We’re stumbling toward another election that looks, to the disenchanted, like a choice between one shade of gray and another. A liberation theologian is violently deposed in Haiti. Guerrillas, in Russia and everywhere, say that even the deaths of children are justified in the light of a larger cause. And a Tibetan monk flies around the world telling us that nonviolent humanity is the one weapon politics defers to.
As the world wavers more than ever between irreconcilables — “Human nature is not black and white,’’ a distinguished British novelist said, “but black and gray’’ — it becomes tempting to ask not what Jesus would do, but what a mortal, conflicted and deeply human soul like that distinguished novelist would do in the modern moment.
Saturday marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of Graham Greene, who made doubt his eternal creed and tried always to find the human, ambiguous truth that lay beyond all slogans or ideologies. And Greene’s characteristic blend of realism and conscience — his determination to see the world in all its fallenness and detail and yet never to give up on it entirely — seems closer to what many are hungering for these days than the bromides of politician or pundit.
Greene’s contention, always, was that a human complication must take precedence over all the noble solace of talk about God and country that even a good Catholic or patriot might resort to. Certainty is the luxury of the unthinking; it’s the things that don’t make sense that we live with. Thus his novels end, often, with a winner half-wishing he’d lost the struggle, or a kindly man who swears he’s honest turning out to be a Judas. It is the very contrariness of things that leads to possibility: There’s always the hope that even a whiskey priest who has done everything wrong in his life may suddenly, almost in spite of himself, do right.
Were he to watch “Fahrenheit 9/11,’’ therefore, Greene might note that Michael Moore, as a spokesman for the dispossessed, with a grasp on the human cost of war — the grieving mother left behind, the bewildered kids at sea in the desert — is offering us an essential and forgotten truth. But he would also surely remark that, as an ideologue himself, Moore squanders all the trust he has won with ad hominem attacks and a distrust of every nuance.
Were he to survey the situation in Iraq, Greene might cite the precedent of Don Quixote, who, declaring that his “occupation and profession’’ is “to wander the world righting wrongs and rectifying injustices,’’ blithely breaks a young man’s leg.
In the world that Greene inhabits, all talk of left and right glosses over the fact that right and wrong are often inseparable.
One reason his novels have lasted into a second century is that he saw that to report on the present is — if you do it right — to document the future. If you look deeply enough at any society, you see not just its systems and circumstances but a character that is enduring.
Thus visitors to Haiti today are best advised to consult Greene’s “The Comedians,’’ from 38 years ago. His portrait of Fulgencio Batista’s Cuba in “Our Man in Havana’’ — all nonchalance, corruption and sudden brutality — is startlingly close to the Cuba of Greene’s friend, Fidel Castro. I thought I saw his Vietnamese heroine, Phuong, as I was sitting in an Internet cafe last month in Saigon, and then the young woman at the terminal next to me clicked on to her e-mail and I read, “Dear Phuong . . . ,’’ a long letter from a foreign admirer.
Greene’s hope, ultimately, was that our predicament could be our redemption: The very fact that we are confused or suffering or scared is what allows us to feel for someone else, even an apparent enemy, and so act better than we should. Our opponent, too, has children at home and hopes for them. One can imagine Greene smiling in approval at the documentary about Al-Jazeera, “Control Room.’’ In it, Arab journalists chronicling American attacks say frankly that they dream of sending their children to the United States for their schooling, while the US military spokesman whose job is to rebut them acknowledges, winningly, that their political views have some merit. For some, Greene is too much a product of his old-school imperial background to be of value today, but as we look at religions claiming political ground, and politicians speaking on behalf of religion, and as we see people everywhere wishing that the United States and its enemies were not so sure of their God-given rightness, some of us find solace in the champion of heart-torn humanism.
A hundred years after his birth, Greene’s still telling us that if God gives us anything, it’s a sense that we are all as wrong, and fallible, as the people we curse at.
— Pico Iyer is author, most recently, of “Sun After Dark’’ (Knopf, 2004).
