Doris Lessing, changer
Doris Lessing was a well-known writer who died in 2013 after a very long life and many prizes, including a Nobel. I confess that I’ve never read a thing she wrote, although I tried a few times. It just didn’t grab me, and I don’t even remember why. But this post isn’t about her novels – it’s about her political beliefs, which I find of interest.
Lessing began as a committed leftist, a Communist. She also was a feminist, and I believe she remained so in one way or another for her entire life. But in many ways she thought for herself and quite early on understood the danger represented by PC thought. She left the hard left quite early on, as well.
Here are some interesting quotes from this article in November, 1997:
Lessing: Capitalism was dead [postwar 40s and 50s in England]. It was done and finished. And the future was socialist or communist. We were going to have justice, equality, fair pay for women, cripples, blacks — everything, in a very short time. This nonsense was believed by extremely intelligent people.
Question: You call these beliefs a kind of mass hypnosis.
Lessing: I call it mass psychopathology. Because what we believed was rubbish. It had absolutely nothing to do with what was going on in the world.
Question: But it was such a heady kind of belief, wasn’t it? Was it truly all rubbish?
Lessing: Look, most of it was rubbish. But it had an enormous emotional charge behind it, which meant that people could achieve more if they believed this kind of thing. You know, if you are fueled by this pure belief, amazing things get done.
Question: You write about all of these interesting, caring, passionate people who put so much work into their belief in communism, and what they got in return was Stalin. It was a cruel kind of a joke.
Lessing: Well, that’s why socialism is, for our time, dead. Because young people say, “Right, all you Reds — look what you were supporting. China and the Soviet Union.” The interesting thing is to ask yourself this question: Why were the Europeans bothered about the Soviet Union at all? It was nothing to do with us. China had nothing to do with us. Why were we not building, without reference to the Soviet Union, a good society in our own countries? But no, we were all — in one way or another — obsessed with the bloody Soviet Union, which was a disaster. What people were supporting was failure. And continually justifying it. That had a disastrous effect on — this is another cliche, forgive me — progressive thinking of every kind.
I think she sees it somewhat clearly in some ways, but in others she connects the failure with Stalin and Communism rather than something inherent to leftism. In the 90s, when she gave this interview, young people were more aware of the Soviet Union and its horrors. It was recent, and the fall of the USSR was recent and within their experience and memory. Nowadays “young people” seem to either have no clue what happened then and earlier, or to know about them and to figure they will avoid them when they get the power, or to be drawn to repeating those horrors because they regard them as an important and necessary tool to be used by the left for control.
More:
Question: You compare that kind o[f progressive thinking to today’s political correctness, to use another cliche. How true is that?
Lessing: I think it is true. I think the attitudes of mind behind it are the same.
Question: What are those attitudes?
Lessing: A need to oversimplify. To control. And an enormous distrust of the innovative, of new ideas. All political movements are like this — we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There’s oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility. This characterizes political correctness.
Question: Your book is, in many ways, about falling out of love with communism….
Lessing: This process was going on right from the beginning. I’m talking about the Soviet Union — people seeing what it was like and leaving. Everywhere you went you met people who had been communists and understood perfectly well the perils of the dream, and were now angry with themselves for falling for it. I think [this interest in communism] was rooted in the First World War and people’s passionate identification with what had been done to the soldiers, which crossed all the national boundaries. I think that’s where a disgust and contempt for government began, at the level we see it now. The automatic reaction of practically any young person is, at once, against authority. That, I think, began in the First World War because of the trenches, and the incompetence of the people on all fronts. I think that a terrible bitterness and anger began there, which led to communism. And now it feeds terrorism [I don’t think shes talking about Islamic terrorism here]. Anyway, that’s my thesis. It’s very oversimplified, as you can see…
Question: On the subject of feminism, let me ask a different question. You’ve written that women seem to be much more easily shocked these days.
