Ideas - Massey at 60: The Legacy of Doris Lessing and the 'Prisons We Choose to Live Inside'

Episode Date: November 7, 2024

Doris Lessing addressed Canadian audiences with her CBC Massey Lectures in 1985, warning warn us against groupthink and what she called the intellectual “prisons we choose to live inside." Now, a response from the present day: Professor Miglena Todorova reflects on Lessing’s message and puts it into the context of today’s politics.

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is a CBC Podcast. Good evening and welcome to Ideas. I'm Lister Sinclair. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed with a conversation across the decades.

Doris Lessing is one of the most respected and distinguished writers in the English-speaking world. Although born in Persia, what is now Iran, and raised in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, she's been living in Britain since 1949. Doris Lessing, in 1985, was facing a world that I also faced back in socialist Bulgaria. This is Meglene Todorova, speaking at Massey College in Toronto. She's at an event marking the college's 60th anniversary, part of a series of events recalling some of the most memorable Massey lectures over the years. In 1985, Doris Lessing delivered The Massys, her topic, Unquestionable Beliefs and the Dangers of Groupthink. She wanted to point out how easy it is to become trapped inside structures of thought.

Doris Lessing's title for this year's Massey Lectures is Prisons We Choose to Live Inside. Lessing gave an optimistic spin to her tale. She suggested that humans are in a process. We're still getting to know ourselves. Is it possible that all the bad things going on, and I don't have to list them, for we all know what they are, are a reaction, a dragging undertow, to a forward movement in the human social evolution that we can't easily see? Perhaps, looking back, let's say in a century, or in two centuries, is it possible they will say, that was a time when extremes battled for supremacy.

The human mind was developing very fast in the direction of self-knowledge, self-command. And as always happens, as always has to happen, this thrust forward aroused its opposite, the forces of stupidity, brutality, mob thinking. I think it is possible. I think that this is what is happening. Doris Lessing died in 2013. To bring back her ideas today for some reconsideration, we invited a response, after four decades of hindsight, from Professor Todorova.

She's the author of Unequal Under-Socialism. It's a book focusing on the lives of women in Bulgaria since the 1930s. Bulgaria is where Maglena Todorova grew up. She now lives in Toronto, teaching at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Being an expert on the history of Eastern European socialism, as well as living through it herself, Maglena has a viewpoint that contrasts sharply with Doris Lessing's, as you'll hear in a moment. We begin, though, with Lessing giving her 1985 Massey Lectures here on Ideas, four decades ago. 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 he 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 outside 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 black boy's relatives demanded 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, not some 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 wrongdoing, went back into the far past of mankind. So far we don't know where it began, but certainly 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. I often think about this incident. It is one of those happenings that seem to give up more meaning as time passes.

Whenever things seem to be going along quite smoothly, and I'm talking about human affairs in general, then it is as if some awful primitivism surges up and people revert. 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 savior, then France's betrayer. When Pétain was disgraced, the tree was solemnly sentenced and executed for collaborating with the enemy. This is what I want to talk about in these five lectures. 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 what I think is that while it is true there is a general worsening, because things are so frightening we are hypnotised by this, and do not notice, or if we notice per little equally strong forces on the other side the forces in short of reason sanity 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're in. I think the sanity must be looked for in precisely this process of looking at our own behavior to judge it, as we examine the farmer who executed an animal to make it expiate a crime, 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. That's how Doris Lessing opened her Massey lectures in 1985. Now we join Maglena Todorova at Massey College in 2024. She's on stage with Ideas producer Tom Howell. Hello, Maglena. Hello. It's a pleasure being here and thank you so much for inviting me. Here is a copy of Doris Lessing's lectures from 1985. She titled them Prisons We Choose to Live Inside. What prisons was she talking about? perspectives. Doris Lessing was a Western privileged upper middle class woman with a very

strong mind, and she was freely expressing herself in not only in lectures, but in books. She went on to win a Nobel Prize for literature in 2007, widely celebrated, often referred to as a feminist and a very strong woman. On the other side, at that time, I was a worker, a factory worker, in socialist Bulgaria in 1985, just emerging out of high school. So I was born in 1965 in a working-class family. And so the prisons that she describes are in a relationship with other kind of locked rooms that I was experiencing as a young woman and a young factory worker and sensing that there was something about socialism that was not working. And the energies of the time were also kind of triggering anxiety about the future, but also what is it that we are doing? Are there possibilities and other things that are out there?

