I have always felt uncomfortable about people who are surrounded by a Van Allen belt of admirers. I suspect that this may go back to my school days and my loathing of sports hearties — those stars adored by boys and masters alike because of their abilities and feats on the playing field. “Oh Jones! That goal you scored on Saturday was absolutely super. Can I warm the seat for you before you use the bogs?”
I suspect that if you start digging, you will find that my feeling does not reflect too well on me and that much is a consequence of sour grapes because I was absolutely hopeless when it came to any activity involving an inflated piece of animal skin. However, be this as it may, the feeling certainly slopped over into my religious life. It is long since I have been a Christian, but way back then when I was I always felt a bit queasy about the Son of God. All of those disciples rather put me off. It’s all a bit unfair in a way because to the best of my knowledge Jesus never played center forward for Nazareth United or was first up to bat for the Israelites against the Philistines.
The feeling has also influenced my life as an academic. I just cannot stand people who attract groupies. As a professional philosopher I suppose I ought to be sucking up to Wittgenstein like everyone else, but I have never been able to. I am sure his thinking has influenced me, through such people as the late Stephen Toulmin and the equally late Thomas Kuhn. But never one on one. I am simply repelled by all of those adoring believers who took down every word he said and have spent long lifetimes transcribing and expounding and explaining. How many times have I sat through papers that began: “As Wittgenstein says, Tractatus, 1, 13, ii, ….”
I don’t think my feeling is entirely irrational. The trouble with people who attract this kind of cult following is that it is very difficult to get good critical discussion of what they say. I have always felt this very much about Karl Popper, who was another with his set of fanatical admirers. At one level I have a real admiration for Popper. I think he stood for Enlightenment values and although I think falsifiabilty as a criterion of demarcation between science and nonscience to be overrated, I agree that science is the highest form of knowledge and that one can and should separate it off from things like religion. Many years ago I was an expert witness for the ACLU in a court case in Arkansas, where we were trying to show the unconstitutionality of a law mandating the teaching of Creationism in the schools. As the philosopher in the case, trying to argue for a real difference between science and religion, I found Popper’s thinking on these matters to be very helpful and inspiring.
But oh those dreadful people with whom he surrounded himself! Ever ready to listen to the master and always fast to correct the misunderstandings. Popper never had to make his own case! I still remember making some critical comments about Popper’s views on psychoanalytic theory — not that I am very keen on the stuff but if you are going to knock it then do it properly. At once a rather beefy Englishman, who I believe later became a Labour Member of Parliament, sprang to his feet, book open, and jumped all over me. “Karl never said that and I have the text to prove it.” All a bit like the fundamentalist who, when you have made some remark about the God of the Old Testament being a bit of an ethnic cleanser, jumps up and exclaims: “But in Leviticus, 15, 42,” or wherever, “God explicitly says that he hates homosexuals more than anyone.” It is conveniently forgotten that Popper a hundred times elsewhere put the boot into Freud, as it is conveniently forgotten that a hundred times elsewhere Jehovah puts the boot into foreigners rather than gays.
Before very long, you just don’t want to argue about these things. If you cannot have a good discussion about criteria of demarcation and like things without it rapidly becoming a moral issue — if it is always implied that you are deliberately slighting one of the world’s true geniuses — then just drop it. And that is a pity because there are interesting issues at stake. These days I feel a bit the same way about Richard Dawkins, another person with a bit of a Messiah complex. As soon as I say anything, one of the faithful jumps to his defense. The best was when I was asked to contribute to his Festschrift and even across the Atlantic one could hear the shrill cries of pain from some very nice young female editor when she saw the first effort that I presented for inclusion. I might say that my final version was very different. I have said elsewhere that I have great admiration for Dawkins, but I just can’t get on with people who know that they are right and that everyone else needs to acknowledge this fact. (I suppose that Jesus does have a bit of an excuse on this score.)
Which brings me to the case of Isaiah Berlin, the Russian-born, English-residing historian of ideas whose essays and letters and so forth are being published nonstop and neverendingly by devoted followers. Over the years I have read a great deal by Berlin. Indeed, in the very first philosophy course I ever took back in 1960, one of the required texts was his essay on Tolstoy and the division of people between hedgehogs (who have one big idea that they pursue nonstop) and foxes (who skip from idea to idea). I feel that I have learned from Berlin’s writings and more importantly, I feel very sympathetic to his decision to be a historian of ideas rather than a straight analytic philosopher. His example has encouraged me to do likewise, tracing themes through the years, showing how they are relevant to the present. My best work has been of this nature.
