APLICACIÓN DEL BIG DATA

Like for so many of his generation, the great wars and ideological storms of the twentieth century shaped Berlin’s political and moral views in a profound way. What began as seemingly benign intentions – national solidarity, ‘true progress’, and ‘real liberty’ – ended disturbingly often in total war and genocide (cf. Berlin 1990:1-19; 2002:53-93). The cynical interpretation of our recent history, not entirely bereft of empirical support, claims therefore that we are almost always on the move from one catastrophe to the next. We have little hope of ever escaping the self-destructive pattern set out by our built-in inability to rise above self-interest or undue attachments to a particular ideology or a particular group of people. At the same time, the twentieth century was also the site of real and lasting human progress, and no time has ever seen more people being lifted out of poverty, slavery, and hopelessness.

An underlying motive behind a great deal of Berlin’s political thought is the wish to expose the faults and shortcomings of the theories and great expectations that led to catastrophe, and which continues to do so, but also at the same time to inspire politicians and others to make wise choices for the future. Instead of fashioning detailed visions of what a perfect society might look like and what we need to sacrifice in order to get there, we should instead concentrate our best efforts around making the here and now a better place, so that we can leave the world in a better state than when we became parts of it.

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His scepticism of Utopianism comes from his interpretations of human history. Here, Berlin contends that once the attainment of a perfect state of affairs is made a goal for political action, one has already embarked on a psychologically ‘slippery slope’ which will very easily lead to an instrumentalisation of all other possible considerations. When the perfect society is presented as being within humanity’s reach, people will, according to Berlin, do things they otherwise would not even contemplate: “For if one really believes that such a solution is possible, then surely no cost would be too high to obtain it: to make mankind just and happy and creative and harmonious for ever – what could be too high a price to pay for that?” (Berlin 1990:15)

A second reason behind his rejection of Utopianism is more theoretical, and originates in his pluralism. If conflicts between fundamental moral values are of a permanent nature, then perfection in human affairs becomes an incoherent notion; we might well enough choose other values than the ones we normally decide to pursue, but it is impossible to realise all values at the same time. “We are doomed to choose, and every choice may entail an irreparable loss” (Berlin 1990:13):

No society can include within itself all forms of life. We may indeed lament the limited space, as it were, of social worlds, and of ours in particular; and we may regret some of the inevitable effects of our culture and social structure. As Berlin has long maintained (it is one of his fundamental themes), there is no social world without loss: that is, no social world that does not exclude some ways of life that realize in special ways certain fundamental values. (Rawls 1993:197)

Berlin stood for a balanced interpretation of Enlightenment values (Jahanbegloo 1992).

While he acknowledged the validity of these values, and indeed the necessity of upholding them in order to create a more decent society, he also recognised that these values have previously been distorted in such a way that the calls for them ended in totalitarianism and mass violence. Berlin was indeed committed to such values as rationality, liberty, and

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equality, but he also warned against a total devotion to only one or a few of these ideals, or to base one’s political actions on a fraudulent or fallacious conception of these values.

There is on this view nothing wrong with the underlying values that have inspired such atrocious regimes as those of the Jacobins or the communists. On the level of abstract values, they are both genuine heirs to the Enlightenment (cf. e.g. Brinton 1928; Berlin 2004).

The problem with these regimes lies not, therefore, in the values they claim to embody, but rather in how they conceptualise these values, what they are willing to sacrifice in order to achieve their goals, and in their analyses of what it takes to realise their ultimate intentions.

These distorted variants of ‘the Enlightenment project’ are in Berlin’s works repudiated because they are willing to sacrifice too much of some of the things that one ought to value, in order to achieve bliss on other scores in some distant and vaguely specified future.

When Berlin wrote about thinkers like Marx, Helvétius or Saint-Simon, his rejection of the idea that human misery now best ought to be compensated for in a future Eden is at its most passionate (Berlin 1996; 2002a). Berlin tempers, therefore, his commitment to Enlightenment values with an admiration for the historical sensitivity and embryonic value pluralism of ‘Counter-Enlightenment’ thinkers such as Vico and Herder (Berlin 1979:1-25;

2000a). He does not, however, adopt their approval of unexamined traditions, and so remains committed to the diffusion of freedom, equality, and human enlightenment, no matter how uncomfortable these ideals must seem at first (Berlin 1978:1-11; 2002:36-52).

Berlin sometimes used the epithet of ‘liberalism’ to describe his own political views.

Berlin’s version of liberalism is, however, strongly characterised by his pluralism. Berlin’s liberalism is an attempt to balance, always provisionally and often precariously, between competing ends (Galipeau 1994). Among these ends one finds equality, justice, generosity, and common decency – in addition to liberty, both positively and negatively understood.

Such balancing acts, whose aim it is to establish and maintain what Berlin describes as an

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‘uneasy equilibrium’, are always limited in scope, limited to a particular society or to a particular policy area, because the peculiarities of a given situation will always influence which decisions one ought to make. The proper aim of political theory is therefore not to provide us with a detailed plan for ideal societies, but instead to try to solve, by way of careful analysis of various ideas and concepts, some of the dilemmas which beset the political issues and problems we are faced with in a given situation.

Towards the end of his essay Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century, published in 1950, he describes one such central balancing act between ends internal to his left-leaning liberalism, namely that between securing an adequate measure of individual liberty, as well as a decent standard of living for everyone. But even if the problem is common to a lot of situations, he characteristically calls upon the contemporaneous experiences of totalitarianism and global war which characterised ‘the age’ in which he wrote:

The dilemma is logically insoluble: we cannot sacrifice either freedom or the organisation needed for its defence or a minimum standard of welfare. The way out must therefore lie in some logically untidy, flexible and even ambiguous compromise. Every situation calls for its own specific policy, since ‘out of the crooked timber of humanity’, as Kant once remarked, ‘no straight thing was ever made’. What the age calls for is not (as we are so often told) more faith, or stronger leadership, or more scientific organisation. (…) What is required is a less mechanical, less fanatical application of general principles, however rational or righteous, a more cautious and less arrogantly self-confident application of accepted, scientifically tested, general solutions to unexamined individual cases. The wicked Talleyrand’s

‘Surtout, Messieurs, point de zèle’ can be more humane than the demand for uniformity of the virtuous Robespierre, and a salutary brake upon too much control of men’s lives in an age of social planning and technology. We must submit to authority not because it is infallible, but only for strictly and openly utilitarian reasons, as a necessary expedient. (Berlin 2002:92)

To sum up, it might be said that Berlin speaks of a liberalism which is sensitive to the uniqueness of the various political problems it strives to supply with solutions. It is a cautious and tentative, but above all an irredeemably moderate form of liberalism which does not seek ultimate solutions but provisional compromises instead. This is perhaps most

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directly expressed in his essay on Zionist Politics in Wartime Washington: “I was, and remain, an incurably sceptical liberal, a convinced gradualist” (Berlin 2004a:667).

As a political theorist, Berlin strove always to be informed by historical knowledge and practical experience, even though he left room open for more principled discussions. His liberalism was not only moderate and tempered by the belief that ultimate values conflict. It was also a work in constant progress, flexible enough to absorb the shocks of unexpected upheavals, and impressionistic enough to accommodate the various and often changing social and political circumstances which often determine whether a piece of political reform is ultimately successful or not. He was perhaps not a systematic political thinker, but that only makes his political thought more interesting and, in the end, more politically relevant.