Agonistes

and the necessary pride that becomes us

Some passages of writing are worth more than most books. Here is the great John Berger on Che Guevara:

Guevara found the condition of the world as it is intolerable. It has only recently become so. Previously, the conditions under which two thirds of the people of the world lived were approximately the same as now. The degree of exploitation and enslavement was as great. The suffering involved was as intense and as widespread. The waste was as colossal. But it was not intolerable because the full measure of the truth about the condition was unknown—even by those who suffered it. Truths are not constantly evident in the circumstances to which they refer. They are born— sometimes late. This truth was born with the struggles and wars of national liberation. In the light of the new-born truth, the significance of imperialism changed. Its demands were seen to be different. Previously it had demanded cheap raw materials, exploited labor and a controlled world market. Today it demands a mankind that counts for nothing.

Guevara envisaged his own death in the revolutionary fight against this imperialism. "Wherever death may surprise us, let it be welcome, provided that this, our battlecry, may have reached some receptive ear and another hand may be extended to wield our weapons and other men be ready to intone the funeral dirge with the staccato chant of the machine-guns and new battlecries of war and victory.”

His envisaged death offered him the measure of how intolerable his life would be if he accepted the intolerable condition of the world as it is. His envisaged death offered him the measure of the necessity of changing the world. It was by the license granted him by his envisaged death that he was able to live with the necessary pride that becomes a man.

At the news of Guevara’s death, I heard someone say: "He was the world symbol of the possibilities of one man.” Why is this true? Because he recognized what was intolerable for man and acted accordingly.

Something about block quotes causes the human brain to skip or skim. But I urge you to read the above and to read it again. Read the whole piece, even. A Berger sentence for me is a lot like a Brutalist building: ugly and monstrous and unimpeachably true. It stands unembarrassed and unadorned and refuses to be denied. It stands against obfuscation and for truth.

Guevara recognised what was intolerable for man and acted accordingly. This I think is simply true. It is true in a way that largely bypasses, or at least reorganises, the tired fight about means and ends. Instead it addresses Guevara the man and his personal orientation to the world.

The degree to which a person finds the truth of the world intolerable and acts accordingly is the degree of their nobility. I believe this and I am aware others do not. I believe that the degree to which a person finds this world tolerable is one degree to which they should feel shame. The degree to which a person finds the world intolerable, but does not act accordingly, is one degree to which they actually do feel shame.

The more one acts accordingly against the intolerability of the world, the more inhospitable this world becomes to them. The less one acts against the intolerability of the world, the more comfortable life becomes. I myself increasingly opt for the latter. This is not a world for the principled. It is built for the cowardly.

I have been reflecting on the nobility of men and women in the light of election in the US, and in light of the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. In the United States some people have found this ethnic cleansing intolerable. I have close relationships with some of the people who have acted accordingly. These people may live without shame. There are different sorts of people acting accordingly: my own friends are Jews involved in what can be called the Jewish Left. They are noble people.

They have peacefully resisted. They have been arrested many times. They have marched, and protested, and blockaded every week for over a year. They have occupied buildings. They have confronted politicians. They have sacrificed relationships, and sleep, and their own health. They are exhausted—not in the sense of a person who has run a marathon, but in the sense of a person who has had the light of their soul extinguished by a political system that denies them at every turn.

In Tuesday’s election American voters will choose between a candidate satisfied with the current rate of ethnic cleansing and one who wishes to accelerate it. My exhausted friends have failed. The Democratic Party is unresponsive to them; it treats them with contempt. The major US political parties remain united in their view that the war should continue, and so it will.

Here is the image of Che Guevara’s dead body Berger was responding to when he wrote that passage:

Berger says that Guevara foresaw, anticipated, this moment. It is a moment in which his enemies prop up his body in an attempt to symbolise the futility of resistance. But photographs are not complete, says Berger. They call for the viewer to decide on their meaning. Guevara lived waiting for this moment of failure. And in doing so, in acting accordingly against the intolerability of the world, in full knowledge that he would not see it become tolerable, he found the necessary pride that becomes a man.

Or:

the foreseeing of this final logic is part of what enables a man or a people to fight against overwhelming odds. It is part of the secret of the moral factor which counts as three to one against weapon power.

When the Americans are done with their voting, the world will continue to be intolerable and the war will continue to be spurred on by their government. There will be a photograph of one or other candidate smiling in victory. We will all be presented with that image.

In face of this photograph we must either dismiss it, or complete its meaning for ourselves. It is an image which, as much as any mute image ever can, calls for decision.