Ursula Le Guin - The Wave in the Mind

Working men watch their company’s CEOs get paid three hundred times what they are paid, and grumble, but do nothing.

Women in most societies uphold the claims and institutions of male supremacy, deferring to men, obeying them (overtly), and defending the innate superiority of men as natural fact or religious dogma.

Low-status males—young men, poor men—fight and die for the system that keeps them under. Most of the countless soldiers killed in the countless wars waged to uphold the power of a society’s rulers or religion have been men considered inferior by that society.

“You have nothing to lose but your chains,” but we prefer to kiss them.

Why?

Are human societies inevitably constructed as a pyramid, with the power concentrating at the top? Is a hierarchy of power a biological imperative that human society is bound to enact? The question is almost certainly wrongly phrased and so impossible to answer, but it keeps getting asked and answered, and those who ask it usually answer it in the affirmative.

If such an inborn, biological imperative exists, is it equally imperative in both sexes? We have no incontrovertible evidence of innate gender difference in social behavior. Essentialists on both sides of the argument maintain that men are innately disposed to establish a power hierarchy while women, though they do not initiate such structures, accept or imitate them. According to the essentialists, the male program is thus certain to prevail, and we should expect to find the chain of command, the “higher” commanding the “lower,” with power concentrated in a few, a nearly universal pattern of human society.

Anthropology provides some exceptions to this supposed universality. Ethnologists have described societies that have no fixed chain of command; in them power, instead of being locked into a rigid system of inequality, is fluid, shared differently in different situations, operating by checks and balances tending always towards consensus. They have described societies that do not rank one gender as superior, though there is always some gendered division of labor, and male pursuits are those most likely to be celebrated.

But these are all societies that we describe as “primitive”—tautologically, since we have already established a value hierarchy: primitive = low = weak, civilised = high = powerful.

Many “primitive” and all “civilised” societies are rigidly stratified, with much power assigned to a few and little or no power to most. Is the perpetuation of institutions of social inequality in fact the engine that drives civilisation, as Lévi-Strauss suggests?

People in power are better fed, better armed, and better educated, and therefore better able to stay that way, but is that sufficient to explain the ubiquity and permanence of extreme social inequality? Certainly the fact that men are slightly larger and more muscular (though somewhat less durable) than women is not sufficient to explain the ubiquity of gender inequality and its perpetuation in societies where size and muscularity do not make much difference.

If human beings hated injustice and inequality as we say we do and think we do, would any of the Great Empires and High Civilisations have lasted fifteen minutes?

If we Americans hate injustice and inequality as passionately as we say we do, would any person in this country lack enough to eat?

We demand a rebellious spirit of those who have no chance to learn that rebellion is possible, but we the privileged hold still and see no evil.

We have good reason to be cautious, to be quiet, not to rock the boat. A lot of peace and comfort is at stake. The mental and moral shift from denial of injustice to consciousness of injustice is often made at very high cost. My contentment, stability, safety, personal affections, may become a sacrifice to the dream of the common good, to the idea of a freedom that I may not live to share, an ideal of justice that nobody may ever attain.

The last words of the Mahabharata are, “By no means can I attain a goal beyond my reach.” It is likely that justice, a human idea, is a goal beyond human reach. We’re good at inventing things that can’t exist.

Maybe freedom cannot be attained through human institutions but must remain a quality of the mind or spirit not dependent on circumstances, a gift of grace. This (if I understand it) is the religious definition of freedom. My problem with it is that its devaluation of work and circumstance encourages institutional injustices which make the gift of grace inaccessible. A two-year-old child who dies of starvation or a beating or a firebombing has not been granted access to freedom, nor any gift of grace, in any sense in which I can understand the words.

We can attain by our own efforts only an imperfect justice, a limited freedom. Better than none. Let us hold fast to that principle, the love of Freedom, of which the freed slave, the poet, spoke.

The shift from denial of injustice to recognition of injustice can’t be unmade.

What your eyes have seen they have seen. Once you see the injustice, you can never again in good faith deny the oppression and defend the oppressor. What was loyalty is now betrayal. From now on, if you don’t resist, you collude.

But there is a middle ground between defense and attack, a ground of flexible resistance, a space opened for change. It is not an easy place to find or live in. Peacemakers trying to get there have ended up scuttling in panic to Munich.

Even if they reach the middle ground, they may get no thanks for it. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom is a slave who, for his courageous effort to persuade his owner to change his heart and his steadfast refusal to beat other slaves, is beaten to death. We insist on using him as a symbol of cringing capitulation and servility.

Admiring heroically useless defiance, we sneer at patient resistance.

But the negotiating ground, where patience makes change, is where Gandhi stood. Lincoln got there, painfully. Bishop Tutu, having lived there for years in singular honor, saw his country move, however awkwardly and uncertainly, towards that ground of hope.

Audre Lord said you can’t dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools. I think about this powerful metaphor, trying to understand it.

By radicals, liberals, conservatives, and reactionaries, education in the masters’ knowledge is seen as leading inevitably to consciousness of oppression and exploitation, and so to the subversive desire for equality and justice. Liberals support and reactionaries oppose universal free education, public schools, uncensored discussion at the universities for exactly the same reason.

Lord’s metaphor seems to say that education is irrelevant to social change. If nothing the master used can be useful to the slave, then education in the masters’ knowledge must be abandoned. Thus an underclass must entirely reinvent society, achieve a new knowledge, in order to achieve justice. If they don’t, the revolution will fail.

This is plausible. Revolutions generally fail. But I see their failure beginning when the attempt to rebuild the house so everybody can live in it becomes an attempt to grab all the saws and hammers, barricade Ole Massa’s toolroom, and keep the others out. Power not only corrupts, it addicts. Work becomes destruction. Nothing is built.

Societies change with and without violence. Reinvention is possible. Building is possible. What tools have we to build with except hammers, nails, saws—education, learning to think, learning skills?

Are there indeed tools that have not been invented, which we must invent in order to build the house we want our children to live in? Can we go on from what we know now, or does what we know now keep us from learning what we need to know? To learn what people of color, the women, the poor, have to teach, to learn the knowledge we need, must we unlearn all the knowledge of the whites, the men, the powerful? Along with the priesthood and phallocracy, must we throw away science and democracy? Will we be left trying to build without any tools but our bare hands? The metaphor is rich and dangerous. I can’t answer the questions it raises.