Lessing: Yes, they are. Almost as a political intention, they’re shocked. I can’t remember ever being shocked if someone exposed himself, or made a pass which I though was inept. I’d just go, “Well, that’s life.” But now, it’s a whole political agenda.
Question: The sudden vogue of sexual harassment, you mean?
Lessing: Well, I’m not saying this isn’t serious, obviously I’m not. That’s the difficulty of this discussion, because I don’t want to sound unsympathetic to women who are sexually harassed, because I know they are. But I think a great many women complain about sexual harassment when it’s nothing of the kind. It’s just one of the minor annoyances of life. When a little boy kisses a little girl at school and it becomes a national issue, what can we say about this? It’s just such lunacy.
Remember, that was in 1997. And then in August 2001 Lessing gave this talk at the Edinburgh Book Festival. Oh, can you imagine? Someone should go to every book festival in the world and just re-read it:
The novelist Doris Lessing yesterday claimed that men were the new silent victims in the sex war, “continually demeaned and insulted” by women without a whimper of protest.
Lessing, who became a feminist icon with the books The Grass is Singing and The Golden Notebook, said a “lazy and insidious” culture had taken hold within feminism that revelled in flailing men.
Young boys were being weighed down with guilt about the crimes of their sex, she told the Edinburgh book festival, while energy which could be used to get proper child care was being dissipated in the pointless humiliation of men.
“I find myself increasingly shocked at the unthinking and automatic rubbishing of men which is now so part of our culture that it is hardly even noticed,” the 81-year-old Persian-born writer said yesterday…
“We have many wonderful, clever, powerful women everywhere, but what is happening to men? Why did this have to be at the cost of men?
“I was in a class of nine- and 10-year-olds, girls and boys, and this young woman was telling these kids that the reason for wars was the innately violent nature of men.
“You could see the little girls, fat with complacency and conceit while the little boys sat there crumpled, apologising for their existence, thinking this was going to be the pattern of their lives.”
Lessing said the teacher tried to “catch my eye, thinking I would approve of this rubbish”.
She added: “This kind of thing is happening in schools all over the place and no one says a thing.
“It has become a kind of religion that you can’t criticise because then you become a traitor to the great cause, which I am not.
“It is time we began to ask who are these women who continually rubbish men. The most stupid, ill-educated and nasty woman can rubbish the nicest, kindest and most intelligent man and no one protests.
“Men seem to be so cowed that they can’t fight back, and it is time they did.”
That was almost twenty years ago.
“We have many wonderful, clever, powerful women everywhere, but what is happening to men? Why did this have to be at the cost of men?”
Not to be flip, but it’s because the whole damned project was to make women manly, and this sort of domination thing is what men do quite naturally. Not always, mind — not against their womenfolk when protecting their womenfolk say — but certainly when demanding recognition amidst other dominating men. This is, again, not the sole characteristic of manliness, but it’s an inescapable one. Wanna be a man? Then you’re going to get a lot of crappy effects along with the good effects.
One of her finest books is entitled The Sweetest Dream, a brilliant literary evisceration of the delusions of the radicals of the 1960s and of the impossibility of making real the utopian dream of perfect egalitarianism. Unsurprisingly, it was dismissed in The Guardian (completely predictable in all its political and aesthetic pronouncements) as “reactionary.”
IMO feminism has long ago ended up where all movements of the left inevitability lead: dogmatic, totalitarian, and far away from understanding human nature and a stupid belief in the arc of history. Leftists keep doing deja vu all over again as they create the new dystopia.
The Grass is Singing is well worth your time.
Lessing reminds me of Camile Paglia.
“IMO feminism has long ago ended up where all movements of the left inevitability lead: dogmatic, totalitarian, and far away from understanding human nature and a stupid belief in the arc of history.” parker
All isms of the left end up there because all isms of the left reject basic aspects of human nature and key operative principles that govern the external reality within which we all exist.
At base, they are at war with God and his creation.
