Das Kapital und die Komödie

The American present. Commercial pilots are living off food stamps or working in donut shops. A Pennsylvania private juvenile detention centre cuts a deal with the county and keeps kids locked up for months on end for talking back or smoking weed. Corporations take out secret life insurance policies on their employees making the corporation the sole beneficiary when the employee dies, while the family of the deceased spirals into debt trying to cover hospital and funeral expenses. Financial institutions ask for bailouts—you may have heard about this one—while suddenly laid-off workers can’t even get paid for their final shifts. How can such corruption be tolerated? Is there a single overwhelming force facilitating all these aberrations from the Western democratic ideal? Michael Moore has an answer, and it’s a whopper. Let’s just say Francis Fukuyama was soooo wrong.

Coming 20 years after Roger & Me, Moore’s celebrated debut as documentary filmmaker, Capitalism: A Love Story displays much of what makes Moore’s films powerful and enduring in their way. The dumpy, tirelessly muckraking son of a Flint, Michigan autoworker, Moore is the self-appointed spokesman for disgruntled blue collar America, not a theorist with a cushy university post but a resourceful and ambitious people-guy who seems to genuinely like talking to people. (Should they be willing to talk to him, which is not always the case.) What Moore has to say is impassioned, funny, highly entertaining, shamelessly tear-jerking, sometimes insightful, and not especially coherent. In its loosely related assembly of true stories of economic injustice, Capitalism is an engaging and compassionate cri de coeur. In its layman’s explication of certain mystifying financial trends and baffling feats of white collar crime, it goes some distance—a short, but still admirable distance—toward making issues of vital importance to everyone a little more accessible. In its attempts to diagnose the singular underlying cause behind all of these stories the film isn’t just an over-simplification but a confused and opportunistic reading of what ultimately feels like an ideological bogeyman. It’s funny. I’m fairly sure I’m on Moore’s side. I’m not sure I know what the hell he’s getting at.

The messiness of Moore’s argument is evident in his roping of everybody from Roosevelt to Obama to Wallace Shawn to Jesus into his back-up band. He actually gets a bunch of priests to say that capitalism is un-Christian!, which I guess might make sense if interpreted as a bald play on the spiritual conscience of the Christian Right—hardly a terribly Catholic bunch—though I have a hard time seeing them in line at the multiplex. When Moore finally gets around to ideological alternatives his discussion of socialism is equally vague and inclusive, offering no clear positive examples of other nations making a sustained go at it and mostly just falling back on championing labour unions. The examples he offers of average Americans overcoming economic injustice are truly inspiring, but they don’t actually show how capitalism in its essence is an inherent obstacle. Still, you should see the movie. You’ll have a good time with it and quite possibly learn something from the details. Just don’t expect to walk away with a thesis. The theorists were always better with those anyway.

Out of the Cold, but far from out of the game: John le Carré's A Most Wanted Man

The titular figure of John le Carré’s A Most Wanted Man is as diminutive and weary-looking as the multitude of parties wanting him are immense and powerful. His name is Issa, a vagabond with “a look of winter,” a half-Russian, half-Chechen in his early 20s. He appears right there in the novel’s wonderful first line, emaciated and brooding, an unsanctioned tourist stalking Hamburg in a black overcoat that renders him only frailer and more conspicuous. He’s, by my measure at least, a rather hysterically devout Muslim, though his humourless, righteous, half-crazed demeanour may be partly the result of illness, perhaps partly of torture, not to mention the dark, grueling journey stowed somewhere in the belly of the ship that brought him to this not altogether friendly German port. There’s also the implication that Issa might be a terrorist. Whatever the case, his presence trips alarms all over. He means many things to many people, and he promises to prove useful in many ways, some of which the reader won’t likely be able to imagine before reaching this superb thriller’s final chapter.

In interviews le Carré has said that as a young man he invested institutions with the qualities he’d have liked to find in parents. It’s a rich observation, not only for what it tells us about le Carré—the institution he refers to being British intelligence, for whom he was once a bonafide spook—nor just the latent desire for authorities to whom we may submit, but for what it says about the persistent nature of patriarchy: in whichever form it takes, it seems ever the foil of the more worrisome heroes of fiction. And in le Carré’s milieu, there’s always reason to worry.

