So… the role of activism… in life… Understanding and action have to go together, oui? Obviously there’s no point acting on something if you don’t understand it. But less obviously you also can’t really understand things if you aren’t acting on them. In more sweeping and prescriptive terms: the way to work towards a better world is to identify really specific problems as accurately as possible and then to fight them. This doesn’t mean that a systematic analysis can’t be useful, or that ideals like ‘liberty’ and ‘justice’ aren’t rather good, motivating catchphrases. But any system of thought can trap you in endless theoretical debates with people who almost agree with you, no matter how fascinating or nearly true it is. You can feel as if you’re making headway if you get a Marxist or an anarchist to admit some inconsistency in their own systematic analysis where yours holds up. In fact, of course, you should be standing side-by-side with both of them in front of Parliament, or EDO, targeting specific problems. That’s the way to really get a proper idea of what’s going on and how it might be changed. You can do nothing political for months, other than read the odd book, or watch the odd film, and feel as if the little sparks of insight that you gain have made something slightly righter in the world. And then of course it all rushes at you at once on a Sunday afternoon: the mass of injustices that you’re complicit in, the impossibility of extracting yourself from that system, in short, the whole huge horrible world. And doing as little harm as possible while reading books suddenly seems very pointless. And at the same time there is no one Solution, no Single Best Course, no one Ideal that you can adhere to in order to improve it, all in one go, on that particular afternoon.

But if you’re working on one little aspect of one big problem then I don’t think it can get you quite like that. Because it is all connected, it’s just that it would take a lifetime, and be rather a pointless use of a lifetime, to diagram all those connections. The harm inflicted by transnational corporations is directly linked to the invasion of sovereign countries which is directly linked to the erosion of civil liberties, to endless privatisation, environmental destruction, the disproportionate poverty of women, everything everything, linked directly to everything else. Of course it is. But, as interesting as books on Liberation Ecology are (and oh they are), it really doesn’t help to just sit back and join all the dots, while there’s people scribbling away the whole time making it endlessly messier and more complicated, the bastards. You just have to furiously work at rubbing out one or two of the dots, with other people, and maybe make slow progress. It can be fun to rub out one dot! It is a human-sized task. And you can make friends while you’re working and stop for tea breaks, like with any other human-sized task. Then when the whole huge system hits you in an over-whelmingly bleak rush of insight, I think it’s easier to stay happy. You can just sort of roll your eyes and look over at some of the people at the next dot and realise that you’re doing the same sort of thing and exchange nods and feel a nice warm rush of solidarity and companionship. Or if you do start to get bored of your dot you can bumble off along one of the tangled lines, rubbing as you go, and find other groups of people to work with, on a different dot. It doesn’t matter that you can’t just tippex out the whole mess in one afternoon.

Really, this is a long-winded, stream-of-consciousness, compound-wordy way of saying that I’m not entirely satisfied with my full-time do-no-harm job, part-time study and sporadic demonstrating. Has anyone an opinion, comment, passing irrelevant thought or salaried activist job for me? Do share! It will make us all happier and better people.

This is a statement about being human, about our shared experience at a fundamental level. You’d think that something so abstract would apply regardless of race or gender boundaries. However, I actually think that this statement has far more resonance coming from a female writer. Ursula Le Guin is in a better position, than say, Hermann Hesse, to appreciate the power of the imagination, and the feeling of being of the world or exiled from it. Controversial, eh? I’d imagine that most people would disagree with me on this, but saying it probably wouldn’t actually hurt many men’s feelings. It can’t, because it is such a strange thing to say that there is no need to take it seriously, because no one else will. But maybe, using your imagination, you can gain a sense of what it would be like if this was a normal thing to say. Would it give you the world, or exile you from it?¹

It is normal to hear the opposite: women don’t have the fierce penetrating intellect of men, women are trivial, women’s literature is about babies and housework, there are no great female thinkers, etc. Echoes of this attitude rebound even in places where it isn’t currently said out loud. It’s a feeling that poisons the act of reading. Women, just like men, are human, feel the same range of emotions and ask themselves the same questions. Maybe more so, to return to my controversial claim, because they are denied agency, encouraged to objectify themselves and at once to see themselves as liberated and to participate in their own oppression. All of which can leave you with some urgent questions about self, society and morality.

But the tools for investigating these fundamental human problems are not designed for us. To read philosophy, or literature, or anything else is to experience the kind of frustration that left-handed people feel when using right-handed scissors. It creates an unpleasant mental itch. Most of the elements of our cultural heritage are openly misogynistic, those which aren’t don’t usually go so far as to actually recognise the fellow humanity of women.²

One of the pleasures of reading is to identify with the experiences of the narrator. To do so in these cases (almost all cases) brings you up abruptly and painfully when you reach the first bit of explicit misogyny. We can either disconnect from our sex, or from what we are reading, to integrate the two is impossible. In fact, throughout school for example, we are often encouraged to suspend criticism, because ‘women’s issues’ are such a weird minority concern. If we do keep all our critical faculties online then we must read such books as artefacts of a hostile civilisation. To study things from a feminist perspective does help us understand the present as well as the past, to understand more clearly where we have come from and where we could go, but even to get to this point is difficult: you first have to seek out feminism, and there are many cultural barriers in the way. The best case scenario then, is to have found and absorbed a feminist perspective from which you can make sense of your cultural heritage, and not to feel ashamedly trivial in wanting to do so. But this doesn’t bridge the divide between our experience and the books that we’re analysing. It can help us to acknowledge and understand the sense of exclusion, but it doesn’t heal it. And of course to feel actively excluded by the literature that we turn to with problems of existential isolation isn’t good for anyone’s anxiety disorder.

