Trump: vigilante of the trivial? (Andrew Harnik/Getty)
Next week, we will celebrate the centenary of John Berger, born on 5 November 1926. In September we mourned the death of Annie Dillard who died aged 81. The two great writers never met — and I don’t know if they read each other’s books — but there are obvious thematic and structural overlaps in their work. Neither was a philosopher, both were profound thinkers. After Berger moved to the French Alps and started work on Pig Earth, the first volume of the trilogy Into Their Labours, he became increasingly drawn to what had preoccupied the precocious Dillard from her 1974 debut, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. “Ultimate concerns,” she calls these in her last novel, The Maytrees (2007), in stark contrast to what several characters decide has happened to academic philosophy, namely that it has “trivialized itself out of the ballpark”.
Not that the trivial is undeserving of serious attention. Alongside a shared interest in the primal and the religious, Berger and Dillard each had things to say about the trivial. They make us wonder if events as momentous as the US elections of 2016 and 2024 and everything calamitous that followed from them — let alone what might still, as they say in America, be coming down the pike — involved, to a not trivial extent, contesting ideas of the trivial.
In her memoir An American Childhood (1987), Dillard recalls how she and a group of other young girls at school were “vigilantes of the trivial”. She’s referring to matters of fashion but no phrase better describes the habits of thought-policing, constant jeopardy and apprehension that underwrote — and undermined — the cultural politics of the American Left over the last dozen or so years. This over-zealous policing was undertaken, as so often in the past, in the name of an entirely worthy cause: social justice. In America, though, this lofty aim co-existed — until Luigi Mangione burst into the debate with a vengeance — with a widespread if grudging acceptance of the idea that healthcare is run on a for-profit basis. Take the case of Joseph Heller who, in No Laughing Matter, tells the story of a long illness and extremely costly recovery. Through sheer inadvertence, as Martin Amis observed, Heller failed to pay a $20 premium which would have meant he got an extra $40,000 of health coverage. “He minds about that,” Amis continues, “but he doesn’t mind about the system” — a system in which, as he succinctly puts it, “you are getting charged for every Kleenex”.
The only concern more ultimate than illness is the least desirable prognosis, death, but in recent years much of the Left — and I think the repetition here is useful — left not just opponents but allies exposed to a creeping ideological infection whereby every little infraction of a constantly updated code (Dillard refers to herself and friends as “enforcers of a code”) risked exposure to the full force of unwritten laws. For every triumph and vindication — the conviction of Harvey Weinstein, most obviously — there was a collateral sentence of undue severity for some relatively trivial offence. Often this sentence was the opposite of lifetime imprisonment without the possibility of parole: indefinite expulsion, and the sentence could never be appealed because the perps were rarely tried. Across American campuses and institutions Arthur Miller’s The Crucible was effectively being re-staged, in real time, in contemporary dress. There’s no shortage of books — Woke Racism by the fearless John McWhorter, The War on the West by Douglas Murray, Unwanted Advances by the ferociously brilliant Laura Kipnis — documenting the absurdities and excesses of this extended moment. Inappropriate jokes, infelicities of language, slips of cultural etiquette, were punished while huge threats were underway, collective resistance to them weakened by the politics of outraged identity. Some issues sailed east across the Atlantic more successfully than others. Micro-aggressions were not such a big deal in Britain where actual aggro and old-school bovver are never more than a head-butt away. Charges of cultural appropriation also proved tricky since many of us — Peter Blake, most famously — could not be persuaded that our Saturday afternoons, our cultural heritage, had not been enriched by the magnificent Kendo Nagasaki.
Meanwhile, like a game show offering ever-escalating prize money, an addictive competition was underway to see who could be most quickly and severely offended, often vicariously, on someone else’s behalf. Ostensibly a weapon of the Left, identity politics helped to do the Right’s work, splintering what are actually shared interests and goals into competing factions of the variously aggrieved. Consciousness raising is a good thing, always, but militant doses of this variant were often consciousness lowering.
The absurdity of much of what was happening went beyond the satirical reach of Tom Wolfe in the Seventies. The prosecutorial dragnet of critical race theory was all the more irresistible because, while it was couched in the idioms of academic rigour, it had — as John McWhorter has repeatedly pointed out — many of the qualities of a cult. While Wolfe had reported hilariously on precursor fads in Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers (1970), Karl Popper had pre-diagnosed the condition in 1962, in Conjectures and Refutations. He was referring specifically to Marxism and psychoanalysis, but critical race theory had the similar “effect of an intellectual conversion or revelation, opening your eyes to a new truth hidden from those not yet initiated. Once your eyes were thus opened you saw confirming instances everywhere: the world was full of verifications of the theory. Whatever happened always confirmed it. Thus its truth appeared manifest; and unbelievers were clearly people who did not want to see the manifest truth; who refused to see it, either because it was against their class interest, or because of their repressions which were still ‘un-analyzed’ and crying aloud for treatment.”
The irony is that the various courses of treatment could easily serve as a distraction from the larger condition to which they were a justified response. That seems to be changing. So although the BBC — of all places — recently published an article about bare nails as an expression of white supremacy, it was quickly withdrawn. During the years when so much fiddling of this kind had been going on, however, Rome, or its contemporary manifestations in Ukraine and Gaza, were busily burning. Broadening the focus beyond armed conflict to include climate change, swathes of the world were literally on fire. And the blaze continues.
Which brings us to the other part of the triviality wars. In the Nineties, a Dutch TV crew took what was by then a well-trodden pilgrimage route — I had taken it myself in the Eighties — to make a film about Berger at his home in the village of Quincy. At one point Berger is asked if he has become more religious and conservative with age. I have transcribed his answer here, with minor edits, but do please try to watch A Touch of Grace on YouTube, from about 28 minutes 44 seconds in, as he reflects on the global triumph of the free economy:
“This system, for the first time in human history, judges and makes decisions about what is happening to our entire planet by the criterion of only one value, which is the value of increasing profit. And this is of a fanaticism by which the so-called fanatics in other parts of the world are really complex, tolerant, nuanced people, the most fanatical of them even. Because this is the absolute fanaticism, and it is a fanaticism of such triviality if one thinks about the needs and the structure of the human spirit, that everything is judged only by this one criterion… What this does is produce colossal injustice [Berger concludes with increasing passion] and against that injustice I feel more militant than ever.”
This was filmed before 9/11, before the advent of ISIS, so it’s necessary to amend what Berger says about tolerant, nuanced people. That aside, to claim that he has been proved right is an understatement. The twice-elected American President is someone who only understands the deal, who recognises no currency or morality other than profit. The price paid for this, in oil, in land, in maiming and lives, in injustice, is, to him… trivial.
By the time this little article is published, the American midterms will be fast approaching. They may offer encouragement, but the choice is not between competing forms of the trivial. As Berger put it in a poem published more than 60 years ago, we:
go backwards or forwards
There are two directions
But not two sides.