In Our Time - War in the 20th Century

Episode Date: October 15, 1998

In the first programme of a new series examining ideas and events which have shaped thinking in philosophy, religion, science and the arts, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss warfare and human rights in the 20th century. He talks to Michael Ignatieff about the life of one of the 20th century’s leading philosophers, Isaiah Berlin, and to Sir Michael Howard about the 20th century will be remembered; as a century of progress or as one of the most murderous in history. When we see pictures on television of starving people in war torn areas most of us feel we must ‘do’ something. Where does the feeling that we are in some way responsible for our fellow human beings originate historically? How has technology affected the concept of the Just War? And what are the prospects for world peace as we enter the next century? With Michael Ignatieff, writer, broadcaster and biographer of Isaiah Berlin; Sir Michael Howard, formerly Regius Professor of History, Oxford University and joint editor of the new Oxford History of the Twentieth Century.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello and welcome to a new series of programmes in which I hope we'll be looking at some of the ideas and events which have influenced the century.

My guest today are the writer and broadcaster Michael Ignatyev, whose most recent book was called The Warrior's Honour and whose biography of Isaiah Berlin, the philosopher, is published this month. And Sir Michael Howard, formerly Regis Professor of History at Oxford, whose joint editor of the new Oxford History of the 20th century. Michael Ignatyev, Isaiah Berlin, often used the image of the fox who knows many things, and the hedgehog who knows one big thing, an image taken from the Greek poet Archilochus. You said that in his 40s, Isaiah Berlin discovered the big thing that he believed in, and he then pursued it in his political philosophy. What was that big thing?

Well, he always thought of himself as a fox, that is, who ran around, who darted, who alluded pursuit, who knew many things. In his 40s, I think as a result of going to Moscow, meeting the poet Akhmatova, seeing how Russian intellectuals were being persecuted, Steele entered into him, and he saw that he was a committed Western liberal who loathed Soviet tyranny. And the one big thing he knew was the defense of liberty against that kind of utopia, that kind of totalitarian tyranny. And then further, that the liberty that he believed in was the liberty of allowing people a chance to make choices, free choices, but choices where you could never be certain that you were right, and therefore the choices that you would make would always involve some kind of loss. that's the kind of central vision.

That's the hedgehog core of what he came to defend for the rest of his life. Because as you're saying in your book, he was a fox in his habits. It was lunch in Washington and dinner in Jerusalem and the opera in London

and chatting with people in all souls in Oxford. It was that life. But this idea became central, the theme of freedom and its betrayal in a way, wasn't it? Why do you think his ideas

were thought to be important outside the context of political philosophy? And do you think they have really important? They've gravitas. They mean something to people today. The people actually act on them.

He's a liberal philosopher. And there are all kinds of liberalisms out there. They're liberalisms that are apologists for the free market. They're liberalisms that are basically defenses of individual liberty. His liberalism, the thing that makes his liberalism different than anybody else is, I think, is his sense that our values are often in contradiction. Liberty will be in contradiction with equality. Justice will be in conflict with mercy.

All the good things that we want in this life we can't have at the same time. We have to choose. Liberty is a state of making often tragic choices in which whatever way we move will lose. There's more emphasis on tragedy in his liberalism than in anyone else's. The reason that he's got shelf life, the reason that he'll last, I think, is that he's the liberal philosopher who speaks most directly to multicultural, multi-ethnic, plural societies where you've got secularists versus religious people, you've got socialists versus liberals, you've got people holding worldviews that are in conflict and can't be squared by some bland

consensus. The good thing about Isaiah is that he cuts liberalism loose from the idea that society should be a bland consensus. When he says you can't have too much of wanting, too much freedom means the freedom of the strong to trample on the weak and the freedom of the rich to consume the poor and so on. But this, as it were, uncompromising compromise, which he seems to put forward, is a very difficult thing to catch the imagination, isn't it? We can see Marx, the extremisms, Marx are the power of social Darwinism. How do you think that Isaiah Berlin's ideas, which it seems to me are both sensible and humane and right in my, in the way I look at life,

how do you think that they can inform people with the energy and excitement to make them act on them in the political world? Because it was a political philosopher. I'm sure they can't. They can't be reduced to slogans. They can't. They don't offer a bright tomorrow. they don't promise full and final victory against life's difficulties and lives. I mean, that's precisely the message.

