Two Spirits of Liberty

The world could use more of Christopher Hitchens's courage and Isaiah Berlin's tolerance.

Redux

Christopher Hitchens, left, and Isaiah Berlin

By Timothy Garton Ash May 08, 2016

hortly after Isaiah Berlin died, Christopher Hitchens launched an attack on him in the London Review of Books. The celebrated liberal philosopher, argued the celebrated polemicist, had been cowardly, weak, inconsistent, an apologist for the Vietnam War, a toady of the powerful. Berlin, wrote Hitchens, was "simultaneously pompous and dishonest in the face of a long moral crisis where his views and his connections could have made a difference." And Hitchens deplored the fact that Berlin's reputation stood "like a lion in your path" if you "chafe at the present complacently 'liberal' consensus."

Berlin's most famous essay is "Two Concepts of Liberty," but it seems to me that Hitchens and Berlin personified two spirits of liberty. The distinction be­tween these two spirits is not a philosophical one, like that between two conc­epts. Rather, it is a matter of temperament, character, habits of the heart. Put most simply, Hitchens exemplified courage; Berlin, tolerance. Hitchens was outspoken, outrageous, never afraid to offend, impressively undeterred by Islamist death threats. He was also almost never prepared to admit that he had been wrong, nimbly shifting his ground to defend, with equal vehemence, whatever contrarian position he chose to adopt at a particular moment. But he was brave, and utterly consistent in his defense of free speech.

Berlin was not notable for his courage. This was a weakness he struggled with. In a letter to a close friend, written when he was already a highly re­spected, middle-aged man, he wrote, "I wish I had not inherited my father's timorous, rabbity nature! I can be brave, but oh what appallingly superhuman struggles with cowardice!" And in an essay on his beloved Turgenev, he evokes "the small, hesitant, self-critical, not always very brave, band of men who oc­cupy a position somewhere to the left of center, and are morally repelled both by the hard faces to their right and the hysteria and mindless violence and demagoguery on their left. ... "

Yet Berlin was one of the most eloquent, consistent defenders of a liberal­ism which creates and defends the spaces in which people subscribing to dif­ferent values, holding incompatible views, pursuing irreconcilable political projects — in short, the Hitchenses and the anti-Hitchenses — can battle it out in freedom, without violence. Berlin personified not merely tolerance but also an extraordinary gift for empathy, that ability to get inside very different heads and hearts which is a distinguishing mark of the liberal imagination.

In a speech delivered in 1944, explaining what the United States was fighting for in the Second World War, to an audience that included many newly created American citizens, Judge Learned Hand declared: "What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias." Who can doubt that Berlin was filled with that spirit of liberty? But Hitchens was filled with a spirit of liberty too.

Though they tend to distrust, even to despise each other, both these spirits are indispensable. Each has its characteristic fault. A world composed entirely of Hitchenses would tend to intolerance. It would be a permanent, if often amusing, shouting match, one in which there would be neither time nor space to understand — in the deepest sense of understanding, involving profound study, calm reflection, and imaginative sympathy — where the other person was coming from. A world composed entirely of Berlins would tend to relativism and excessive tolerance for the sworn enemies of tolerance.

lainly this tension does not begin with those two late-20th-century writers. Toward the end of his life, the German-British liberal thinker Ralf Dahrendorf wrote a book about a line of political intellectuals he called Erasmians, among whom he included Isaiah Berlin. And the argument between these two spirits of liberty is already there in the 16th-century relationship between Erasmus of Rotterdam and Martin Luther. Erasmus, the most cele­brated scholar of his day, prepared the way for the Reformation. So close was his intellectual affinity with Luther in earlier years that the joke went aut Erasmus Lutherat, aut Erasmissat Lutherus — now Erasmus Luthers, now Luther Erasmusses. But when Luther made his break with the Roman Church, Erasmus would not follow. Men of goodwill, he insisted, must be able to conduct these arguments with civility and reason, within the body of the church. In his com­mentary on the Latin adage "So many men, so many opinions" (Quot homines, tot sententiae), he attributes to St. Paul the view that "for the putting aside of strife, we should allow every man to have his own convictions." (This was, one might add, adventurous ijtihad of St. Paul.) In 1517, the very year that Luther nailed his Protestant theses to a church door, Erasmus wrote an essay titled "The Complaint of Peace," lamenting the "word warriors" who "attack each other with poison pens, ripping each other up with the keen phases of satire and hurling lethal darts of insinuation."