No less than three of the central characters in A Most Wanted Man, the three we can come closest to calling heroes, perform vital actions dictated by a troubling paternal legacy. Issa is the unhappy beneficiary of a tremendous sum left to him by a dead father he loathes. Brue, the affable, 60-year-old Scottish proprietor of a Hamburg bank, finds himself obliged to aid Issa due to the compromising legacy of his own father, whose business of financial management, both in its legitimate and crooked forms, Brue has carried on in his perfunctory fashion. Annabel, the young, idealistic, but very smart and more than capable activist lawyer who takes Issa’s case, struggles with the fact that for all her overt, deep-seated rebellion, she too has taken on the same vocation as her father, perhaps as a method of somehow doing good through the very same means her father used to do ill. These uneasy relationships to their respective dads is just about all these three really have in common, but, in le Carré’s inspired stratagem, it’s enough to tether their fates together.

Some claim the end of the Cold War left certain writers in limbo, le Carré most of all, seeing how the author of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold practically made the tangled web of Cold War intelligence his personal literary domain. But the novels that sprung up in the wake of what Francis Fukuyama zealously called the end of history followed their natural patterns, with le Carré turning his attention to multinational corporations, for one, in The Constant Gardener. That the war on terror should now loom over A Most Wanted Man comes as no surprise, and le Carré responds to its new world order with considerable vigor and insight, recognizing how the West’s current bogeyman might be seen as even more ubiquitous and unpredictable than the communists were, thus granting intelligence agencies tacit license to be still more ruthless. In a blackly humorous bit of anti-terror double-think, le Carré has one intelligence official explain to another how a terror suspect is that much more likely to be a jihadi for the very fact that he does not behave like a jihadi. And in a nice tip of the hat to his past work, le Carré sets this new tale in the same country that once marked the Cold War’s ideological frontier, and in the very city that was once home to Mohamed Atta.

As pessimistic as le Carré can be toward institutions, he remains, like his most notable forbearer Graham Greene, a true believer in individuals. Issa may be to the end a bit of a headache, an enigmatic centerpiece and all-purpose pawn too fanatical for the author to bother peering very deeply into, but le Carré is more than generous in his texturing of both Annabel, who for all her altruistic illusions is not condescended to, and Brue, who seems to be the character closest in spirit—as well as in age—to the author. “A lonely rich man in late life, still looking for the dignity of love” is how Annabel describes Brue, and the description is genuinely tender. It also starts to allude to the fundamental weaknesses of such essentially ordinary characters in the face of unfathomable power—for all our better intentions and beliefs, when our back’s against the wall, most of us simply do what we’re told. The world of A Most Wanted Man, controlled by the ostensibly diplomatic interests of at least three governments, each having very big fists, is not a forgiving one. It is harsh, and it thinks nothing of consuming lives to forward its goals. Which is to say that, Cold War be damned, this is still the world of spy fiction. “Don’t go soft on me,” one German operative warns another, “there’s no room for it in this operation.” “ Tell me one where there was,” slyly counters the other. There is, of course, no response to be had for that. And that, I’m guessing, is why we keep reading.

Calling for an end to the End of History: John Gray's disarming critiques of apocalyptic misadventure

Reading John Gray’s 2002 book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals is rather like having some particularly gummed-up section of your brain scrubbed ruthlessly clean. With steel wool. For most readers, Gray’s taut, provocative, almost gleefully unsentimental attacks on certain venerated schools of liberal thought can initially feel both unnerving and unsavoury.

With surgical precision (and, to be sure, a few sweeping generalizations), he takes to task the Enlightenment-born notion of progress, which is to say the largely unquestioned belief that the accumulation of knowledge will inevitably make man better. More specifically, he attacks what we misleadingly call secular humanism, weaving in numerous examples of human activity at its bleakest to impart a clear sense of the impulses toward irrationality and conflict that make us basically similar to all other animals. His dismissal of the convention of dividing political outlooks into neat camps of Left and Right (a most welcome dismissal as far as I’m concerned) will no doubt enrage those who consider their allegiance to either side a badge of honour. I would recommend finding a copy in hardcover, not only because it is a book to be revisited but because you may find yourself compelled to hurl it across the room more than once before quickly resuming your reading of it. For this reason alone a more durable edition is quite useful.

