Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

By Doris Lessing

The Nobel Prize winner reflects on living “in a time when it is frightening to be alive, when it is hard to think of human beings as rational creatures.”

In this perceptive collection of essays, Doris Lessing considers the savage past of our species and the remnants of it that seem to regularly erupt in our supposedly advanced and civilized world. Ultimately, she directly addresses the prime questions before us all: how to think for ourselves, how to understand what we know, how to pick a path in a world deluged with opinions and information, and how to look at our society and ourselves with fresh eyes.

“It’s a sobering book, but Lessing is hopeful—and her main source of hope stems from the capacity of human beings to study themselves and learn from their own behavior.” —The New York Times 

“Pithy, tough-minded, optimistic.” —New Society

“One of the most important writers of the past hundred years.” —The Times (London)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 7, 2013
• ISBN: 9780062295019

Book preview

When in the Future They Look Back on Us

THERE WAS ONCE A HIGHLY RESPECTED and prosperous farmer, who had one of the best dairy herds in the country, and to whom other farmers came from all over the southern half of the continent for advice. This was in the old Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, where I grew up. The time was just after the Second World War.

I knew this farmer and his family well. The farmer, who was Scotch by origin, decided to import a very special bull from Scotland. This was just before science had discovered how to send potential calves from one continent to another by airmail in small packages. The beast in due course arrived, flown in, naturally, and was welcomed by a reception committee of farmers, friends, experts. He cost £10,000. I don’t know what that would be now, but it was a very large sum for the farmer. A special home was made for him. He was a massive, impressive animal, mild as a lamb, it was claimed, and he liked to be tickled at the back of his head with a stick held safely at a distance, from behind the bars of his pen. He had his own keeper, a black boy of about twelve. All went well; it was clear the bull would soon become the father of a satisfactory number of calves. He remained an attraction for visitors, who would drive out on a Sunday afternoon to stand about the pen, brooding over this fabulous beast, who looked so powerful and who was so docile. And then he suddenly and quite inexplicably killed his keeper, the black boy.

Something like a court of justice was held. The boy’s relatives demanded, and got, compensation. But that was not the end of it. The farmer decided that the bull must be killed. When this became known, a great many people went to him and pleaded for the magnificent beast’s life. After all, it was in the nature of bulls to suddenly go berserk, everyone knew that. The herd boy had been warned, and he must have been careless. Obviously, it would never happen again … to waste all that power, potential, and not to mention money—what for?

The bull has killed, the bull is a murderer, and he must be punished. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, said the inexorable farmer, and the bull was duly executed by firing squad and buried.

Now, as I’ve said, this farmer was not some ignoramus, or bumpkin. Moreover, like all his kind—the ruling white minority—he spent a good deal of time condemning the blacks who lived all around him for being primitive, backward, pagan, and so forth.

But what he had done—this act of condemning an animal to death for wrong-doing—went back into the far past of mankind, so far back we don’t know where it began, but certainly it was when man hardly knew how to differentiate between humans and beasts.

Any tactful suggestions along these lines from friends or from other farmers were simply dismissed with: I know how to tell right from wrong, thank you very much.

There is another incident. A certain tree was once sentenced to death, at the end of the last war. The tree was associated with General Pétain, for a time considered France’s saviour, then France’s betrayer. When Pétain was disgraced, the tree was solemnly sentenced and executed for collaborating with the enemy.

I often think about these incidents: they represent those happenings that seem to give up more meaning as time goes on. Whenever things seem to be going along quite smoothly—and I am talking about human affairs in general—then it is as if suddenly some awful primitivism surges up and people revert to barbaric behaviour.

This is what I want to talk about in these five essays: how often and how much we are dominated by our savage past, as individuals and as groups. And yet, while sometimes it seems as if we are helpless, we are gathering, and very rapidly—too rapidly to assimilate it—knowledge about ourselves, not only as individuals, but as groups, nations, and as members of society.

This is a time when it is frightening to be alive, when it is hard to think of human beings as rational creatures. Everywhere we look we see brutality, stupidity, until it seems that there is nothing else to be seen but that—a descent into barbarism, everywhere, which we are unable to check. But I think that while it is true there is a general worsening, it is precisely because things are so frightening we become hypnotized, and do not notice—or if we notice, belittle—equally strong forces on the other side, the forces, in short, of reason, sanity and civilization.

And of course I know that as I say these words there must be people who are muttering, Where? The woman must be crazy to see anything good in this mess we are in.

I think this sanity must be looked for in precisely this process of judging our own behaviour—as we examine the farmer who executed an animal to make it expiate a crime, or the people who sentenced, and executed, a tree. Against these enormously powerful primitive instincts, we have this: the ability to observe ourselves from other viewpoints. Some of these viewpoints are very old—much older perhaps than we realize. There is nothing new in the demand that reason should govern human affairs. For instance, in the course of another study, I came upon an Indian book, a good two thousand years old, a manual for the sensible governing of a state. Its prescriptions are every bit as cool, sensible, rational as anything we could come up with now; nor does it demand any less in the way of justice, even as we understand justice. The reason I am mentioning this book at all—it is called the Arthásàstra, by the way, and was written by one Kautilya, and is unfortunately hard to come by outside specialist libraries—is that this book that seems so unimaginably old talks of itself as the last in a long line of similar books.

