How to Cure a Fanatic (Hardcover)

A small, readable book on a subject of crucial interest by a major writer should be cause for close public attention. In this case, the subject is the surge of religious and political extremism that has swept the world in the last several decades. The writer is Israel’s Amos Oz, who writes from a vantage point close to the epicentre of contemporary extremism. This is, therefore, a book that deserve to be widely read.
How To Cure a Fanatic is in fact two essays, along with an interview that bridges the two essays. The first essay, “Between Right and Right” presents the elegant proposal that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is neither religious nor political, but a conflict over real estate in which the competing claims to the real estate are roughly equal and accurate. But Oz takes it to far less comfortable intellectual territory than elegance can plumb. He criticizes the Western notion that all conflict is grounded in communication failure, making a distinction between “dialogue” and “compromise” that reduces both terms to their practical essentials. “What we need,” he writes, “is not just coffee and a better understanding. What we need is a painful compromise . . . For me the word ‘compromise’ means life. And the opposite of compromise is not idealism, not devolution; the opposite of ‘compromise’ is fanaticism and death.”
Oz believes that the necessary compromise between Israelis and Palestinians is inevitable, and that it will be complex and painful for both claimants when it arrives. One wonders about that, not because of any weakness in his logic, but for the very reason that Oz is so sane-an astonishing accomplishment for a man who has lived in the midst of ethnic madness his entire life.
Still more interesting is the title essay: “How To Cure a Fanatic”, a 32-page encapsulation of the world we live in today that manages to stick to practicalities and still offer a slim ray of hope that fundamentalism and fanaticism can be resisted. Here again, Oz’s existential optimism confines him to practicalities and singularities. But therein, he argues, lies the light. “ . . . Fanaticism is almost everywhere, and its quieter, more civilized forms are present all around us and perhaps inside of us 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! . . . the seed of fanaticism always lies in uncompromising self-righteousness . . . ”
How does he propose we cure fanatics? By enforcing the specificity of imagination instead of its sentimentalities, and by deliberately cultured laughter.
To illustrate the first of these, he relates an anecdote about a novelist friend in an intercity limousine arguing with a chauvinist chauffeur. The chauffeur suggests that the meaning of life for Israelis is to kill Arabs. But the novelist, instead of denouncing the chauffeur as a racist, asks him to get specific: who does the killing? How do they do the killing?
Oz’s novelist friend then gets still more specific with the chauffeur. “ . . . suppose you are allocated a certain residential block of your hometown 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 you are about to go home, but just as you turn to go home . . . 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 . . . ‘You know, you are a very cruel man.’”
Later in the essay, Oz describes his politics and his mission as a writer this way: “I am trying to enhance our ability to imagine each other. On every level, on the most everyday level, to just imagine each other.”
But why laughter? “A sense of humor,” Oz writes, “is a great cure. I have never once in my life seen a fanatic with a sense of humor, nor have I seen a person with a sense of humour become a fanatic, unless he or she has lost that sense of humor . . . Humor is relativism, humor is the ability to see yourself as others may see you, humor is the capacity to realize that no matter how righteous you are and how terribly wronged you have been, there is a certain side of life that is always a bit funny.”
Trying to summarize Oz’s much more textured arguments this way, is, of course, a fools errand. The essence of his solution to fanaticism-and the core values of his novels and other essays-lie in the dedicated pursuit of the specifics-that baby crying on the 4th floor-that grounds all great writers. If you hold that crying baby in your mind while you enjoy the frustration of Oz’s chauffeur, you’ll be cured of fanaticism too.
Brian Fawcett (Books in Canada)

Oz, one of Israel's foremost novelists and also a leader in the peace movement, sets up opposite poles—pragmatism and fanaticism—in the two essays in this thin (both in size and content) volume. Pragmatism is Oz's path to peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Writing in ardent, articulate and informal prose (the essays originated as lectures), Oz (A Tale of Love and Darkness) writes that this conflict is a straightforward, though intense, battle over real estate in which both sides have legitimate claims to one tiny piece of land. And the necessary compromise—in the form of two states, "divided roughly according to demographic realities"—will be deeply painful for both, the loss of land a kind of amputation, in Oz's words. Also crucial to peace, in Oz's view, is providing homes and jobs for the residents of the squalid Palestinian refugee camps. But how to convince the anti-compromise fanatics on both sides? On this score, Oz is less satisfying, suggesting the remedial value of humor and imagination (i.e., learning to really see the other). The book's third part, an interview with Princeton University Press's Brigitta van Rheinberg, is largely redundant, leaving this feeling more like a padded pamphlet than a book, despite the virtues of Oz's perspective. (Mar.)
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