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``How to Cure a Fanatic'' by Amos Oz; Princeton University Press ($12.95)
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The world's most famous line about fanatics remains philosopher George Santayana's snippy judgment in "The Life of Reason'' that fanaticism "consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim." Many another thinker has shared his condescension toward a state of mind placed somewhere between narrow and hermetically sealed.
To Churchill, the fanatic "can't change his mind and won't change the subject." To Aldous Huxley, the fanatic "consciously overcompensates a secret doubt." Keats wrote, "Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave / A paradise for a sect."
Perhaps the most widely read modern take on fanaticism as impaired psychology came from longshoreman-philosopher Eric Hoffer, author of "The True Believer.'' To Hoffer, fanatics usually prove to be "selfish people ... forced by innate shortcomings, or external circumstance, to lose faith in their own selves." The fanatic, "perpetually incomplete and insecure," is able to find self-assurance "only by clinging passionately to whatever support he happens to embrace."
And yet a thinner, more positive countertradition about the fanatic endures, too. The early 20th-century American journalist Heywood Broun noted that we sometimes leap to conclusions too soon. "Just as every conviction begins as a whim," he wrote, "so does every emancipator serve his apprenticeship as a crank. A fanatic is a great leader who is just entering the room."
Behind all the logic-chopping lies the more constrained derivation of the notion itself, from the Latin "fanaticus,'' "pertaining to a temple, inspired by a god." The Oxford English Dictionary highlights the core meaning of fanaticism as "filled with excessive and mistaken enthusiasm, especially in religion."
It is this complicated, inconsistent conceptual history that the great Israeli novelist Amos Oz, one of the most prominent members of his country's Peace Now movement for decades, faces in addressing the issue in this spare book.
"How to Cure a Fanatic'' comes in the same slim, wallet-size shape as Princeton University Press' huge hit from last year, Harry G. Frankfurt's "On Bullshit.'' Whether that's sufficient space for a topic like this is presumably not a seat-of-the-pants decision, but it's hard to argue with a publishing formula that produced a No. 1 best-seller.
"How to Cure a Fanatic'' comprises the title essay and a second short piece, "Between Right and Right" - both originally lectures Oz gave in Germany in 2002. They're freshened with a September 2005 interview Oz provided as a coda.
True to his liberal humanistic roots, Oz believes everyone in the Arab-Israeli mess simply needs, in the end, to be reasonable. Characteristically intuitive rather than scholarly, Oz nonetheless makes a spirited effort to analyze "fanaticism" in the context of the Mideast, even if it ends up his tag for those he considers unreasonable.
Oz's fanatics "believe that the end, any end, justifies the means," in contrast to "the rest of us, who believe that life is an end, not a means." But this is clearly humanistic mush. Hamas doesn't think "any end" justifies any means. Neither do resolute Israeli settlers in the West Bank. They believe specific ends justify specific means.
Similarly, Oz describes fanatics as those "who think justice, whatever they would mean by the word, is more important than life." They contrast with "those of us who think life takes priority over many other values, convictions or faiths."
Yet history's parade of moral heroes includes many figures who fit exactly this definition. If, as Oz writes, "the seed of fanaticism always lies in uncompromising self-righteousness," what of the parallel truth that the seed of moral progress - think William Lloyd Garrison, and Gandhi - usually lies in uncompromising righteousness?
Oz makes more sense when he offers policy rather than philosophy. He favors the familiar "two-state solution." A return to "modified" pre-1967 lines. The Israeli-Palestinian dispute is not a religious or civil war but a "real estate dispute." Just as the "remedy for fanaticism" is "a sense of humor," because of the openness that frame of mind requires, the remedy for Israeli-Palestinian fighting is compromise.
"Between Right and Right," and the closing interview, outline Oz's background assumptions in coming to those views. Readers who share Oz's belief that the Israeli-Arab conflict is "between two victims" will welcome his constant equalization of the moral positions, his suggestion that the first joint project between Israel and a Palestinian state should be "a shared monument reflecting on our past stupidities, our past idiocies." Those who think justice and morality align more with one people than the other, with the attacked rather than attackers, may find Oz's position a species of fanatical nonjudgmentalness.
Diderot thought fanaticism "one step" from barbarism. So, one might argue, is the failure to make crucial moral distinctions.
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(c) 2006, The Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.
