The Source of Self-Regard - Toni Morrison Page 0,50

with frustration and want, but they are also capable of fierce resistance to the dehumanization and trivialization that politico-cultural punditry and profit-driven media depend upon.

We are worried, for example, into catalepsy or mania by violence—our own and our neighbors’ disposition toward it. Whether that worry is exacerbated by violent images designed to entertain, or by scapegoating analyses of its presence, or by the fatal smile of a telegenic preacher, or by weapons manufacturers disguised as occupants of innocent duck blinds or bucolic hunting lodges, we are nevertheless becoming as imprisoned as the felons who feed the booming prison industry by the proliferation of a perfect product: guns. I say perfect because from the point of view of the weapons industry the marketing is for protection, virility, but the product’s real value, whether it is a single bullet, a thousand tons of dynamite, or a fleet of missiles, is that it annihilates itself immediately and creates, thereby, the instant need for more. That it also annihilates life is actually a by-product.

What will we think during these longer, more comfortable lives? How we allowed resignation and testosteronic rationales to purloin the future and sentence us to the dead end that endorsed, glamorized, legitimated, commodified violence leads to? How we took our cue to solving social inequities from computer games, winning points or votes for how many of the vulnerable and unlucky we eliminated? Winning seats in government riding on the blood lust of capital punishment? Winning funding and attention by revamping 1910 sociology to credit “innate” violence and so make imprisonment possible at birth? No wonder our imagination stumbles beyond 2030—when we may be regarded as monsters to the generations that follow us.

If scientific language is about a longer individual life in exchange for an ethical one; if political agenda is the xenophobic protection of a few 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 simply “upgrade,” where else might we look for hope in time’s own future?

I am not interested here in signs of progress, an idea whose time has come and gone—gone with the blasted future of the monolithic communist state; gone also with the fallen mask of capitalism as free, unlimited, and progressive; gone with the deliberate pauperization of peoples that capitalism requires; gone also with the credibility of phallocentric “nationalisms.” But gone already by the time Germany fired its first death chamber. Already gone by the time South Africa legalized apartheid and gunned down its children in dust too thin to absorb their blood. Gone, gone in the histories of so many nations mapping their geography with lines drawn through their neighbors’ mass graves; fertilizing their lawns and meadows with the nutrients of their citizens’ skeletons; supporting their architecture on the spines of women and children. No, it isn’t progress that interests me. I am interested in the future of time.

Because art is temporal and because of my own interests, my glance turns easily to literature in general and narrative fiction in particular. I know that literature no longer holds a key place among valued systems of knowledge; that it has been shoved to the edge of social debate; is of minimal or purely cosmetic use in scientific, economic discourse. But it is precisely there, at the heart of that form, where the serious ethical debates and probings are being conducted. What does narrative tell us about this crisis in diminished expectations?

I could look for an Edith Wharton shouting “Take your life”—that is, Take on your life! For a Henry James appalled (in The Sense of the Past) by an ancient castle that encloses and devours its owner. For a William Faulkner envisioning a postnuclear human voice, however puny. For a Ralph Ellison posing a question in the present tense signaling a sly and smiling promise of a newly sighted (visible) future. For a James Baldwin’s intense honesty coupled with an abiding faith that the price of the ticket had been paid in full and the ride begun. Those voices have been followed, perhaps supplanted, by another kind of response to our human condition. Modern searches into the past have produced extraordinary conceptual and structural innovations.

The excitement of anticipating a future, once a fairly consistent preoccupation of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century literature, has recently been reproduced in an amazing book by Umberto Eco—The Island of