There is no full and final victory. It's not merely that utopia isn't attainable. Isaiah bet on the proposition that utopia was a contradiction in terms, that you simply couldn't have a society in which people would be perfectly happy, perfectly reconciled with their situation. Now, he said actually, didn't it? Utopias have their value. Nothing so wonderfully expands the imaginative horizons of human potentialities,

but as guides to conduct, they can prove literally fatal. Absolutely. And his whole sense of this century was it was a century that had nearly destroyed itself in its pursuit of utopia. I think he's therefore a skeptic, someone who will be listened to as long as people want to hear skeptical, deflations of utopia. But, you know, we've been so proof and so susceptible to utopia in this century, there's no guarantee there won't be long periods of time where people don't want to hear what Isaiah has to say at all.

I can see Sir Michael Howard nodding and I'm coming to you in a moment, but just one more thing before I leave you, Michael Ignatia. In the two concepts of liberty, Isaiah Berlin wrote, over a hundred years ago, the German poet Heiner warned the French not to underestimate the power of idea. philosophical concepts nurtured in the stillness of a professor's study could destroy civilization. Then he added, if professors can truly wield this fatal power, may not be that only other professors, or at least other thinkers, can alone disarm them. Our philosophers seem oddly unaware of these devastating effects of their activities. That's a very high claim for thinkers. Do you think that he, in his thinking, justified or testified to that? Oh, Isaiah was very, very self-critical, and he would have thought that would be putting claims for himself much too high. If that's what you're getting at, it's certainly right.

He'd say it had a life of being accused of being overachieving. Exactly, and he said, long may I be overestimated. But you think he's right about other philosophers, then? Leave him aside for a moment. I just think that his, there is absolutely no doubt that the 20th century has been driven by ideas. There's a kind of anti-intellectual populism which says that what intellectual say and right doesn't matter. But the 20th century really vindicates the kind of ways in which it kind of bastardized Darwinism, you know, got into European fascism and led to this kind of survival of the fittest ideology that literally led to the concentration camps.

Or, conversely, these utopias of, you know, socialist equality that led again to the Gulag. I mean, he had a very strong sense that this. stuff didn't arise simply because people are tyrannous and brutal and cruel. These kind of concentration camp endings arise because people believe in certain kind of utopias. They're driven by intellectual projects. And it's those that are the catastrophic beginnings, the bright beginnings of these catastrophic ends. As Michael had, in your, you've co-ed into the Oxford History of the 20th century. There are about two dozen essays by different hands, which you introduce it.

it. But this idea of Utopia is picked up by Daringoff at the end, Professor Ralph Dandolph in his last essay, and you talk about ideas very much in your prolog and in your introduction. Michael Ignatyev has just said that the 20th century was driven by ideas. Do you agree with that?

Yes. It was the century of ideologies. And I think what I tried to show in my introduction and other things came through is why it should have been. It was because the great movement of the last 300 years has been that which began with the Enlightenment, the belief that mankind had emancipated

themselves from traditional values which were based fundamentally on a belief in God, or a God transmitted by priests whose authority was upheld by and upheld that of a landed aristocratic rule with the king of the head of it. And that all that was smashed by the the encyclopedists of the 18th century, they said that man could live by reason alone. In the 19th century, one saw the modernization process extending over the whole of Western Europe, one saw the gradual disintegration of those hierarchic,

agrarian societies, of the traditional beliefs in one kind of religion or another, and the development of urban-based societies, as opposed to agrarian-based societies, egalitarian as opposed to hierarchical, and the elimination with the First World War as the final catastrophic conclusion of the whole of traditional values and beliefs

as they had been inherited over the centuries and had been absorbed by peoples without them realising that that was really it, leaving an absolutist would have blasted heath on which anybody could come and build and provide ideas. If they were no longer going to believe in God or King, What were they going to believe in?