So for Lessing, the prison is our strong beliefs and passions when we line ourselves behind ideologies or when we have very strong commitments to certain political, moral or social ideals. We choose to be in that prison because we refuse to read and to acquire other ideas or to understand that very often what we are passionate about today may be what she calls ludicrous for the next generation. She uses in her lecture quite a few references to socialism and communism. quite a few references to socialism and communism. And as a young woman joining Communist Party and participating in young socialist circles and thinking a great deal about Marxism, Stalinism, and these kind of big ideas at the time,

she emerged in 1985, actually finding her own ideas a complete waste of time. That is heartbreaking in a way, because also she looks back to see the loss and generations lost faith and hope in the promises and the premises of socialism. This could be absolutely crushing. So her lecture is a call to revisit the past and also to kind of realize that there is a way for us to break up that cycle of the violence that is also associated with revolutions and with things that didn't go well. Maglena Todorova mentions a crucial turning point in Doris Lessing's life,

abandoning communism. Lessing first became attracted to communist ideas as a young adult in the 1940s. She was still living in what was called Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. After moving to Britain, she joined the British Communist Party. Her break from the party occurred in the late 1950s. Among the many reasons, it was the Soviet Union's brutal crushing of the Hungarian uprising in 1956. That same year, Doris Lessing was banned from entering South Africa and Rhodesia. This was due to her opposition to apartheid. By the time she was giving her Massey lectures, Doris Lessing had put her faith in a mixture of Sufism and social science.

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 2,000 years old, if not older, 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, and even as we understand it.

But the reason I'm mentioning this book at all it is called the Othus Roestra, by the way, and was written by one Cortilia, and is unfortunately hard to come by out of specialist libraries, is that this book, which to us seems her unimaginably old, talks of itself as the last in a long line of similar books containing the laws of good

government stretching far away into the past of the author. It could be said that this is a matter for gloom rather than optimism, that after so very many thousands of years of knowing perfectly well how our country should be well managed, we're 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, is 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. But that is the point. I think when people look back at this time, the one we're living through, they will be amazed at one thing more than any other. It is this, that we do know more about ourselves now than people did in the past, but that very little of it has been put into effect. There has been this great explosion of information about ourselves. The information is the result of our, of mankind's, still infant ability to look at itself objectively. It concerns our behavior patterns. The sciences in question are sometimes called the behavioral sciences, and is about how we function in groups and as individuals. Not about how we may like to think we behave and function, which is often very flattering, but about how we can be

observed to be behaving when observed as dispassionately as when we observe the behaviour of other species. These new sciences, the social or behavioural sciences, are precisely the result of our capacity to be detached and unflattering about ourselves. As I say, there is this great mass of new information from universities, research institutions and from gifted amateurs, but very little of it has been put into effect. Our ways of governing ourselves haven't changed. The operations of our political systems remain the same. Our institutions continue to operate under capitalism, communism, socialism, and so forth, just as if we had not been given all this information, which could make us all so much more efficient, effective.

Our social evolution has put into our hands means of transforming our institutions, the way we govern ourselves. But we continue blithely, as if this had not happened. Our left hand does not know, does not want to know, what our right hand does. This is not want to know what our right hand does this is what I think is the most extraordinary thing there is to be seen about us

as a species now and people to come will marvel at it as we are amazed at the blindness and inflexibility of our ancestors I spend a good deal of time wondering how we will seem to the people who come after us. This is not an idle interest, but a deliberate attempt to strengthen the power of that other I

which we can use to judge ourselves. We all know, who read history at all, that the passionate and powerful convictions of one century usually seem absurd, extraordinary to the next. There is no epoch in history that seems to us as it did to the people who lived through it. What we live through in any age is the effects of mass emotions, of social conditions on us,

from which it is almost impossible to detach ourselves. Often the mass emotions are those which seem the noblest, best, and most beautiful. And yet, inside a year, five years, a decade, five decades, people will be asking, how could they have believed that? Because events will have taken place, nearly always unexpected events, which have banished the said emotions to the dustbin of history, to coin a phrase. She relies on the emergence of behavioral psychology and behavioral sciences. And so she thinks that there is a way for us to correct our behavior, there is a way to maintain sanity and rationality.

