The Source of Self-Regard - Toni Morrison Page 0,11
subject to serious debate. Even our definitions of the present have prefixes pointing backward: postmodern, poststructuralist, postcolonial, post–Cold War. Our contemporary prophets look back behind themselves after what has gone on before.
There are good reasons for this rush into the past for all our answers to contemporary problems. First there is the happiness that its exploration, its revision, its deconstruction afford. One reason has to do with the secularization of culture, another to do with the theocratization of culture. In the former there will be no Messiah and afterlife is understood to be medically absurd. In the latter, the only existence that matters is the one following death. In both, sustaining human existence on this planet for another half a billion years is beyond our powers of imagination. We are cautioned against the luxury of such meditation, partly because it is the unknown, mostly because it may defer and displace contemporary issues—like missionaries who were accused of diverting their convert’s attention from poverty during life to rewards following death.
I don’t want to give the impression that all current discourse is unrelievedly oriented to the past and indifferent to the future. The social and natural sciences are full of promises and warnings that will affect us over very long stretches of time. Scientific applications are poised to erase hunger, annihilate pain, extend individual life spans by producing illness-resistant people and disease-resistant plants. Communication technology is making sure that virtually everyone on earth can “interact” with one another and be entertained, maybe even educated, while doing so. We are warned about global change in terrain and weather that radically alters human environment; we are warned of the consequences of maldistributed resources on human survival and warned of the impact of overdistributed humans on natural resources. We invest in the promises and sometimes act intelligently on the warnings. But the promises trouble us with ethical dilemmas and a horror of playing God blindly, while the warnings have left us less and less sure of how and which and why. The prophecies that win our attention are those with bank accounts large enough or photo ops sensational enough to force debate and outline corrective action, so we can decide which war or political debacle or environmental crisis is intolerable enough; which disease, which natural disaster, which institution, which plant, which animal, bird, or fish needs our attention most. These are obviously serious concerns. What is noteworthy among the promises and warnings is that, other than products and a little bit more personal time owing to improved health, and more resources in the form of leisure and money to consume these products and services, the future has nothing to recommend itself. We are being seduced into accepting truncated, short-term, CEO versions of the world’s wholly human race.
The loudest voices are urging those already living in day-to-day dread to think of the future in military terms—as a cause for and expression of war. We are being bullied into understanding the human project as a manliness contest where women and children are the most dispensable collateral.
If scientific language is about longer individual life in exchange for an ethical one; if political agenda is the xenophobic protection of a few of our families against the catastrophic others; if religious language is discredited as contempt for the nonreligious; if secular language bridles in fear of the sacred; if market language is merely an excuse for inciting greed; if the future of knowledge is not wisdom but “upgrade,” where might we look for humanity’s own future? Isn’t it reasonable to assume that, projecting earthly human life into the far-distant future may not be the disaster movie we have come to love, but a reconfiguration of what we are here for? To lessen suffering, to tell the truth, raise the bar? To stand one remove from timeliness, like an artist encouraging reflection, stoking imagination, mindful of the long haul and putting his or her own life on the line, to imagine work in a world worthy of life?
For a future that perhaps only the young will be able fully, purely to imagine, this new War Against Error has no guarantee of victory. Sentient life is original and very hard. A student of mine (probably twenty years old) recently gave me a piece of art. Printed, cut, and pasted within it were these lines:
No one told me it was like this.
It’s only matter shot through with pure imagination.
[So] rise up little souls—join the doomed army toward the meaning of