In her book “Mara and Dann”, Doris Lessing discusses different sorts of people that might be found in her imagined future. One group is called the Hennes. Their peculiar trait is that they all look EXACTLY alike, with no deviation, as if they were all the same person. Even the men and women look alike, except that the women have small breasts.
They are dull and slow, and creatures of habit. They eat because it is time to eat, and run because it is time to run, and never question anything about the reasons why they do what they do.
The “order” of their camp seemed a useful metaphor to me, and I will quote the book:
She was surprised at the apparent confusion of this camp. Then she saw there were blocks of order, unconnected with the others. A block of tents was neatly set out, with tidy paths between, but this was set at an angle to some rows of sheds, equally well arranged, and both were unrelated to an adjacent suburb with itself was composed of rows of little boxes. To get from one part to another of this camp . . .was difficult, for she found herself following the nearest of paths, hoping to achieve the next settlement, but it ended perhaps against the wall of a house, or simply stopped. Storehouses, water tanks, stood here and there, and there was a watchtower in the very center of the camp. . . when surely it should have been at its edge?
What this reminded me of is the intellectualism of the Academy. I had a brilliant professor in graduate school–who may well have taught Jerry Wright, since we got our Master’s in the same place–who was an avowed Marxist. I talked with him a bit about it, enough to get a list of recommended texts, which I still have. He suggested I start with Gramsci. Then if memory serves it was Marx’s essay on Feuerbach. I still have not read either.
The point here is that you can have a wonderfully coherent narrative, with all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed, you can have a ready countersalvo to all critics, and still be COMPLETELY WRONG.
If you never leave your little neighborhood, and content yourself with equating your conceptions of the wider world with reality, you can reach a point where your conclusions are so self evident, so obvious, that to question them is tantamount to confessing some combination of idiocy and venality.
OF COURSE the paths in my neighborhood are straight. Of course the houses are lined up neatly. It’s all there. Everything you need.
But try to move from that cozy world into practice, and everything falls apart like a wet cardboard wheelbarrow. It won’t hold anything. What happens with leftists at that point is they turn to violence.
Let’s supposed I asked George Bernard Shaw this question: Mr. Shaw, if, as you suggest, all income is equalized, and the State guarantees an income, from whence comes the motivation to work? His answer–and he gave it–was that everyone would be forced to work, and if they objected they would be shot.
But Mr. Shaw, if you are calling Capitalism a type of slavery in that some are compelled to work from economic necessity, how is it an improvement if they are compelled to work through fear of sudden death, and the sundry steps short of that, such as incarceration, and various forms of torture?
His answer: my system is necessarily a just one, since Capitalism is manifestly an unjust one. This conclusion is both necessary and sufficient for my case. Please stop talking now.
That is a path from an orderly neighborhood, running into the wall of a house in the next neighborhood.
As I keep saying, perception is movement. If you are locking yourself in a ghetto, you are missing some or all of the big picture. You are failing to understand, and in so doing confessing, frankly, that what you really want is in fact a prison.
Lessing, by the way, titled a series of essays “Prisons we choose to live inside”.
Food for thought, hopefully.