How to Cure a Fanatic Read online

  I have been called a traitor many times in my life. The first time was when I was twelve and a quarter and I lived in a neighbourhood at the edge of Jerusalem. It was during the summer holidays, less than a year before the British left the country and the state of Israel was born out of the midst of war.

  One morning these words appeared on the wall of our house, painted in thick black letters, just under the kitchen window: PROFI BOGED SHAFEL. ‘Proffy is a low-down traitor.’ The word shafel, ‘low-down’, raised a question that still interests me now, as I sit and write this story. Is it possible for a traitor not to be low-down? If not, why did Chita Reznik (I recognized his writing) bother to add the word ‘low-down’? And if it is, under what circumstances is treachery not low-down?

  I had had the nickname Proffy, attached to me ever since I was so high. It was short for Professor, which they called me because of my obsession with checking words. (I still love words. I like collecting, arranging, shuffling, reversing, combining them. Rather the way people who love money so are the same with coins and banknotes and people who love cards do with cards.)

  My father saw the writing under the kitchen window when he went out to get the newspaper at half past six that morning. Over breakfast, while he was spreading raspberry jam on the slice of black bread, he suddenly plunged the knife into the jam jar, almost up to the handle, and said in his deliberate way:

  ‘What a pleasant surprise. And what has His Lordship been up to now that we should deserve this honour?’ My mother said:

  ‘Don’t get at him first thing in the morning, it’s bad enough that he’s always being got at by other children.’

  Father was dressed in khaki, like most men in our neighbourhood in those days. He had the gestures and voice of a man who is definitely in the right. Dredging up a sticky mass of raspberry from the bottom of the jar and spreading an equal amount on both halves of the slice of bread, he said:

  ‘The fact is that almost everyone nowadays uses the word “traitor” too freely. But what is a traitor? Yes indeed. A man without honour. A man who secretly, behind your back, for the sake of some questionable advantage, helps the enemy to work against his people. Or to harm his family and friends. He is more despicable than a murderer. Finish your egg, please. I read in the paper that people are dying of hunger in Asia.’

  Later on in this novel, the reader may find out that the mother was totally wrong: Only he who loves might become a traitor. Treason is not the opposite to love, it is one of its many options. Traitor, I think, is the one who changes in the eyes of those who cannot change and would not change and hate change and cannot conceive of change, except that they always want to change you. In other words, traitor, in the eyes of the fanatic, is anyone who changes. And that’s a tough choice, the choice between becoming a fanatic or becoming a traitor. In a sense, not to be a fanatic means to be, to some extent and in some way, a traitor in the eyes of the fanatic. I have made my choice, as Panther in the Basement will tell you.

  I have called myself an expert of comparative fanaticism. This is no joke. If you ever hear of a school or university starting a department of comparative fanaticism, I am hereby applying for a teaching post. As a former Jerusalemite, as a recovered fanatic, I feel I’m fully qualified for that job. Perhaps it is time that every school, every university conducts at least a couple of courses in comparative fanaticism, because it is everywhere. I don’t mean just the obvious manifestations of fundamentalism and zealotry. I don’t refer just to those obvious fanatics, the ones we see on television, in places where hysterical crowds wave their fists against the cameras while screaming slogans in languages we don’t understand. No, fanaticism is almost everywhere, and its quieter, more civilised forms are present all around us and perhaps inside ourselves as well. Do I know the anti-smokers who will burn you alive for lighting a cigarette near them! Do I know the vegetarians who will eat you alive for eating meat! Do I know the pacifists, some of my colleagues in the Israeli Peace Movement, who are willing to shoot me right through the head just because I advocate a slightly different strategy on how to make peace with the Palestinians. So, I’m not saying, of course, that anyone who raises his or her voice against anything is a fanatic. I’m certainly not suggesting that anyone who has strong opinions is a fanatic. I’m saying that the seed of fanaticism always lies in uncompromising righteousness, the plague of many centuries. Of course, there are degrees of evil. A militant environmentalist may be uncompromisingly righteous, but he or she will cause very little harm compared, say, to an ethnic cleanser or a terrorist. Yet all fanatics have a special attraction, a special taste for kitsch. Very often, the fanatic can only count up to one; two is too big a figure for him or for her. At the same time you will find that very often fanatics are hopelessly sentimental: they often prefer feeling to thinking and have a particular fascination with their own death. They despise this world and feel eager to trade it for ‘heaven’. Their heaven, however, is usually conceived like the everlasting happiness in the conclusion of bad movies.

