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Nobel committee’s brilliant choice, and I don’t mean Gore

Posted in Irshaddering Thoughts on Oct 15, 2007

I mean Doris Lessing, winner of the latest Nobel prize in literature. What makes Lessing such a compelling writer is that she’s an exemplar of moral courage — the willingness to break silences within your own community for the sake of a greater good.

A Londoner born in Persia and raised in Southern Rhodesia, Lessing once gave a series of lectures in my city of Toronto. Later published under the provocative title Prisons We Choose to Live Inside, those lectures turned me on to the force of her thinking.

Notice the word “choose” in her title. We’re not mere victims of our past, Lessing insists. We have the option - each of us - to be informed by cultural, ethnic, creedal and religious traditions without being bullied by them.

And who is “we?” That’s the beauty of Lessing. She refuses to play favorites. Women and men, whites and blacks, oppressors and self-styled liberators must be held to the same standard of conduct. Otherwise, justice has no integrity.

Let me illustrate by quoting directly from Prisons We Choose to Live Inside. First, she takes on the thought-police of her own “white” tribe:

I was brought up in a country where a small white minority dominated a 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 of them 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.

Typical authoritarianism of the Right, right? Lessing then exposes the same abusive traits on the Left:

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 [union leader] Arthur Scargill had led the strike badly. 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 the man. The woman said she knew who these men were. They were friends. She could not believe that decent folk could have done such a thing.

Ah, writes Lessing, but welcome to our eminently human impulse for dividing the world between us and them. Not only will supposed friends turn on you when the pack demands it, but you should expect them to. She warns:

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 evil-doer. This is an absolutely automatic process; nearly everyone in such situations behaves automatically.

So where’s hope? Exactly with the “no-goodniks, the criminals, the evil-doers.” That is, with the handful of heretics who engage in self-criticism. I’m highlighting her words for good measure:

There is always the minority who do not behave automatically, and it seems to me that our future, the future of everybody, depends on this minority. 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.

Music to my reformist Muslim ears! Teaching the need for moral courage - the choice to become a smeared minority , to transcend tribalism, to prefer the common good - is exactly what I’ll soon be doing at New York University.

If you want to know more about the Moral Courage Project that I’ll be initiating and directing, go the GET UPDATES box on the right-hand side of this page and join my confidential mailing list.

A final note: The New York Times recently re-printed a 1992 op-ed by Lessing in which she skewers political correctness not just among anti-communists, but also among anti-racists and feminists.

That’s who the Nobel committee chose as this year’s winner in literature. Proof, perhaps, that there is a God.