Yes. Is the 20th century's belief in ideology in some definitive way, which you can tell us, different from, say, the 14th, 15th, 16th century's belief in the ideology of Christianity? It depends how you do define ideology. I think the difference in the ideology of Christianity is something that they had had developed slowly and incrementally. But it developed in different ways. It had reinvented itself again and again. In its way, it was a sort of a totalitarian belief, which had become civilised,

that it underpinned a pretty static kind of society, although it also underpinned revolutions of various points. The difference, I think, between that and 20th century ideologies is that these were inventing new utopias, as Michael Ignatier had said, which had to be enforced by new kinds of models, by new kinds of compulsion, with the abolition, the renunciation of all the modifications,

all the civilized elements, which had been built in and gradually evolved by the 18th and 19th century. Why do you think that we, if you're right, and if the 20th century is, and if you and Michael Ignatia,

I have to keep calling you by our full names because I have two Michaels, but there you go, if you're right that the 20th century has been peculiarly marked, peculiarly susceptible, peculiarly inflicted on by ideologies. Why do you think that is?

Is it because of the strength of the ideologies? Is it because of the disruption of the time? Is it because we ourselves have become more susceptible? Why do you think it is? If it is so, why is it so? Well, it is because, as I suggested, because of the disruption, if not the actual destruction, of all the older belief systems.

And that was particularly so in those countries, particularly Russia and then later on Germany, where the whole of society had really been torn apart and destroyed by the effects of war. The old belief system, for example, in Spain, the old belief, the Catholic system in Spain, was more or less intact, and fascism was superimposed on it. So the old belief system still maintained. Fascism was a very, very minor part of the general reaction in Spain. In Spain, what you get basically is an old-fashioned clerical society with a very, very nasty edge built in. into it, fighting against the new secularist socialism.

Italy again maintained its religion, so to a great extent in Germany. Britain was a religious society which didn't go that way. So you can't have... Because Britain has never become an ideological society, very largely because we have been very, very gently changed as opposed to the catastrophic changes of our continental neighbours. If we had lost the First World War and been through the kind of catastrophe, that Germany went through in the 1920s,

I would not put any money on our remaining a liberal society or avoiding the kind of ideological confrontations that happened elsewhere. Really? I'd be inclined to be rather more optimistic than you. I hope there's no way of judging it. But Michael Nardiav, what do you say to at Michael Howard has said? Can I infuse another question here? Do you think that these ideas that you're talking about, and Michael Howard's book is talking about Marx and Darwin,

and you were talking about it. social downd. Do you think these ideas that men take on because they're ideas and it largely is men? Or do you think it takes on because it suits their purposes? Like Vlad the Impaler said he was a Christian, but basically it was Vlad the Impaler and he wanted, you know, he wanted

to get his own back for what had happened to him as a child, as we all know, but he also wanted to conquer the enemy and he impaled. Now, how much are we talking about ideas just being the cherry on the cake, just not being the drive, really? Vicious, wicked people are vicious and wicked anyway, and they nab an idea because it helps them along.

I think you can examine that question by looking at someone like Lenin. I mean, it's clear that Lenin, on the one hand, was a genuine intellectual, a genuine ideologist. He sat there lonely years in the British Museum in the late 1890s, reading books and having thoughts. There's that Lenin, and then there's also the Lenin, the ruthless technician of power. and I have a feeling that clearly the ideology simply serve the ruthless technician of power. But I think that Sir Michael's made a terribly important point about the blasted Heath after the end of the First World War. I mean, Lenin takes over the apparatus of one of the biggest states in the world in a situation of total devastation, total disintegration of the Tsarist regime, total disintegration of all conceivable.

available values. He has the mechanisms of state power in the right hand. In the left hand, he has the hot gospel of communism. You put the two together and you've got an absolutely irresistible machine. I don't think you can run that machine, that machine of power, unless you give somebody something to believe in. The two, in other words, you're suggesting that you just use the ideology to kind of cover the machine. The ideology makes the machine work. People die for the machine because they believe in the ideology. And that's the truly awful thing about the 20th century. We've never had a more efficient state machine.

