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There seems to be no bottom to the evil human beings are capable of
when in the grip of an idea that seems to justify it: an idea of a
"higher good"~that is, a good higher than the protection of human
beings from suffering and death. Johnson mentions the "heartlessness
of ideas": to this I would have to add the heartlessness of ideologues,
both secular and religious, which absence of the organ of love I suspect
has something to do with the excessive clarity, or apparent clarity,
of language, particularly written language, and the ease with which
language can be abused. It is very easy to translate such abuse into
the abuse of human bodies when a particular text is treated as an
authority for action (the Bible, the Communist Manifesto, Mein
Kampf, etc.). As Wittgenstein insisted, we can indeed be hypnotized
by language~so much so that we can become blind to the world we live
in, sleepwalkers following the injunctions of a dead or absent
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authority, simply on the basis of a powerfully persuasive thread of
words.
The written word can be a moral danger because its author~who might
qualify or elaborate on a written text's apparent certitudes~is usually
not available for consultation. And his readers can be tempted to
invest his words with an authority they may not deserve. The impulse
can be to create a world as unambiguous as a book~or as our interpretation
of that book.
And so we need to be a little suspicious of the word, roping ourselves
to the mast of our doubt against the sirens' song of language. Literature
is, paradoxically, one way of doing this: by immersing ourselves in
the schoene schein~the beautiful illusion~of literature, we
can, maybe, break the spell of language: we learn how easily and
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