Author: Doris Lessing
Publication: The Economic Times
Dated: October 18, 2007
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 recognisable 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.
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.
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 behaviour 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". "Raising consciousness", like "commitment",
like "political correctness", is a continuation of that old bully,
the party line. 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 behaviour.
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 moralising, 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.
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.
Doris Lessing, London The writer is winner
of the 2007 Nobel prize for literature. The article was written in 1992
