from Berlin's Historical Inevitability

A not dissimilar philosophy is, it seems to me, to be found in the writings of Tolstoy and other pessimists and quietists, both religious and irreligious. For these, particularly the most conservative among them, life is a stream moving in a given direction, or perhaps a tideless ocean stirred by occasional breezes. The number of factors which cause it to be as it is, is very great, but we know only very few of them. To seek to alter things radically in terms of our knowledge is therefore unrealistic, often to the point of absurdity. We cannot resist the central current, for they are much stronger than we, we can only tack, only trip to the winds and avoid collisions with the great fixed institutions of our world, its physical and biological laws, and the great human establishments with their roots deep in the past - the empires, the Churches, the settled beliefs and habits of mankind. For if we resist these, our small craft will be sunk, and we shall lose our lives to no purpose. Wisdom lies in avoiding situations where we may capsize, in using the winds that blow as skilfully as we can, so that we may last at any rate our own time, preserve the heritage of the past, and not hurry towards a future which will come soon enough, and may be darker even than the gloomy present. On this view it is the human predicament - the disproportion between our vast designs and our feeble means - that is responsible for much of the suffering and injustice of the world. Without help, without divine grace, or one or other form of divine intervention, we shall not, in any case, succeed. Let us then be tolerant and charitable and understanding, and avoid the folly of accusation and counter-accusation which will expose us to the laughter or pity of later generations. Let us seek to discern what we can - some dim outline of a pattern - in the shadows of the past, for even so much is surely difficult enough.

- Isaiah Berlin in Historical Inevitability commenting upon the human predicament as seen by Tolstoy and others. Berlin's point is to clarify one of the set of thoughts through which value judgment and ultimately personal responsibility can be dissolved. I found this passage succinct, illuminating, and a brilliant distillation of what I find to be my own views, continuously in flux.