It could be said that this is a matter for gloom rather than optimism, that after so many thousands of years of knowing perfectly well how a country should be managed, we are so far from achieving it; but—and this is the whole point and focus of what I want to say—what we know about ourselves is much more sophisticated, goes deeper, than what was known then, what has been known through these long thousands of years.

If we were to put into practice what we know

Reviews for Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

[baswood · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Prisons We Choose To Live Inside by Doris Lessing 1986These essays are taken from a series of five lectures given by Doris Lessing under the auspices of the Canadian Broadcasting Company in 1985. The overriding themes of of these lectures are that we do not learn from history, we as a civilization keep repeating the same mistakes, despite being better informed and we fail to take notice of the developing sciences of psychology and anthropology. Lessing makes her case persuasively and asks the questions that continue to baffle some people. Why do we continue to go to war, why do we elect leaders that we know or at least suspect are telling us lies.“ I think it is sentimental to discuss the subject of war or peace, without acknowledging that a great many people enjoy war - not only the idea of it but the fighting itself……… people who have lived through a war know that as it approaches, an at first secret, unacknowledged, elation begins, as if an almost invisible drum is beating……….an awful, illicit, violent excitement is abroad….. everyone is possessed by it.” “ We have now reached the stage where a political leader not only uses, skilfully, time-honoured rabble rousing tricks - see Shakespeare's Julius Caesar - but employ experts to make it even more effective. But the antidote is that, in an open society, we may also examine these tricks being used on us. If, that is, we choose to examine them”My favourite of the five short essays (they are all good) is her one on Group Minds: nothing scientific here and nothing particularly new but she gets across her points as to how difficult it is to stand apart from the majority, whether it is a social group, an income level group, or even a protest movement. How easy it is to be carried along by emotions instead of examining the evidence at hand in the light of reason. The Wind Blows Away our Words by Doris Lessing 1987This is reportage and stories following Lessing’s trip to Peshawar and Chitral in Pakistan in 1986. She had for some time been involved in the Resistance to the Russian invasion of Afghanistan through the aid organisation Afghan Relief. Peshawar in Northern Pakistan is as near as many people could get to the front line resistance in Afghanistan and was at that time the home to a huge number of refugees. She got to interview some of the leaders of the Muhjahadin, but her primary focus in this extended essay is the plight of the refugees, particularly the women, who having fled the bombing found themselves imprisoned in camps where their freedom was curtailed by the rising power of the Mullahs She bemoans the fact that the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and the plight of the refugees received little coverage in the Western press; famine in Africa was much higher in the list of priorities, in spite of the fact that there were an estimated five million Afghan refugees and over a million civilians killed by the Russians. There is no doubt that Lessing had points to make from her own perspective, but I see them as particularly valid. I had stayed in Peshawar and Chitral ten years earlier and had spent a little time in Afghanistan as well staying in the same hotels that Lessing was reporting from and so her descriptions of the towns and villages brought them back vividly to life. I have no reason to doubt that her descriptions of the border regions on the edge of conflict are no less accurate. Both of these collections of essays are well worth reading, 4 stars.

[andrewblackman · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A clear-sighted, well-argued plea for individuality of thought in an age of mass emotions and social conditioning.Doris Lessing has faith in the power of writers to stay detached from these mass emotions and "enable us to see ourselves as others see us." I like the image she gives of writers as a collective organism, constantly evolving but always providing this same crucial function of detached examination of the human condition.There are some fascinating passages on the way mass emotions are constructed by governments and leaders, for example pointing out how often "blood" is invoked when calling people to war or revolution - this, she says, is a harking back to our long ancestral history of ritual sacrifice, cleansing through blood. Also the constant projection of an Enemy to rally people together.It's refreshing to hear Lessing's account of how often majority opinion has been completely wrong, and the most seemingly unchangeable opinions have changed completely - for example the white minority in the Rhodesia of her childhood thought that their racist regime would last forever, but it didn't. Also in World War Two, Britons revered friendly, pipe-smoking Uncle Joe Stalin, their ally against Hitler, but then a couple of years later he was their worst enemy (I remember my grandmother talking about this as well).There are lots of fascinating psychological experiments showing how much we will do to agree with authority or with the group - only a small minority (she puts it at 10%) is usually prepared to go against the group opinion, often at great individual cost. She says that all of us are, to some degree, brainwashed by the society we live in, and that "There is nothing much we can do about this except to remember that it is so."She goes on: "It seems to me that we are being governed by waves of mass emotion, and while they last it is not possible to ask cool, serious questions. One simply has to shut up and wait, everything passes." This reminds me of living in New York through 9/11 and the hugely irrational responses to it. In that time, there were certain things you simply couldn't say.Lessing gives several examples of this group thinking, from classic psychological experiments (such as the one where people are divided into prisoners and warders, and the warders quickly become sadistic and authoritarian) to the world of literature, where certain writers are praised by everyone, then suddenly fall out of fashion (Lessing herself wrote a couple of novels under a pseudonym to see if they got the same reaction as her other work, and of course they were rejected by her two regular publishers and ignored by the critics).This book was written in 1987, before the arrival of technologies like the internet. The methods of control and manipulation are surely stronger now than in 1987, but so are the possibilities for resistance. It's easier now to find the information that undercuts official propaganda, or to publish your own individual views, or to connect with other people who dissent from the majority opinion. Not following the herd is a challenge at any time, but, as Lessing says, it's vital:"Of course, there are original minds, people who do take their own line, who do not fall victim to the need to say, or do, what everyone else does. But they are few. Very few. On them depends the health, the vitality of all our institutions."