A Message to the 21st Century
Isaiah Berlin
October 23, 2014 Issue
Twenty years ago-on November 25, 1994-Isaiah Berlin accepted the honorary
degree of Doctor of Laws at the University of Toronto. He prepared the
following “short credo” (as he called it in a letter to a friend) for the
ceremony, at which it was read on his behalf.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” With these words
Dickens began his famous novel A Tale of Two Cities. But this cannot, alas,
be said about our own terrible century. Men have for millennia destroyed
each other, but the deeds of Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Napoleon (who
introduced mass killings in war), even the Armenian massacres, pale into
insignificance before the Russian Revolution and its aftermath: the
oppression, torture, murder which can be laid at the doors of Lenin, Stalin,
Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and the systematic falsification of information which
prevented knowledge of these horrors for years-these are unparalleled. They
were not natural disasters, but preventable human crimes, and whatever those
who believe in historical determinism may think, they could have been
averted.
I speak with particular feeling, for I am a very old man, and I have lived
through almost the entire century. My life has been peaceful and secure, and
I feel almost ashamed of this in view of what has happened to so many other
human beings. I am not a historian, and so I cannot speak with authority on
the causes of these horrors. Yet perhaps I can try.
They were, in my view, not caused by the ordinary negative human sentiments,
as Spinoza called them-fear, greed, tribal hatreds, jealousy, love of
power-though of course these have played their wicked part. They have been
caused, in our time, by ideas; or rather, by one particular idea. It is
paradoxical that Karl Marx, who played down the importance of ideas in
comparison with impersonal social and economic forces, should, by his
writings, have caused the transformation of the twentieth century, both in
the direction of what he wanted and, by reaction, against it. The German
poet Heine, in one of his famous writings, told us not to underestimate the
quiet philosopher sitting in his study; if Kant had not undone theology, he
declared, Robespierre might not have cut off the head of the King of France.
He predicted that the armed disciples of the German philosophers-Fichte,
Schelling, and the other fathers of German nationalism-would one day destroy
the great monuments of Western Europe in a wave of fanatical destruction
before which the French Revolution would seem child’s play. This may have
been unfair to the German metaphysicians, yet Heine’s central idea seems to
me valid: in a debased form, the Nazi ideology did have roots in German
anti-Enlightenment thought. There are men who will kill and maim with a
tranquil conscience under the influence of the words and writings of some of
those who are certain that they know perfection can be reached.
Let me explain. If you are truly convinced that there is some solution to
all human problems, that one can conceive an ideal society which men can
reach if only they do what is necessary to attain it, then you and your
followers must believe that no price can be too high to pay in order to open
the gates of such a paradise. Only the stupid and malevolent will resist
once certain simple truths are put to them. Those who resist must be
persuaded; if they cannot be persuaded, laws must be passed to restrain
them; if that does not work, then coercion, if need be violence, will
inevitably have to be used-if necessary, terror, slaughter. Lenin believed
this after reading Das Kapital, and consistently taught that if a just,
peaceful, happy, free, virtuous society could be created by the means he
advocated, then the end justified any methods that needed to be used,
literally any.
The root conviction which underlies this is that the central questions of
human life, individual or social, have one true answer which can be
discovered. It can and must be implemented, and those who have found it are
the leaders whose word is law. The idea that to all genuine questions there
can be only one true answer is a very old philosophical notion. The great
Athenian philosophers, Jews and Christians, the thinkers of the Renaissance
and the Paris of Louis XIV, the French radical reformers of the eighteenth
century, the revolutionaries of the nineteenth-however much they differed
about what the answer was or how to discover it (and bloody wars were fought
over this)-were all convinced that they knew the answer, and that only human
vice and stupidity could obstruct its realization.
This is the idea of which I spoke, and what I wish to tell you is that it is
false. Not only because the solutions given by different schools of social
thought differ, and none can be demonstrated by rational methods-but for an
even deeper reason. The central values by which most men have lived, in a
great many lands at a great many times-these values, almost if not entirely
universal, are not always harmonious with each other. Some are, some are
not. Men have always craved for liberty, security, equality, happiness,
justice, knowledge, and so on. But complete liberty is not compatible with
complete equality-if men were wholly free, the wolves would be free to eat
the sheep. Perfect equality means that human liberties must be restrained so
that the ablest and the most gifted are not permitted to advance beyond
those who would inevitably lose if there were competition. Security, and
indeed freedoms, cannot be preserved if freedom to subvert them is
permitted. Indeed, not everyone seeks security or peace, otherwise some
would not have sought glory in battle or in dangerous sports.
Justice has always been a human ideal, but it is not fully compatible with
mercy. Creative imagination and spontaneity, splendid in themselves, cannot
be fully reconciled with the need for planning, organization, careful and
responsible calculation. Knowledge, the pursuit of truth-the noblest of
aims-cannot be fully reconciled with the happiness or the freedom that men
desire, for even if I know that I have some incurable disease this will not
make me happier or freer. I must always choose: between peace and
excitement, or knowledge and blissful ignorance. And so on.
So what is to be done to restrain the champions, sometimes very fanatical,
of one or other of these values, each of whom tends to trample upon the
rest, as the great tyrants of the twentieth century have trampled on the
life, liberty, and human rights of millions because their eyes were fixed
upon some ultimate golden future?
I am afraid I have no dramatic answer to offer: only that if these ultimate
human values by which we live are to be pursued, then compromises,
trade-offs, arrangements have to be made if the worst is not to happen. So
much liberty for so much equality, so much individual self-expression for so
much security, so much justice for so much compassion. My point is that some
values clash: the ends pursued by human beings are all generated by our
common nature, but their pursuit has to be to some degree controlled-liberty
and the pursuit of happiness, I repeat, may not be fully compatible with
each other, nor are liberty, equality, and fraternity.
So we must weigh and measure, bargain, compromise, and prevent the crushing
of one form of life by its rivals. I know only too well that this is not a
flag under which idealistic and enthusiastic young men and women may wish to
march-it seems too tame, too reasonable, too bourgeois, it does not engage
the generous emotions. But you must believe me, one cannot have everything
one wants-not only in practice, but even in theory. The denial of this, the
search for a single, overarching ideal because it is the one and only true
one for humanity, invariably leads to coercion. And then to destruction,
blood-eggs are broken, but the omelette is not in sight, there is only an
infinite number of eggs, human lives, ready for the breaking. And in the end
the passionate idealists forget the omelette, and just go on breaking eggs.
I am glad to note that toward the end of my long life some realization of
this is beginning to dawn. Rationality, tolerance, rare enough in human
history, are not despised. Liberal democracy, despite everything, despite
the greatest modern scourge of fanatical, fundamentalist nationalism, is
spreading. Great tyrannies are in ruins, or will be-even in China the day is
not too distant. I am glad that you to whom I speak will see the
twenty-first century, which I feel sure can be only a better time for
mankind than my terrible century has been. I congratulate you on your good
fortune; I regret that I shall not see this brighter future, which I am
convinced is coming. With all the gloom that I have been spreading, I am
glad to end on an optimistic note. There really are good reasons to think
that it is justified.
C The Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust 2014
From: Baghdasarian
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/oct/23/message-21st-century/