And there is a way to critically evaluate our own behavior and our own ideas. And for her, socialism or how socialism didn't work, and also the autocratic regimes that came about, the loss of millions of lives in Soviet Russia, what was happening also in the 1950s and 60s in Eastern Central Europe and in the Balkans were all lessons, social laboratories. And so her mission in the lectures is to educate younger people, especially in the population, on these new tools provided by behavioral psychology

at the time in the 1980s. So we work on ourselves to become better human beings. Is she right? Is it quite possible to study these social laboratories and come up with ways to fix ourselves? I absolutely agree with Lessing that history teaches us a great deal of possibilities. And we also, through time, have learned how not to repeat mistakes. So studying history and the past is absolutely and terribly important. Where Lessing may be actually not wrong, but her horizons in the lectures are limited, is this kind of heavy reliance on psychology.

And psychology, even in the 1980s, is a masculine enterprise. It is, you know, a very white enterprise as well, very Western, very Eurocentric enterprise. And so it is interesting that a strong woman would rely so heavily on science that builds upon the needs, the emotions, and the experiences of men. She's also, in my view, what she also misses in the picture that she paints about these prisons is that social behavior cannot be reduced to simple psychology, that often our behavior is also the outcome of social structures. And these social structures are the external contexts that prompt us and position us for certain behaviors. And I think that Doris Lessing was missing precisely that point.

And one reason in my view she was missing that point is also that she was reading behavioral psychology and was very inspired by it naturally because it was the available tool at the time for intellectuals such as herself right um but she wasn't reading much of the women's literature and the feminist psychology that was also emerging in the at the time radical politics of the times, that were gesturing to these important structures, economic, political, and other structures. Socialist economies are another way to also understand the relationship between structure, economic structure in particular, and behavior. So I grew up in a completely different world than

we have today the economy was planned for every five years uh we knew that we will all wear a particular kinds of shoes we will do the same things we did not over produce which saved the environment by the way but everything was planned 95% of the population was employed. I grew up in a country where there was not a single woman who was not in the public economy. There was nobody who would claim to be a housewife. Absolutely unknown phenomenon to me. Did you feel this was great? Did you feel you believed? Yes and no. In the sense that if you have also an economy that is an extension of a political ideology that really seeks to control all aspects of human behavior,

really seeks to control all aspects of human behavior, then you also experience the world as a form of violence. So in order to have socialism, we need a planned economy. We need this kind of economy because it will produce these kinds of behaviors that are conducive to sustained socialism or redistribution of wealth and we will all be equal. But, you know, that same system suffocates the mind. So I'm not allowed to think for myself. I'm not allowed to express myself in a particular way. That is also a form of violence on a person. So I couldn't choose to go to pursue university studies. I was destined for a factory floor. That's okay, right? But I'm told what to do. So we need this kind of balance in understanding, right? That relationship and that too much control over the structure could produce dictatorship.

But unleashing behavior without looking at the structure is missing also the point do you remember emerging from that at some point and suddenly thinking for yourself thinking outside that yes i think that that happened uh in the mid 1980s we were, there was a cultural shift in Bulgaria in particular, but also across the Balkans and Eastern and Central Europe. It was a cross-generational phenomenon. So my mother, but also my peers, we were all seeking something new and different. We were all convinced that this system is not working. And we had two choices, either to make it better or break it. And so we hit the streets

and we felt that enough is enough. And so I have to participate in the making of my own future. But also the experiences at the factory floor, being with other women. This is where I started realizing that even within an economy where all women are equal and have access to the professions, where we are invited to pursue the kind of education, there are public kitchens, there is a two-year long paid maternity leave, everything was so rosy for women. Violence against women continued.

We continue to be secondary citizens of a socialist system, which means that it was my realization that patriarchy, but also ethnic prejudices and other prejudices, but also ethnic prejudices and other prejudices survive also the reformation or the complete restructuring of the economy. So for me, this was the moment when I started slowly realizing that socialism is not going to produce or this kind of material organization and redistribution is not going to necessarily lead to social justice. And everything collapsed. So I packed and I left and I went to the United States. On Ideas, you're listening to Escaping Thought Prisons with Meglena Todorova and Doris Lessing. We're a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM,

in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC News app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA

and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighborhood or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto wherever you get your podcasts.

