Watership Down and the Crisis of Liberalism – The New York Times

Those virtues are distributed among different rabbits: Along with Fivers prophet, there is the statesman-leader Hazel; the soldier-fighter Bigwig; the thinker-inventor Blackberry; the storyteller Dandelion; and more. And what makes the regime the rabbits are founding good and successful, but first and foremost good is the integration of the different virtues, the cooperation of their different embodiments, their willing subordination to one another as circumstances require.

The military hero, Bigwig, could have been a Woundwort in a different dispensation; instead he willingly bends to the statesman, Hazel, who lacks his strength and fearlessness but exceeds him in foresight and guile. Hazel in turn defers to Fivers gift of prophecy, his religious genius, which is why the band escapes disaster in the first place (their original warrens leader is a talented statesman, but fatally dismissive of the religious and mystical) and why it ultimately succeeds in founding and sustaining a new regime.

Meanwhile, the other virtues invention, lore keeping, even comedy play supporting roles as needed, and nobody claims the wrong sort of authority. (The keenest intellect, for instance, neither aspires to nor is vested with the greatest power; note well, meritocrats.) Out of this collaboration a regime emerges that is rebuke to both the grim alternatives, with a mixture of hierarchy and liberty that works with the grain of rabbitness instead of seeking a corrupt comfort or an impossible level of security.

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The spoilers are over; now lets return to the late-modern liberal world, and consider our own discontents in the light of the contrast that Adams draws between his newly founded warren and its rivals.

Somewhere near the root of those discontents is a fear that the kind of balanced and virtuous society simultaneously mystical and practical, orderly and free that the rabbits build in Watership Down has slipped somehow from our grasp, or else was always just a myth. In which case we are left to choose between its darker rivals, between a comfortable decadence in which virtue erodes and the reaper beckons, or else some variant on Efrafas totalitarian alternative.

Which option you choose depends on which destination you fear most. One anxiety in the Western world right now, palpable on both the right and the left, is that the plush, end-of-rabbit-history warren is liberalisms dystopian destination: a sleek and fattened inhumanity, a terrible mix of comfort and cruelty, a loss of basic human goods under the pressure of capitalism or secularism or both.

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Watership Down and the Crisis of Liberalism - The New York Times