PITTSBURGH (TNS) — I’ve been reading as much as I can on Ukraine president Volodomyr Zelenskyy’s Oval Office encounter with American president Donald Trump. My sympathies are with Ukraine and its president, and I really dislike the juvenile contempt piled on Zelenskyy — the photoshopped picture of him looking like a child in the chair next to Trump, for example — after he tried to get more for his country than Trump was offering.
But I genuinely don’t know what America should do. Maybe Trump is right, if for the wrong reasons.
I genuinely don’t know what Ukraine should do, what it can do, when faced with an enemy as brutal and determined as Vladimir Putin. And what it can do when dealing with a not entirely reliable Europe and an American president who claims to want peace but wants to achieve it by approving the Russian invasion, and who uses an invaded nation’s desperation to force through a business deal advantageous to America.
My hours of reading didn’t answer my questions, but only complicated the answer. Lots of people made sense. It did show how deeply, bitterly the Americans who care divide over Ukraine. The fight over Ukraine symbolizes many others, and many of those conflicts will be even deeper and bitterer. Trump is not going to let Americans reconcile with each other, and the Democratic leadership doesn’t seem any keener on doing that.
OLDER CONFLICTS
The Russian-English political thinker Isaiah Berlin helps us think about this division. A Russian Jew who lived through the Russian Revolution and came to England with his family in 1921, when he was 12, Berlin spent most of his life at Oxford University. He specialized in the history of ideas and in the defense of liberalism and what he called “pluralism” and his followers called “value pluralism.” He died in 1997.
One advantage reading someone from a few decades is that you find that we have been through this before, faced the same kind of challenges and the same kinds of problematic people. That can feel encouraging. Not a lot, I must say, but a little. We’re not alone. This is the way the world has been.
As a young academic, Berlin got to know future Labour politician Richard Crossman. He thought him, his biographer Michael Ignatieff wrote, “a brash, aggressive bully, with a vein of cynicism running through his talk.”
You can think of examples.
Crossman, Berlin said, “hated the civil service, respectability, conventional values of a decent honest dreary kind. What he wanted was young men singing songs, students linking arms, torchlit parades. There was a strong fascist streak in him. He wanted power, hated liberalism, mildness, kindness, amiability.”
You can think of more examples.
A LIBERAL AND A GENTLEMAN
Berlin was, in contrast, a liberal and a gentleman. He defined his liberalism as the belief “that decent respect for others and the toleration of dissent is better than pride and a sense of national mission; that liberty may be incompatible with, and better than, too much efficiency; that pluralism and untidiness are, to those who value freedom, better than the rigorous imposition of all-embracing systems, no matter how rational and disinterested, better than the rule of majorities against which there is no appeal.”
His belief in value pluralism grew from his rejection of “optimistic monism,” the belief that there is one truth and that it ought to be clear to everyone — and if others don’t see it the way you do, you will probably have to impose it on them. The belief “that there can be more than one valid answer to a problem, that in itself is a great discovery. It leads to liberalism and toleration,” he wrote.
It leads to liberalism and tolerance in people like Berlin. It doesn’t so much in other people. He singled out Marxists and religious movements.
You can think of other examples.
“When truths or ultimate values are incompatible with each other,” and people just can’t agree, he argued, they have to find an “uneasy equilibrium” and “a tolerable compromise must be painfully achieved.” No one likes the compromise, because everyone believes they’re right and the other people wrong on very crucial matters. (Like the future of Ukraine and the use of American power.)
They honestly believe very bad things will happen if the other guys win and — this makes the problem so serious — they might be right. (I don’t know what Trump truly believes, but he acts as if his beliefs are absolute.)
THE ALTERNATIVE
But the alternative is an all-out fight which one side will eventually win and play the despot over the other. Great if your side wins, but bad if it loses. And probably bad for everyone else.
This seems obviously true. I have my convictions, some of which are absolute, but I have to live in a world with people who have opposing absolute convictions. Everyone has absolute views, unless they’re completely selfish and think of nothing higher than themselves. (You can think of examples.)
I don’t have a lot of hope in more people thinking like Isaiah Berlin. But maybe the shared desire to do good to people we know, a desire that many Americans do share, can overcome the political anger. We can’t fight a total war and take care of the marginalized and vulnerable. Hungry people don’t care that we disagree, and maybe their need will remind enough of us that we must find that tolerable compromise.
(David Mills is deputy editorial page editor for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.)