We're putting two intellects up against each other today. One, Doris Lessing, speaking to us from 1985, giving her Massey lectures here on this program. People of my age have lived through several violent traversals. Speaking back to Doris Lessing across the decades is Miglena Todorova. Now a professor in Toronto, Miglena grew up in socialist Bulgaria. My mother was really a dedicated follower of socialism. She came from a small village. She had only fourth grade education. She worked very, very hard.

Miglena Todorova brings up her own family's story to address the topic of Doris Lessing's lectures, how to escape an ideological prison, what Lessing called the prisons we choose to live inside. She would say that socialism brought not only electricity, it was for real, right? She had shoes, she had more food, she has a home, right? So all of these, the material benefits of socialism were fantastic to her. She refused to participate in any political elections after socialism collapsed. So Bulgaria emerges now all of a sudden democratic. We have,

for the first time, we are experiencing democratic elections, genuinely free elections. She wouldn't participate. I think later on, I realized that part of the reason, I think, was that what she lived through and what we saw is how revolutionaries became dictators. That was a profoundly insightful realization, not only for her, but also for people like me. Why is it that the leaders of the people, those who led the people, those who were committed to the people, those who would swear to provide for the people and who inspired millions of people became dictators what is it about the political systems that are conducive to this kind of behavior my mother refused to vote because in in her mind we saw it for a century before that because bulgaria was a kingdom then you know it became a socialist a communist country

then it became you know a member of of the European Union and a democracy. All within the span of 80 years. Like literally every generation of your family. Exactly. And so you hear from your parents' stories, your grandparents, you know, literally bowed to a czar, right? A king. Then all of a sudden I'm emerging in the 1980s in a completely different situation. Throughout the entire time, however, she and we witnessed how those committed to social justice,

those who would lead us, would simply, you know, occupy these positions of power and often would change course. How would you feel about Doris Lessing suggesting that your mother was choosing to live inside a prison? Oh gosh, that only a white privileged woman in London, right, whose parents, you know, brought her to Rhodesia, right, to farm, would make such a pronouncement. would make such a pronouncement. We were not in a prison, to the contrary, actually. We were absolutely flying because the energies after the collapse of socialism in places like Bulgaria were extraordinary and conducive to imaginations, to new social forms. If you ask me, honestly, I feel that our energies were killed by becoming European Union members and NATO members and lining up within the structures that existed. But there was an

extraordinary innovation at that moment of transition between socialism and whatever democracy we wanted to build. It was international structures, however, and the markets and that pressure that was mostly external, it did not allow these energies to really flourish and to materialize in structures where we could also govern ourselves. So we were not in charge of our own future, but that's not a prison. Because even today, in places like Bulgaria, there are much more innovation and energies that are inspiring than in places like the United States, frankly, right? A celebrated democracy, celebrated for the creativity. For Doris Lessing, however, it was easy to perceive a prison, but she did not think that she was in a prison.

She was lecturing the masses whom she perceived to imprison themselves. And that is this elitist also posture that she could afford. Because even in the 1980s, her references are not, say, the radical liberation movements against racism, you know, feminist movements, gay and lesbian movements, the new radical things that were happening in education, the Canadian worldwide example of a welfare state that is benign but also strong. kind of these new energies are not her lessons. They're not her references. Her references are psychologists. And her prison is what she witnessed through the eyes of a British kind of, you know, woman who traveled the world. And so she was living in London.

She was born in Iran to write a family that had the mobility because of colonialism to be wherever they choose. For them, globalization was happening already, right? what she also calls human stupidity. So she's referring to a particular kind of person and people in a social group. And in that is this kind of, you know, elitist posture. She even refers at one point to her belief that she actually thinks that certain elites are very useful to us. And so it's good to have these people who are privileged and who are telling the rest of the population how to behave or what to do. During the Second World War, from the moment the Soviet Union was invaded by Hitler and became an ally of the democracies, that country was affectionately regarded in popular opinion. Stalin was Uncle Joe, the ordinary chap's friend. Russia was the land of brave, liberty-loving heroes.