No ideology in fundamental opposition to reality is sustainable. They are dogmatic because they cannot withstand factual contradiction, thus the first sacrifice upon the left’s ideological altar is… factual truth.
They end up totalitarian because an unsustainable ideology can only continue through coercion. The more evident the failure, the greater the coercion. See Venezuela, Cuba and N. Korea…
The Good Terrorist is a very good novel, which when it came out was seen as the sign of her defection from the hardcore Left. It was met by puzzled or hostile reviews, but enough others who said, “Wow, this is really something” that I was moved to pick it up.
“At base, they are at war with God and his creation.”
I’ve not seen it phrased that way, but it says it all.
Today, she would most likely be skewered. Raked over the coals. Drawn and quartered. (Alas this is what “we” have come to—I would prefer to blame social media for this sorry—make that disgusting—state of affairs…well, you have to blame somebody/something…don’t you?)
FWIW I couldn’t make heads or tails of “The Four-Gated City” one of a quadrilogy, if I’m not mistake. (This probably means that I read it at the wrong time…)
OTOH, “The Golden Notebook” I found astounding…the both times I read it.
Towards the middle-end of her career, she veered off into science fiction (which I never read). Perhaps her political transfiguration—which I hadn’t known about and was quite surprised that it occurred, given her previously vehement views “from the other side”—had something to do with that…
If you want to understand what happened with her and communism read Martha Quest, the first in the Children of Violence series.
“At base, they are at war with God and his creation.” Spot on.
Denial of God manifests as nihilism or Utopianism, but strangely they are the two sides of the same coin “Listen here God, I don’t need you!” You can hear the disillusionment with the world and it’s creator.
And from popular culture:
Tyler Durden: Shut up! Our fathers were our models for God. If our fathers bailed, what does that tell you about God?
Narrator: No, no, I… don’t…
Tyler Durden: Listen to me! You have to consider the possibility that God does not like you. He never wanted you. In all probability, he hates you. This is not the worst thing that can happen.
Narrator: It isn’t?
sdferr on February 1, 2020 at 4:36 pm said:
Not to be flip, but it’s because the whole damned project was to make women manly, and this sort of domination thing is what men do quite naturally.
Not entirely. But the movement has always been not about equality, but about power.
“An unsustainable ideology can only continue through coercion.” That is a keeper. Thank you Geoffrey. Wide wisdom captured in a tiny cage of words.
And now it feeds terrorism [I don’t think shes talking about Islamic terrorism here]. IRA, ETA, Brigate Rosse, Red Army
Thanks for the reading suggestions.
‘I was taken around and shown things as a “useful idiot” […] that’s what my role was […] I can’t understand why I was so gullible.’
A brief anecdote by Lessing about her 1952 trip to the USSR. BBC “Useful Idiots” at about 2:30. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p008vd41
This and other related quotes, including a few about political correctness, at her wikiquote page.
Religious/moral philosophy for people capable of self-moderation. Competing interests to mitigate progress of others running amuck.
Capitalism, or, more correctly, private capital and market economies, is a dynamic, optimal system and organization to determine price and distribution of finitely available, accessible resources.
Liberalism is divergent. Libertarianism is emergent. Progressivism is monotonic. Conservativism is moderating. #PrinciplesMatter
Men and women are equal in rights and complementary in Nature and nature. We’re not children anymore. Reconcile.
Individual dignity. Intrinsic value. Inordinate worth. Natural imperatives.
Right now i am waiting to be homeless as my existence ruins diversity and as we all know, people like me are born women hating nazis… too bad i married my wife, and she has to suffer for being with me…
Incidence of male–female suicide ratio by WHO region
Europe (13%) 4.0 : 1
Americas (13.5%) 3.6 : 1
American Foundation for Suicide Prevention
https://afsp.org/about-suicide/suicide-statistics/
White males accounted for 69.67% of suicide deaths in 2017.
The rate of suicide is highest in middle-age white men in particular.
