The sense of reality Book

I loved this book. When I read Berlin, I think. To give you an idea of my thoughts, let me post some notes I made about the last portion of the title essay, "The Sense of Reality" :

Here, Berlin summarizes the European revolutionaries' profound failure: (p. 29) "Something had been miscalculated, something had proved recalcitrant to the social arithmetic employed. The makers of the revolution found themselves, in each case, swept on by the forces which they had released in a direction which they had scarcely anticipated. Some were destroyed by these forces, some attempted to control them but were plainly controlled by them, for all their efforts to dominate the elements."

How could such good intentions go so badly? Unintended consequences with a vengeance. Plans for any improvement, no matter how small, depend on understanding existing reality and the precise way the proposed change will affect that reality. We look back at those naïve revolutionaries and wince when we realize how little they really knew about the human material they were trying to mold to specification.

Since there is manifestly too much information about any given society for any individual or small group to be able to master and direct effectively, we can reasonably assume that these revolutionaries erred by attempting to direct their efforts guided by only the most obvious facts about the people they were trying to lead. By ignoring the existence of the vast oceans of facts (as described above by Berlin) about social life that they had little or no access to, they guaranteed their own failure.

They stir up the obvious parts of society, their targets for overthrow. In the meantime, the far more numerous and very potent not-so-obvious parts of society are also bestirred, unaccountably, unpredicted, unplanned, unguided. The revolution at this point goes off the rails, into new territory unmapped. The revolutionaries might not notice at first, but it's only a matter of time before these unmapped regions forcibly impact those obvious ones, and events take an entirely new, and generally very violent turn.

That's when the revolutionaries start turning the screws, attempting to force the people into the revolutionary mold. And that's when they start resisting even more. We can see this occur every time the revolutionaries decry "the forces of reaction" that are "sabotaging the revolution." The revolution has dead-ended into social realities unexamined and unplanned for. At this point, the revolution, in the sense of becoming something genuinely new and improved, creating a social space where people can live more freely, it instead ceases and simply becomes a coup d'etat, a power struggle. The victors get the spoils. The losers die. (See notes on Hannah Arendt's "On Revolution.")

He asks why conservatives generally hate revolution. Are they simply hidebound reactionaries, or do they know something important about the complexity of human relationships? We can see from the above his answer to that question.

There is a sense that what politicians do, what they must do, is inherently different than what scientists and technologists do. A wise politician is called a statesman. He is the one who wields not only technical knowledge but human understanding as he seeks a good answer to current political problems.

Conservatives have the sense of politics as the art of the genuinely possible, not the crafting of utopia. The statesman knows what can be done and what simply cannot. He can't always fit this kind of knowledge into words. It's more of a sense, a sense of people as individuals and how they operate in groups. The best of the statesmen's work survives (at least in memory) even unto this day: Washington, Lincoln, Bismarck, Julius Caesar, Richelieu are compared to Hitler and Stalin very favorably (of course). But what did the former do that the latter couldn't do or even conceive of?

There is no one thing. There is no "secret" as it were. The best thing we can say is that the former knew their societies well and the latter didn't.

Berlin references Tolstoy's epilogue to "War and Peace." "…of the unaccountable infinitesimals of which individual and social life is composed…"

A statesman has a strong sense of these in the form of unspoken tacit knowledge and understanding. Derived from close observation and long experience. This is why the best politicians simply cannot do their best work while young. They need years of experience under their belts before they can really understand what it is they do.

They are able to "play it by ear," to do something now and to just stand there later'or vice versa. There are few guidelines and no laws to follow while engaging in political improvisation. You must know your people and know what you want for them and know what can be done and what cannot. You must be eminently practical and have very little theory, at least not enough to mislead you.

Traditionalist conservatives (surprisingly) make similar errors to those made by revolutionaries on the left. They assume that simplifying explanations of complex human realities exist. Things like tradition or religious faith or some form of organicism are assumed to tie people together alone. Berlin insists that human reality is far more complex than that which both revolutionaries and traditionalists take it to be.

"There is no substitute for a sense of reality." (p. 35)

And, that sense of reality is utterly dependent upon our respect for the utterly inexhaustibly numerous particulars of human life.

The problems with positivism in this regard'Hegel had it out with them in his time. Unfortunately, his argument wound up arguing against the scientific method for the natural sciences and for some mystical process by which a metaphysician could argue from the general to the particular and somehow wind up understanding any particular situation in all its particular richness. For example, the World Spirit. Hegel wound up with the worst of both worlds'no genuine science and no genuine philosophy.

Positivists believed that all knowledge can be gained through the methods used in the natural sciences. Hayek made the same argument against the 19th century positivists in his "The Counter-Revolution of Science." Check out on p. 195 how Hayek deals soundly with Comte and Hegel.]

Both Hayek and Berlin argue that the utopianisms of the 19th and 20th centuries flowed directly from the early 19th century positivists.

When we are being realistic, we dismiss such utopian dreams (described earlier in the essay) as by definition unrealizable. Berlin asks an important question here: What are we doing when we so dismiss such schemes? We are assuming certain "forces" will be too strong for the would-be revolutionaries, that they will be stopped, that they cannot succeed against them. What are these forces? Certainly they are not laws, as in the laws of physics.

Here is Berlin's answer (p. 37): "When we speak of some process as inevitable, when we warn people not to pit their wills against the greater power of the historical situation, which they cannot alter, or cannot alter in the manner they desire, what we mean is not that we know facts and laws which we obey, but that we do not; that we are aware, beyond the facts to which the potential reformers point, of a dark mass of factors whose general drift we perceive but whose precise interrelations we cannot formulate, and that any attempt to behave as if only the clear 'top level' factors were significant or crucial, ignoring the hinterland, will lead to frustration of the intended reforms, perhaps to unexpected disaster."

There is a simple way of putting this: One man cannot know what a million men know. TMI (too much information) is very, very real. Recognizing TMI and its impact on human life is exactly the same thing as having a good strong sense of reality in Berlin's sense of the phrase.

(p. 37) "…they take their knowledge of a small portion of the scene to cover the entire scene…" They sample from classes and groups they assume contain identical members. Or they construct computer models. Or they write treatises and manifestos. Or they call their dreams inevitable. They take the (very limited) array of facts they have mastered and simplify them further. They announce proudly that they are on 'the right side of history.' They name what they assume the forces of history are and assume they can control what they name.

Berlin points out that historical 'forces too great to be resisted' simply means that almost all the things that millions of people say and do and know are in fact unknown to us and unknowable by us, and can't be accounted for in any model of human society we may have occasion to construct. This 'not knowing' is the insurmountable obstacle to the utopian desire for smoothly incorporated revolutionary change. The fact of profound ignorance can't be tamed, lectured to, weedled or pleaded out of, or commanded in any way.

When we resist the blandishments of the Utopians, we resist their wholly unwarranted simplifications of reality. We resist what Berlin condemned as (p. 39) "…fanciful, pseudo-scientific histories and theories of human behavior, abstract and formal at the expense of the facts, and to revolutions and wars and ideological campaigns conducted on the basis of dogmatic certainty about their outcome--vast misconceptions which have cost the lives, liberty and happiness of a great many innocent human beings."