A world gone bad

John Berger’s new book, “Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance” (Pantheon: 148 pp., $21), is alternately illuminating and infuriating, by turns considered and full of cant. Gathering 17 essays, all composed since Sept. 11, it aspires -- in elliptical fashion -- to make sense of a world where much of what we “believed was happening in history, or believed should happen, has turned out to be illusory.”

For Berger, the cause of all this is despair, which begets hopelessness and violence while stripping human existence to its most awful, elemental core. That’s a valid point, and he uses it to frame a cogent critique of global capitalism, an ideology in which “the making of profit has to be mankind’s guiding principle, before which everything else from the traditional past or aspiring future must be sacrificed as illusion.”

Where Berger runs into trouble is on the Palestinian question, which animates many of the essays here. There’s something admirable about his sense of humanism, his moral outrage, but he’s wrong to justify the acts of those he labels “martyrs,” who “sacrifice themselves in suicidal counter-attacks.”

Berger is after a mythology of common people, one embodied by what he sees as the Palestinians’ care in the smallest gestures, their “expression of great attention to the moment. Calm and considered, as if it could conceivably be the last moment.” Yet what care is there in a suicide bombing, what guiding principle, what quality of hope?

To his credit, Berger understands this, and when he steers clear of rhetoric, “Hold Everything Dear” becomes a thoughtful meditation on the divisive ethos of power. In the struggle between despair and freedom, he argues, no one has a monopoly on good or evil. “Both exist on both sides. The choice is between self-respect and self-chaos.”

-- David L. Ulin