  Let me digress into a story, I’m a notorious digresser, I always digress. A dear friend and colleague of mine, the wonderful Israeli novelist Sammy Michael, had once the experience, that some of us writers have from time to time, of a very long inter-city car drive with a chauffeur who was giving him the usual lecture on how urgent it is for us Jews to kill all the Arabs. And Sammy listened to him and rather than scream, ‘What a terrible man you are. Are you a Nazi, are you a fascist?’ he decided to deal with it differently. He asked the chauffeur: ‘And who do you think should kill all the Arabs?’ The chauffeur said: ‘What do you mean? Us! The Israeli Jews! We must! There is no choice, just look at what they are doing to us every day!’ ‘But who exactly do you think should carry our the job? The police? Or the army? Or maybe the fire brigade? Or the medical teams? Who should do the job?’ The chauffeur scratched his head and said: ‘I think it should be fairly divided between every one of us, every one of us should kill some of them.’ Sammy Michael, still playing the game, said: ‘OK, suppose you are allocated a certain residential block in your home town of Haifa and you knock on every door, or ring the doorbell asking: “Excuse me, sir, or excuse me, madam, do you happen to be an Arab?” and if the answer is yes, you shoot them. Then you finish your block and are about to go home, but just as you turn to go home,’ Sammy said to the chauffeur, ‘you hear somewhere on the fourth floor in your block a baby crying. Would you go back and shoot this baby? Yes or no?’ There was a moment of quiet and then the chauffeur said to Sammy Michael: ‘You know, you are a very cruel man.’ Now, this is a significant story because there is something in the nature of the fanatic which essentially is very sentimental and at the same time lacks imagination. And this sometimes gives me hope, albeit a very limited hope, that injecting some imagination into people may help cause the fanatic to feel uneasy. This is not a quick remedy, this is not a quick cure, but it may help.

  Conformity and uniformity, the urge to belong and the desire to make everyone else belong, may well be the most widely spread yet not the most dangerous forms of fanaticism. Remember the moment in that wonderful film, Monty Python’s Life of Brian, when Brian says to the crowd of his would-be disciples: ‘You are all individuals!’, and the crowd shouts back: ‘We are all individuals!’ except one of them who says sheepishly, in a small voice: ‘I’m not,’ but everyone angrily hushes him. Indeed, having said that conformity and uniformity are mild but widespread forms of fanaticism, I have to add that very often the cult of personality, the idealisation of political or religious leaders, the worship of glamorous individuals, may well be another widespread form of fanaticism. The twentieth century seems to have excelled in both. Totalitarian regimes, deadly ideologies, aggressive chauvinism, violent forms of religious fundamentalism on the one hand and the universal idolisation of a Madonna or a Maradona on the other. Perhaps the worst aspect of globalisation is the infantilisation of humankind: ‘the global kindergarten’, full of toys and gadgets, candies a
nd lollipops. Up to the mid-nineteenth century, give or take a few years – it varies from one country to another, from one continent to another – but roughly, up to somewhere in the nineteenth century, most people in most parts of the world had at least three basic certainties: where I will spend my life, what I will do for a living and what will happen to me after I die. Almost everyone in the world, just a hundred and fifty years ago or so, knew that they were going to spend their lives right where they were born or somewhere nearby, perhaps in the next village. Everyone knew they would do for a living what their parents did for their living or something very similar. And everyone knew that, if they behaved themselves they would be transformed to a better world after they died. The twentieth century has eroded, often destroyed, these and other certainties. The loss of those elemental certainties may have provided for the most heavily ideological half-century, followed by the most fiercely selfish, hedonistic, gadget-orientated half-century. For the ideological movements of the first half of the last century the mantra used to be ‘tomorrow will be a better day – let’s make sacrifices today’; let’s even impose sacrifices on other people today, so that our children will inherit a paradise in the future. Somewhere around the middle of that century, this notion was replaced by the notion of instant happiness, not just the famous right to strive for happiness, but the actual widespread illusion that happiness is displayed on the shelves and that all you have to do is simply make yourself rich enough to afford happiness with your wallet. The notion of ‘happily ever after’, the illusion of lasting happiness, is actually an oxymoron. Either plateau or climax. Everlasting happiness is no happiness, just like an everlasting orgasm is no orgasm at all.

  The essence of fanaticism lies in the desire to force other people to change. The common inclination to improve your neighbour, or to mend your spouse, or to engineer your child, or to straighten up your brother, rather than let them be. The fanatic is a most unselfish creature. The fanatic is a great altruist. Often the fanatic is more interested in you than in himself. He wants to save your soul, he wants to redeem you, he wants to liberate you from sin, from error, from smoking, from your faith or from your faithlessness, he wants to improve your eating habits, or to cure you from your drinking or voting habits. The fanatic cares a great deal for you, he is always either falling on your neck because he truly loves you or else he is at your throat in case you prove to be unredeemable. And, in any case, topographically speaking, falling on your neck and being at your throat are almost the same gesture. One way or another, the fanatic is more interested in you than in himself, for the very simple reason that the fanatic has a very little self or no self at all. Mister Bin Laden and his ilk do not just hate the West. It’s not that simple. Rather, I think they want to save your souls, they want to liberate you, us, from our awful values, from materialism, from pluralism, from democracy, from freedom of speech, from women’s liberation … All these, the Islamic fundamentalists maintain – are very, very bad for your health. Bin Laden’s immediate target may have been New York, or Madrid, but his goal was to turn moderate, pragmatic Muslims into ‘true’ believers, into his kind of Muslims. Islam, in Bin Laden’s view was weakened by ‘American values’, and to defend Islam, you must not just hit the West and hit it hard, you must eventually convert the West. Peace will prevail only when the world is converted not to Islam, but to the most fundamentalist and fierce and rigid form of Islam. It will be good for you. Bin Laden essentially loves you: by his way of thinking September 11th was a labour of love. He did it for your own good, he wants to change you, he wants to redeem you.

