The Meaning of Recognition (54 page)

Since it was Berlin’s, we have a right to ask how well he did it. The first answer has to be that he did it very well. Though a worthy assemblage of his more heavyweight efforts,
The
Proper Study of Mankind
is a bit misleading about how delightful he could be; and as so often happens with writers on serious topics, it is when he is at his most entertaining that he is most
informative. He didn’t really write all that brilliantly. Most of his prose pieces were transcripts of his talk boiled down from draft to draft, which is not the same process as the
ab
initio
concentration necessary to yield a cogently nuanced text that reads like speech. He himself called his talk ‘an avalanche’, and he seems to have had little gift for the
aphorism. That might have been one of the secrets for his continuing success at glamorous dinner tables. With his salon-wise wife Aline to manage his diary, he went on dining out until he had to be
carried. Dr Johnson, in his own old age, told Boswell that he wasn’t much invited anymore, because his unanswerable sallies silenced the table. Berlin was careful not to make the company feel
stupid. On the night I saw him in action, he engaged in a tremendous competition with the political journalist Frank Johnson to name and evoke, with sound effects, every second-rate opera in the
world. They were at each other like Joe Louis and Jersey Joe Walcott, to hilarious effect: titled ladies were spitting pheasant. At his best, he could get the same sparkling treasure into his
writings. To take just one compilation,
Against the Current:
there is wealth of incidental truth in it. ‘Benjamin Disraeli, Karl Marx and the Search for Identity’ is the ideal
introduction to both men and makes you wonder how they would have got on. (Not very well, probably: we learn that Marx called Lassalle ‘the Jewish nigger’.) ‘The
“
Naïveté
” of Verdi’ is a classic restatement of Schiller’s principle of the difference between the naïve and the sentimental: saturated with
Berlin’s infectious love of music, it should be on the first-year course of every student in the country. Best of all, there is the essay about Montesquieu, which comes in handy when we try
to give the second answer.

The second answer had to be that he missed a lot out, and some of it has proved to be of lasting importance. Here we should remember Burckhardt’s principle. Berlin was already getting old
before it started to emerge that totalitarianism had been so poisonous that the collapse or reform of the governments that imposed it would be no guarantee of its disappearance. If the first thing
we now see about Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Maoist China and the other totalitarian states is their irrationality, it could be because of the growing evidence that totalitarianism can live
without a state, and even without having a new state in mind. In that respect, even Saddam Hussein was obsolete, because he was a student of Stalin. Osama Bin Laden doesn’t need to be a
student of anybody except Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, the
Brigati Rossi
, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez (usually glorified as ‘Carlos’) and whichever Japanese terrorists attacked
the El Al desk at foreign airports because they had no Jews of their own. Irrationality, we can now see, is a force in itself, and scarcely in need of a brain. Already there is not just an
equivalence, but a blend, between the Islamism that condemns the Western liberal democracies and the international pseudo-left intelligentsia that condemns them as well. The anti-Semitic arguments
of those Muslim groups – whether terrorist organizations or, less openly, states – who think Israel can be made to disappear are only just crazier than the pseudo-left arguments
proclaiming America’s responsibility for every injustice in the world. In fact the Arab arguments might even be more sane: the Palestinians can scarcely have a parallel state while suicide
attacks against Israel continue, but sacrificing the Palestinians has always suited the Arab nations, and meanwhile Israel, under that degree of pressure, can be relied upon to go on gravitating
towards an extremism of its own; although what the Arabs expect the Israelis to do with their atomic bombs should the point arrive when Israel caves in is difficult to judge.

