[Reader-list] John Berger on Being in the present moment

[Rana Dasgupta]

I think it's worth reading this, more because
Berger asks good questions than because he
gives good answers.

Sometimes it seems as if the language we use
to describe our world is a kind of theme
park: a Disneyland whose limited palette of
primary colours and whose small collection of
dusty, but obstinately popular, and
perpetually recycled, narratives, is supposed
to stand for Everything.

It is not simply "the world" that gets lost
in these moments of seeming.  It is also
ourselves; for isn't our quest for a language
of the grandiose contemporary also a search
for interiority?  That is why language and
ethics, and the connections between the two,
are such crucial areas for us to explore.

Berger asks questions which connect to these
concerns.  I have questions, too:  What is
the sense of "shame" that fills him and that
makes the future impossible to look upon?
And from where does his "self" derive its
being within this emptiness of language and
ethics that he describes?

R


John Berger: Written in the Night

Written in the night: The pain of living in
the present world

I WANT to say at least something about the
pain existing in the world today. Consumerist
ideology, which has become the most powerful
and invasive on the planet, sets out to
persuade us that pain is an accident,
something that we can insure against. This is
the logical basis for the ideology's
pitilessness.

Everyone knows, of course, that pain is
endemic to life, and wants to forget this or
relativise it. All the variants of the myth
of a Fall from the Golden Age, before pain
existed, are an attempt to relativise the
pain suffered on earth. So too is the
invention of Hell, the adjacent kingdom of
pain-as-punishment. Likewise the discovery of
Sacrifice. And later, much later, the
principle of Forgiveness. One could argue
that philosophy began with the question: why
pain?

Yet, when all this has been said, the present
pain of living in the world is perhaps in
some ways unprecedented. I write in the
night, although it is daytime. A day in early
October 2002. For almost a week the sky above
Paris has been blue. Each day the sunset is a
little earlier and each day gloriously
beautiful. Many fear that before the end of
the month, US military forces will be
launching the "preventive" war against Iraq,
so that the US oil corporations can lay their
hands on further and supposedly safer oil
supplies. Others hope that this can be
avoided. Between the announced decisions and
the secret calculations, everything is kept
unclear, since lies prepare the way for
missiles.

I write in a night of shame. By shame I do
not mean individual guilt. Shame, as I'm
coming to understand it, is a species feeling
which, in the long run, corrodes the capacity
for hope and prevents us looking far ahead.
We look down at our feet, thinking only of
the next small step.

People everywhere, under very different
conditions, are asking themselves - where are
we? The question is historical not
geographical. What are we living through?
Where are we being taken? What have we lost?
How to continue without a plausible vision of
the future? Why have we lost any view of what
is beyond a lifetime?

The well-heeled experts answer.
Globalisation. Postmodernism. Communications
revolution. Economic liberalism. The terms
are tautological and evasive. To the
anguished question of where are we, the
experts murmur: nowhere. Might it not be
better to see and declare that we are living
through the most tyrannical - because the
most pervasive - chaos that has ever existed?
It's not easy to grasp the nature of the
tyranny for its power structure (ranging from
the 200 largest multinational corporations to
the Pentagon) is interlocking yet diffuse,
dictatorial yet anonymous, ubiquitous yet
placeless. It tyrannises from off shore - not
only in terms of fiscal law, but in terms of
any political control beyond its own. Its aim
is to delocalise the entire world. Its
ideological strategy, besides which Osama
bin Laden's is a fairy tale, is to undermine
the existent so that everything collapses
into its special version of the virtual, from
the realm of which(and this is the tyranny's
credo) there will be a never-ending source of
profit. It sounds stupid. Tyrannies are
stupid. This one is destroying at every level
the life of the planet on which it operates.

Ideology apart, its power is based on two
threats. The first is intervention from the
sky by the most heavily armed state in the
world. One could call it Threat B52. The
second is of ruthless indebtment, bankruptcy,
and hence, given the present productive
relations in the world, starvation. One could
call it Threat Zero.

The shame begins with the contestation (which
we all acknowledge somewhere but, out of
powerlessness, dismiss) that much of the
present suffering could be alleviated or
avoided if certain realistic and relatively
simple decisions were taken. There is a very
direct relation today between the minutes of
meetings and minutes of agony.

Does anyone deserve to be condemned to
certain death simply because they don't have
access to treatment which would cost less
than $2 a day? This was a question posed by
the director of the World Health Organisation
last July. She was talking about the Aids
epidemic in Africa and elsewhere from which
an estimated 68 million people will die
within the next 18 years. I'm talking about
the pain of living in the present world.