So the problems of existence that we face in greater intensity in day to day life are something most women have to face by themselves, “the problem without a name” (the one that drives housewives to Valium), as Betty Friedan calls it. To even try to face them without compromise requires the very privileged position of time and space to think, some degree of immunity from the more pernicious aspects of modern culture, a supportive feminist community, and luck.

Reading books that write women back into history helps. I like Joanna Russ’s “How to Suppress Women’s Writing” and Patricia Fara’s “Pandora’s Breeches.” And of course there is literature written by women that addresses these issues, but in order to turn to anything philosophical or abstract it has to break away from tradition altogether. The science fiction of Ursula Le Guin is the best example of this that I have read, “The Dispossessed” is a book on the scale of anything by Sartre or Borges, but with a much broader range. To be speculative for a moment, perhaps it is Ursula Le Guin’s experience of being oppressively-gendered that gives her a far more subtle appreciation of the difficulties in drawing the conceptual boundaries that separate the individual from their society. Whatever the reason, it’s a great book that gives me a fuzzy glow instead of a cold chill.

1. The answer is b if you’re a man, and a or none-of-the-above depending on how forgiving you are if you’re a woman.

2. Just a brief illustration of the main ways in which this can happen: In Bacon’s “New Atlantis,” women are just written out of society (they are mentioned in a couple of places, when, for example they take place in grandfather-celebrating rites). In Somerset-Maugham’s “Of Human Bondage” the narrator’s viewpoint is clearly and un-self-consciously anti-women. But if this is taken far enough, as in D.H. Lawrence’s “Women in Love,” then the misogyny can be so seamlessly integrated into the text that it seems almost to be a clever social commentary. The first I can read from a critical viewpoint, the second I can’t read anymore, the third I enjoy reading as long as I don’t think about the author. Most books that I’ve read, annoyingly, are more like the Somerset-Maugham.

“Radical” is often set up as the opposite of “reasonable.” It contravenes common sense and common practice. The motivations of a radical person are usually deemed to be temperamental instead of rational, they are dismissed as over-enthusiastic, too focussed on one issue, paranoid or just unrealistic. In fact these dismissals, being entirely ad feminam, are themselves irrational, although unswervingly in line with common sense. The last accusation, ‘unrealistic,’ is the special case that all of the others boil down to, and in the end it says nothing other than “I disagree.”

Self-consciously reasonable types rely a lot upon deductive logic, and this is commendable, since it is a very effective tool for the finding of conclusions in deductive arguments. However you can’t syllogise out of thin air, and the fact that we’re not yet all in agreement seems to indicate that we don’t have a shared set of premises in common, or if we do they are very elusive. So when, for example, one argues with a ‘post-feminist,’ the argument that they are trying to make you understand is that your conclusion does not follow from their premises (‘reality,’ ‘common sense,’ whatever they call it, for them it lies beyond the range of the discussion). This is usually very obviously true, but admitting that and then moving on to explain why you disagree with their premises will normally result in a restatement of the same point. Maybe with slightly different words, but essentially the same point: “You aren’t being realistic.”

On the other hand the radical thinker is usually arguing one of two rather stronger positions:

a) That the post-modern misogynistic free-market-licking evolutionary psychologist is spouting either false or inconsistent beliefs;

or b) They are simply giving an alternative description of whichever ‘reality’ is being discussed, which they believe is in some way better suited to the task.

This second is obviously a bit woolly, but obviously not all radical thought is right, so there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be woolly. Importantly it is much less woolly than a refusal to acknowledge that deviation from one particular viewpoint is even possible. All I want to do is show that the use of ‘radical’ as if it is a derogatory term is on backwards. It is an admission of adhering to common sense that should be shameful. Radicalism means thinking right back to the root of a concept, being open-minded enough to change even deeply held or comforting beliefs if they are contradictory or unsupported. In Rilke’s words: to think in line with common sense is to go along with the “social consensus,” and to refuse to honestly work out the “internal justification” that would support or undermine it. It may be that one can internally justify a system very similar to common sense, but if people did that then the argument would carry on as an enjoyable and informative untangling rather than ending with an abrupt “Oh, are you a feminist?!” or “Yes, but that’s not how the world is.” or “Well you’ve got to compromise, haven’t you?” or “Isn’t that a bit, um, you know, radical?