Living in Hope and History (24 page)

Consultation with how communities in poverty see themselves
in relation to the ordinary fullness of life other communities take for granted is now recognized by research as integral to harnessing the negatives of social resentment and passivity into vital partnership for change. It is the fortunate world outside dollar-a-day subsistence that needs to begin to see the impoverished as our necessary partners in world survival, partners to be listened to in respect of the components of what a decent life is. It is the privileged world that needs to come to the realization that a ‘decent life' cannot be truly lived by any of us while one-quarter of the developing world's population exists in poverty.

If economic poverty began when some had surplus production and some did not, and nothing much has changed in principle, the second cause of poverty as a phenomenon of human history is war, and nothing much has changed there, either. Wars, social conflict, whether at international, national, or inter-ethnic level, still produce hunger and homelessness, the prime characteristics of poverty, and now, it seems, on a rolling action scale, spreading as a deadly pandemic from one territory to another. The eradication of poverty implies a hand-in-hand relation with agencies of the non-violent resolution of conflict. The peace-keeping, peace-promoting work of the United Nations and other formations, fraught with difficulty, danger, and frustration, and controversial as it is, must be seen as a vital component of the decade's aim. The Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, has put the truth succinctly: ‘Without peace development is not possible; without development peace is not possible.'

The violence of nature—flood, drought, and earthquake—is another factor that has caused poverty since ancient times, and that is something which is not within human capability to prevent, as wars are. But the violence perpetrated
by
humankind
on
nature is increasingly one of the causes of poverty. The destruction
of indigenous forests, the pollution of oceans, the leaching out of the land by indiscriminate use of chemicals; these take away from communities their livelihood. The leakage of nuclear waste makes water unpotable and, as the people of South-East Asia have so recently experienced, the hellish miasma from burned-out trees makes the very air unbreathable. The problem of poverty cannot be solved while the earth and its oceans that feed us are abused by ruthless government planning and blinkered human greed.

What are the moral perceptions of poverty?

These are governed by those looking on, looking in, so to speak, from the outside. ‘Poor but honest': consider the dictum. Why do the rich never make the qualification, ‘Rich but honest'? No-one has commented on moral attitudes in this context better than Bertolt Brecht. Here is his poem:

Food is the first thing. Morals follow on
.

So first make sure that those who now are starving

Get proper helpings when we do the carving
.

Is for people to be honest when they are starving our measure of virtue, or is it a measure of our hypocrisy? Common crime, up to a certain level—economic white-collar crime is the prerogative of the wealthy—is a product of poverty and cannot be countered by punitive methods alone. Some of the funds that citizens, living in urban fear of muggings and robberies, want to see used, as the saying goes, to ‘stamp out crime' with more police and bigger prisons, would have better effect diverted to the aim of stamping out poverty. No-one will be safe while punishment and pious moral dicta are handed out in place of food. The campaign against poverty is the best campaign against crime.

Finally, the definition of poverty does not end with material
needs; the aim of its eradication will not be complete or perhaps even attainable without the world's attention to the deprivation of the mind: intellectual poverty. As food is the basic need of the starved body, literacy is the basic need of the starved mind. According to the United Nations Development Programme's
Human Development Report
1997, in the past fifty years adult illiteracy in the world has been reduced to almost half. If it can be virtually ended by early next century, it will be a great force in the six-point global action plan provided by the Report, and not only because the ability to read and write is crucial to participation in development, the open sesame to the world of work, mental skills, and self-administration that is economic freedom. For to be illiterate or semi-literate is to be deprived of the illumination and pleasure of reading, of each individual's rightful share in an exploration of the world of ideas; it is to spend one's life imprisoned between the walls of one-dimensional experience.

Illiteracy cruelly stunts the human spirit both as a cause and as a result of the disempowerment we now dedicate a decade to bring to an end. We are here to discuss and pledge the means we know we have at our disposal; and I want to close with what I believe can be our text, for the day and the decade. It comes from William Blake.

Many conversed on these things as they labour'd at the furrow
Saying: ‘It is better to prevent misery than to release from misery:

It is better to prevent error than to forgive the criminal
.

Labour well the Minute Particulars, attend to the Little-ones,
And those who are in misery cannot remain so long

If we do but our duty: labour well the teeming Earth.'

—Speech to the United Nations Development Programme, UN
,
Launch of ‘Decade for Elimination of Poverty'
New York, October 17, 1997

The ceaseless adventure
.
—Jawaharlal Nehru

 

 

 

 

 

 

T
he State has no imagination.

The State has no imagination because the State sees imagination as something that can be put into service.

The Writer is
put into service
by his imagination; he or she writes at its dictate.

