Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

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 which we all shield ourselves from the horrors of which we are capable … in times of war we revert, as a species, to the past, and are permitted to be brutal and cruel.

It is for this reason, and of course others, that a great many people enjoy war. But this is one of the facts about war that is not often talked about.

I think it is sentimental to discuss the subject of war, or peace, without acknowledging that a great many people enjoy war – not only the idea of it, but the fighting itself. In my time I have sat through many many hours listening to people talking about war, the prevention of war, the awfulness of war, with it never once being mentioned that for large numbers of people the idea of war is exciting, and that when a war is over they may say it was the best time in their lives. This may be true even of people whose experiences in war were terrible, and which ruined their lives. People who have lived through a war know that as it approaches, an at first secret, unacknowledged, elation begins, as if an almost inaudible drum is beating … an awful, illicit, violent excitement is abroad. Then the elation becomes too strong to be ignored or overlooked: then everyone is possessed by it.

Before the First World War, the socialist movements of all Europe and America met to agree that capitalism was fomenting war, and that the working classes of all those countries should have nothing to do with it. But the moment war was actually there, and the poisonous, fascinating elation had begun, all those decent, rational, honourable resolutions about keeping out of the war were forgotten. I have heard young people discussing this, uncomprehending. This is because they do not understand how it can have happened. It is because they have not experienced, and have not been told about that dreadful public elation that is so strong – strong because it comes from an older part of the human brain, of the human experience, than the decent, humane, rational part, which passes resolutions condemning war. But suppose the delegates to that socialists’ conference had had such information. Even more importantly, suppose they had been prepared to discuss it as it affected them, for it is easy to call other people primitive, and difficult to acknowledge that we may be so. Surely they would have been very much more efficient; indeed, as they had all expected, vainly, to happen, the working masses of Europe might have refused to go like lambs to the slaughter.

When I was in Zimbabwe in 1982, two years after Independence, and the end of that appalling war that was very much uglier and more savage than we were ever told, I met soldiers from both sides, whites and blacks. The first obvious fact – obvious to an outsider, if not to themselves – was that they were in a state of shock. Seven years of war had left them in a stunned, curiously blank state, and I think it was because whenever people are actually forced to recognize, from real experience, what we are capable of, it is so shocking that we can’t take it in easily. Or take it in at all; we want to forget it. But there was another fact and for the purposes of this discussion perhaps a more interesting one. It was evident that the actual combatants on both sides, both blacks and whites, had thoroughly enjoyed the war. It was a fighting that demanded great skill, individual bravery, initiative, resourcefulness – the skills of a guerrilla, talents that through a long peace-time life may never have been called into use. Yet people may suspect they have them, and secretly long for an opportunity to show them. This is not the least of the reasons, I believe, that wars happen.

These people, black and white, men and women, had been living in that extreme of tension, alertness, danger, with all their capacities in full use. I heard people say that nothing could ever come up to that experience. The dreadfulness of the war was too near for them to be saying, ‘The best time of our lives’, but they were, I am sure, beginning to think it. I am talking of course of the actual combatants, certainly not the civilians, who had a miserable time of it, with both the white government troops and the black guerrillas making use of them for their own purposes, treating them brutally.

Now that war has gone away into the past, and has become formalized in sets of words, images of heroism. The young people will probably have a small unconscious hankering after what they hear in their parents’ voices as they talk about it; if they were soldiers, that is. The civilians who lived through it will not talk about it much, having learned the impossibility of conveying the awfulness of it. But the black soldiers, most of whom were taught war as they came out of childhood, and the white soldiers, will be talking with nostalgia. The great war of liberation, the glorious war, which did so much psychological damage to the country, and to its people: damage which, after a war, we simply do not want to look at. Perhaps we cannot look at it, precisely as a result of that damage. This heroic and glorious war was quite unnecessary in the first place and could easily have been avoided by the use of only a minimum amount of common sense on the part of the whites. They were, however, in the grip of all kinds of primitive emotions. ‘I shall pick up my rifle and fight to the last drop of my blood.’ I quote. I go on to quote the first half of this sentence, ‘If you think that Reds like yourself and the British Government are going to give our country to the blacks, I shall pick up my rifle and fight to the last drop of my blood.’ And he did.

I heard precisely this sentiment recently from a white South African.

Yes, indeed it does seem that against passions as primitive as these, the small voice of reason is not likely to succeed. Let us look at South Africa, where the experiences of Kenya and white Rhodesia have taught them nothing. But perhaps, and we must hope it, tucked away among the fanatics are reasonable men and women who have taken a long cool look at Kenya and Rhodesia and learned. Perhaps. It does not look like it now.

This word ‘blood’. It is always being used by leaders to raise our temperatures.

‘The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.’ That is Thomas Jefferson.

‘The blood shed by our soldiers will inspire us in the time of peace.’

Only through blood can we be reborn!’

‘The way to a glorious future lies through blood.’

‘The blood of our martyrs shall be our inspiration: never shall we forget the blood that has been shed for us all.’