On average, there are 129 suicides per day.
Do remember my Ex took my son and two other children with her to rob a bank
I never got to see him grow up, as a man i had no rights, even after that
Only got to play catch with him once..
Never taught him anything
My wife and i now have no children, we could not afford it given the economic hit in my past from the system favoring a person who faked their murder, and ended up in federal prison… I on the other hand have a clean record, lifetime of hard work, etc..
personally, i cant wait till its over as there is nothing left to wait for but more pain
and its hard to watch my wife suffer because of it, despite her being from indonesia
A wonderful woman that deserved better, but we didn’t believe what most don’t
[I wanted to be a researcher scientist, but alas, no money for white males (despite what people think)… out of Bronx science, there was nothing, as the cash went to make the numbers unequal (they were equal when i was born according to the governments tables)… sister has many degrees, children, and a great home… i on the other hand, have no real family, my family believes that everything went to men, so i must be a screw up, and so, i have no family]
In the UK
In 2018, 4,903 men took their own lives, 12pc more than in 2017 and an average of 13 per day. In comparison, 1,604 women died by suicide in the same time frame: about four per day.
Men are 14pc more likely to get cancer than women and they’re 37pc more likely to die from the disease.
https://www.cancer.org/research/currently-funded-cancer-research/grants-by-cancer-type.html
Breast Cancer – $93,777,500 – 162 Grants
The largest of them, Dallas-based Susan G. Komen for the Cure, grossed $420 million last year alone. All told, an estimated $6 billion is raised every year in the name of breast cancer.
Prostate Cancer – 35,599,002 – 48 Grants
Among the big cancers, breast cancer receives the most funding per new case, $2,596 — and by far the most money relative to each death, $13,452. Notably, prostate cancer, the most common cancer, receives the least funding per new case at just $1,318. But on a per-death basis it ranks second
Why Men Are the New College Minority
Males are enrolling in higher education at alarmingly low rates, and some colleges are working hard to reverse the trend.
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/08/why-men-are-the-new-college-minority/536103/
The Disappearing College Male
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ccap/2015/05/04/the-disappearing-college-male/
Men saying “no thanks” to college
The proportion of men on college campuses is dropping
https://www.denverpost.com/2017/06/04/men-women-college-proportion/
Girls Have Always Been Better at School. Now It Matters More.
The higher-education gender gap has become a major factor in American political and economic life, and it yawns even wider in other rich countries.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-06/young-women-widen-the-higher-education-gap
70 percent
The homeless population is largely male. Among individual adults, 70 percent are men.
Tons more..
but when you have to agree with a professor and others about a political truth to earn a degree, and more… why bother… not like america needs men any more… not like we are ever going to have a conflict… or need to risk inventing… do note that a lot of the numbers on benefits are juggled, its not only what they compute, its how they compute it, and they throw out a lot of data if its ‘inconvenient’.
I’ve been beating this drum for decades… its not bad enough to warrant much discussion over that period… look how bad the schools had to get before Neo did a thread on it, but still, the people who warned early are unheard for either their divulging things, or for how they changed
I’ve given up now…
there is no chance for anything..
all the funding for those without connections go to the protected classes
(another drum i mentioned only to be called names)
the SBA wont help… its only for women – 8A program eats all funds – and gives very asymmetric help, which means if your not one of them, your not able to get any help
This was explained to me by a banker… They are clever about the language they use, and so, good people do not really know what goes on there. Certainly Neo didnt when i tried to explain it over 10 years ago.
None of the above is available if your not a protected class designated as disadvantaged
Why would anyone risk any others? this is why women businesses are growing, not because they are out-competing, but because they have super advantages that keep on coming…
As i said, i have given up now…
there is no way to compete and the men know it
they know their tax dollars go to fund their negative outcome
re: terrorism
There were thousands of Lefty terrorist bombings in the US in the early part of the 70s. The Red Guards and other lefty groups continued that type of terrorism in Europe for decades.