Memories of Reading, 2025

 There was an online book sale and I picked this book up along with four others that has laid dormant on my shelves ever since they arrived. This is a series of essays that, like many others in my reading history, I wish I remembered more from. It is about politics and ideas.

I remembered that he said how historians constantly oscillates between horrified by saying more than what they know, leaving them to only state what is proven by fact about the past, which is very little, and continuing to attempt to paint a picture of a past that is filled with humanity, all of the lives—“aesthetic, religious, moral, intellectual, imaginative” lives of people that may not succeed in being scrutinized in a purely facts-based manner. Imagination in history.

I remember him saying that good politics shouldn’t look towards some utopian, static state of perfection, because all humans have different wants and needs and goals and desire that will inevitably be in conflict with each other and contradictory and that uniform harmonious ending can never be achieved in a pluralist society. And so the goal of good politics is to create instutions that minimizes the friction and the suffering caused by disagreements, and not to purge the polity of disagreements themselves. I think this is especially telling for structures of democracy. Following this, Berlin says that all of political thoughts contains two visions of the perfect society: one of them, the pluralist, believing society to inevitably be full of clashes and therefore needs constant readjustment and compromise will need to be maintained in a “condition of imperfect equilibrium”, while the other believes that the goal is to eliminate any disagreements, that a healthy society is one that is unified and peaceful, and only one set of ends or goals is the rational one, the debate can only occur over what the means to achieve that goal is. This reminds me of debates in America about the right to healthcare and welfare and so on: in my home country and in Indonesia, there is little debate about whether children deserve free lunches or whether people deserve healthcare, the debate is about how to achieve it—more or less government intervention. In America the debate is still going on about whether the goal is good and necessary. I think there is no way for this topic to avoid a moral judgement, from an outside perspective who lives in a society where the rational good is already decided.