Berlin’s ‘Message to the 21st Century’

 In 1994, the University of Toronto honored Isaiah Berlin with a doctor of laws degree.

Berlin, who was 85 and sick, couldn’t attend. But he wrote a note to be read at the ceremony. He described it to a friend as a “short credo.” It’s better known as “A Message to the 21^st Century.”

Looking at the movements of the 20^th century, Berlin tried to explain how something that begins as an innocent social contract can evolve into despotic oppression.

If you are truly convinced that there is some solution to all human problems, that one can conceive an ideal society which men can reach if only they do what is necessary to attain it, then you and your followers must believe that no price can be too high to pay in order to open the gates of such a paradise. Only the stupid and malevolent will resist once certain simple truths are put to them. Those who resist must be persuaded; if they cannot be persuaded, laws must be passed to restrain them; if that does not work, then coercion, if need be violence, will inevitably have to be used — if necessary, terror, slaughter.

Here, he says, is the tragic idea that was underneath fascism in Spain and Italy, Nazism in Germany, communism in the Soviet Union and theocracy in the Middle East.

The root conviction which underlies this is that the central questions of human life, individual or social, have one true answer which can be discovered. It can and must be implemented, and those who have found it are the leaders whose word is law.

Berlin’s Freedom and Its Betrayal was a summary of his academic research into a question that fascinated him. “A Message to the 21^st Century” was a summary of that summary.

• Isaiah Berlin, “A Message to the 21^st Century,” The New York Review of Books, Oct. 23, 2014.