It is not too much to say that when the word blood is pronounced, this is a sign that reason is about to depart.

All this blood business of course goes back to ritual sacrifice, the thousands of years during which priests slit the throats of first humans, then animals, to let blood flow out to please some savage deity. It goes very deep in us all, blood sacrifice, the sacrificial victims, scapegoats. When a leader invokes blood to arouse us to support him and his cause, it is time for us to be on our guard, to think of those long millennia when our ancestors’ lives were safeguarded by blood and sacrifice. But our lives do not need blood; we only regress to the use of it when we are forced to. To reflect that it is nearly always those leaders who claim to be in the forefront of progress, enlightenment, etc. who are the most ready to invoke blood, does offer the pleasures of irony. Well – the pleasures of irony, one sometimes has to think, are the only consolation when contemplating the human story.

‘We will drown the Enemy in seas of his own blood.’

Ah yes, the enemy …

There was, not long ago, a very interesting experiment in a certain American university. This was in a small university, near a small town, which had close ties with the university.

One day, representatives of the psychology department invited the townspeople to come up to the university campus and take part in an experiment. It was a nice day, the university was a pretty place, townspeople and university people were used to trying to please each other, and several hundred people arrived at the campus at the time appointed. And then … nothing whatever happened. Nothing. The psychologists were nowhere to be seen. No explanations. No announcements. The visitors stood about waiting. Then they began to seek out acquaintances and friends, and still nothing happened. Discussing this, that they had all come up and nothing further was offered to them, they began to argue. Quite soon, there were two camps among them, with strongly opposing views. Next, the crowd had separated into two, and spokespeople had emerged. Debates ensued. Then quarrels. Much more was being discussed than the question of their being invited up here to their university (the townspeople thought of it as theirs) and then ignored. All kinds of issues were being aired and disagreed upon.

Past causes of disagreement emerged and took on a new life. 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.

You Are Damned, We Are Saved (#ulink_94ac15f3-77c5-5cd7-b51b-ac7434e1543e)

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 split again we may perhaps behave less mechanically.’ Mind you, it seems it is not enough to be aware of how things are likely to happen. It is said that those highly intelligent people who set up the Bolshevik party in London in, I think, 1905, said to each other, ‘Let us learn from the French Revolution and let us not split violently over points of doctrine and then start murdering each other.’ But this is exactly what happened. They were helpless in the grip of forces they themselves had helped let loose. They did not understand what was happening to them. We have more and more information that can, if we use it, help us understand what is happening to us in various situations.

Yet everywhere, among certain kinds of persons, this great new achievement is put down. Why? I think that in this case it is more than just older generations of academics resenting new attitudes. I think that what they have been unconsciously looking for, and failing to find, are certitudes and dogmas, proven recipes that can be applied to every situation.

People like certainties. More, they crave certainty, they seek certainty, and great resounding truths. They like to be part of some movement equipped with these truths and certainties, and if there are rebels and heretics, that is even more satisfying, because this structure is so deep in all of us.

In Britain, a country that is rapidly being polarized into extremes (it is frightening to be a part of it) it was the miners’ strike that precipitated or made obvious a process that began, I believe, with the collapse and fragmentation of the Left. For a very long time in Britain we have had a balance of Left and Right, each side containing within itself a large range of different opinions. This balance has gone. The Left is a mass of small and large groups. This is a classical recipe for social disorder, even revolution.

The polarization can be seen not only in politics, but in universities. A friend of mine decided to study anthropology and she found she had no alternative but to listen to Marxist lectures – lectures based on Marxist attitudes. If you say that Marxism is no longer a unity but a series of little churches, each with its own dogmas, I agree; but there are certain attitudes in common. These are again largely unconscious. Some things are not discussed, or hardly mentioned. It is possible to sit through hours, days, of discussion about war, and never hear it mentioned that one of the causes of war is that people enjoy it, or enjoy the idea of it. So it is also that one may hear, or read, interminably about the problems of the Left, and never hear it said that the reason why the Left is in such trouble is that people have seen Socialism in action in country after country and are terrified of it. The Soviet Union: a tyranny, where if you disagree you find yourself in a mental hospital, because by definition you must be mad; a country where it is reckoned twenty million people died from the excesses of Stalin. China, where between twenty and sixty million people (the figures vary according to source) were slaughtered in the Cultural Revolution and where the country’s progress was set back, according to its own estimates, by a generation. Cuba … Ethiopia … Somalia … South Yemen … I could go on, but there is no need. No need, except for people actually inside the Left. There, as always in great mass movements, reign certain sentimental certitudes that are unchallenged and undiscussed. One is that Socialists are better than nonSocialists – morally better, that is – in spite of the fact that Socialism has created the most monstrous tyrannies, has murdered millions. And still does. Another certitude is that all Capitalists are bad, mean ill to the community, are brutal and corrupt. Another, that Socialists are peaceful by nature. Another, that women are inherently more peaceable than men. History does not exactly bear this out.