Tag Archives: Isaiah Berlin

Preserving the right to defend ourselves against our enemies

Posted on by
Reply

On November 25, 1994 Isaiah Berlin was given an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws at the University of Toronto for which he prepared what he called a “short credo”. Read it all. It is about is protecting ourselves from the enemies of our civilisation and the kinds of things we may need to do. Some of these enemies possess the potential to wield immense power in combination with a conviction that they are not only irrefutably right but that this certainty gives them the right to do whatever it takes to prevail. So far as they are concerned, the future of mankind is dependent on understanding whatever it is they believe. They will therefore do whatever it takes to make their own views ascendant. Recognise the type? Any current examples around? Free and unfettered speech for them and those who sympathise?

Here is part of what Isaiah Berlin had to say at the end of a long life thinking about these and other similar questions. He was thinking about a European menace that had come with The Enlightenment (so-called) which led to many a totalitarian ideology. Today it is a more ancient enemy of free thought that is the problem. And to tell the truth, with ISIS and its offshoots, it is hard to see that they are trying to do me or anyone else any good. Berlin may thus be even farther away from explaining the nature of the problem we face than he could have known. I don’t quite see the benefit to the people whose heads they cut off nor to anyone else. This is part of what Berlin wrote:

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.

Nothing about our current marauders reminds me in any way of people who are looking for “a just, peaceful, happy, free, virtuous society”. They merely look like the return of Tamerlane and Genghis Khan. The overlay of bringing any kind of virtue to the world is not credible. They could not possibly even believe it themselves. That our own crew of leftist misfits and psychopaths give them cover is part of what Berlin was originally referring to when his thoughts only ranged as far as Lenin and Pol Pot. ISIS is a different world. So what should be done? How are we to protect ourselves from such evil? Here’s his advice:

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.

We are able to talk to each other because we are, for the most part, bourgeoise and therefore prone to compromise while recognising the need to trade off parts of one desired outcome for others which compete and get in the way of each other. This is the world we live in, will always live in. There are people who would impose their wills on us if they could and literally by the sword and armed might. If you think you can compromise with such savagery you are wrong. They must be fought every inch of the way. Speaking for myself, I will not put our civilisation, my civilisation, at supreme risk to preserve some individual principle such as the right to say whatever I want whenever I want no matter what harm it may do to myself, my family, my friends, my country and my way of life. Berlin thought he saw a better world coming but he hadn’t seen what we have.

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.

Well if such a future is coming, it is not coming yet. In the meantime, we must do what we can to preserve this way of life that if snuffed out as so many wish to do will not soon return. It is up to us, we who are alive today, to defend the freedoms we inherited, which, as always, requires us to balance each of our rights against others of our rights to preserve what we have. If our enemies prevail, no one will be talking about preserving our rights for a very long time to come.

John Stuart Mill on the role of the state in the prevention of harm to others

Posted on by
Reply

This is John Stuart Mill on the basic principle of a free society found in his On Liberty:

“The object of this Essay is to assert one very simple principle, as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties, or the moral coercion of public opinion. That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.” [My bolding]

I have an article at Quadrant Online on The Right and Will to Defend Ourselves. What do I think of the state taking strong measures to protect us from the harm that others wish to do. I am all for it. There is no single simple overriding principle that is the final arbiter in what actions a state may take to protect me from the harm others wish to do. Here is Isaiah Berlin, whom I quote in the article, discussing the same thing:

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.

Berlin not only understood Mill perfectly well, that would be where he would have found his own principle first stated. Minority opinion is one thing which must be protected to the ends of the earth; the call to murder one’s fellow citizens is quite another thing altogether.

He was right to be wrong

Posted on by
Reply

An interesting article by Walter Lacquer on Isaiah Berlin versus Isaac Deutscher titled, Better to be Wrong than Right? For some intellectuals, it all depends. I read both when I was much younger but of the two I can only think I have been influenced by Isaiah Berlin. The article ends like the title itself with a paraphrase of something Arthur Koestler wrote in one of his books about some Stalinist who believed, given the circumstances of the 1930s, that while it was wrong to have supported Stalin he had been right to be wrong. This is how it is put by Lacquer:

As the leftist French journalist Jean Daniel once put it: better to be wrong with Jean-Paul Sartre than right with Raymond Aron. Sartre might have been consistently wrong in his political judgment and his intellectual opponent Aron almost always right. But Sartre, like Deutscher, was pro-Soviet during the cold war while Aron, like Isaiah Berlin, was pro-American (and also, like Berlin, pro-Israel). And that settled the matter.

This is how reputations quite often develop in the world of ideas, and how they endure—an interesting issue itself, and certainly one in need of further investigation.

If you’re on the left, your reputation is impregnable. There is no need of investigation. There are almost no major leftists of the past whose names are mud. Not Stalin, not Mao although maybe Pol Pot who simply gets ignored except by people like me. That is just how it is and will remain.