Norman Manea - The Fifth Impossibility - Essays on Exile and Language

Nevertheless, the longing for an idealized community remains active in modern democracies; perhaps not in society as a whole but certainly in numerous closed groups. Communitarian narcissism generates suspicion and cult worship; sectarian formations sometimes present staggering similarities to the totalitarian model. The technique of mind control, the absolutism of power, the doomsday scenarios, the mystical exaltation going as far as ritual crime: these are the truly baneful characteristics of many closed groups in the open society.

The 900 suicides in Guyana in 1978, the 80 who died as a result of the authorities’ brutal and stupid attack on the Davidian sect in Waco, Texas, in 1993, and the 48 who perished in 1994 in the Swiss castles of the Order of the Solar Temple are just the tip of an iceberg of social pathology. The growing number of local militias and religious and communal tribunals in the United States is also a part of this phenomenon.

Illusions and delusions can themselves create hell. Quite a few people wonder, for example, whether the disturbing rise in cases of “repressed memory,” cited in the numerous reports of child abuse, does not resemble the witch hunts of several centuries ago. In volatile and suggestible persons, the psychosis triggered by “child abuse” films can become an obsession with satanism, a twisted form of regaining cohesion and protective authority through belief. “A religion is a sect that has succeeded,” said the French historian Ernest Renan. And in their closeness and isolation, sects do have militant global visions.

Bad Taste and Cultural Innocence

In the open society, the public expression of frustration and illusion takes on carnivalesque aspects in the simplistic political debate. You do not know what to think more strange or ridiculous when, in response to the serious educational problems of young people under attack from violence, drugs, and precocious sexual initiation, the Christian right argues that the reintroduction of school prayer will make things better, while the liberal left seems to accept the idea of giving teenagers classroom lessons in masturbation. The cacophony of bad taste and cultural innocence is often overwhelming, obliterating any chance for a substantive exchange of opinions.

Yet the advantages of an open society can also be experienced in crises. In a democracy, the authorities would never aim to intimidate every voice into silence; here, the abolition of dialogue seems to be less of a real danger than the loss of meaning. The dominant tendency is for values to proliferate and rapidly perish, and it is no wonder that the end result is insignificance. But individualism, competition, and unhindered confrontation sustain an energy of self-affirmation that undermines centralism and absolutism, the essential premises of closed societies and their dark disorders.

Gradually, by opening itself to ever more finely shaded demands of the individual that may border on eccentricity, the democracy of late capitalism accepts outrage and thereby limits its effects. Blasphemy can operate only in restricted areas and sectarian groups. At the macro level of an open and heterogeneous society, blasphemy cannot resonate except in the form of scandal — scandal that is instantly carnivalized through commercial promotion, channeled to a broad public, and reduced to a routine product.

As the power of blasphemy has become more negligible, the field of the carnival has become larger. Freed from the pressure of blasphemy, society has opened itself to the prolific forms of carnival: the dozens of television channels on which ordinary people “confess” to millions of viewers; the nonstop “talk shows” about everything under the sun, complete with tears, laughter, and applause, where the scandalous becomes mere planetary gossip that grotesquely fuses together the unusual with the farcical, all too common vulgarity with suffering, intimacy with stupidity, authenticity with parody, exhibitionism with frustration. The television audience’s Pantagruelian consumption — the omnipresent and omnipotent monster of trivialization — compresses the earthly Babel into a huge village fair.

“Televised” reality becomes a self-devouring “proto-reality” without which the real world is not confirmed and therefore does not exist. The selection process is harsh, the cacophony deafening, the images volatile; the ephemeral remains sovereign. The fierce competition to break through the sound barrier of attention seems all the more futile, the wilder it becomes. The trial of the sports star O. J. Simpson, accused of an atrocious crime, attracts more attention than the American president’s speech about the barely flourishing State of the Union. The frontier between good and evil is ever harder to glimpse.

Every day, the thousands of new items about people agitating for rights, recognition, revenge, and fame demonstrate an ever more cynical renunciation of dialogue. Chosen at random, any such piece of news comes to illustrate the carnivalesque hysteria of today’s world, in which fanaticism is not necessarily religious, or necessarily antireligious, because it does not necessarily have any meaning other than the release of a huge frustration.

Cohabiting with the Outrageous

Unfortunately, one can see an increasingly pronounced blurring of the meaning of opposites. The reverse of closed-mindedness sometimes appears to be merely its complement. And culture seems to be ever more visibly losing “the insistence of the ideal” (what the English critic George Steiner once called “the blackmail of perfection”) — that is, the nonmystical relationship, not infrequently adversarial and always contradictory, but in any case profound, between religious spirituality and the spirituality of culture.

The perception of outrageousness is being lost; we are now reaching a routine cohabitation with the outrageous. Always permissible, made banal, it is even becoming in a way indispensable. The elimination of all criteria, hence of all limitation, has destructive effects that are incalculable and, above all, seem hard, if not impossible, to stop.

The horrors of this century do not seem to have marked only “the death of God.” As George Steiner rightly observes,

Much has been said of man’s bewilderment and solitude after the disappearance of Heaven from active belief. We know of neutral emptiness of the skies and of the terrors it has brought. But it may be that the loss of Hell is the more severe dislocation …. To have neither Heaven nor Hell is to be intolerably deprived and alone in a world gone flat. Of the two, Hell proved the easier to re-create …. Needing Hell, we have learned how to build and run it on earth.

A world that has more in common with a carnival, however, than with an over-perfect hell. Carnival aspiring, without success, to blasphemy.

In the great free-market carnival of the modern world, nothing appears audible unless it is scandalous, but nothing is scandalous enough to become memorable. An imperfect world, to be sure. Its citizens undoubtedly have enough grounds for dissatisfaction and concern. Sometimes they receive strange confirmation of the privileges they enjoy when they look at the ever more numerous exiles coming to live among them. The majority of these exiles have known captive man in the dark carnival of tyranny, before being able to contemplate free man and the not always happy carnival of liberty.

Without hell, no illusions. The memory of their life stories is the memory of a perverse and closed utopia, in which individuality as such was blasphemy.

What Exiles Remember

Exiles living in the West know the alternative to the often stupefying spectacle of man in freedom. They recognize, of course, the huge differences between a closed society, distorted by terror and misery, and an open society, distorted by selfish competition and trivial publicity; between a manipulated collectivism and a welltrained individualism. They will never forget that totalitarianism, not democracy, provoked the Holocaust and the Gulag, and the Cambodian and Chinese genocides, and that ethnic and religious fanaticism provoked the Bosnian tragedy.