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...