The Source of Self-Regard - Toni Morrison Page 0,10

the inherent evil of the dis- or unbelieving, but his or her refusal to acknowledge his or her mistake. The lesson to be learned was: acceptance or death. A hard education in a difficult school, the doors to which are still ajar. Freely, reverently it is pried open by unbelievers as well as the faithful, by politicians as well as Enron, Halliburton, and WorldCom.

Now that this medieval school has reopened, the old curricula are revised. Rushing to teach the lessons, administrations spin out of control, skipping between the cheating scholar’s expedience and the dullard’s violence; between courses on empire’s fundamentalism and seminars on theocratic domination. And nations and pseudo-states assert powers that would make Caligula smile as they educate their pupils in purging, cleansing, slaughtering. Graduation parties are held where exploitation, assuming the seductive costume of globalism, dances with any willing partner. In its pursuit corporations plop themselves down in every corner of the globe selling “democracy” as though it were a brand of toothpaste, the patent to which they alone control.

I think it is time for a modern War Against Error. A deliberately heightened battle against cultivated ignorance, enforced silence, and metastasizing lies. A wider war that is fought daily by human rights organizations in journals, reports, indexes, dangerous visits, and encounters with malign oppressive forces. A hugely funded and intensified battle of rescue from the violence that is swallowing the dispossessed.

If we have progressed psychologically, scientifically, intellectually, emotionally no further than 1492, when Spain cleansed itself of Jews, to 2004, when Sudan blocks food and remains content to watch the slow starvation of its people; no further than 1572, when France saw ten thousand slaughtered on Saint Bartholomew’s Day, to 2001, when thousands were blown into filament in New York City; no further than 1692, when Salem burned its own daughters and wives and mothers, to 2004, when whole cities are choked with sex tourists feeding off the bodies of young girls and boys. Then, in spite of our shiny new communication toys, our gorgeous photos of Saturn, our sophisticated organ transplants, we are studying the same old curricula that waste the lives they cannot destroy. We turn to sorcery: summoning up a brew of aliens, enemies, demons, “causes” that deflect and soothe anxieties about gates through which barbarians stroll; anxieties about language falling into the mouths of others, about authority shifting into the hands of strangers. The desire, the mantra, the motto of this ancient educational system is, Civilization in neutral, then grinding to a halt. And anyone who thinks otherwise is naïve because there is real danger in the world. Of course there is. That is precisely why a correction is in order—new curricula, containing some powerful visionary thinking about how the life of the moral mind and a free and flourishing spirit can operate in a context increasingly dangerous to their health.

No more apologies for a bleeding heart when the opposite is no heart at all. Danger of losing our humanity must be met with more humanity. Otherwise we stand meekly behind Eris, hold Nemesis’s cloak, and genuflect at the feet of Thanatos.

Enjoining the work of AI is more critical today than ever before because the world is more desperate; because governing bodies more hampered, more indifferent, more distracted, more inept, more depleted of creative strategies and resources; because media are increasingly cheerful pawns on the exchange market, courtiers for corporations who have no national interests or loyalties and are committed to no public service.

What strings these social perversions together, for me, is profound error—not only the errors in questionable but unquestioned data, in distorted “official” releases, in censorship and the manipulation of the press, but also and especially faults deeply embedded in the imagination. A prime example is the inability or unwillingness to imagine future’s future. The inability or unwillingness to contemplate a future that is neither afterlife nor the tenure of grandchildren. Time itself seems not to have a future that equals the length or breadth or sweep or even the fascination of its past. Infinity is now, apparently, the domain of the past. And the future becomes discoverable space, outer space, which is in fact the discovery of past time. Billions of years of it. Random outbreaks of armageddonism and persistent apocalyptic yearnings suggest that the future is already over.

Oddly enough it is in the West—where advance, progress, and change have been signatory features—where confidence in an enduring future is at its slightest. Since 1945, “world without end” has been