But I cannot stomach the boosters. The most recent eruption is in the latest New York Review of Books. The English author A. N. Wilson has written (last summer in the Times Literary Supplement) a highly critical review of the new installment of the collected (or rather selected) letters, suggesting that basically Berlin was a pretty second-rate scholar and not a very nice man to boot. To Berlin’s defense in the NYRB spring two of the devoted, including a distinguished New York Times columnist, saying that Berlin was indeed a great chap, that he never wrote a major book is not to be held against him, and that when he said lousy things behind their backs about people with whom he pretended to be friends that was OK. These people deserved what they got and in any case Berlin was so superior that his speaking (or rather, dictating letters at very great length into a Dictaphone) in this way was excusable. Only a cad like Wilson could be so mean to such a lovely bloke as Sir Isaiah.
Well I never met Berlin so I cannot say what sort of chap he was. But I will say with Wilson that although he strikes me as good, he fails as a major scholar. There is not the tremendous hard work and the synthetic imagination that I associate with the best. Clever essays are all very well, but in the end that is all they are. Clever essays. I know only too well that, important though the essay form may be, it is too easy to pull out before the going gets tough. It is only in the big work that big themes can unfold and be explored. And that is missing.
Isaiah Berlin I suspect devoted his time and talents to his followers — conversation, good living in fancy Oxford colleges to which he could invite the chosen and apparently monstrous amounts of letter writing. That was his choice and it obviously paid off in wide circle of devotees. But I will say that although I will surely go on reading Berlin’s essays on occasion, I shall be very careful about saying anything in print. It is just not worth the bother. As it is, I suspect that this post will bring upon me the charge of anti-Semitism (as it has done all over the Internet against Wilson) for being mean to Sir Isaiah. So in the future, I will stay with the folks whose egos and acolytes don’t demand the constant praise and adoration. As I said above, my attitude probably tells you as much about me as about anyone else. But I cannot help feeling that people like Berlin (and Popper and Dawkins) lose out in the end. They don’t get the tough-minded criticism that fertilizes the best scholarship.
7 Responses to Isaiah Berlin and His Groupies
dank48 - February 15, 2010 at 9:47 am
Excellent piece imo. It’s interesting how some people–in whatever field of endeavor–seem to be surrounded by boosters, supporters, ditto-heads, hangers-on, members of an entourage or clique or posse, and others don’t. Stars sometimes are surrounded by planets, moons, and other such debris, which shine only because they reflect the light given off by the stars. And Ruse has put his finger right on the problem: the insulation from the hurly burly world, where someone might actually disagree with the great one, is not healthy, especially for the star. But it seems to be seductive. And as Ruse points out, people who think they know they’re right can sometimes be mistaken, and there are subjects about which reasonable people can in fact disagree. Of course, if one is always right in one’s own mind, it’s easy to overlook the fact that one’s mind is not the only one. And that human need to bend the knee to someone or something will find a way to worship, whether the object of veneration likes it or not. The acolytes love a good auto da fe, if only to point up how they themselves are truly orthodox, unlike the benighted heretic.Ruse will probably get called anti-semitic for failing to bow to Berlin, and there’s probably someone dippy enough to call him anti-scientific for pointing out imperfections in the thought of Popper and Dawkins as well.
suomynona - February 15, 2010 at 11:34 am
Here, here, Prof. Ruse! And have I mentioned that I’m a devotee of your Brainstorm oeuvre? Spot on, spot on!But seriously, the cult of personality is a tricky one. I have a similar reaction to Paul de Man, another one who seems to have plenty of books written about him but didn’t write a book of his own. I imagine it gets even trickier when your field involves calling up the problems with mistaking popularity for truth, as with Dawkins’ religious following.
dawgyo - February 15, 2010 at 11:42 am
Mike, I loved your totally irrelevant asides about Jesus–hilarious! I’m looking forward to your next piece about inappropriate faculty – student liaisons and your sneaking in some comments about Muhammad’s (SAAW) pedophilia–lol! Such remarks will also help you ward off those accusations of anti-Semitism due to your Isaiah Berlin piece. Keep tweaking those silly Christians (and co-religionists)!
