Prisons We Choose to Live Inside. Doris Lessing
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It was being said that this occasion was turning out quite useful after all, because this was an opportunity to ‘have it out once and for all’, as one woman put it. The two camps began to quarrel quite violently. Small scuffles began, first among the young men. At that point, when it was obvious that more serious fighting would begin, the psychologists appeared and said that as they had explained right from the beginning, this was a social experiment. Research was going on into the tendency of the human mind to see things in pairs – either/or, black/white, I/you, we/you, good/bad, the forces of good/the forces of evil.
‘You, the crowd,’ went on these intrepid researchers, ‘have only been here for a couple of hours and already you are separated into two camps, with leaders, and each side sees itself as a repository of all good, and the other camp as at the best wrong-headed. And you were on the point of fighting about absolutely non-existent differences.’
How that particular afternoon ended, we do not know, but I hope it was in a large jamboree of some kind, where all these artificially inflamed passions disappeared in harmony and good will.
This business of seeing ourselves as in the right, others in the wrong; our cause as right, theirs as wrong; our ideas as correct, theirs as nonsense, if not as downright evil … Well, in our sober moments, our human moments, the times when we think, reflect, and allow our rational minds to dominate us, we all of us suspect that this ‘I am right, you are wrong’ is, quite simply, nonsense. All history, development, goes on through interaction and mutual influence, and even the most violent extremes of thought, of behaviour, become woven into the general texture of human life, as one strand of it. This process can be seen over and over again in history. In fact, it is as if what is real in human development – the main current of social evolution – cannot tolerate extremes, so it seeks to expel extremes and extremists, or to get rid of them by absorbing them into the general stream.
‘All things are a flowing …’ as Heraclitus, the old Greek philosopher, said.
There is no such thing as my being in the right, my side being in the right, because within a generation or two my present way of thinking is bound to be found perhaps faintly ludicrous, perhaps quite outmoded by new development – at the best, something that has been changed, all passion spent, into a small part of a great process, a development.
I WAS BROUGHT UP in a country where a small white minority dominated the black majority. In old Southern Rhodesia the white attitudes towards the blacks were extreme: prejudiced, ugly, ignorant. More to the point, these attitudes were assumed to be unchallengeable and unalterable, though the merest glance at history would have told them (and many were educated people) that it was inevitable their rule would pass, that their certitudes were temporary. But it was not permissible for any member of this white minority to disagree with them. Anybody who did faced immediate ostracism; they had to change their minds, shut up, or get out. While the white regime lasted – ninety years, which is nothing in historical terms – a dissident was a heretic and traitor. Also, the rules of this particular game demanded that it was not enough to say ‘So and so disagrees with us, who are the possessors of evident truth.’ It had to also be said, ‘So and so is evil, corrupt, sexually depraved,’ and so on.
A few months after the start of the miners’ strike in Britain, in 1984, just when it was moving into its second, more violent phase, a miner’s wife came on television to tell her story. Her husband had been on strike for months and they had no money. While he supported the union, and agreed there should have been a strike, he thought Arthur Scargill had led the strike badly. Anyway, along with a minority, he had gone back to work. A gang of miners had broken this couple’s windows, smashed up the inside of their house, and beaten up the man. The woman said she knew who these men were. It was a very tight community, she said. She recognized them. They were friends. She was stunned and bewildered. She could not believe that decent mining folk could have done such a thing. She said that one of these men who had been in the gang greeted her when he was alone, ‘just as he always had done’, but when he was with his friends, she was invisible to him.
She simply could not understand it, she said. But I think – and this is absolutely my point – that not only should she have understood it, she should have expected it; that we should all understand and expect these things, and build what we know from history and from the laws of society we already have into how we structure our institutions.
Of course it may be argued that this is a fairly bleak view of life. It means, for instance, that we can stand in a room full of dear friends, knowing that nine-tenths of them, if the pack demands it, will become our enemies – will, as it were, throw stones through our windows. It means that if you are a member of a close-knit community, you know you differ from this community’s ideas at the risk of being seen as a no-goodnik, a criminal, an evildoer. This is an absolutely automatic process; nearly everyone in such situations behaves automatically.
But there is always the minority who do not, and it seems to me that our future, the future of everybody, depends on this minority. And that we should be thinking of ways to educate our children to strengthen this minority and not, as we mostly do now, to revere the pack.
Bleak? Yes it is. But as we all know, growing up is difficult and painful; and what we are talking about is the growing up of ourselves as social animals. Adults who hold on to all kinds of cosy illusions and comforting notions remain immature. The same holds good of us as groups or as members of groups – group animals.
It is easy for me now to say ‘group animal’ or ‘the social animal’. It is commonplace now to say we human beings were animals, and a great deal of our behaviour is rooted in past animal behaviour. This way of thinking has come about in a quiet revolution over the past, let us say, thirty or forty years. It is an interesting contradiction that while this revolution has gone on and has succeeded, on the whole it has been without the approval of the academics in the various fields. The popularizers are disapproved of, but that is nothing new. The professionals, the possessors of a certain field of knowledge, never like it when mavericks among them share it with the mob.
Something else contradictory is going on, and in those fields that are known as ‘the soft sciences’ – psychology sociology, social psychology, social anthropology and so on – precisely those areas where so many fascinating discoveries are being made about ourselves. It is the fashion to denigrate them, to call them the ‘failed’ sciences. One constantly finds contemptuous or dismissive references to these ‘failed’ disciplines. These departments are the first to be got rid of when retrenchments are being made. But what is interesting is that these are all new areas of study, very new, some of them less than half a century old. Looked at collectively they amount to a completely new attitude towards ourselves, our institutions – the detached, curious, patient, investigative attitude that I think is the most valuable thing we have in the fight against our own savagery, our long history as group animals. An enormous amount of work is being done, large numbers of experiments have been, are being, made, some of which transform our ideas about ourselves, and there are whole libraries full of a new type of book – completely new, the result of a new type of research.
As I said in the last lecture, I believe that people coming after us will marvel that on the one hand we accumulated more and more information about our behaviour, while on the other, we made no attempt at all to use it to improve our lives.
As an example, let us take what we know about how we function in groups. People in groups we now know are likely to behave in fairly stereotyped ways that are predictable. Yet when citizens join together to set up, let us say, a society for the protection of the unicorn, they do not say, ‘This organism we’re setting up is likely to develop in one of several ways. Let us take this into account and watch how we behave so that we control the society and the society does not control us.’ As another example, the Left might find it useful to say something like this, ‘It has been easily observable for some time that groups like ours always split and then the two new groups become enemies equipped with leaders who hurl abuse at each other. If we remain aware of this apparently inbuilt drive that makes groups split and