“Historians call this sort of thing “normalization,” or, if they are German, Vergangenheitsbewältigung, “coming to terms with the past.” Through books and films, we process the exceptional and traumatic into the banal and mildly diverting.”
“Rosenfeld identifies three types of normalization: relativization, universalization, and aestheticization.”
“The “relativizers” want to diminish the “moralistic aura” that comes with “exceptionality,” the taint of particularly appalling actions.”
“The “universalizers” want to inflate the aura of exceptionality and liberate it as a license for present ambitions, especially humanitarian intervention.”
“The third circle of normalizing Hell is reserved for the “aestheticizers.” The West, Rosenfeld writes, has a tradition that “historical events should be depicted from a realistic perspective.” Realism respects “a prevailing desire to preserve the integrity of the historical record.” This desire has “clear moral underpinnings,” even if, as with many of our moral underpinnings, we observe the principle in its breach. Many of those breaches are inspired by another tradition, more recent in origin, but now familiar to the point of tedium: the revolt against realism and its ethical implications. If the past can be shorn of its historical reality, it sheds its historic traditions, and the ethical demands they place on the present. Not all “relativizers” set out to neutralize the past. Many “relativizers” adopt new forms of representation in the hope of expressing “deeper moral agendas.””
“For Rosenfeld, all three forms of normalization distort the “historical record.” Yet aestheticization is especially risky. It is less about the “moral dimensions of the past” than the “artistic challenges of representing it.””
“Science is an object of gawping wonder, but its merits remain beyond description, venerated but incommunicable.”
““The incommunicable,” Sartre observed, “is the source of all violence.””