July 26, 2006

Berlin's Spirit Questions Bush Doctrine

James Pinkerton gets a little too cute with his "talk" with Isaiah Berlin's ghost in an attempt to paint President Bush as a French-style revolutionary (don't tell the French) with little understanding of current world realities. To sum it up Pinkerton/Berlin criticize the President for promoting human freedom as the cure to Man's political problems. For Pinkerton/Berlin that's too single-minded.

However, the idea of liberty is a large, wide-ranging concept. It covers the ability to trade freely with one's fellow man, to speak and protest one's government, to create art free of government sanction, the ability to worship as one pleases, and so on and so on. Freedom is an all-encompassing concept. It's an abstraction of a host of related ideas. With Berlin's words Pinkerton reduces human liberty into "one totalistic thing" something Berlin warns against.

Maybe Pinkerton/Berlin would approve of Thomas Barnett's idea of the pursuit of connectedness, economically, culturally, and politically. Then, that might be playing word games like Pinkerton/Berlin did with freedom.

When President Bush talks about spreading freedom across the globe he doesn't mean there's the one American form or that nations with little history of freedom to instantly become as free as the U.S. No proponents of freedom's expansion believe Iraq, Lebanon, or the rest of the Middle East will become Switzerland anytime soon. Pinkerton/Berlin doesn't offer any words from President Bush to suggest otherwise.

"Grave Wisdom from a Grave Oxford Don"