The State is a collective intelligence. This is so whether it is arrived at by way of the Central Committee of the Party or whether it is the result of the long process of primaries and secondaries in a multi-party order. When the State projects a social vision—and it has no more concentrated unit of vision—it does so through the perceptions of planners, advisers, commissions, experts in this and that, ministers of this and that, constitutional lawyers, spokesmen, politicians. The formation of the State's vision is a process of
briefing
. Its product is social engineering.

The imagination can never be the product of a collective. It is
the most concentrated of cerebral activities, the most exclusive, private, and individual. If there is a physiological explanation of it, I have never read one that matches the experience I know, and others do, as writers. Wicks along the way of the past—childhood or only yesterday, or even an hour ago, in the dark of time in which the Writer, unlike other people, is always comfortable, as a blind man feels along his darkness—these wicks are lit up one by one, and they are followed to caverns that were missed, where voices that did not complete what there was to say, sound on; places that have never been open to ordinary perception, or may be in time to come. For the Writer is connected with time; that is the imagination. The State is connected with history; the State has only
projection
in place of imagination. For the writer, those small lights fuse in a single vision and become the Cyclops eye. It is what that eye sees that no other does. Only the Writer him- or herself can focus that beam as a social product—poem, novel, or story. The inner eye of the State is one of those revolving balls made up of fragments of mirror which used to dominate old dance-halls. It winks all over the place, casting back upon all who pass under its surveillance whatever spotlight it chooses to illuminate itself with from without—turning faces timid with green, tense with violet, or happy with sunset-rose.

What kind of relation can there be between the imagination and the projection?

How do the Writer and the State get on?

We know that there have been examples of the imagination feeling at home within the projection; something close to what Lukÿcs calls the duality of inwardness and outside world, overcome. This unity, then, becomes ‘the divinatory-intuitive grasping of the unattained and therefore inexpressible meaning of life.' Time and history meet. And of course the philosophy of social order, from which the State selects for projection whatever
serves the purpose of power in its particular circumstance (rebellious population, high unemployment, famine or plenty)—the philosophy of social order was first
imagined
, in the secular world, by writers, the writers of antiquity. It was from Plato's cavern of small lights that the shadows on the walls came out to try democracy, in the flesh. But what the State made of the ancients' visions of social order belongs to the realm of history and not imagination—extant in the forms of democracy that actually do exist in some countries of both East and West, and also in the kind of total travesty that exists in my own country, South Africa, where the State fantasizes (which is not at all the same thing as imagining) the projection of a ‘democratic process' as a social order where the majority of the population has no vote.

But I believe that more often, in instances where time and history appear to have met, this has been, so to speak, before the event: the Writer's imagination has visualized an ordering of human lives that seems to be attainable by the projection of a State not yet created. The Risorgimento is one example. The Russian Revolution, in the vision of a Mayakovsky, another. And there are more. But once the State is established, the duality between Writer and State opens again. Why? I do not think the whole explanation is to be found in the stark fact that the ideals of a revolution are at best difficult to realize and at worst are betrayed, when the revolution itself succeeds. The Writer himself knows that the only revolution is the permanent one—not in the Trotskyite sense, but in the sense of the imagination, in which no understanding is ever completed, but must keep breaking up and re-forming in different combinations if it is to spread and meet the terrible questions of human existence. What alienates the Writer from the State is that the State—any State—is always certain it is right.

Brecht's imagination had an uneasy relationship with the projection
of the State in East Germany; although his political beliefs were those he saw embodied in the idea of the State, the State's projection of the idea was not that of his imagination. His theory of epic theatre seemed orthodox enough (orthodoxy always belongs to the projection, of course); it was, in the words of Walter Benjamin, ‘to discover the conditions of life'. That is what the Writer's imagination seeks to do everywhere; and as happened to Brecht, it is generally not exactly what the State would have from the Writer. The State wants from the Writer
reinforcement
of the type of consciousness it imposes on its citizens, not the discovery of the actual conditions of life beneath it, which may give the lie to it. The State wants this whether it is in the form of the pulp fiction where individualism is safely channelled as a monogram on a variety of consumer goods and the ideal of human achievement takes place not on earth at all, but is extraplanetary, or whether it is in the form of the incorruptible worker exposing the black marketeer, or whether—East or West—it is the retributory bad end of the spy who sells defence plans, his fate thus transforming the State's nuclear arms into the sacred sword of King Arthur.

Where the State's projection of social order allows it to do so, it often goes so far as to imprison the imagination, in the person of the Writer, or the banning of a book. Where the State says it welcomes and encourages assaults by the imagination on the State's projection, it invites the poet to dine at State House, and shores up if not the law, then something invoked as the traditional morality of the nation, against the breaches the high tide of the imagination has made in the consciousness of the State's subjects.