Dahrendorf recalls a scene when the mortally ill 35-year-old Ulrich von Hutten, a reformer who was in some ways even bolder than Luther, actually knocked on the door of Erasmus's house in Basel to seek help, "but Erasmus, himself sick, and fearful both of physical and of spiritual infection, did not admit him. All Basel saw it. … " Hutten had just enough strength left to pen an Expostulation With Erasmus, including this stinging rebuke: "Your own books will have to fight out the battle between them." For several years, Erasmus resisted pressure from church leaders to confront the reformers, and when he finally did so, it was in the form of a learned dialogue disputing Luther's views on free will. Hutten's barb was an early version of the 20th-century jibe that a liberal is someone who can't take his own side in an argument. It connects to a recurrent critique of liberalism as pale, bloodless, sickly, unable to stand up for itself in a fight.

People can possess these two qualities in different measures at different times. Dahrendorf himself was an Erasmian in his old age, but as a 15-year-old schoolboy in Nazi Berlin he had formed a resistance group and been incarcer­ated in a Gestapo camp. There is the courage of youth and the tolerance born of experience. The mix in any one person is never entirely simple. Hitchens could be witheringly, contemptuously intolerant in print and on the public stage, yet in private he had a gift for good fellowship with a remarkably wide range of people. One of his characteristic and, for the recipient, mildly irritating rhetorical tropes was to say, "X is a friend of mine, but …" followed by a fulminating attack on something said or written by X.

Erasmians also have their own brand of courage or, perhaps more precisely, of fortitude. It takes a certain quiet fortitude to maintain your intellectual in­dependence when all about you are becoming partisan. "On no other account do I congratulate myself more," Erasmus wrote toward the end of his life, "than on the fact that I have never attached myself to any party." It takes perseverance to keep calmly advocating an independent, liberal position — balanced, fair, respectful of complexity, more concerned to get at the truth than to be entertaining — when what Jacob Burckhardt called the terribles simplificateurs are harvesting youthful enthusiasm and collective emotion.

"So we must weigh and measure, bargain, compromise, and prevent the crushing of one form of life by its rivals," wrote Berlin, three years before he died, in a text subsequently published by The New York Review of Books as a "message to the 21st century." "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 you must believe me, one cannot have everything one wants — not only in practice, but even in theory."

Raymond Aron was another such Erasmian, and his last hours are a perfect example of this cooler virtue. Convinced that his friend Bertrand de Jouvenel had been travestied in a book by an Israeli historian, Aron agreed to testify in a libel case de Jouvenel had launched against the author and publisher. Emphasizing to the court that de Jouvenel had been wrong in his early assessment of Hitler, while Aron himself "at once saw the devil in Hitler" — and, as his audience knew, had gone on to serve Charles de Gaulle's exile government in London — he nonetheless deplored the book as ahistorical: "The author never put things into context. The definition he gives of fascism is so vague and imprecise that it could include anything." It therefore represented "the worst kind of libel — the result of a procedure which I deplore and condemn: guilt by asso­ciation."

Having thus spoken up for intellectual clarity, historical understanding and elementary fairness, the frail old philosopher stepped out of the courtroom and into a car, where he suffered a massive heart attack and died. Just before he disappeared, Aron remarked to the journalist Marc Ullman: "Je crois avoir dit l'essentiel." (Roughly translated as: "I believe I said what needed saying.") What finer death could there be for an Erasmian?

It is quite rare that these two spirits of liberty, with their distinctive qualities of courage and of tolerance, come combined in equal parts in one individual. The nearest I have seen to this was Václav Havel, a brave dissident, in the footsteps of his 14th-century compatriot Jan Hus. He proved that courage through four years in prison and multiple subsequent arrests. His solidarity with dissidents in other parts of the world was unwavering. One of his last public actions, when already a very sick man, was to stand outside the Chinese Embassy in Prague to protest against the imprisonment of Liu Xiaobo — an exceptional, undiplomatic act for a former president. Yet Havel was also the epitome of Erasmian tolerance, not just unfailingly courteous but genuinely open to a wide range of philosophies and ways of life, wanting them all to be heard and seen. Usually, however, the two spirits of liberty are found unevenly distributed be­tween individuals: the one more Lutheran, the other more Erasmian. Freedom needs both.

It is for others to say whether we can identify a similar dichotomy in non-Western cultures and traditions. My own superficial impression from countries I know much less well, such as China, Myanmar, and Egypt, is that we can. On my journeys I have met deeply admirable people who seem to me to embody each of these two spirits of liberty. And was Gandhi perhaps, like Havel, an exception to prove the rule, combining both courage and tolerance? What is certain is that those who stand up for free speech in these countries, against the armed and booted orthodoxy of their time, make harder decisions, and face graver consequences, than most of us in the West ever will.

Timothy Garton Ash is a fellow at St. Antony's College, Oxford, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. This essay is adapted from his new book Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World (Yale University Press).

A version of this article appeared in the  May 13, 2016 issue.

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