11159995 - February 15, 2010 at 11:54 am
I think the generalization about “clever essays” goes too far. I haven’t read enough of Berlin’s writing to defend him on this score, but I would argue that an influential thinker like Albert O. Hirschman has done his best work in the form of what might be called an extended essay (think of his work on “exit, voice, and loyalty” and on “the passions and the interests”). And to go back to an earlier era, what about writers like Montaigne? There is something to be said for pearls of wisdom imparted in sparkling gems of writing that are brief and to the point.—Sandy Thatcher
nbirn21 - February 15, 2010 at 12:09 pm
Perhaps I can contribute modestly to the discussion, but I do suffer from a grave drawback: I wqas a colleague of Karl Popper at the London School of Economics from 1953 to 1959 and of Sir Iaiah Berlin at Oxford from 1959 until 1966 and may not be as freely iaginative in what I write as others owing to the constraints of experience. I did not know Professor Popper well, and getting to know him at all would have been difficult. I was teaching in sociology and he was convinced that the sociologists were in league to keep students away from his lectures. He was indeed surrounded by acolytes, and i recall an occasion on which I had invited to lunch at the LSE my friend Charles Taylor, then at Oxford, who had written in Universities and left Review a critique of Popper’s “methodological individualism.” One of his assistants reproached me for offending good taste by inviting to the faculty lunch room a critic of our eminent colleague. In fact, the entire LSE faculty was aware of the eccentricities of our colleague and of his disciples, and took it as the price we had to pay to have in our midst an interesting and stimulating thinker. The British did not expect perfection of human nature, and continentals especially were expecteds to provide a bit of color to the prevailing grayness of life in southern England.As for immunity from criticism by others in the social sciences and philosophy, Popper had none. I did know Berlin quite well and indeed he was a sponsor of my appointment to Nuffield College and we worked together on the introduction of sociology to the curriculum in the Politicsa, Philosophy, Economics degree. About his proclivity to gossip, a certain unsteadiness in his relations to others, no one had any illusions. Equally, all or most appreciated his great desire to become a major figure on the British and internatioal scene. That he did, and it was because of his immense talents, wit and insight. Again it is nonsense to suggest that his views were not criticised. I recall a seminar on the Marxist concept of alienation I co-taught with a colleague in philosophy (Iris Murdoch). Upon learning of our intention to offer it, Berlin declared that he knew it was aimed at his ideas and that he would come and defend himself–which he did, to everyone’s profit and pleasure. His general views of human nature and history werecontested daily at Oxford and everywhere else in the UK by colleagues who did not accept his version of liberalism or reading of the modern age. Finally, I’d suggest that Professor Muse has a rather limited view of what amounts to a contribution to academic life and humanistic culture, generally–a major work subjected to criticism in the scholarly journals. There are more things under heaven and earth than dreamed of by this Horatio.Finally, as to Berlin’s character, no one at Oxford or elsewhere in the UK at the time supposed that saintliness was a common human trait and it was agreed that most persons had their own fusions or assemblages of very positive and very negative traits. Having Berlin around seemed worth putting up with things that on balance, had to be allowed for. C’est la vie meme.
nbirn21 - February 15, 2010 at 2:05 pm
First an apology to Professor Ruse for terming him Professor Muse but I trust that he will agree that it wasn’t an offensive mistake. Secondly, a friend called to suggest that I identify myself and I am glad to do so—Norman Birnbaum, University Professor Emeritus at Georgetown U Law Center, not entirely distant from last century’s arguments about freedom, its limits and nature….come to think of it, the argument is continuing…
jhough1 - February 15, 2010 at 4:52 pm
I never met Berlin, but read a great deal of what he wrote, including most recently his reports on American politics from a post in the British embassy in World War II. I generally found myself agreeing with him, but he always seemed so conventional that I never could understand why he ranked so high. When I was at University of Toronto, I had colleagues who were extraordinarily knowledgeable and insightful, but seemed to thinkthat it was almost improper to put this in print and hence wrote little that was original or insightful. Perhaps Berlin was that way, for everyone who met him found him witty and insightful and saw him playing a very useful role in political debates in British academia. People define the role they want to play as scholars, and clearly Berlin was very good at the useful role he chose.