The naming of the intolerable is itself the hope

We live in times that are creeping dangerously towards the intolerable. Not merely ‘interesting’, as the Chinese saying has it.

My post’s title comes from a passage in John Berger’s and our faces, my heart, brief as photos. He had been looking at a photo of five men he met a couple of years before in Turkey. They are workers and union organisers and he worries about their fate in the wake of a recent coup. This is the coup of 1980 but it applies to times since in many places where the right or the military assume power.

It is relevant to the situation now in the US and possibly quite soon in the UK and Europe.

There is the threat of torture for these men in the photo. Even Berger would have struggled to believe that the US would elect a president who openly declared his support for torture.

Torture is never about information. Torture is always about repression and warning and fear.

But the main premise of Berger’s passage is that hope lies in the naming and describing of the intolerable. When the intolerable is met head on, change for the better begins.

Here is how he ends this passage:

When something is termed intolerable, actions must follow. These actions are subject to all the vicissitudes of life. But the pure hope resides first and mysteriously in the capacity to name the intolerable as such: and this capacity comes from afar — from the past and the future. This is why politics and courage are inevitable. The time of the torturers is agonizingly but exclusively the present.

The extreme right may win for now. But their time — the time of the torturers — will always be temporary. We name the intolerable and we start to resist.