We've never had more efficient technology of domination. And we've never had more totalizing ideologies. You put the two together and you've got something that damn near destroy the human race in this century. That's why, as I always said, you know, this was the worst century in recorded history. And when you asked him, what was it that astonished him about his own life? it was simply that he'd survived it. I think you've got to look at individuals concerned, Flaard the Impaler, about whom you're obviously a greater expert than I am,

was functioning within a certain kind of medieval type of Christianity, and he took the myth as it was and functioned within it and used it to justify what he was doing as people normally do in those kinds of societies. Didn't Stalin? Stalin, again, is somebody who I think is dealing, with, as Michael In Nadiav said, a situation where all beliefs are virtually disappeared, and the party then does become virtually a church, both in Russia and indeed in Nazi Germany. Now, clearly Hitler was somebody who fanatically believed in what he preached,

and I should think that somebody like Himmler also did, and one can see various others who did. So you're arguing with Michael Ignatjev, that in Hitler's case, the idea was integral to the power? Oh, completely. But he could never have got where he did if he did not, A, have this idea, and B, was able to act as a sort of an enthusiastic proselytizer for it, and organize the ideology in a brilliant, terrifyingly effective way. You write about the social Darwinism of war in your essay, in this book of essays about the 20th century, and you talk about nationalism was the ultimate test of the fitness of nations to survive. Now, Isaiah Berlin

talked a great deal about nationalism and was against it, although he was four groups, as it were. You also remarked that nationalism seemed to have come to an end about 100 years ago, yet here it is. There's still a power at the end of the century. Could you tell us why you think, having it having been thought to come to an end 100 years ago, it's still flourishing and so dynamic and so disruptive and perhaps also positive? Can Can we discuss that? Well, there are two different, I suppose nationalism is the same, wherever it is,

but it appears in different guises, in different kinds of societies. For Western Europe, on the whole, nationalism, reinforced the existing social and political structure, and was used to do that. What had previously been dynastic loyalties to the House of Hoenssela, or the House of Bourbon, whatever it may have been, was reinforced by nationalism, God, king and country all came together.

And if there wasn't a king, it was just too bad, who just had La Patria, and this was equally good. They were reinforcing these large, solid, modernising societies. In Eastern Europe, where there was not an effective,

coherent society already going. The dynastic loyalty to the Habsburg family was not enough to hold the empire together. And when that collapsed, then it fell into little bits and all the local nationalisms, which had been encouraged by the nationalist ideology of the 19th century, all the historians who were devising the history of Serbia and the history of Greece or the history of Romania, all the dictionary writers and the linguists who had been turning what had previously been local dialects into full languages,

Gaelic, whatever it may have been, creating its worthy idea of nations. These then took over, and they were intensely disruptive because Serbs defined themselves as being not Croets. Croats define themselves as being not Romanians and not Hungarians,

and as a result, you do get nationalism, not being a cohesive affair, but being an immensely disruptive affair. Michael Ignatyev, Isaiah Berlin's views of nationalism, it seems to me, were different to employ in the real world? Well, you know, people hold propositions.

Ideas are always built into a life, anchored in a life. Isaiah was no exception. Isaiah was a Jew, a Russian Jew, who'd known what it was like to experience anti-Semitism, who very early in his life saw Jews and Palestine struggling for statehood. He's the only liberal to give houseroom. to nationalism, really, to take it seriously, to respect this longing for belonging. The only liberal not to disdain all those dictionary writers you were saying who wanted to create

the language of their country and the identity of their country. He tried to walk a line that is very hard to reconcile between believing in a liberal state, in liberal democracy, in checks and balances, but also having some respect for people who have no state of their own, who have no home of their own, who longed to have the liberal state that we all take for granted. That's why he was much more sympathetic to the longings for belonging that fuel nationalism than almost anybody else. The question is whether you can have nationalist passions of this intensity and a liberal democratic state at the same time. He thought you could, but there are not many places which have brought this off. He would claim, for example,

Israel brought it off, a nationalist achievement, a Zionist state, that it's also liberal democratic. Lots of people think not so. Michael Hahn, can I bring you to the forward of the book in this 20th century book? You said that the 20th century opened with a, quote, paradoxical combination of hope and fear. Could you not say the same of the opening of the 19th century? I think that neither of those, although both those sentiments were there, they were neither of them so widespread. because the intelligentsia or the elites, or whatever you like to call them, were far smaller and in a way I think far less influential.