Most analyses and prognoses about what is
happening are understandably presented and
studied within the framework of their
separate disciplines: economics, politics,
media studies, public health, ecology,
national defense, criminology, education. In
reality each of these separate fields is
joined to another to make up the real terrain
of what is being lived. It happens that in
their lives people suffer from wrongs which
are classified in separate categories, and
suffer them simultaneously and inseparably.

A current example: some Kurds, who fled last
week to Cherbourg, have been refused asylum
by the French government and risk being
repatriated to Turkey, are poor, politically
undesirable, landless, exhausted, illegal and
the clients of nobody. And they suffer each
of these conditions at one and the same
second. To take in what is happening, an
interdisciplinary vision is necessary in
order to connect the "fields" which are
institutionally kept separate. And any such
vision is bound to be (in the original sense
of the word) political. The precondition for
thinking politically on a global scale is to
see the unity of the unnecessary suffering
taking place. This is the starting point.

I WRITE in the night, but I see not only the
tyranny. If that were so, I would probably
not have the courage to continue. I see
people sleeping, stirring, getting up to
drink water, whispering their projects or
their fears, making love, praying, cooking
something whilst the rest of the family is
asleep, in Baghdad and Chicago. (Yes, I see
too the forever invincible Kurds, 4,000 of
whom were gassed, with US compliance, by
Saddam Hussein.) I see pastry cooks working
in Tehran and the shepherds, thought of as
bandits, sleeping beside their sheep in
Sardinia, I see a man in the Friedrichshain
quarter of Berlin sitting in his pyjamas with
a bottle of beer reading Heidegger, and he
has the hands of a proletarian, I see a small
boat of illegal immigrants off the Spanish
coast near Alicante, I see a mother in Mali -
her name is Aya which means born on Friday -
swaying her baby to sleep, I see the ruins of
Kabul and a man going home, and I know that,
despite the pain, the ingenuity of the
survivors is undiminished, an ingenuity which
scavenges and collects energy, and in the
ceaseless cunning of this ingenuity, there is
a spiritual value, something like the Holy
Ghost. I am convinced of this in the night,
although I don't know why.

The next step is to reject all the tyranny's
discourse. Its terms are crap. In the
interminably repetitive speeches,
announcements, press conferences and threats,
the recurrent terms are Democracy, Justice,
Human Rights, Terrorism. Each word in the
context signifies the opposite of what it was
once meant to. Each has been trafficked, each
has become a gang's code-word, stolen from
humanity.

Democracy is a proposal (rarely realised)
about decision-making; it has little to do
with election campaigns. Its promise is that
political decisions be made after, and in the
light of, consultation with the governed.
This is dependent upon the governed being
adequately informed about the issues in
question, and upon the decision-makers having
the capacity and will to listen and take
account of what they have heard.

Democracy should not be confused with the
"freedom" of binary choices, the publication
of opinion polls or the crowding of people
into statistics. These are its pretence.
Today the fundamental decisions, which effect
the unnecessary pain increasingly suffered
across the planet, have been and are taken
unilaterally without any open consultation or
participation. For instance, how many US
citizens, if consulted, would have said
specifically yes to Bush's withdrawal from
the Kyoto agreement about the carbon dioxide
greenhouse effect which is already provoking
disastrous floods in many places, and
threatens, within the next 25 years, far
worse disasters? Despite all the
media-managers of consent, I would suspect a
minority.

It is a little more than a century ago that
Dvorák composed his Symphony From the New
World. He wrote it whilst directing a
conservatory of music in New York, and the
writing of it inspired him to compose, 18
months later, still in New York, his sublime
Cello Concerto. In the symphony the horizons
and rolling hills of his native Bohemia
become the promises of the New World. Not
grandiloquent but loud and continuing, for
they correspond to the longings of those
without power, of those who are wrongly
called simple, of those the US Constitution
addressed in 1787.

I know of no other work of art which
expresses so directly and yet so toughly
(Dvorák was the son of a peasant and his
father dreamt of his becoming a butcher) the
beliefs which inspired generation after
generation of migrants who became US
citizens. For Dvorák the force of these
beliefs was inseparable from a kind of
tenderness, a respect for life such as can be
found intimately among the governed (as
distinct from governors) everywhere. And it
was in this spirit that the symphony was
publicly received when it was first performed
at Carnegie Hall (16 December 1893).

