“Everyone knows that pain is endemic to life, and wants to forget this or relativize it. All the variants of the myth of a Fall from the Golden Age, before pain existed, are an attempt to relativize 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. 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.
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 long, U.S. military forces will be launching the “preventive” war against Iraq, so that the U.S. 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: Globalization. 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 tyrannizes from offshore, not only in terms of Fiscal Law but in terms of any political control beyond its own. Its aim is to delocalize the entire world. Its ideological strategy, beside which 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….
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-general of the World Health Organization last July. She was talking about the AIDS epidemic, in Africa and elsewhere, in which an estimated 68 million people will die within the next eighteen 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, etc. 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 recently to Cherbourg, and have been refused asylum 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.“
—from WHERE ARE WE? by John Berger, from the introduction to Between the Eyes, Essays on Photography and Politics, by David Levi Strauss, excerpted in the March 2003 Harper’s
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Little Bristling Soul 