Communism was an interesting manifestation of popular will, which we should copy. All this for four years, and then suddenly, and it seemed overnight, it went into reverse. All these attitudes became wrong-headed, treasonable, a threat to everybody. People who'd been chuntering on about Uncle Joe suddenly, just as if all that had never happened, were using the slogans of the Cold War. One extreme, sentimental and silly, bred by wartime necessities, was replaced by another extreme, unreasoning and silly.

To have lived through such a reversal once is enough to make you critical forever afterwards of current popular attitudes. I think writers in any case are by nature more easily able to achieve this detachment. People who are continually examining and observing become critics of what they observe. Look at all those utopias

written through the centuries. Moore's Utopia, Campanella's City of the Sun, Morris's News from Nowhere, Butler's Erwin, which is nowhere backwards. All the many different blueprints for possible futures produced by science and space fiction writers

who, I think, are in the same tradition. These, of course, are all criticisms of current societies for you can't write a utopia in a vacuum. I think writers, novelists, storytellers perform many useful tasks for their fellow citizens but one of the most valuable is precisely this to enable us to see ourselves as others see us of course in totalitarian societies writers are distrusted for precisely this reason as we know happens in all communist

countries where this function the criticizing one is. Novel should be on the same shelf with anthropology, seen as anthropology, says one friend of mine, an anthropologist. Writers comment on the human condition, talk about it continually. It is our subject. Literature is one of the most useful ways we have of achieving this other I, this detached manner of seeing ourselves. History is another. of achieving this other I, this detached manner of seeing ourselves. History is another,

and yet literature and history increasingly are not seen like this by the young as indispensable tools for living. But I'll come back to that later. To return to the farmer and his boar, it may be argued that this sudden regression to primitivism affected no one but himself and his family, was a very small incident on the stage of human affairs. But exactly the same can be seen in large events,

affecting hundreds or many millions of people. For instance, recently in Brussels, when British and Italian fans rioted, they became, as onlookers and commentators continually reiterated, nothing but animals. The British louts, it seems, were urinating on the corpses of people they'd killed. To use the word animal here seems to me unhelpful. This may be animal behavior, I don't know,

but it is certainly human behavior when humans allow themselves to revert to barbarism, and has been for thousands, probably even millions of years, depending on where one decides to put the beginning of our history as humans, not animals. In times of war, as everyone knows who has lived through one, or talked to soldiers when they are allowing themselves to remember the truth, and not the sentimentalities with which we all shield ourselves from the horrors of which we are capable, in times of war we revert as a species to the past, and are permitted

to be brutal and cruel. It is for this reason, and of course others, that a great many people enjoy war. But this is one of the facts about war that are not often talked about. 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. I have sat through in my time many, many hours listening to people talking about war,

the prevention of war, the awfulness of war, with it never being once mentioned that for large numbers of people the prevention of war, the awfulness of war, with it never being once mentioned that for large numbers of people the idea of war is exciting, and that when a war is over they may say it was the best time in their lives. This may be true even of people whose experiences in war were terrible and which ruined their lives. People who have lived through a war know that as it approaches, an at first secret, unacknowledged elation begins, as if an almost inaudible drum is beating, and awful, illicit, violent excitement is abroad. Then the elation becomes too strong to be ignored or overlooked.

Then everyone is possessed by it. Before the First World War, the socialist movements of all Europe and America met to agree that capitalism was fomenting war and that the working classes of all these countries would have nothing to do with it. But the moment war was actually there and the poisonous, fascinating elation had begun,

all those decent, rational, honourable resolutions about keeping out of the war were forgotten. I have heard young people discussing this, uncomprehending. This is because they do not understand how it can have happened. It is because they have not experienced and have not been told about that dreadful public elation which is so strong, strong because it comes from an older part of the human brain,

of the human experience, than the decent, humane, rational part which passes resolutions condemning war. But suppose the delegates to that conference had had the information, and even more importantly, suppose they had been prepared to discuss it as it affected them, for it is easy to call other people primitive and difficult to acknowledge that we may be. Then they would have been very much more efficient.

And indeed, as they had all expected, vainly to happen, the working masses of Europe might have refused to go like lambs to the slaughter. to go like lambs to the slaughter. Speaking in 1985, Doris Lessing felt hopeful about what societies would do when enough people knew enough about human psychology. She saw social sciences adding to the sum of human knowledge. There was, not long ago, a very interesting experiment in a certain American university. This was in a small university near a small town which had close ties with the university. One day representatives of the psychology department invited the townspeople to come up to the university campus and take part in an experiment. It was a nice day, the university was a pretty place, townspeople and university people were used to trying to please each other.