We can be certain, however, that the performance of the Western intelligentsia has never been worse. Before the collapse of the Warsaw Pact regimes, the intelligentsia was merely deluded. After
the collapse of the World Trade Center, it has gone haywire. Essentially a branch of the home entertainment industry, the left intelligentsia circulates, almost entirely for its own consumption,
opinions even more contemptuous of ordinary people than used to prevail on the right. At least Kissinger, when he gave the green light for the toppling of Allende and the hideous events that
predictably followed, could be reasonably sure that Chile’s standard of living would go up. When fashionable intellectuals pour scorn on Iraq’s provisional government as American
stooges, they effectively ally themselves with the fanatics who would like to kill its every minister, with special treatment for the women. As Abba Eban once suggested, a consensus is an opinion
shared by people who wouldn’t dare to hold it individually. Loathe their own societies as they might – and there is plenty to loathe, even for those of us who realize that a free nation
is bound to be full of things we don’t like – even the most uninformed Western intellectuals are smart enough to see individually that President Bush didn’t order the attack on
the Twin Towers: if he had, the Golden Gate bridge would have fallen down instead. But collectively they are ready to agree that it doesn’t matter what lies are told as long as a greater
political truth is being served. They are unfazed when it is pointed out that the same assumption was a point of agreement between Hitler and Stalin. The totalitarian attitude to the truth, with
history being rewritten not just retroactively but as it happens, has become standard. This could be an instance of decay through inheritance. Studying the institutionalized opportunism of states
ruled by unalleviated mendacity, a previous generation of students caught the bug. In their separate death throes – spasmodically sudden in the case of the Third Reich, gruesomely prolonged
in the case of the USSR – the totalitarian powers were dying patients who infected the doctors: a clear case of the original virus being sucked up into the syringe. The antibiotics have
become toxic, like Harry Lime’s penicillin. Measuring their virulence, we get a good idea of how lethal the disease was that they were originally employed to cure.

But we can’t ask philosophers to predict events. What we can ask of them is that they should illuminate realities. The big reality that Berlin did not illuminate was the force of evil. His
original background among the analytical philosophers, none of whom liked abstractions, may have stuck to him even after he broke away. Wittgenstein, by whose linguistic scrupulosity Berlin was
buffaloed, said nothing about the Nazi assault on the Jews until it was all over. He had to see the photographs of the liberated death camps before he finally realized that the Nazis had meant what
they said: a late and hard way to find out that death really is an event in life. For most of the philosophers, evil was a word: too large a one, and thus lacking in specificity. But evil is a
reality, as Berlin’s fellow philosopher Stuart Hampshire discovered. Hampshire didn’t reason his way to that conclusion. He arrived at it emotionally, when he interrogated Kaltenbrunner
at Nuremberg. Wedded to ideas, Berlin missed the opportunity to develop his political theories from his feelings. His love of music might have given him the hint. Quality is art’s equivalent
for the truth: Aron said that. Berlin didn’t, but he felt it. When it came to great music, Berlin was alive to the composer’s all-comprehending tragic sense that made it great.

When it came to history, he had the tragic sense, but somehow he never got it into his writings. It went the way of his grandfathers, into a mental realm where threatening facts are received but
not attended to, like brown envelopes from the Council piling up on the hall table. There are prose writers, stretching from Thucydides and Tacitus onward, whose plain language gives us the thrill
of poetry because they can face the full rage of chaos and still use its power to reinforce their sense of order. The passage in Tacitus about Sejanus’ daughter is an uncanny forecast of the
girl who gave her age to the German sergeant of engineers at Babi Yar. What Tacitus says would drive us to despair if it had not driven him to a perfect sentence. There is a gravitas beyond
eloquence. Montaigne is often like that. From more modern times, Burckhardt is invariably like that, even when going wild about the arts. (As Berlin did, Burkhardt loved Verdi – after the
premiere of
Aida
he had to calm himself down with beer – but he could give you the same lift when he talked about Torquemada.) From Berlin’s own time, we can read Golo
Mann’s essays and the section of his
Deutsche Geschichte
dealing with the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich; we can read the book reviews Lewis Namier wrote after the war, when the
German generals were cranking out the autobiographies that proved they had known Hitler was a madman even though they had known nothing about what he did; we can read the paragraphs that
sympathetically but decisively discredit Georg Lukács in the third volume of Leszek Kolakowski’s
Main Currents of Marxism
; we can read the chapter of Benedetto Croce’s
Storia d’Europa nel secolo decimonono
that devastatingly analysed the Soviet Union as early as 1931; we can read Abba Eban’s
Personal Witness
, a diplomatic memoir that
leaves Metternich’s sounding simple-minded; we can read a lot of prose like that and get the same thrill. Not always sprightly but always dense with implication, it is the unmistakable and
addictive music made by those who have felt on their own skins, even if only as a flash of heat from the far horizon, the full destructive power of human history and are still wedded to making
sense of it. Berlin could hear it in his beloved Herzen. He could not, however, quite produce it himself, and it might well be because he couldn’t let thought give way to feeling. But feeling
is thought’s wellspring. The clue was staring him in the face, in his essay about Montesquieu.