Yes, certainly there was enormous optimism on the part of the Enlightenment and those survivors, people like Gerta and others who were indeed still around, that things are improving, that the force of reason is becoming stronger, that the old regime is being gradually destroyed. I am not aware, and this is probably my ignorance of intellectual history, of the same kind of dread about what the future might bring, that you do get at the beginning of the 20th century. There was great dread in this country about the further effects of the French Revolution,

that the reason had destroyed humanity and that were Napoleon to go totally unchecked, then the future of Western, as they saw it, the Western nations would be under great intellectuals, threat and threat to their freedom and self. Well, there is certainly that kind of fear. There may also be, because I'm not aware of it, a rather more existential terror of the way in which mankind was developing. In the 20th century, to that there is far more extreme. There is the sense that the whole of the past has been rubbish,

that everything which we have brought up to believe is no longer valid, that the philosophers, the writers, the artists, all these people are tearing up traditional beliefs by their roots, and heaven knows what is going to happen to mankind as a result. Yes, that was picked up in a sympathetic review by Norman Stone of your book. He did point out that at the end of the, as you say, at the beginning of this century, 100 years ago, There was the big ideas, a theory of relativity.

There was Schoenberg in music. There was Freud. He looked at dreams and said that life is about sex and money. And people have tended to take that rather literally from then. And there were huge statements. He also makes the point at the end of this century, we don't seem to be producing big ideas in the same way. Would you say that at the end of the trenches century,

the big ideas of shrunk or disappeared or slipped through our fingers? I think that we're now very very very. frightened of big ideas, that we've seen what big ideas do lead us to. Utopia was a very big idea. Now I think that we are rather happy that there are no longer any big ideas of that kind to mislead us. We're rather happier to become, not quite in Aisar, Berlin's way, we're rather happier to become hedgehogs, sort of huddling down with the one big thing which we know. And what is the one big thing which we know?

the big thing which most people know is how to their own lives, their own little patch, their own ideas of how to live their lives, rather than, and I think there's now everywhere a great desire to go back, as it were, to a kind of domestic type of wound, because we're so alarmed at the threats which are being posed to it by the other thing, which is globalisation. But in your book, I mean, in this, some of the essays are saying that is impossible because a globalization among other things. It is more impossible than it has ever been. Unless that is true.

That is why people are hanging on to their own little patches with a sort of far greater degree, as it were, of fear, than might otherwise be the case. I think the age of utopia is over, but I do think that everywhere I look, people are trying to... The one lesson people have drawn from the 20th century is we better build some firewalls,

some protection against human power. We've got to protect the individual. We've got to have human rights. We've got to protect people against the abuse of science and the abuse of political power. The sense that we've got to have self-limiting ideologies, ideologies that stop at the human subject that say this far and no further. And that, I think, was, I mean, to beat my drum again, something that Isaiah Berlin really did fight for and believe.

He believed in the idea that the heart of human reasons, was to put limits to the exercise of human violence. And if we can do that, we'll make it through the next century, but only if we do. But as Michael Howard says in his book, we now have to live with the fact

that we can't have a big war again ever because of nuclear... Well, we'd be not as silly if we had a big war yet. Didn't you say we never care. Yes, but the idea of this temporizing, temperate philosophy entering into the power struggle seems to be something that it's more hope than experience, isn't it?

Well, experience has been so unfortunate that there's very little left except hope. I think the basic problem really is how can one take this liberal, sensible, cultivated, self-limiting philosophy of

Aizar, Berlin, and make it a global idea. This is something which liberals do try to do the whole time. And it is the attempt to do this does show itself in particular human rights law, international law, all those other things.

But it's very difficult to get as wildly excited about that sort of thing as one can about utopias. Well, thank you very much, Sir Michael Howard, who's co-edited the Oxford History of the 20th century and Michael Ignatyev, whose biography of Isaiah Berlin is published next week. Thanks for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes

about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio four.