems will be solved. The promised utopia is never quite named in explicit terms, but the implication is often quite clear.

Once the promise of utopia is implied, politics almost inevitably come to be seen as a matter of existential survival. When the stakes are so high, it becomes easy to excuse virtually any means imaginable of securing survival. Thus the illiberal ideology offers two choices to people: You can become a true believer in the ultimate cause of the movement and fight for it with revolutionary zeal. Or, if you lack belief in the possibility of utopia, the implied offer is that you become a pervasive cynic who rejects all political visions as equally corrupt while seeking to make the best life one can for oneself in an unhappy and miserable world.

Le Carré’s fiction is pervaded with people of both types. Karla is the most notable example of the first type. But the fanatics are a minority. Most are not so high-minded. They instead leverage the uncertainty and amoral nature of the Cold War world to pursue whatever pleasures they most value–usually violence or sex, but sometimes power or money. These types are probably more familiar to us now than any of us would prefer. The unhappy characteristic they all share, of course, is not just an indifference to civic life, but a blithe dismissal that a civic life founded on liberal virtues is even possible. In both cases, the possibility of rapprochement is simply excluded from the beginning: there is only struggle between irreconcilable factions and the only outcome is that one side will vanquish the other.

And it is precisely this point that makes Smiley compelling. Smiley refuses the binary choice that illiberal ideologies attempt to force on people. He is not a perfect character, at times he is not even particularly sympathetic. By his own admission, he is sometimes heartless. And yet he remains neither a fanatic, nor a cynic. How does he do it? One part of the answer comes in the final words he ever spoke in a le Carré novel:

So was it all for England, then?’ he resumed. ‘There was a time, of course there was. But whose England? Which England? England all alone, a citizen of nowhere? I’m a European, Peter. If I had a mission – if I was ever aware of one beyond our business with the enemy, it was to Europe. If I was heartless, I was heartless for Europe. If I had an unattainable ideal, it was of leading Europe out of her darkness towards a new age of reason. I have it still.

One need not be a Europhile in the way of le Carré to benefit from this wisdom. The point is not to define Europe as a kind of heroic figure in political life, free from ambiguity or darkness. Rather, the point is that Europe for le Carré stood as a symbol for a society devoted to reason and persuasion, not power and domination. Smiley’s espionage work was done in service to higher goods, not the mere naked acquisition of power for his arbitrarily selected team. And that commitment to liberal virtues necessarily constrained what he could and could not do in their service.

Such a commitment does constrain what politics can be, of course, but that is a feature rather than a bug. To demand generalized uniformity on questions of ultimate meaning and purpose in our technological and cultural environment is a political pipe dream that will only ever be achieved in farce and through terror. If you recognize that, then you inherently recognize that our politics are not about ultimate meaning, but about preserving a space for healthy civic life and neighborly care amidst the evil chances of the world and the struggles and uncertainties that beset us all. If we can have trust in one another, if we can reason with one another when we disagree, respecting the claims of one another even as we endure in difference, then we preserve a space where the things we still share in common—desires for the kind of place we might live in, for the virtues we wish to characterize that place, and so on—can be meaningfully pursued. Smiley devoted himself to proximal goods in political life as a real counterweight to the attempts of illiberals to attain ultimate goods in political life. Smiley was not utopian or perfectionist, but in repudiating perfectionism he did not yield to an amoral hedonism. He remained principled, a man who sought to do the right thing, even if the attempts often took place in impossible circumstances. He found a way of being neither a fanatic nor a cynic. The name we have for that way is something like "democratic liberalism."

Critics will reply, of course, that proximal goods, like reason and persuasion and tolerance, are thin gruel set next to the thicker goods promised (and never delivered, I might add) by strong gods and their illiberal ideologies. One reply to that, of course, is to note precisely the point that illiberal ideologies promise the world but have a proven record of delivering mayhem and bloodshed. That alone should be reason enough to find the value in a political life aimed at proximal goods.

Yet Smiley’s own example also suggests that this critique undervalues the pleasures of proximal goods. In seeking to oppose the totalitarian while remaining personally decent, Smiley is forced toward a certain way of life–and one that is not without its pleasures.

There is a joy to be had in understanding something deeply, after all, and taking the time to understand your enemies not simply as monsters, but as humans, even if humans fallen into great evil. It is a joy to be able to perceive the heart of the matter and then to set forth the whole story of a person or problem to others for their own good and prosperity.

In order to do that, one must be defined by a certain patience of thought as well as calm internal spirit, to say nothing of immense self-mastery. In one of his more famous scenes, Smiley says to a colleague that one ought to lay out all the facts in a case and then try the stories on like clothes. It’s an arresting metaphor and one I have returned to many times. But the ability to even do such a thing presupposes a measure of quiet reflection and careful thought that is quite foreign to many of us today, captive as we are to anxiety, paranoia, and rage. The characteristics that make one illiberal are also the characteristics that usually make one an ineffective political mover. As Tolkien taught us long ago, “oft evil will shall evil mar.”

Yet if we step back, this question is worth asking: What person doesn’t want to be defined by self-mastery, by a calm internal spirit, by an ability to patiently discern the world and one’s neighbor? Some might find such qualities unattractive, I suppose. But most of us do not. Many of us find such qualities deeply compelling and desire that they would be more characteristic of us. Smiley, the great liberal, has these traits in spades. That he does is precisely because he rejects the illiberal and the totalitarian and, in doing so, discovers the pleasures of liberal life. And in the sordid world of espionage fiction, a world which sometimes resembles our own in depressing ways, to have obtained such virtue is no small thing.