Toni Morrison and War Against Error (and Fascism)

by Bill Doughty

Toni Morrison wrote:

"I think it is time for a modern War Against Error. A deliberately heightened battle against cultivated ignorance, enforced silence, and metastasizing lies. A wider war that is fought daily by human rights organizations in journals, reports, indexes, dangerous visits, and encounters with malign oppressive forces. A hugely funded and intensified battle of rescue from the violence that is swallowing the dispossessed." 

Those are Morrison's words in the essay "The War on Error," presented as a lecture in Edinburgh, Scotland, August 29, 2004, one year after the United States invaded Iraq in response to 9/11 – under the pretense that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Toni Morrison, 1931-2019 (Photo taken by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders)

Morrison's essay is one of 43 works published in "The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations," Alfred A. Knopf, 2019.

The book includes both poignant reflections and occasional musings about people, art/literature, nature, history and race from the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

From another essay, "Racism and Fascism," published in The Nation in 1995 – nearly twenty-five years ago! Morrison writes about the warning signs and steps to fascism:

1. Construct an internal enemy, as both focus and diversion.
2. Isolate and demonize that enemy by unleashing and protecting the utterance of overt and coded name-calling and verbal abuse. Employ ad hominem attacks as legitimate charges against that enemy.
3. Enlist and create sources and distributors of information who are willing to reinforce the demonizing process because it is profitable, because it grants power and because it works.
4. Palisade all art forms; monitor, discredit or expel those that challenge or destabilize processes of demonization and deification.
5. Subvert and malign all representatives of and sympathizers with this constructed enemy.
6. Solicit, from among the enemy, collaborators who agree with and can sanitize the dispossession process.
7. Pathologize the enemy in scholarly and popular mediums; recycle, for example, scientific racism and the myths of racial superiority in order to naturalize the pathology.
8. Criminalize the enemy. Then prepare, budget for and rationalize the building of holding arenas for the enemy – especially its males and absolutely its children.
9. Reward mindlessness and apathy with monumentalized entertainments and with little pleasures, tiny seductions: a few minutes on television, a few lines in the press; a little pseudo-success; the illusion of power and influence; a little fun, a little style, a little consequence.
10. Maintain, at all costs, silence.

Morrison writes, "In 1995 racism may wear a new dress, buy a new pair of boots, but neither it nor its succubus twin fascism is new or can make anything new. It can only reproduce the environment that supports its own health: fear, denial and an atmosphere in which its victims have lost the will to fight."

Fascism can come from the left or right, liberal or conservative. "We must not be blindsided" by different labels for "domination agendas," Morrison writes, "because the genius of fascism is that any political structure can host the virus and virtually any developed country can become a suitable home." It's not about ideology, she contends, it's about power.

Signs of fascism as evidenced by the White Power movement and White Nationalism.

Can it happen here? Are we susceptible to what she calls "the forces interested in fascist solutions to national problems"? Do those forces try to make us see immigrants and nonwhites as the Other, worthy of contempt, fear and hate? Will we counter those forces with greater emphasis on education and critical thinking? That's at the heart of Morrison's works and a reasoned response to a "war on error." 

Here's something she wrote about migration, eight months after the attacks of 9/11 (from "The Foreigner's Home" – presented in the Alexander Lecture Series, University of Toronto, May 27, 2002): 

"The spectacle of mass movement draws attention inevitably to the borders, the porous places, the vulnerable points where the concept of home is seen as being menaced. by foreigners. Much of the alarm hovering at the borders, the gates, is stoked, it seems to me, by 1) both the threat and the promise of globalization; and 2) an uneasy relationship with our own foreignness, our own rapidly disintegrating sense of belonging."

President Obama presents Toni Morrison with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012.

After Morrison's death at 88 earlier this month, former president Barack Obama said, "Toni Morrison was a national treasure. Her writing was not just beautiful but meaningful — a challenge to our conscience and a call to greater empathy." 

He continued: "And so even as Michelle and I mourn her loss and send our warmest sympathies to her family and friends, we know that her stories—that our stories—will always be with us, and with those who come after, and on and on, for all time."

The former commander-in-chief began publishing his reading lists during his presidency and continues the tradition. On Aug. 15, Obama shared a list of recommended summer reading books, beginning with the works of Toni Morrison. 

"To start, you can't go wrong by reading or re-reading the collected works of Toni Morrison," he wrote. "'Beloved,' 'Song of Solomon,' 'The Bluest Eye,' 'Sula,' everything else — they're transcendent, all of them. You'll be glad you read them," Obama said.

Here are other books recommended by Obama this year:

"Lab Girl," by Hope Jahren"The Shallows," by Nicholas Carr"Inland," by Téa Obreht"American Spy," by Lauren Wilkinson"Wolf Hall," by Hilary Mantel"Exhalation," by Ted Chiang"Maid," by Stephanie Land"How to Read the Air" by Dinaw Mengest"Men Without Women" by Haruki Murakami"The Nickel Boys" by Colson Whitehead

CNO Richardson meets with future CNO Gilday in 2017.

Reading promotes critical thinking. And preventing another War on Error requires critical thinking. 

Tomorrow, Aug. 22, Adm. Mike Gilday is scheduled to become the new Chief of Naval Operations, as Adm. John Richardson steps down. During his tenure Richardson has championed reading and thinking. "Remember to never stop striving to expand your mind," he advised on the Navy Professional Reading Program site.

"Warfare is a violent, intellectual contest between thinking and adapting adversaries. The team that can think better and adapt faster will win," Richardson said, adding, "...we must do more to sharpen our thinking, learn the lessons from history, and expand our minds. It is our responsibility as leaders to continue to grow and to always question the status quo."