BOOKS
Mr. Berlin's Anti-Determinism
By HENRY FAIRLIE MR. ISAIAH BERLIN has one of the most remarkable styles among contemporary writers in ideas. It is both the child and the father of his method of argument. For those who are not familiar with it. here is a passage from his recent (and now published) lecture on historical inevit- ability.* He is describing the attitudes of those who believe.
in some form or another, in an objective 'march of history' : The process may be thought of as being in time and space or beyond them; as being cyclical or spiral or rectilinear, or as occurring in the form of a peculiar zig-zag movement sometimes called dialectical; as continuous and uniform, or irregular, broken by sudden leaps to 'new levels'; as due to the changing forms of one single 'force,' or of conflicting elements locked (as in some ancient myth) in an eternal Pyrrhic struggle; as the history of one deity or 'force' or 'principle,' or of several; as being destined to end well or badly; as holding out to human beings the prospect of eternal beatitude; oi eternal damnation, or of both in turn, or of neither.
This, it should be added, is not, like some other passages !, his lecture, a parody of his style; it is Mr. Berlin at his best.
It is a rhetorical style; the style of a polemicist; and it consists in one favourite trick, as it rests on one favourite mark of punctuation. The trick is to link together, by a series of semi- colons, a procession of related ideas, in such a way that the reader notices only their affinity and does not stop—who can arrest the flow of Mr. Berlin's words?—to question whether there is any reason why they should be associated with each other. Mr. Berlin argues—it is a traditional platform habit—by association. You believe in this; therefore, you must believe in that; and that; and this again; and that; until you have been argued into a position which bears no recognisable relationshir to your original assumptions. Mr. Berlin at one point refer delightfully to 'those enjoyable games of patience which Pro- fessor Arnold Toynbee plays with the past and future of man- kind.' His own game is consequences.
This method of argpment is particularly important in this ledture—the first Auguste Comte Memorial Trust lecture, given at the London School of Economics—because it is Mr. Berlin's object to lump together as many different theories as possible under the single title of determinism. After one portmanteau of a sentence, in which he bundles together all who believe in 'patterns, plans, purposes, ideals, thoughts in the mind of a rational Deity or Universal Reason, goals, aesthetic, self- fulfilling wholes, metaphysical rationales, theological other- worldly justifications, theodicies . . he concludes that all 'these theories are, in one sense or another, forms of deter- minism, whether they be teleological, metaphysical, mechan- istic, aesthetic, or scientific.'
The purpose of this exercise is to condemn them all because what 'all forms of genuine determinism' entail is.'the elimina- tion of the notion of human responsibility.' Mr. Berlin is passionately indignant at those who deny 'the reality of human choices'; who believe that to explain is to justify; that whatever Is, Is necessary and inevitable. There is something majestic
* Historical loci itabIllty. By Isaiah Berlin. (O.U.P., 6s.)
about his denunciation of those 'who, in this way, seek relief from moral responsibility : Our sense of guilt and of sin, our pangs of remorse and self- condemnation, are automatically dissolved; the tension, the fear of failure and frustration disappear as we become aware of the elements of a larger 'organic whole,' of which we are variously described as limbs or members, or reflections, or emanations, or finite expressions; our sense of freedom and independence, our belief in an area, however circumscribed, in which we can choose to act as we wish, falls from us; in its place we are provided with a sense of membership in an ordered system, each with a unique position, sacred to him alone. We are soldiers in an army, and we no longer suffer the pains and penalties of solitude; the army is on the march, our goals are set for us, not chosen by us; doubts are stilled by authority.
The time, as Mr. Berlin well knows, could not be more ripe for an assault on all those who 'tend to make us accept whatever happens as irresistible and foolhardy to oppose.' He may say little new in condemning them, but he says it with an intellectual edge and vigour which makes it well worth reading.
Mr. Berlin, then, wishes us to make moral judgements. But from what assumptions or attitudes are those judgements to come? How is it possible to blame an action as bad or praise it AS good unless that action can be related to some accepted idea of what the purpose of human action should be? Yet Mr. Berlin precludes himself—and would preclude the rest of us—from finding some sanction for our moral judgements by protesting as vehemently against Christians and all others who assume that there is some purpose in the world as against the more blatant forms of determinism. His argument by association, his pretence that there is more than a superficial affinity between the teleology of the Christian and the determinism of Hegel or Marx or Spengler, leads him to the impossible position where, anxious though he is to make moral judgements, he cap offer rio basis for them.
His misunderstanding of the Christian position is startlingly revealed in his parody of the'views of Burke. It is easy to recog- nise Burke, even if Mr. Berlin had not actually mentioned him. as one of those who belieVe that 'we cannot resist the central currents, for they are much stronger than we, we can only tack, only trim to the winds and avoid collisions with the great fixed institutions of our world, its physical and biological laws, and the great human establishments with their roots deep in the past—the empires, the churches, the settled beliefs and habits of mankind.' even if it is an over-simplification. But it is wholly untenable to argue that Burke ever drew from this, or a like, position, the conclusion : 'Let us then be tolerant and charitable and understanding, and avoid the folly of accusation and counter-accusation, which will expose us to the laughter and pity of later generations.' Did Burke never call heaven as well as earth to oppose the monstrous evils of the French Revolu- tion? Was there, indeed, ever a political thinker who was readier to use his religious beliefs as a basis of moral judgements?
Between those who believe that 'everything has a purpose, although our minds may be too feeble or distraught to discover in any given case what this purpose is,' and those who believe in a transcendent 'reality,' between these two and those social scientists who believe that it is possible to discover stable laws of human behaviour, there is, as Mr. Berlin claims, an obvious affinity. It may even be that their attitudes grow in fact from 'one of the deepest of human desires . . . to find a unitary pattern in which the whole of experience, past, present and future, actual, possible and unfulfilled, is symmetrically ordered.' But the quality of their attitudes differs fundamentally from one to the other, and in the light of the fact that the idea of individual responsibility owes more to Christianity than to any other body or belief or thought, it seems churlish as well as a little stupid for Mr. Berlin to deny it for the sake of finding a unitary pattern in which hit own ideas may be symmetrically ordered.
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