By Doris Lessing (1992)
While we have seen the apparent death of Communism, ways of thinking that were either
born under Communism or strengthened by Communism still govern our lives. Not
all of them are as immediately evident as a legacy of Communism as political
correctness.
The
first point: language. It is not a new thought that Communism debased language
and, with language, thought. There is a Communist jargon recognizable after a
single sentence. Few people in Europe have not joked in their time about
“concrete steps”,
“contradictions”,
“the interpenetration of opposites”, and the rest.
The
first time I saw that mind-deadening slogans had the power to take wing and fly
far from their origins was in the 1950s when I read an article in The Times of
London and saw them in use. “The demo last Saturday was irrefutable proof that the concrete
situation...”
Words confined to the left as corralled animals had passed into
general use and, with them, ideas. One might read whole articles in the
conservative and liberal press that were Marxist, but the writers did not know it.
But there is an aspect of this heritage that is much harder to see.
Even
five, six years ago, Izvestia, Pravda and a thousand other Communist papers were
written in a language that seemed designed to fill up as much space as possible
without actually saying anything. Because, of course, it was dangerous to take
up positions that might have to be defended. Now all these newspapers have
rediscovered the use of language. But the heritage of dead and empty language
these days is to be found in academia, and particularly in some areas of
sociology and psychology.
A
young friend of mine from North Yemen saved up every bit of money he could to
travel to Britain to study that branch of sociology that teaches how to spread
Western expertise to benighted natives. I asked to see his study material and he
showed me a thick tome, written so badly and in such ugly, empty jargon it was
hard to follow. There were several hundred pages, and the ideas in it could
easily have been put in 10 pages.
Yes,
I know the obfuscations of academia did not begin with Communism --as Swift, for one, tells us-- but the
pedantries and verbosity of Communism had their roots in German academia. And now that has
become a kind of mildew blighting the whole world.
It is
one of the paradoxes of our time that ideas capable of transforming our
societies, full of insights about how the human animal actually behaves and
thinks, are often presented in unreadable language.
The
second point is linked with the first. Powerful ideas affecting our behavior can
be visible only in brief sentences, even a phrase – a catch phrase. All writers are asked
this question by interviewers: “Do you think a writer should...?” “Ought writers
to...?” The question always has to do with a political stance, and note that the assumption behind the
words is that all writers should do the same thing, whatever it is. The phrases
“Should a writer...?”
“Ought writers to...?” have a long history that seems unknown to the people who
so casually use them.
Another is “commitment”, so
much in vogue not long ago. Is so and so a committed writer?
A
successor to “commitment”
is “raising consciousness.” This is double-edged. The people whose consciousness
is being raised may be given information they most desperately lack and need, may be
given moral support they need. But the process nearly always means that the
pupil gets only the propaganda the instructor approves of. “Raising consciousness,” like
“commitment,” like “political correctness,” is a continuation of that old bully, the party
line.
A
very common way of thinking in literary criticism is not seen as a consequence
of Communism, but it is. Every writer has the experience of being told that a
novel, a story, is “about”
something or other. I wrote
a story, The Fifth Child,
which was at once pigeonholed as being about the Palestinian problem, genetic
research, feminism, anti-Semitism and so on.
A
journalist from France walked into my living room and before she had even sat
down said, “Of
course The Fifth Child is about
AIDS.”
An
effective conversation stopper, I assure you. But what is interesting is the
habit of mind that has to analyze a literary work like this. If you say,
“Had I wanted to write
about AIDS or the Palestinian problem I would have written a
pamphlet,” you tend to get
baffled stares.
That a work of the imagination has to be “really” about some
problem is, again, an heir of Socialist Realism. To write a story for the sake
of storytelling is frivolous, not to say reactionary.
The
demand that stories must be about something is from Communist thinking and, further back, from
religious thinking, with its desire for self-improvement books as simple-minded
as the messages on samplers.
The
phrase political
correctness was born as
Communism was collapsing. I do not think this was chance. I am not suggesting
that the torch of Communism has been handed on to the political correctors. I am
suggesting that habits of mind have been absorbed, often without knowing it.
There
is obviously something very attractive about telling other people what to do: I
am putting it in this nursery way rather than in more intellectual language
because I see it as nursery behavior. Art -- the arts generally -- are always
unpredictable, maverick,
and tend to be, at their best, uncomfortable. Literature, in particular, has
always inspired the House committees, the Zhdanovs, the fits of moralizing, but,
at worst, persecution. It troubles me that political correctness does not seem
to know what its exemplars and predecessors are; it troubles me more that it may
know and does not care.
Does
political correctness have a good side? Yes, it does, for it makes us re-examine
attitudes, and that is always useful. The trouble is that, with all popular
movements, the lunatic fringe so quickly ceases to be a fringe; the tail begins
to wag the dog. For every woman or man who is quietly and sensibly using the
idea to examine our assumptions, there are 20 rabble-rousers whose real motive
is desire for power over others, no less rabble-rousers because they see
themselves as anti-racists or feminists or whatever.
A
professor friend describes how when students kept walking out of classes on
genetics and boycotting visiting lecturers whose points of view did not coincide
with their ideology, he invited them to his study for discussion and for viewing
a video of the actual facts. Half a dozen youngsters in their uniform of jeans
and T-shirts filed in, sat down, kept silent while he reasoned with them, kept
their eyes down while he ran the video and then, as one person, marched out. A
demonstration -- they might
very well have been shocked to hear -- which was a mirror of Communist behavior,
an acting out, a visual representation of the closed minds of young
Communist activists.
Again
and again in Britain we see in town councils or in school counselors or
headmistresses or headmasters or teachers being hounded by groups and cabals of
witch hunters, using the most dirty and often cruel tactics. They claim their
victims are racist or in some way reactionary. Again and again an appeal to
higher authorities has proved the campaign was unfair.
I am
sure that millions of people, the rug of Communism pulled out from under them,
are searching frantically, and perhaps not even knowing it, for another dogma.
-- from the New York Times Op Ed page, June 22, 1992
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