And several hundred people arrived at the campus of the university at the time appointed. And then, nothing whatever happened. Nothing. The psychologists were nowhere to be seen. No explanations, no announcements. The visitors stood about waiting. Then they began to seek out acquaintances and friends, and still nothing happened.

Discussing this, that they'd all come up and nothing further was offered to them, they began to argue. Quite soon there were two camps among them, with strongly opposing views. Next the crowd had separated into two, and spokespeople, men and women, had emerged. Debates ensued, then quarrels. Much more than the question of their being invited up here to their university,

the town thought of it as theirs, being invited up and then ignored was being discussed. All kinds of issues were being aired and disagreed. Past causes of disagreement emerged and took on new life. It was being said that this occasion was turning out quite useful after all, because this was an opportunity to have it out once and for all, as one woman put it. By this time, two camps or parties were clearly defined.

They began to quarrel quite violently. Small scuffles began among the young men first. At that point when it was obvious that more serious fighting would begin the psychologists appeared and said that, as they had explained right from the beginning, this was a social experiment. Research was going on into the tendency of the human mind to see things in pairs. Either or, black white, I and you, we and you, good and bad, the forces of good, the forces of evil. You, the crowd, went on these intrepid researchers, have only been here for a couple of hours, and already you are separated into two camps, with leaders,

and each side sees itself as a repository of all good, and the other camp, as at the best, wrong-headed, and you are on the point of fighting about absolutely non-existent differences. How that particular afternoon ended we do not know, but I hope it was in a large jamboree of some kind, where all these artificially inflamed passions disappeared in harmony and goodwill. This business of seeing ourselves as in the right, others in the wrong, our cause as right, theirs as wrong-headed,

our ideas as correct, theirs as nonsense, if not as downright evil. Well, all of us in our sober moments, our human moments, the times when we think, reflect, and allow our rational minds to dominate us, we all of us suspect that this I am right, you are wrong is quite simply nonsense. All history, development, goes on through interaction, mutual influence, and even the most violent extremes of thought, of behavior, become woven into the general texture of human life as one strand of it.

This process can be seen over and over again in history. In fact, it is as if what is real in human development, the main current of social evolution, cannot tolerate extremes, seeks to expel extremes and extremists, or to get rid of them by absorbing them into the general stream. All things are a-flowing, as Heraclitus, the old Greek philosopher, said. There is no such thing as my side being in the right,

because, within a generation or two, my present way of thinking is bound to be found perhaps faintly ludicrous, perhaps quite outmoded by new development. At the best, something that has been changed, all passion spent, into a small part of a great process, a development. I'm also a privileged woman, so let's kind of backtrack. I am a professor, although an immigrant woman, I'm a professor in Canada. I have the privilege to speak to young people and in many ways to profess, to lecture, and do what Doris Lessing is doing.

I also can express, I'm trained to express myself to publish, right? So I'm a member of an intellectual elite. The fact that I'm here speaking while you're over there lunching and listening to me, right, is a manifestation. We don't know what they're doing afterwards. Yeah, right. It is a manifestation of that. But the point of an elite is what the members of the elite choose to do with the power they have. Because we also have socialist elites. We also have anti-racist elites. We have feminist elites. We also have, you know, social democratic elites. But as my mother would say, let us leave to see what they will be doing. Because we saw it over and over again, how these elites will become the new oppressors. So we need elites to inspire us. But we also can find similar inspiration within

ourselves and within our smaller communities. So that kind of posture of let's teach the masses how to behave or what to do is not a way for me to really kind of move us to a notion of a we. A we presumes for me not racial affiliation, not gender or sexual affiliation, not because we are Canadians, Bulgarians or whatever. The we for me is only political. A we or any form of solidarity for me is absolutely fruitful and I learned this in socialism

when we align behind political causes. If we are committed to some kind of a different world, if we are committed that we want to change a system, that political commitment will materialize in some kind of alliance. That alliance will produce the change. Solidarity in that sense, or the we, right, is different from the elite. Solidarity is possible, but also solidarity is also liquid. That notion that we will always be in solidarity because we belong to a particular race, to a particular ethnic group, to a particular religious group, or to a nation, right, it doesn't work. But it works if we, you know, come for short-term political alliances to produce the political changes that we want to produce and to see. That to me is meaningful solidarity. And I know that because I witnessed it in the women's movements in Bulgaria,