Only gradually as you read Straw Dogs does it become clear that at the core of Gray’s argument is a realist diagnosis of our ongoing and increasingly destructive inability to recognize the abundant failings of Enlightenment philosophy and its reactionary, utopian undercurrents, persistent modes of thinking that, most notably, form the backbone of neo-conservatism as first popularized in Francis Fukuyama’s divisive but still hugely influential The End of History and the Last Man, which presupposes that history is one long march of progress ending with the entire human race adopting the same ideological model. With the catastrophe that is the invasion of Iraq –that all-too-perfect expression of utopian, neo-con delusions– having begun in the interim, Straw Dogs, whether you buy into all of Gray’s ideas or not, has become an even more essential text, one that nicely and succinctly sums up Gray’s post-Cold War perspective of global politics.

But if Straw Dogs is the ideal introduction to Gray’s philosophy, his new book Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (Doubleday, $29.95) functions as a more finely detailed analysis of global trends that have more fully erupted since. Much of this analysis is founded in the same contention that defined Straw Dogs: that the rationale that leads a government peopled by the Christian Right into disastrous nation building –and ironically binds it to Islamic terrorists– finds its lineage in a perhaps surprisingly diverse history of unrealizable utopian exploits, including Jacobinism, Soviet and Chinese communism and, at one particularly gruesome extreme, Nazism, all of which, however indirectly, have their roots in Christianity, which Gray purports is the mother of all mankind’s dreams of apocalypse and universal redemption through righteous violence and upheaval. Granted, to arrive at this conclusion you have to view any outspoken anti-Christian view, such as atheism, as inherently and unavoidably informed by the dictates of Christianity. Richard Dawkins and Chris Hitchens should love that! But anyone familiar with the work of Nietzsche, who both declared God dead while never quite slipping out of God’s grip, this theory shouldn’t actually seem so far-fetched.

Harsh critics of Gray, of which there of course many, tend to misinterpret or baldly misquote his texts. He just rubs people the wrong way, to the point where they don’t seem able to read very coherently. Writing for, oddly enough, The New Humanist, Laurie Taylor for example has protested against what she deems to be Gray’s unrelenting pessimism. “Gray is literally proposing that we should do nothing to try to change our world,” she tells us. Yet this directly contradicts Gray’s explicit appeal to simply apply more reasonable models of policy-making. Politics, he writes near the close of Black Mass, “is not a vehicle for universal projects but the art of responding to the flux of circumstances.”

But let’s look for an example of Gray at his most iconoclastic. “‘Humanity’ does not exist,” he boldly announced in Straw Dogs. “There are only humans, driven by conflicting needs and illusions, and subject to every kind of infirmity of will and judgment.” Am I crazy for being able to sleep nights while more or less agreeing that people are indeed diverse, unruly, passionate, unpredictable and requiring a variety of problem-solving initiatives instead of one single ideological vision of “perfect” government for all, i.e.: American-style (and violently forced) democracy?

I didn’t grow up in an especially religious household, but I do remember that as a little kid I felt at once desirous and fearful of the notion of going to heaven. The alternative described to me seemed almost too horrible to even ponder, yet heaven seemed like this eerily static place where all the pleasures and adventures of life came to a screeching halt. I didn’t know what to make of the Promised Land, only that I was afraid not to get in. Maybe Talking Heads put it best: “Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.”

Not to oversimplify Gray’s ideas, but I appreciate his recognition of my childhood response to the never entirely imaginable utopian state that so many religious and political parties strive to enter us unto. Accepting mortal man with all his flaws might be more useful than endeavouring toward some great social project that will deliver us all to a realm that denies us all the sorrows and joys that make real life what it is. Of course, Gray doesn’t deny that we still might dream of such a place, he just points out that it might not be the smartest foundation for government.