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PDF FormatThe second reason: He was not a pluralist. If he had been, he would have understood that nationalism (as long as it does not descend into chauvinism) is essentially pluralistic, since it advances particular identities. Giuseppe Mazzini—the shining example of nineteenth-century European nationalism—wanted to help all nationalist movements, not only the Italian national movement. And that is the nationalist attitude at its best. The English nationalist does not want the Japanese to be more English. He wants a world in which there is Zen Buddhism and Haiku, martial arts, and Noh theater—and he wants to have something to give to the Japanese. He will have nothing to offer if he is not English.
The close link between nationalism and pluralism is the philosophy of Herder in a nutshell. Berlin admired Herder, but not for the right reasons. Herder, who coined the expression “spirit of the people” (volksgeist), was a national pluralist, and Berlin invented a Herder who was not a nationalist: Ostensibly a pluralist but in fact a liberal.53 Just as he created the Romanticists in his own image, Berlin created Herder in his own image; Romanticism and nationalism did not appear to him as opinions but as reflections of his opinion. Worse, according to his own doctrine, it was actually up to him to preserve the link between nationalism and pluralism, because nationalism, in his conception, was born from Romanticism, and Romanticism, in his conception, championed pluralism. In other words, precisely because of his two basic premises (nationalism is Romantic, and Romanticism is pluralistic) he should have reached the conclusion that nationalism and pluralism are closely linked. This is what he would have concluded, had he been a pluralist.
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A thinker who writes about other thinkers rather than expressing his own worldview explicitly is likely to be considered a pluralist. Berlin’s writings evoked, as mentioned, a sense of roaming widely among currents of ideas, and so the hedgehog passed himself off as a fox. How successful the illusion was can be ascertained by reading the praise typically heaped on Berlin and the criticism typically leveled against him. First, the praise. “Isaiah Berlin’s essays in the history of ideas are not written from a point of view,” Roger Hausheer wrote in the introduction to one of the anthologies of Berlin’s essays. “They are not intended directly to illustrate or support (or for that matter attack or undermine) any single historical or political theory, doctrine or ideology… they are wholly exploratory and undogmatic.… Less, perhaps, than any other thinker does Berlin suppose himself in possession of some simple truth, and then proceed to interpret and rearrange the world in the light of it.”54 As for the criticism: “I cannot perceive any solid logical or philosophical ground in his work for exonerating him from the charge of relativism,” Norman Podhoretz wrote two years after Berlin’s death.55
This is the conventional image that is attached to Berlin by adherents and critics alike. The man lectured and wrote, so it would seem, not “from a point of view” but with a bird’s-eye view, and therefore you won’t find any tendentious interpretation in him of the history of Western thought. This absence of tendentiousness is sometimes attributed to him as a virtue (as Hausheer would have it) and at other times as a vice (as Podhoretz claims). Yet his objective, Olympian view that admirers and detractors of Berlin ascribed to him was only an affect.
Let us ignore the affect and deal with the content. Was Berlin’s philosophical argument, as is normally thought, a pluralistic one? In an interview he gave in 1988, Berlin summarized what he regarded as a pluralistic outlook: “One can choose one life or the other, but not both; and there is no over-arching criterion to determine the right choice; one chooses as one chooses, neither life can objectively be called superior to the other.”56 This leads to the practical, political conclusion: “Room must be made for a life in which some values may turn out to be incompatible, so that if destructive conflict is to be avoided compromises have to be effected, and a minimum degree of toleration, however reluctant, becomes indispensable.”57
We would appear to be faced with a multicultural argument concerning the pluralistic recognition of the validity of different ways of life. But when Berlin elaborates his argument, it turns out that he means something different: “I believe, in other words, that some of the ultimate values by which men live cannot be reconciled or combined…. You cannot combine full liberty with full equality… Justice and mercy, knowledge and happiness can collide,” and therefore “the idea of a perfect solution of human problems—of how to live, cannot be coherently conceived…. Utopian solutions are in principle incoherent and unimaginable… so there have to be choices. Choices can be very painful. If you choose A, you are distressed to lose B. There is no avoiding choices between ultimate human values…. All fanatical belief in the possibility of a final solution, no matter how reached, cannot but lead to suffering, misery, blood, terrible oppression.”58
In other words, Berlin is not speaking about a clash of systems of values (or cultures), but about a clash of values within each system, within each culture. All normative systems contain, according to him, absolute values that are mutually exclusive—values such that the choice of one of them is an unavoidable impingement on another. The choice between absolute and incompatible values must be made, but it is not a choice that can be explained according to any system of values. In fact, every choice of one value at the expense of another value in the same system makes the system irrelevant. For, according to Berlin, one is not likely—indeed one is not able—to apply any particular value system but only to apply a few values that do not constitute a system and are not derived from any one system.
If you choose, for example, the value of equality at the expense of liberty, this does not mean that you have chosen a socialistic value system; you have chosen only one socialist value, not other socialist values, like the sanctification of technological progress or of productive labor. And if you choose, let’s suppose, the value of mercy at the expense of justice, this does not mean that you have chosen Christianity; the value you chose is incidentally Christian; you did not choose it because it is a Christian value, but because you also, like the Christians, subscribe to it. As a value system, Christianity is foreign to us. You may not believe in Christ, and Christian value terms such as “grace,” “guilt,” “absolution,” and the heavenly or hellish “hereafter” may mean nothing to you. So you are for equality, but not socialism, and you are for mercy, but not Christianity. You have made for yourself, as Tolstoy did, a private, homemade ethos. Tolstoy was a Christian who did not go to church, a socialist who opposed technological progress, and a Buddhist who did not practice Buddhist meditation. He chose values, not value systems—and so, in Berlin’s opinion, should you.
Therefore, Berlin does not accept the validity of any particular value system. He only recognizes individual moral decisions based on a private voice of conscience. This is an eclectic ethos, not a pluralistic ethos, since pluralism demands recognition of the validity of competing value systems.
Had he been a pluralist, Berlin would have said something like this: Christianity offers us a religious ethic, whereas Buddhism and socialism offer us an atheistic ethic. Christianity and Buddhism offer us redemption of the individual soul, whereas socialism offers us social redemption. Christianity and socialism developed in the West, whereas Buddhism developed in the East. Well, even though I am an atheist, I recognize the independent validity of religions, therefore I recognize the independent validity of the Christian ethic; even though I am an individualist, I recognize the independent validity of collective theories of redemption, and therefore recognize the independent validity of the socialist ethic; and even though I am a Westerner, I recognize the independent validity of eastern cultures, therefore I recognize the independent validity of the Buddhist ethic. I do not agree with any of these three value systems, but I will defend their right to exist because cultural, religious, and political diversity—the diversity itself—is my ethos.
But Berlin does not accept the independent validity of value systems. He accepts, as noted, only the validity of values that float in a moral space, devoid of context, and subject to the choice of private conscience. The ethical man, in Berlin’s doctrine, is a man exempt from cultural, religious, and political pluralism, since he is not required to accept the independent value and justification of value systems.
