Hope, Even Now

Writing “The Soul and the Operator” in 1990 just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, John Berger puts history into a Marxist framework—the battle between communism and capitalism seems to have ended with capitalism the victor. After all, as he writes, in the two centuries between the French Revolution and the fall of the Soviet Union, the world was “‘unified’, modernized, created, destroyed, and transformed” in a way it never had been before, and capitalism had generated the energy for those changes.

But Berger strongly implies that whatever capitalism has done for the world, the cost has been far too high. “It was a period when self-interest, instead of being seen as a daily human temptation, was made heroic,” he writes. Perhaps the way Ivan Boesky put it at UC-Berkeley’s business school graduation in 1986 is even clearer: “I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.” The result, of course, has been an impoverishment of the world like nothing ever seen in history. The world had seen poverty throughout its history, lots of it, but before capitalism, it had always been the result of scarcity. If people were starving to death, it was because there was simply no food to be had. In the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries—the age of capitalism—the world has had vast surpluses of food (and every other material item). That’s what capitalism does; it produces wealth and surpluses. But as Ivan Boesky pointed out, it also produces greed, so when people starve today, as millions do, it is because they can’t afford the price being charged for it, by those who have much more than they need, of course.

Berger blames much of this moral sinkhole on the way capitalism seduced people into compartmentalizing their beliefs, and especially their spiritual beliefs, from their actions, which were “based exclusively on a materialist interpretation of life.” In such a system, he points out, economic laws are given the authority of natural laws, with the result being that “official religion became an evasive theatre, turning its back on real consequences and blessing principally the powerful.” The fact we don’t notice it today is precisely Berger’s point.

But the human imagination needs more than material goods, Berger reminds us, so even nonreligious people recreate “spiritual” expressions—vegetarianism, Romanticism, sports, art. One of the most powerful of those movements is the “transcendent but secular faith of those struggling for social justice against the greed of the rich.” Movements that came to Berger’s mind in 1990 were the French Revolution, the Prague Spring of 1968, the fall of the Soviet Union the year before. In our time, it would be Bernie Sanders. Such movements can inspire enormous self-sacrifice. It was on that wave that the 20th century communist movement rode into the world political scene. It was a new faith that sought to save the world from social injustice.

But, and here is Berger’s major point, such movements harbor the seeds of their own failure in their very belief systems. “Since their faith was unnamed,” he writes, “it could be easily usurped. It was in the name of their determination and their solidarity that the party-machines justified the first crimes, and, later, the crimes to cover up further crimes, till finally there was no faith left anywhere.”

Berger saw in the fall of the Soviet Union an attempt to reclaim a more authentic spiritual experience. It promised for the world in 1989 a new day, when “the living are remeeting the dead…sharing their pain and their hope.” The world was poised on the edge of true happiness “when people can give the whole of themselves to the moment being lived, when Being and Becoming are the same thing.” He ends the essay with a question: how long can such a moment last? He sees the dangers always lurking—bigotry, fanaticism, racism, the greed of capitalism—and leaves us with the encouragement that, in the end, nothing is predetermined.