Isaiah Berlin and the Collision of Values

“Collisions of values are of the essence of what they are and what we are…the world in which what we see as incompatible values are not in conflict is a world altogether beyond our ken; …it is on earth that we live, and it is here that we must believe and act.”

-- Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity

Although his name will long be philosophically synonymous with his famous essay “Two Concepts of Liberty”, (Such is the sad fate of those who coin schemas.) it is to be hoped that Isaiah Berlin will someday be equally remembered as one of the twentieth century’s most eloquent defenders of pluralism in the modern world. Like Arendt, Berlin had an unflinching conviction that the vibrancy and survival of the human world depended the simple fact that we must share it with others, and his writings on the Romantics and the political essays collected in The Crooked Timber of Humanity are without question some of the most extraordinary defenses of the beauty and necessity of difference in the English language. As few could in his generation, the great historian held no illusions about the conflict and misery that these “collisions of values” brought, and he brooked none from others. Still, as he puts it in “The Tragedy of Modernity”, it could not be otherwise, nor would we want it to be, even though “in this way tragedy enters into life as part of its essence, not as something which can be resolved by rational adjustment: to hope to eliminate it is merely to cheat oneself, to be superficial, to avert one's eye from the truth; and this is to betray one's integrity, the most heinous sin of all - deliberate moral suicide”. To live in a world with others who are truly different than ourselves, different in ways that confront us and that we ourselves confront, for Berlin is the breath of life made into the wind of history.

As the situation in Israel-Palestine has once again veered from tragedy to calamity and back again, however, those of us who agree in even the broadest strokes with Berlin find ourselves confronted with the limits of Berlin’s observations as a political creed rather than a simple truism. We are and should be unable to escape from treating it as a mere abstraction or principle. The difficulty is that although Berlin could speak of societies that necessarily contain clashing “hierarchies of values” and describe the stuff of politics as the negotiation of the incommensurabilities in those hierarchies, conflicts like these remind us that these “values” are not tables of desires suitably ranked in neat Maslowian fashion. These values are the anxieties of homes threatened or burned; the pains of hunger that keep sleep away; deeply loved lands that must be shared, and cannot; and needs for solace from grief that is nearly impossible to meet in any circumstance, let alone in war when new grief knocks. When Berlin calls these the irreconcilables of politics, he means it literally and with all of the strife that words cannot convey: that these collisions both come from and create those things to which we truly cannot reconcile ourselves, which cannot be persuaded away, and with which we must learn to live.

Politics always demands the question of what is to be done, but the incommensurate is exactly that. How many times and in how many tongues has the intractability of this conflict been lamented, this conflict which might be one of the purest (though hardly the only) visible incarnations of this problem in the world? Michael Kenny recently gave voice to a frequent lament about Berlin’s vision of this problem: “the mismatch between the grandeur of his moral understanding and the banality of some of his political prescription is rather striking.” Berlin was, in the end, a kind of tragedian Liberal. While he always reiterated that there was a “public obligation… to avoid extremes of suffering”, he saw the protection of basic rights and liberties as the best that could be managed in a world in which “the glory and dignity of man consist in the fact that it is he who chooses, and is not chosen for”. That is all to the right, perhaps, within the politics of a stable nation, but as a political response to violently conflicting values, it fails at precisely the moment when it is most needed: when a conflict has transcended the values that can be contained in rights, when the play of negotiating those rights in peace-making has broken down, and when rage and grief and fear begin to leave only unacceptable options on the political table.

Perhaps, though, this is not a failing of Berlin’s vision but of our vision of politics. Maybe it is merely the realization that as desperately as we might want otherwise, there is a finite number of political answers to the question “what is to be done”. In an age in which we have come to thoroughly internalize the reality that the personal is political (even as we protest it), that suggestion grinds against our belief that something must be done, and to do something is to act, and to act is to demand political change of things with which we cannot reconcile ourselves. Of course, Berlin writes…that is politics. And that is what makes up the collision of values to begin with. Collisions do not change their nature – and this collision must change its nature, few would disagree – by being lamented, condemned, or merely contained. They change only in the sometimes painfully slow process of the value systems themselves changing, a process which too often – perhaps, tragically, usually – comes at atrocious cost. But that war, which looks not at all like what we know as a war and is instead fought in living rooms between members of different generations, is where the war is won or lost.

[caption id="attachment_14027" align="alignleft" width="317"] Isaiah Berlin[/caption]

In the political world, lines must be drawn and their violation condemned. Our commitment to having an ethical relationship to politics demands it. But Berlin recognized that it is ultimately our moral selves that must travel beyond the drawing of necessary lines, that have to traverse the boundary between what we can countenance as acceptable and what we must understand in others. It is only in that process, moving beyond the realm of the acceptable (without losing sight of it) to the space of understanding – and Arendt and Berlin shared this idea – that the hope of changing collisions lies. Politics can be used to contain politics, but it cannot save itself. Its deepest vulnerability is not the unacceptable, but the incomprehensible, and it is that impulse, to incomprehension, that must be fought when lines are being drawn. It is always partisans who invoke the incomprehensibility of their opponents’ actions. Incomprehensibility always authorizes. And bloody conflicts like this will always stretch our comprehension. I will readily confess that there have been actions on both sides this month I find truly incomprehensible, and every one of our understandings does and must have a limit, but that is precisely where our capacities must not break, as the plea for political rights so often does. A future that is better than the collision we face lies only in the realm between what we deem acceptable and what we understand, between the right and the world. Only those who will brave that realm can hope to carry it into the political.

-- Ian Storey