Prisons We Choose to Live Inside. A collection of five short essays in which Doris Lessing tries to make sense of the fact that the world is so messed up and has always been messed up and will likely continue being messed up in spite of us knowing the reason why it's so messed up. She writes, "Looking back over my life, what I see is a succession of great mass events, boilings up of emotion, of wild partisan passion, that pass, but while they last it is not possible to do more than think: 'These slogans, or these accusations, these claims, these trumpetings, quite soon they will seem to everyone ridiculous and even shameful.' Meanwhile, it is not possible to say so. One mass movement, each a set of mass opinions, succeeds another. And each breeds a certain frame of mind: violent, emotional, partisan, always suppressing facts that don't suit it, lying, and making it impossible to talk in the cool, quiet, sensible low-keyed tone of voice which, it seems to me, is the only one that can produce truth."
If there is to be any hope for change, what we must do is take "that deliberate step into objectivity and away from wild emotionalism, deliberately choosing to see ourselves as, perhaps, a visitor from another planet might see us."
She touches on the methodology and effectiveness of brainwashing, both consciously employed and unconsciously brought to bear on each of us by governments, by the media, by the community, the social group, and the family. These pressures to accept conformity are all but irresistible if we don't anticipate them beforehand, recognize them in ourselves and others, and consciously and consistently fight against them to keep our minds clear and our emotions from being manipulated. We're going to have to teach ourselves to do this, however, because even in a so-called "democratic" society the status quo has a vested interest in keeping you from thinking for yourself.
"What government, anywhere in the world, will happily envisage its subjects learning to free themselves from governmental and state rhetoric and pressures? Passionate loyalty and subjection to group pressure is what every state relies on."
Yet it is only by breaking the enchantment of conformity that we can escape the reactionary "us vs. them" mentality that has dominated human behavior and that has doomed the human race to repeat the same catastrophic mistakes since the beginning of recorded history. We can see that history written plainly. We lament it. So why don't we finally wake up and change? Well for one thing it feels good to the majority of people to stick with the group, to wallow in communal emotionalism, no matter how squalid, sometimes especially because such mass emotions are so squalid and stupid and sadistic.
"Everything that has ever happened to me has taught me to value the individual, the person who cultivates and preserves her or his own ways of thinking, who stands out against group thinking, group pressures. Or who, conforming no more than is necessary to group pressures, quietly preserves individual thinking and development."
Yes, sounds like a good idea. Sadly, despite Lessing's hopeful note at the end of this collection, my guess is that one in every hundred million people will actually put her wisdom into practice. I mean, Socrates said much the same thing 2,500 years ago.
Angels & Insects. These books consists of two novellas, "Morpho Eugenia" and "The Conjugal Angel." In "Morpho Eugenia" William Adamson has just returned from a long research expedition through the rain-forests, far from civilized England. It's the late 19th century and the theories of Charles Darwin are electrifying the intellectual world. Some see Darwin's work as elevating man to a liberating new plateau of understanding; others see it as devaluing all of creation into a meaningless, godless clockwork mechanism and redefining man as just another beast. Adamson is staying at the home of a fairly well-to-do patron until he can fund a new expedition. He's been marked by the savagery and beauty he's witnessed in the jungle but not so much that he cannot appreciate the refinements and beauties of civilized England, not to mention the charms of the Alabaster daughters, one in particular. He falls in love, thinks his affections hopeless, finds they aren't, and ends up married to a woman above his own social station. His father-in-law promises to fund Adamson's next expedition—but when?—since the babies start coming fast and furious. Meanwhile Adamson grows less and less enchanted with his new life, his wife, and his father-in-law, who, though unfailingly good-natured, belabors poor Adamson with his repetitive literary attempts to defend the old religious order, seeing in the beauty and functioning of the world a divine order of some kind, a working of God's invisible hand. Adamson, though, has seen how disorderly life can be in the jungle, where nature is both horrifically prolific and utterly amoral, where for every one experiment in life that survives, a thousand others perish. In the end, he discovers that not only is it a jungle "out there" but also right at home, where his wife is reverting to a shockingly amoral animality in their conjugal bed and this when he's not in it. To make matters worse, she's doing it with a member of her own family. Luckily for Adamson, he's been slowly but surely falling in love with one of the servants, an intelligent, free-thinking woman who's just as interested in biology as he is and every bit as eager to escape that perverse hothouse of dysfunction and hypocrisy and head for the jungle where things are what they seem, be they ever so brutal.
"The Conjugal Angel" is also set in the late 19th century and deals with another consequence of the general crisis of faith brought on by the new scientific understanding that was then sweeping the intellectual world: spiritualism. A circle of like-minded people gather regularly to conduct seances where they hope to make contact with the departed. One of the group is a woman who was once betrothed to a close friend of Alfred Tennyson. The young man died and she's been in mourning for him ever since, though she's been remarried now for years. The "conjugal angel" of the title refers to a theory set forth by Emanuel Swedenborg that we each have a soul-mate to whom we'll be joined in a kind of eternal orgasm when we die. The eccentric Mrs. Jesse thinks its the man she was betrothed to and lost and she's trying to find him again in the Great Beyond. She's in for a surprise, though, when he eventually does show up via the medium used to channel his spirit. In the meantime, Tennyson himself feels the stirrings in the aether as the spirit of his old friend comes closer. It turns out he loved Arthur, too, loved him quite a bit more than as "just" a friend, as evidenced by the extended love-poem he wrote him after his untimely death, "In Memorium." So it turns out it was a love-triangle, after all; is it Tennyson's body, not Mrs. Jesse's, that the angel Arthur awaits in the afterlife in order to complete a conjugal love for all eternity that neither of them dared while still mortal?
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