  Very often, these things begin in the family. Fanaticism begins at home. It begins precisely with the very common urge to change a beloved kin for his or her own good. It begins with the urge to sacrifice oneself for the sake of a dearly beloved neighbour, it begins with the urge to tell a child of yours, ‘You must become like me not like your mother,’ or ‘You must become like me not like your father,’ or, ‘Please, become something very different from both your parents.’ Or, among married couples, ‘You have to change, you have to see things my way or else this marriage is not going to work.’ Very often it begins with the urge to live your life through someone else’s life. To give yourself up in order to facilitate the next person’s fulfilment or the next generation’s well being. Self-sacrifice very often involves inflicting dreadful feelings of guilt upon the beneficiary, thus manipulating, even controlling, him or her. If I had to choose between the two stereotypical mothers in the famous Jewish joke – the mother who says to her kid, ‘Finish your breakfast or I’ll kill you,’ or the one who says, ‘Finish your breakfast or I’ll kill myself,’ – I would probably choose the lesser of two evils. That is, rather not finish my breakfast and die, than not finish my breakfast and be guilt-ridden for the rest of my life.

  Let us turn now to the gloomy role of fanatics and fanaticism in the conflict between Israel and Palestine, Israel and much of the Arab world. The Israeli-Palestinian clash is essentially not a civil war between two segments of the same population, or the same people, or the same culture. It is not an internal but an international conflict. Which is fortunate, as international conflicts are easier to resolve than internal conflicts, religious wars, class wars, value wars. I said easier, I did not say easy. Essentially the battle between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs is not a religious war, although the fanatics on both sides are trying very hard to turn it into a religious war. It is essentially no more than a territorial conflict over the painful question of ‘whose land?’. It is a conflict between right and right, between two very powerful, very convincing claims over the same small country. Not a religious war, not a war of cultures, not a disagreement between two traditions, but simply a real-estate dispute over whose house this is. And I believe this can be resolved.

  In a small way, in a cautious way, I do believe that imagination may serve as a partial and limited immunity to fanaticism. I believe that a person who can imagine what his or her ideas imply when it comes to the crying baby on the fourth floor, such a person may become a less complete fanatic, which is a slight improvement. I wish I could tell you at this point that literature is the answer, because literature contains an antidote to fanaticism by injecting imagination into its readers. I wish I could simply prescribe: read literature and you will be cured of your fanaticism. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Unfortunately, many poems, many stories and dramas throughout history have been used to inflate hatred and to inflate nationalistic self-righteousness. Yet, there are certain works of literature which, I believe can help up to a point. They cannot work miracles, but they can help. Shakespeare can help a great deal. Every extremism, every uncompromising crusade, every form of fanaticism in Shakespeare ends up either in a tragedy or in a comedy. The fanatic is never happier or more satisfied in the end; either he is dead or he becomes a joke. This is a good innoculation. And Gogol can help, too: Gogol makes his readers grotesquely aware of how little we know, even when we are convinced that we are one hundred per cent right. Gogol teaches us that your nose may become a terrible enemy, may even become a fanatic enemy, and you may find yourself fanatically chasing your own nose. Not a bad lesson in itself. Kafka is a good educator in this respect, although I am sure he never meant to be used as an education against fanaticism. Kafka shows us that there is darkness and enigma and mockery even when we think we have done nothing wrong at all. That helps. (And had we but world enough and time, I would go on at length about Kafka and Gogol and the connection, the subtle connection, I see between these two, but that’s for another occasion.) And William Faulkner can help. The Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai expresses all of this better that I could ever hope to express it, when he says ‘Where we are right no flowers can grow.’ It’s a very useful line. So, to some extent, some works of literature can help, but not all of them.

  And if you promise to take what I’m about to say with a big pinch of salt, I can tell you that, in principle at least, I think I have invented the
remedy for fanaticism. A sense of humour is a great cure. I have never once in my life seen a fanatic with a sense of humour, nor have I ever seen a person with a sense of humour becoming a fanatic, unless he or she has lost that sense of humour. Fanatics are often sarcastic. Some of them have a very pointed sense of sarcasm, but no humour. Humour contains the ability to laugh at ourselves. Humour is relativism, humour is the ability to see yourself as others may see you, humour is the capacity to realise that no matter how righteous you are and how terribly wronged against you have been, there is a certain side to life that is always a bit funny. The more right you are, the more funny you become. And, for that matter, you can be a righteous Israeli or a righteous Palestinian or a righteous anything, but, as long as you have a sense of humour, you might be partially immune to fanaticism.