The Humanities and Culture Heroes
Edith Kurzweil :
This is the last sessio n o f our memo rable conference. I
want to thank all of you , and parti cul arl y o ur wo nderful panelists, for
being with us. W e will begin with D o ris Lessing.
D oris Lessing:
Th e titl e of my talk is " Unexamined Mental Attitudes
Left Behind by Communism ." I think people from East Europe and
Central Europe will recogni ze that in w hat I am going to say, I will be
talking as a W estern Europea n. I'm go in g
to
make half a dozen points,
each o ne, o f course, ove rsimplified . All o f them illustrate the fac t that
while we have seen the apparent dea th of Communi sm , ways of thinking
that we re bo rn under Communi sm o r strength ened by Communism still
govern our li ves.
Th e very first po int is language . It is no t a new tho ught that Com–
muni sm debased language and with language, th o ught. Th ere is a Com–
muni st j argon recogni zabl e after a sin gle sentence. Few people have not
j oked in their youth abo ut concrete steps, contradi cti o ns, th e interpene–
trati o n o f oppos ites and all th e rest. Th e first time I saw that mind–
deadenin g sloga ns had th e power to take wing and fl y fa r from their
origins was in th e fifti es when I read a leader in the Times and saw them
in use: "The demo last Saturday was irrefutable proof that the concrete
situ ati o n...." W o rds that had been as confin ed to th e left as corralled
animals had passed into general us e and , with them , ideas. One might
read whole articles in the conservati ve and liberal press that were Marxist,
but the writers didn't know it.
Th ere is an aspec t of thi s heritage that is mu ch harder to see . Even
fi ve or six yea rs ago
Izves tia, Pravda,
and a tho usa nd o ther Communist
papers were written in a language that seemed des igned to fill up as
much space as possible without ac tu all y say ing anything - because, of
course, it was dangero us to take up positi o ns that mi ght have to be de–
fended. N ow , all these newspapers have rediscovered th e usc of language.
But th e heritage of dead and empty language th ese days is still to be
fo und in some areas of academi a and parti cularly in some areas of sociol–
ogy, psychology, and some literary criti cism.
R ecently, a young friend of min e from N o rth Yemen saved up , with
much sac rifi ce, every bit of mo ney he could to travel to that fount of
excell ence, Britain , to study the branch of sociology that teaches how
to
spread W estern know-how and experti se to beni ghted nati ons . It cost
him £ 8000 , and that was fiv e years ago. I asked to see his study material ,
