Prisons We Choose to Live Inside. Doris Lessing
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of reason, sanity and civilization.
And of course I know that as I say these words there must be people who are muttering, ‘Where? The woman must be crazy to see anything good in this mess we are in.’
I think this sanity must be looked for in precisely this process of judging our own behaviour – as we examine the farmer who executed an animal to make it expiate a crime, or the people who sentenced, and executed, a tree. Against these enormously powerful primitive instincts, we have this: the ability to observe ourselves from other viewpoints. Some of these viewpoints are very old – much older perhaps than we realize. There is nothing new in the demand that reason should govern human affairs. For instance, in the course of another study, I came upon an Indian book, a good two thousand years old, a manual for the sensible governing of a state. Its prescriptions are every bit as cool, sensible, rational as anything we could come up with now; nor does it demand any less in the way of justice, even as we understand justice. The reason I am mentioning this book at all – it is called the Arthásàstra, by the way, and was written by one Kautilya, and is unfortunately hard to come by outside specialist libraries – is that this book that seems so unimaginably old talks of itself as the last in a long line of similar books.
It could be said that this is a matter for gloom rather than optimism, that after so many thousands of years of knowing perfectly well how a country should be managed, we are so far from achieving it; but – and this is the whole point and focus of what I want to say – what we know about ourselves is much more sophisticated, goes deeper, than what was known then, what has been known through these long thousands of years.
If we were to put into practice what we know … but that is the point.
I think when people look back at our time, they will be amazed at one thing more than any other. It is this – that we do know more about ourselves now than people did in the past, but that very little of this knowledge has been put into effect. There has been this great explosion of information about ourselves. The information is the result of mankind’s still infant ability to look at itself objectively. It concerns our behaviour patterns. The sciences in question are sometimes called the behavioural sciences and are about how we function in groups and as individuals, not about how we like to think we behave and function, which is often very flattering. But about how we can be observed to be behaving when observed as dispassionately as when we observe the behaviour of other species. These social or behavioural sciences are precisely the result of our capacity to be detached and unflattering about ourselves. There is this great mass of new information from universities, research institutions and from gifted amateurs, but our ways of governing ourselves haven’t changed.
Our left hand does not know – does not want to know – what our right hand does.
This is what I think is the most extraordinary thing there is to be seen about us, as a species, now. And people to come will marvel at it, as we marvel at the blindness and inflexibility of our ancestors.
I spend a good deal of time wondering how we will seem to the people who come after us. This is not an idle interest, but a deliberate attempt to strengthen the power of that ‘other eye’, which we can use to judge ourselves. Anyone who reads history at all knows that the passionate and powerful convictions of one century usually seem absurd, extraordinary, to the next. There is no epoch in history that seems to us as it must have to the people who lived through it. What we live through, in any age, is the effect on us of mass emotions and of social conditions from which it is almost impossible to detach ourselves. Often the mass emotions are those which seem the noblest, best and most beautiful. And yet, inside a year, five years, a decade, five decades, people will be asking, ‘How could they have believed that?’ because events will have taken place that will have banished the said mass emotions to the dustbin of history. To coin a phrase.
People of my age have lived through several of such violent reversals. I will mention just one. During the Second World War, from the moment the Soviet Union was invaded by Hitler and became an ally of the democracies, that country was affectionately regarded in popular opinion. Stalin was Uncle Joe, the ordinary chap’s friend, Russia was the land of brave, liberty-loving heroes, and Communism was an interesting manifestation of popular will – which we should copy. All this went on for four years and then suddenly, almost overnight, it went into reverse. All these attitudes became wrong-headed, treasonable, a threat to everybody. People who had been chatting on about Uncle Joe, suddenly, just as if all that had never happened, were using the slogans of the cold war. One extreme, sentimental and silly, bred by wartime necessities, was replaced by another extreme, unreasoning and silly.
To have lived through such a reversal once is enough to make you critical for ever afterwards of current popular attitudes.
I think writers are by nature more easily able to achieve this detachment from mass emotions and social conditions. People who are continually examining and observing become critics of what they examine and observe. Look at all those utopias written through the centuries. More’s Utopia, Campanella’s City of the Sun, Morris’s News from Nowhere, Butler’s Erewhon (which is an anagram of ‘nowhere’), all the many different blueprints for possible futures produced by science and space fiction writers who, I think, are in the same tradition. These of course are all criticisms of current societies, for you can’t write a utopia in a vacuum.
I think novelists perform many useful tasks for their fellow citizens, but one of the most valuable is this: to enable us to see ourselves as others see us.
Of course in totalitarian societies writers are distrusted for precisely this reason. In all Communist countries this function, the criticizing one, is not permitted.
Incidentally, I see writers, generally, in every country, as a unity, almost like an organism, which has been evolved by society as a means of examining itself. This ‘organism’ is different in different epochs and always changing. Its most recent evolution has been into space and science fiction, predictably, because humanity is ‘into’ studying space, and has only recently (historically speaking) acquired science as an aptitude. The organism must be expected to develop, to change, as society does. The organism is not conscious of itself as an organism, a whole, though I think it will soon be. The world is becoming one, and this enables us all to see our many different societies as aspects of a whole, and the parts of those societies shared by them all. If you see writers like this – as a stratum, a layer, a strand, in every country, all so varied, but as together making up a whole, it tends to do away with the frantic competitiveness that is fostered by prizes and so forth. I think that writers everywhere are aspects of each other, aspects of a function that has been evolved by society.
Writers, books, novels, are used like this, but I don’t think the attitudes towards writers, literature, reflect this. Not yet.
Novels should be on the same shelf with anthropology, says one friend of mine, an anthropologist. Writers comment on the human condition, talk about it continually. It is our subject. Literature is one of the most useful ways we have of achieving this ‘other eye’, this detached manner of seeing ourselves; history is another. Yet literature and history increasingly are not seen like this by the young, as indispensable tools for living … but I’ll come back to this later.
To return to the farmer and his bull. It may be argued that the farmer’s sudden regression to primitivism affected no one but himself and his family, and was a very small incident on the stage of human affairs. But exactly the same can be seen in large events, affecting hundreds or even millions of people. For instance, when British and Italian soccer fans recently rioted in Brussels, they became, as onlookers and commentators continually reiterated, nothing but animals. The British louts, it seems, were urinating on the corpses of people they had killed. To use the word ‘animal’ here seems to me unhelpful. This may be animal behaviour, I don’t know, but it is certainly human behaviour, when humans allow themselves to revert to barbarism, and has been for thousands, probably even millions of years – depending on where one decides to put the beginning of our history as humans, not animals.
In times of war, as everyone knows who has lived through one, or talked to soldiers when they are allowing themselves to remember the truth, and not the sentimentalities with