Dvorák was asked what he thought about the
future of American music and he recommended
that US composers listen to the music of the
Indians and Blacks. The Symphony From the New
World expressed a hopefulness without
frontiers which, paradoxically, is welcoming
because centred on an idea of home. A utopian
paradox.

Today the power of the same country which
inspired such hopes has fallen into the hands
of a coterie of fanatical (wanting to limit
everything except the power of capital),
ignorant (recognising only the reality of
their own fire-power), hypo critical (two
measures for all ethical judgments, one for
us and another for them) and ruthless B52
plotters. How did this happen? How did Bush,
Murdoch, Cheney, Kristol, Rumsfeld, et al et
Arturo Ui, get where they did? The question
is rhetorical, for there is no single answer,
and it is idle, for no answer will dent their
power yet. But to ask it in this way in the
night reveals the enormity of what has
happened. We are writing about the pain in
the world.

The political mechanism of the new tyranny -
although it needs highly sophisticated
technology in order to function - is starkly
simple. Usurp the words Democracy, Freedom,
etc. Impose, whatever the disasters, the new
profit-making and impoverishing economic
chaos everywhere. Ensure that all frontiers
are one-way: open to the tyranny, closed to
others. And eliminate every opposition by
calling it terrorist.

(No, I have not forgotten the couple who
threw themselves from one of the Twin Towers
instead of being burnt to death separately.)

There is a toy-like object which costs about
$4 to manufacture and which is also
incontestably terrorist. It is called the
anti-personnel mine. Once launched, it is
impossible to know who these mines will
mutilate or kill, or when they will do so.
There are more than 100 million lying on, or
hidden in, the earth at this moment. The
majority of victims have been or will be
civilians.

The anti-personnel mine is meant to mutilate
rather than kill. Its aim is to make
cripples, and it is designed with shrapnel
which, it is planned, will prolong the
victim's medical treatment and render it more
difficult. Most survivors have to undergo
eight or nine surgical operations. Every
month, as of now, 2,000 civilians somewhere
are maimed or killed by these mines.

The description anti-personnel is
linguistically murderous. Personnel are
anonymous, nameless, without gender or age.
Personnel is the opposite of people. As a
term it ignores blood, limbs, pain,
amputations, intimacy, and love. It abstracts
totally. This is how its two words when
joined to an explosive become terrorist.

The new tyranny, like other recent ones,
depends to a large degree on a systematic
abuse of language. Together we have to
reclaim our hijacked words and reject the
tyranny's nefarious euphemisms; if we do not,
we will be left with only the word shame. Not
a simple task, for most of its official
discourse is pictorial, associative, evasive,
full of innuendoes. Few things are said in
black and white. Both military and economic
strategists now realise that the media play a
crucial role, not so much in defeating the
current enemy as in foreclosing and
preventing mutiny, protests or desertion.

Any tyranny's manipulation of the media is an
index of its fears. The present one lives in
fear of the world's desperation. A fear so
deep that the adjective desperate, except
when it means dangerous, is never used.
Without money each daily human need becomes a
pain.

Those who have filched power - and they are
not all in office, so they reckon on a
continuity of that power beyond presidential
elections - pretend to be saving the world
and offering its population the chance to
become their clients. The world consumer is
sacred. What they don't add is that consumers
only matter because they generate profit,
which is the only thing that is really
sacred. This sleight of hand leads us to the
crux.

The claim to be saving the world masks the
plotter's assumption that a large part of the
world, including most of the continent of
Africa and a considerable part of South
America, is irredeemable. In fact, every
corner which cannot be part of their centre
is irredeemable. And such a conclusion
follows inevitably from the dogma that the
only salvation is money, and the only global
future is the one their priorities insist
upon, priorities which, with false names
given to them, are in reality nothing more
nor less than their benefits.

Those who have different visions or hopes for
the world, along with those who cannot buy
and who survive from day to day
(approximately 800 million) are backward
relics from another age, or, when they
resist, either peacefully or with arms,
terrorists. They are feared as harbingers of
death, carriers of disease or insurrection.
When they have been "downsized" (one of the
key words), the tyranny, in its naivety,
assumes the world will be unified. It needs
its fantasy of a happy ending. A fantasy
which in reality will be its undoing. Every
form of contestation against this tyranny is
comprehensible. Dialogue with it, impossible.
For us to live and die properly, things have
to be named properly. Let us reclaim our
words.