`The World Has Changed'

The first of John Berger’s many books that I read (26 of them stand on my shelves) was G., his Booker Prize-winning novel published in 1972. He gave his prize money to the Black Panthers, fashionable hoodlums de jour. Despite my growing revulsion with his politics -- tarted-up Marxism made palatable for dim fellow-travelers, combining savagery and coyness -- I continued to admire G. and some of his other work, especially the trilogy of novels devoted to French peasantry, known collectively as Into Their Labours. At its best Berger’s work is clear-eyed, compassionate and beautifully written. Unfortunately, he wrote his best work long ago. Toward Berger I have long felt loyalty rooted in youthful enthusiasm. The time has come to shed sentimental illusions. His just-published book is Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance, which I first browsed about in, then started to read sequentially, only to stop after the sixth sentence. The first piece is “Wanting Now,” and here are those first six sentences:

“The world has changed.”

[A truism, self-evident at least since Heraclitus. Such a sentence is, in fact, saying: “Drop everything and listen to me. I have portentous news.” In other words, steel yourself for a sermon or op-ed piece of exceeding self-righteousness.]

“Information is being communicated differently.”

[Ditto.]

“Misinformation is developing its techniques.”

[Ditto. Substitute Goebbels for Heraclitus.]

“On a world scale emigration has become the principal means of survival.”

[Dubious, but let it pass.]

“The national state of those who had suffered the worst genocide in history has become, militarily speaking, fascist.”

With this libel against Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, Berger identifies himself as a willing purveyor of the opiate of the contemporary Left: anti-Semitism. Particularly objectionable is the clause with which he opens the sentence, intended as a feint before he delivers his roundhouse. A mere 18 words turns everything that follows, and perhaps everything that preceded it, into a form of pornography. No surprise, I suppose, from a man who endorsed the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. In his book’s second piece, “Seven Levels of Despair,” written two months after the 9/11 attacks, Berger says:

“What makes a terrorist is, first, a form of despair.”

No, what makes a terrorist is, first, a willingness to commit evil acts, to kill and maim innocent people. By writing, publishing and presumably believing such inversions of morality and good sense, Berger has forsaken any aesthetic or intellectual respectability he once enjoyed. His public dissolution reminds us that politics is a powerful corrosive, dissolving everything it touches -- truth, a healthy ethical sense and, always, art. Berger’s work of a lifetime has turned into pernicious muck.