I witnessed it in the women's movements in Bulgaria, as well as in the United States and in Canada, beginning even as early as the 1970s. Women have done this kind of work and understand that when they come to a smaller collective, across racial boundaries, across class boundaries, they found the very specific ways to come to an agreement of what political action will, you know, make it better for each woman in the small collective. So many of them practice that. This is the backbone of the so-called second wave of feminism that absolutely changed the world for many, many women. the world for many, many women. And women would gather in homes, in small clubs, in the local library, and in coffee shops, and they would literally map what kind of action will make it better for each one of us. So these days, everybody's talking about compassion. The we will come if we only are compassionate. Like Lessing, we rely on psychology and emotions. And so all kinds of stuff is done to make me feel in a particular way. When we don't feel this way, we also feel guilt. Why don't I feel that kind of compassion, right?

compassion, right? Women understand that. And even, you know, a black woman would say it's hard to be in the presence of people who can kill you, meaning with white people and white women. But across this racial and other boundaries, we can still be with each other and talk about what kinds of politics will make it better for all of us. The we requires particular political project, not a shared race, shared gender, shared sexuality. These alliances actually, history also teaches us, tend to disintegrate. I want to get you to talk a little bit about doubt, which is an important concept in your work and comes up in Doris Lessing. What do you do with doubt? Doubt is actually very productive. It's not a prison. Doubt has been that desire and that strive to continuously question everything that is candid to me as the final truth,

whether ideological or moral, right? That doubt comes from the fact that I watched socialism crumbling, I watched the viciousness of capitalism, you know, I watched czarism and kingdoms. And so doubt is productive in the sense that I'm asking what else is out there? What else can we create beyond socialism and capitalism, for instance? So I was reading recently that over 70% of young people in Canada and the United States would like to see, you know, more socialist and more socialism in the political system. They would be supportive, actually, of socialist parties, right? I'm thinking this is great, except that I doubt that you know anything about what it is to live, actually, in socialism. You also close yourself down to any critique of

socialism because you're so holding on to it that all of your hope is invested in this, all of these paradigms of Marxism and socialism, right? So people like me who have something critical to say would be muted instantly. But that doubt is also the ability to question, but also to support creativity. And to support creativity, you need to give this young passionate people actually who are already looking to the future, we need to give them tools to transcend these kinds of arresting ideologies we have. You know, it's either social democracy, socialism, American-style capitalism, now Chinese-style of capitalism, or kind of, you know, a Russian style of authoritarianism.

This is what is available to us. All discussions are about that. We are not inventing anything new, but we keep debating what we already have. Invention, for me, requires that people are invited to see the future. We don't need only studies of the past. You need studies of the future. I think in places like Canada, we are too comfortable and we are getting sleepy politically. If the political system allows us two choices only and something in between, right, we do not even dare to discuss, do we need a radical overhaul of the political system? That scares us.

And I think that the creative energies and kind of unleashed imagination by changing the curriculum, by inviting young people to think of what I think is such an exciting thing. I saw the emergence now of literature called possibility studies. Possibility studies is doing what I'm trying to do in my own way. Possibility studies, literary where we are not gonna, we will study history but we will spend more time imagining the future. And by imagining the future you become responsible for it. So that younger people are willing to take a risk for radical politics, something we are no longer comfortable with. Getting older, right, you don't

want to lose all of your privileges and your pension and da-da-da, but there is something more energetic and willing and fearless in the younger generations, and so the classrooms are full of brave young people who are ready. I think our job is to give them tools. Thank you. You were listening to Escaping Thought Prisons with Doris Lessing and Meglena Todorova. The episode was produced by Tom Howell with help from Philip Coulter and Pauline

Holtzworth. Thank you to Massey College for hosting the event. Ideas is a broadcast and a podcast. Our vast archive contains more than 300 past episodes. Do check them out. Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Senior producer, Nikola Lukšić. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayyad. Thank you.