Demonizing Difference
In all these cases, the natural exercise of the intellect — whether focusing on moral interrogation, aesthetic research, or epic creation — was elevated to the rank of blasphemy simply because it challenged the comforts of spiritual routine and convention. In the end, as the Australian scholar David Lawton points out, “blasphemy is an orthodox way of demonizing difference, in order to perpetuate violence against it.” If blasphemy can be seen as “a discourse that includes those who purport to be offended by it,” then it is no wonder that “literature, representation and reading is [sic] potentially blasphemous.”16
The demonization of difference is actually quite common. Its dark, blind, fanatical carnivalization may even reach the point of crime (as in the Rushdie case). PEN figures show that in 1993, 89 writers were murdered around the world, 150 were in prison, and 216 were under investigation.
Where there is no possibility of dialogue, blasphemy is simplification. The impact of blasphemy is all the greater, of course, in closed, authoritarian societies. In the silence of submission and the cold of dogma, the void is suddenly filled with panicky alarm. Anything that conflicts with the communitarian canon becomes blasphemy. Through careful manipulation and surveillance, the authorities maintain at any cost the narcissistic illusion of homogeneity and cohesiveness. Everything foreign or unusual becomes a source of danger to be negated and shut away — in the name of the ideal of perfect cohesion.
One might repeat Cioran’s “without hell, no illusions” for too many of the characteristically closed, authoritarian social-political systems — even for countries suffering the painful transition from a closed to an open society. It may be that suffering strengthens belief but, at the same time, lends power to illusions. As has often been pointed out, however, the effect of illusions is so painful that it seems an involuntary homage to skepticism.
In closed, authoritarian societies, there is an obsession with blasphemy which assists the artificial cohesion imposed by the system, while carnivalization is the acting out of its dark, oppressive, fanatical consequences. In pluralistic democracies, on the other hand, blasphemy is rapidly diluted, whereas carnivalization becomes more widespread in the frivolous forms of entertainment imposed by mass consumption.
The existence of ever broader individual liberties, combined with an acceptance of diversity, effectively cancels out the risks of blasphemy in the society as a whole (“people like to demolish all reputations, even legitimate, even justified”). It is hard to imagine, in the varied cultural market of the West, that something like the Rushdie affair could be triggered by even the most unconventional, iconoclastic, heretical, indecent, or provocative book — or painting, sculpture, music, ballet, photography, or film. The emancipation of thought and taste goes together with increased tolerance, but also with ever more widespread indifference.
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 carnivaclass="underline" 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.