The Meaning of Recognition

by Clive James

  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, li
ke 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.

  Sir,

  In his reaction to my piece about Isaiah Berlin, David Boll (10 September) attributes to me a belief that I do not hold. I am not one of the ‘promoters of evil as the universal explanation’. I merely believe that a conception of evil is necessary, or else there will be explanations that are doomed to be inadequate. Perhaps (as Dan Jacobson has reminded me in a private letter) I should not have left it open to be inferred that I think Hitler and Stalin had nothing at all going on in their heads. I think they had plenty. But I also think that their ideas, such as they were, were held in order to further their proclivities, which had the primacy. As for Mr Boll’s assumption that I have no ‘worries over American policy’, would that it were true. If only for their triumphs in Abu Ghraib, I would like to see George W. Bush deposed from office and Donald Rumsfeld made a subject for study in a mental institution. Will that do? But this is not an argument about what I think; it’s an argument about what Berlin thought, or anyway about what he said. From that viewpoint, Mr Boll’s apparent belief that Berlin had no obligation to write in detail about totalitarian atrocities reveals a strange set of assumptions about what an historian of ideas might be called upon to account for. ‘He wrote on plenty of other matters, besides which he made it plain enough what he thought of the horrors.’ Yes, but he didn’t actually say much.

  Tim Congdon (17 September) assures us that Berlin did actually say a lot, in the case of the Soviet Union. But when I called Berlin’s book about Marx a one-off, I had hoped to make it clear that the book was unique in the context of his pre-war activities. His detailed writings about the Soviet Union came after the war, as I said. I don’t see how Mr Congdon could have misread me on that point in any way except wilfully, but perhaps I should try harder with my prose next time. It is hard to see, however, that any degree of effort on my part could have staved off Mr Congdon’s ability to find ‘deeply offensive’ my account of the fate of the Jewish refugees who were shut out of Palestine. I can think of other subjects that I have been flippant about in my time, but not that one. This might be the moment, however, to repeat my opinion that anti-Semitism is a disaster for the just cause of the Palestinians in claiming their own state, because the suicide bombings can only deliver Israel into the hands of its own fanatics. Why Berlin said so little in support of the Peace Now dissidents is a question at the heart of the mystery I was trying to crack open. Michael Ignatieff tells us that Berlin was guilty about his silence on the point, but doesn’t a true philosopher turn his internal conflicts into a subject?

  It could be said that Berlin was not trying to be a philosopher. Those of us who believe, however, that he made his exit from formal philosophy in order to say more about the world are bound to wonder about those occasions on which he seemed to be struck dumb. After all, he was free to speak, untrammelled by the kind of analytical concentration on language that leaves it with no subject beyond itself. That can be a valuable subject, of course, but meanwhile the world is left waiting. Joseph Gonda (17 September) brings his expertise as a professional philosopher to bear on my use of the word ‘instinct’, saying that it ‘explains too much and thereby too little’. But the word ‘instinct’ explains a reasonable amount when you oppose it to the word ‘idea’. It means something you’ve got, not something you thought of. Since we will always need the conception of an innate disposition antecedent to reason, it is hard to see that the word ‘instinct’ can ever be ‘as conceptually dodoesque as phlogiston’. (Wittgenstein, who seldom mixed a metaphor, must be wondering what went wrong up here.) Phlogiston was never dodoesque: i.e. it was never alive. It was a wrong theory that became scientifically superseded. Whatever some philosophers might think, words do not become scientifically superseded. Mr Gonda’s accusation that I was perverting Montesquieu might well be right, but his attendant complaint (‘it is no accident that James does not quote or refer to Montesquieu’s writings while doing so’) is a bit steep. Berlin, in his essay on Montesquieu to which I was referring the reader, does quite a lot of quoting, including the sentence from Lettres Persanes that I translated: ‘La justice est éternelle, et ne dépend point des conventions humaines’. But if Mr Gonda wants to hear Montesquieu quoted directly by me, let me give him a sentence from De l’esprit des lois, Chapter XVII. After conceding that the practice of torture might suit despotic governments, and that it was normal for the Greeks and Romans to torture slaves, he trails off with an ellipsis before saying this: ‘Mais j’entends la voix de la nature qui crie contre moi.’ Now what could he have meant by that?

  Stephen Pain (17 September) can’t imagine how much I would be pleased if it were thought that I had ‘descended to the Dame Edna level of criticism’. That great lady has enviable powers of analysis, especially when it comes to skewering the kind of stuffed shirt who thinks Australians are funny when they try to use hard words. But the major point of his letter is by far the bigger insult, because it depends on an almost inspired distortion of the argument I was most careful to ma
ke. ‘I do dislike,’ he writes, ‘this awful form of ethnocentricism that insists if a person is Jewish then they must have something to say about the Holocaust.’ But I didn’t say that he should have said something because he was Jewish. I said that he should have said something because he was a thinker about history, which was on fire all around him, yet for some reason he preferred to talk about how the house had been built, at the very moment when it was burning down.

  Dan Jacobson’s private letter was, of course, the one that mattered. When you have a genuine case, it can never really be overstated, but there is always a temptation to understate the possible objections. Hitler and Stalin regarded themselves as monuments of the intellect, and were so regarded by their followers: so it was foolish of me to allow the suggestion that their actions might have been unaccompanied by mental activity. Mein Kampf amounted to a consistent, if not reasoned, presentation of a case, and was unreadable only in the sense of being repellent. There were intellectuals outside Germany – most conspicuously Harold Nicolson – who read it and not only saw what Hitler was on about, but guessed what he might do. And Stalin’s Short Course, which he supervised even if he did not write it, marks the culmination of a Marxist-Leninist tradition, even if it also marks its final descent into sclerosis. But I hold to the conclusion that it was their desire for a certain kind of action that made them think that way in the first place. A stronger objection to that conclusion – an objection which none of the philosophers made, strangely enough – would have been to say that Mao Zedong began by trying to put his principles into action through comparatively benevolent means. He became murderous only later on. When he did, he became more murderous than anybody, but the objection remains. In his case I wouldn’t pretend to have an answer to it. Philip Short, in his excellent biography of Mao, doesn’t have an answer either. I suppose one possible explanation is that the idea of dealing with an opposing view by killing everyone who holds it, or even might hold it, can enter the head at any time. Nor does the person so inspired necessarily have to be in charge of a state. Tacitus, talking about Tiberius, gave us everything we need to know about what the despot can do if the mood takes him. The despotic actions adduced by Tacitus were repeated with depressing regularity all the way down to Pol Pot. But the characteristic genocide of more recent times – one thinks, or tries not to think, of Rwanda and Darfur – is a different matter. Now we must deal, or fail to deal, with genocide instead of a state, with mass killing as a mode of being; and the focal field of study for that might be in modern terrorism, which, for all but sentimentalists who think there can be no irrationality without a reason, so clearly raises the question of whether someone might not want to perpetrate an evil for its own sake, and even against his own nominated political interests.