August 25, 2006: Another Lesson from Isaiah Berlin

It looks like it is again necessary to revisit what Isaiah Berlin had tried to say in his study of the history of ideas. This time the occasion is a comment about the current situation in the Middle East that appeared on The Blotter, a Web site maintained by ABC News. The comment was posted by Adrian Reyes. Here are the first three sentences:

It's a good thing that Gaza, Iraq, Iran, the West Bank, Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, and Hezbollah have nothing to do with each other. Once again, terrorists are bad people. They can not be reasoned with and want nothing more than the destruction of Israel and the collapse of the West.

Now I have found the comments on this site to be a bit more reasoned than those I have encountered elsewhere (which may be either damning with faint praise or feinting with damned praise); but, given my interests in text analysis, I was fascinated with the way in which the third of these sentences appears to refute the first! Perhaps that is why so many (all?) attempts at discourse about the Middle East seem to come to an impasse. What Gaza, Iraq, Iran, the West Bank, Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, and Hezbollah have to do with each other is a shared animosity towards the state of Israel, which they perceive as a colonial imposition of Western values on Islamic cultures. If we do not recognize that this is, at the very least, a point of view that needs to be tested by validity claims (in the spirit of Jürgen Habermas' noble, if idealistic, attempts to characterize the processes by which differing parties can arrive at a mutual understanding), then the bloodshed will continue and, in the language of another comment on The Blotter, enough will never be enough! More than ever we need to honor the teachings of Isaiah Berlin, who passionately (if verbosely) argued that the "Western intellectual tradition" was not the only source of ideas or values. As John Gray put it in a recent review, "In opposition to this view Berlin maintained that conflicts of values are real and inescapable, with some of them having no satisfactory solution. He advanced this view not as a form of skepticism but as a universal truth: conflicts of value go with being human." If Berlin never prescribed how, as humans, we could live with these conflicts of value, then Habermas has tried to pick up that gauntlet; and we should all put our best efforts towards translating his idealistic theories into practices for a better world.