Given the fanatical tendencies of some on this List and their tendency to
lace their rhetoric with baseless prejudice, especially in instances where
individuals hold dissenting and critical views, i'm forwarding this brilliant
apercu on prejudice by Isaiah Berlin, written to an undisclosed friend and
only recently published by the New York Review of Books.
Hamjatta Kanteh
**************************************
1.
Few things have done more harm than the belief on the part of individuals or
groups (or tribes or states or nations or churches) that he or she or they
are in sole possession of the truth: especially about how to live, what to be
& do—& that those who differ from them are not merely mistaken, but wicked or
mad: & need restraining or suppressing. It is a terrible and dangerous
arrogance to believe that you alone are right: have a magical eye which sees
the truth: & that others cannot be right if they disagree.
This makes one certain that there is one goal & one only for one's nation or
church or the whole of humanity, & that it is worth any amount of suffering
(particularly on the part of other people) if only the goal is
attained—"through an ocean of blood to the Kingdom of Love" (or something
like this) said Robespierre<A HREF="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/#fn3">[3]</A>: & Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, & I daresay leaders
in the religious wars of Christian v. Moslem or Catholics v. Protestants
sincerely believed this: the belief that there is one & only one true answer
to the central questions which have agonized mankind & that one has it
oneself—or one's leader has it—was responsible for the oceans of blood: but
no Kingdom of Love sprang from it—or could: there are many ways of living,
believing, behaving: mere knowledge provided by history, anthropology,
literature, art, law makes clear that the differences of cultures &
characters are as deep as the similarities (which make men human) & that we
are none the poorer for this rich variety: knowledge of it opens the windows
of the mind (and soul) and makes people wiser, nicer, & more civilized:
absence of it breeds irrational prejudice, hatreds, ghastly extermination of
heretics and those who are different: if the two great wars plus Hitler's
genocides haven't taught us that, we are incurable.
The most valuable—or one of the most valuable—elements in the British
tradition is precisely the relative freedom from political, racial, religious
fanaticism & monomania. Compromising with people with whom you don't
sympathize or altogether understand is indispensable to any decent soci-ety:
nothing is more destructive than a happy sense of one's own—or one's
nation's—infallibility, which lets you destroy others with a quiet conscience
because you are doing God's (e.g. the Spanish Inquisition or the Ayatollas)
or the superior race's (e.g. Hitler) or History's (e.g. Lenin–Stalin) work.
The only cure is understanding how other societies—in space or time— live:
and that it is possible to lead lives different from one's own, & yet to be
fully human, worthy of love, respect or at least curiosity. Jesus, Socrates,
John Hus of Bohemia, the great chemist Lavoisier, socialists and liberals (as
well as conservatives) in Russia, Jews in Germany, all perished at the hands
of "infallible" ideologues: intuitive certainty is no substitute for
carefully tested empirical knowledge based on observation and experiment and
free discussion between men: the first people totalitarians destroy or
silence are men of ideas & free minds.
2.
Another source of avoidable conflict is stereotypes. Tribes hate neighbouring
tribes by whom they feel threatened, & then rationalize their fears by
representing them as wicked or inferior, or absurd or despicable in some way.
Yet these stereotypes alter sometimes quite rapidly. Take the nineteenth
century alone: in, say, 1840 the French are thought of as swashbuckling,
gallant, immoral, militarized, men with curly moustachios, dangerous to
women, likely to invade England in revenge for Waterloo; & the Germans are
beer drinking, rather ludicrous provincials, musical, full of misty
metaphysics, harmless but somewhat absurd. By 1871 the Germans are Uhlans
storming through France, invited by the terrible Bismarck—terrifying Prussian
militarists filled with national pride etc. France is a poor, crushed,
civilized land, in need of protection from all good men, lest its art &
literature are crushed underheel by the terrible invaders.
The Russians in the nineteenth century are crushed serfs, darkly brooding
semi-religious Slav mystics who write deep novels, a huge horde of cossacks
loyal to the Tsar, who sing beautifully. In our times all this has
dramatically altered: crushed population, yes, but technology, tanks, godless
materialism, crusade against capitalism, etc. The English are ruthless
imperialists lording it over fuzzy wuzzies, looking down their long noses at
the rest of the world—& then impoverished, liberal, decent welfare state
beneficiaries in need of allies. And so on. All these stereotypes are
substitutes for real knowledge—which is never of anything so simple or
permanent as a particular generalized image of foreigners—and are stimuli to
national self satisfaction & disdain of other nations. It is a prop to
nationalism.
3.
Nationalism—which everybody in the nineteenth century thought was ebbing—is
the strongest & most dangerous force at large to-day. It is usually the
product of a wound inflicted by one nation on the pride or territory of
another: if Louis XIV had not attacked & devastated the Germans, & humiliated
them for years—the Sun King whose state gave laws to everybody, in politics,
warfare, art, philosophy, science—then the Germans would not, perhaps, have
become quite so aggressive by, say, the early nineteenth century when they
became fiercely nationalistic against Napoleon. If the Russians, similarly,
had not been treated as a barbarous mass by the West in the nineteenth
century, or the Chinese had not been humiliated by opium wars or general
exploitation, neither would have fallen so easily to a doctrine which
promised they would inherit the earth after they had, with the help of
historic forces which none may stop, crushed all the capitalist unbelievers.
If the Indians had not been patronized, etc., etc.
Conquest, enslavement of peoples, imperialism etc are not fed just by greed
or desire for glory, but have to justify themselves to themselves by some
central idea: French as the only true culture; the white man's burden;
communism: & the stereotypes of others as inferior or wicked. Only knowledge,
carefully acquired & not by short cuts, can dispel this: even that won't
dispel human aggressiveness or dislike for the dissimilar (in skin, culture,
religion) by itself: still, education in history, anthropology, law
(especially if they are "comparative" & not just of one's own country as they
usually are) helps.
Notes<A HREF="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/#fnr1">[1]</A> History of Western Philosophy (Simon and Schuster, 1945), p. 226.
<A HREF="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/#fnr2">[2]</A> For example, in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford University Press, 1969),
p. 135.
<A HREF="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/#fnr3">[3]</A> Berlin may be referring to the passage where Robespierre writes that "en
scellant notre ouvrage de notre sang, nous puissons voir au moins briller
l'aurore de la félicité universelle" ("by sealing our work with our blood, we
may see at least the bright dawn of universal happiness"). Rapport sur les
principes de morale politique qui doivent guider la Convention nationale dans
l'administration intérieure de la République [Paris, 1794], p. 4.
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