What the great humanists have, and learn to overcome, is an apprehension that humanity might be worthless. Berlin lacked that apprehension, and it would be quixotic to regret it. It might have
eroded his gusto, which is one of his most lavish gifts to us. Nobody who ever heard his booming burble in the lecture hall as he delivered an unbroken hour-long extravaganza from notes written on
a tram ticket will ever forget his incarnation of benevolent mental energy. An invention from the ground up, like the Wolfson College he created in his later years, he was part of the landscape.
But he paid the sure penalty for being in the swim. As a theoretician, his chief concerns were not the threats to democracy from without, but the conflicts within. Most of what he said about those
was bound to become unremarkable. His celebrated distinction between positive and negative liberty is now the common debating point between and within all the main political parties. Every parent
knows that you restrict liberty if you ban smacking. Every child knows that you increase it. There is nothing thought provoking about the dichotomy because there is nothing except the dichotomy.
The same applies to his celebrated pluralism. In a free society, what else is there? Dangerously, he left in the air the question of whether good ends could be reconciled. The missing answer left
the way open for the suggestion, recently popularized by Donald Rumsfeld, that some ends might have to be pursued by bad means: a tempting idea that Berlin got from Machiavelli.

But it is only an idea. Its refutation was formulated by Montesquieu. Berlin’s essay on Montesquieu is a good candidate for the most resonant piece he ever wrote about anything, but even
then he stopped short conceptually of the conclusions he was on the point of reaching by instinct. He gives a detailed account of how Montesquieu’s pluralism valued all cultures; and then a
further account of how Montesquieu, seeing the danger, wanted to leave room for some cultures being more valuable than others; but he made comparatively little of the device by which Montesquieu
furthered the concept of an absolute morality that would apply even in the world of relative values that he had done so much to celebrate. Yet the device was right there in Montesquieu’s
prose, and Berlin actually quoted it. ‘Justice is eternal, and doesn’t depend at all on human conventions.’ Berlin thought Montesquieu had merely deepened his problem by saying
that there could be universal laws in a relative world. But Montesquieu wasn’t saying that there were universal laws instinctive to all men. He was saying that there were eternal laws
instinctive to some of them. Montesquieu argued that it didn’t matter who says torture might be necessary: our better nature, if we have one, tells us it is wrong. He was, in other words, a
good man by instinct. The implication is that there were good men among the first men, and bad men too. If Berlin had faced the likelihood that his own goodness, like the evil of Stalin and Hitler,
stemmed from a time when there was no idea in mankind’s head except where the next meal was coming from and how to kill it, he might have been better equipped to deal with modern malevolence
in its full horrific force. There was an Isaiah Berlin in the cave. He just had less to talk about at dinner, and the food was terrible.

TLS
, 3 September 2004

Postscript

After this piece appeared, the correspondence columns of the
TLS
were predictably bombarded by professional philosophers who seemed annoyed that an amateur had strayed
on to their turf. I could summarize their letters, but perhaps their opinions are more digestibly evoked by the collective reply that I sent to the editor in the hope of seeing them off. Apparently
it worked.