Ideas, Ideals and Compromises

When one is young, one is convinced of the black and white’ness of many topics. We start off intending to be the way Angela Davis described:

“I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.”

Then we graduate, enter the “real world” and our attitude towards those topics changes. Sometimes it’s because we realize the difficulty of changing anything At others, it’s because we understand what André Gide described thus:

“The colour of truth is grey.”

Ok, nothing new so far.

And then I read Isaiah Berlin’s perspective on the evils of the 20^th century (Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot etc). Berlin’s take on why these deeds happened? He accepts the contribution of the usual suspects (“fear, greed, tribal hatreds, jealousy, love of power”) but feels the major contributor was:

“They have been caused, in our time, by ideas; or rather, by one particular idea. It is paradoxical that Karl Marx, who played down the importance of ideas in comparison with impersonal social and economic forces, should, by his writings, have caused the transformation of the twentieth century, both in the direction of what he wanted and, by reaction, against it.”

To complicate matters, says Berlin, the central tenets of most people “are not always harmonious with each other”. As an example, he cites equality and liberty:

“Complete liberty is not compatible with complete equality—if men were wholly free, the wolves would be free to (figuratively) eat the sheep. Perfect equality means that human liberties must be restrained so that the ablest and the most gifted are not permitted to advance beyond those who would inevitably lose if there were competition.”

In the movie Inception, Leonardo di Caprio talked about the power of an idea:

“Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it's almost impossible to eradicate.”

Berlin extends di Caprio’s point to its logical and tragic consequence:

“If you are truly convinced that there is some solution to all human problems, that one can conceive an ideal society which men can reach if only they do what is necessary to attain it, then you and your followers must believe that no price can be too high to pay in order to open the gates of such a paradise. Only the stupid and malevolent will resist once certain simple truths are put to them. Those who resist must be persuaded; if they cannot be persuaded, laws must be passed to restrain them; if that does not work, then coercion, if need be violence, will inevitably have to be used—if necessary, terror, slaughter.”

So what’s the solution then? Berlin’s answer:

“Compromises, trade-offs, arrangements have to be made if the worst is not to happen. So much liberty for so much equality, so much individual self-expression for so much security, so much justice for so much compassion.”

Berlin realizes this is a tough ask:

“I know only too well that this is not a flag under which idealistic and enthusiastic young men and women may wish to march—it seems too tame, too reasonable, too bourgeois, it does not engage the generous emotions…(But) The denial of this, the search for a single, overarching ideal because it is the one and only true one for humanity, invariably leads to coercion. And then to destruction, blood—eggs are broken, but the omelette is not in sight, there is only an infinite number of eggs, human lives, ready for the breaking.”

The reason Berlin’s essay hit me so hard was that it made me realize that compromises are not something to be made grudgingly. Rather, they need to be made because no one ideal is necessarily right; and pursuing any ideal single-mindedly will cause a reaction, even violence and bloodshed.