Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

You Are Damned, We Are Saved

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.

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