When I was a boy in the Dutch polder, let’s go back, Dutch television broadcast the British documentary series Ways of Seeing from. Every Sunday evening, the left-wing British writer and critic John Berger looked critically at ‘great’ art, putting it in a new light.
It was a hit. Our view, Berger taught his audience, is not neutral. The way we see and interpret things is not separate from the society that has shaped us. What we see is influenced by who and what we are, by where we come from, what we’ve been told, what we’ve learned.
All this may now sound like a collection of open doors, in those years it was considered a revelation. Breathlessly I watched every new episode of Ways of Seeing. Not that I understood everything. My world was still small. Besides, I didn’t even know most of the artworks deconstructed by Berger.
What made John Berger’s speeches exciting to me is, I think, the discovery of the existence of the ‘critical view’ itself, the discovery that when you force yourself to see differently, you really see things around you differently. will see that changes your world.
Meaning is given, nothing goes without saying.
Everything has become critical
The critical framework in which Berger are Ways of Seeing made has expanded enormously in the decades that followed. The ‘critical view’ has been democratized. It extends to almost all aspects of our existence. Almost every aspect of the social context in which I grew up, as a white middle-class boy in a commuter village in the polder, is questioned critically. Not only with regard to racism and inclusiveness, but also the way in which we in the Netherlands deal with our past, with nature, with the origin of our prosperity and the story of our national history. Everything, it seems, has become critical.
A fundamental critique. I recently attended a lecture by Amitav Ghosh, a writer I first met in the 1990s, when his novels still appeared in the Netherlands in a well-meaning ‘world’ series. Today, Ghosh writes a lot about the climate crisis and the way we view it. In his book The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis he argues that the climate crisis is largely caused by the same purely instrumental, exploitative view that saw colonized peoples as less human or non-human.
Read also this interview with Ghosh on the occasion of the book The Nutmeg’s Curse
To face the climate crisis, Ghosh says, we must learn to look at the world, and ourselves in that world, in a radically different way. In other words, our view must first change before we can actually change our world. This means that the entire traditional ‘Western’ view of man, which is no longer exclusively Western, has to be overhauled.
On the climate side, Ghosh is anything but an optimist, given the severity of the crisis and the time pressure we are under. But what he does believe in is the ability of art, the ability of images and stories, the human imagination, to direct the gaze differently, to deal with the natural world differently.
How we look at art says something about us, Berger showed us, but art always looks at us, as it were, Ghosh says – encourages us, explores possibilities, gives us ideas, makes us aware, changes our way of to look.
It’s easy to be skeptical about that. I am also skeptical. I believe that a critical view should also be able to question idealism, without losing faith in those ideals.
Because go for it. The requested change in consciousness on just about all fronts is a difficult, often painful process. Confessing change by mouth is easy; especially when you are among like-minded people. But when you are one of those who are asked to change, adapt and accommodate, it is a challenge to actually embed that change in your existence.
Hence the resistance. The critical questioning of almost everything, that cannot have escaped anyone’s attention, has led to a fierce social reaction, especially among people who do not feel seen and appreciated by today’s ‘elites’.
This reaction has many causes, certainly also socio-economic ones, but I think it is essentially aimed at the critical view itself, the dismantling of familiar and therefore ‘self-evident’ ways of looking. As a result, your entire existence seems to be in jeopardy. The feeling that your own world is being undermined by ‘elites’ who don’t care about you at all is an inexhaustible source of anger. Sometimes rightly so, but that anger has now become a goldmine for politicians and the media, which incessantly come up with examples of ‘woke madness’, with ideological hair-splitting salon radicals and perky identity jargon of an unhinged wealthy class.
Woke War III
John Berger’s critical eye that questions is now portrayed as a hostile ideology: wokism.
Even the war in Ukraine is increasingly framed by the radical right as a woke war. Putin’s own language in his speeches is permeated with hatred of the West, which is said to be completely captivated by a critical discourse that undermines traditional values. By framing the liberal values of liberty and equality as an ideology to fight, Putin’s deadly poison takes on the appearance of a cure.
His language is gratefully adopted by Putin’s apologists in the West. “The neocons and Woke links are joining forces to lead into Woke War III,” US venture capitalist David Sacks recently wrote in a widely read opinion piece in news week. That is nonsense, it is precisely the radical left that, out of distaste for Western imperialism and the arms industry, is being too accommodating to Putin’s aggression, with impotent calls for ‘peace’ and ‘diplomacy’.
It does not matter. The woke ghost can be used against anything you are too lazy to think about, anything that prompts you to change your mind, anything that requires change and effort. If you manage to frame Putin’s war, the main conflict after World War II, as a war of our ‘woke’ elites, then it is not ‘our war’ and Ukraine can be comfortably left to its own devices.
Four NRC editors – Folkert Jensma, Martine Kamsma, Hanneke Chin-A-Fo and this week Bas Heijne – take turns discussing what strikes them within their specialization.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of October 22, 2022