On Art, Courage, and Our Collective Responsibility in Dark Times

 

As we witness the devastating conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, and witnessing the rising tide of authoritarianism worldwide, Doris Lessing's 1957 reflections on the artist's role become more relevant. Since the 1960s, the world has moved from testing nuclear weapons to stockpiling large arsenals, while simultaneously creating an ecological time bomb. Today’s conflicts starkly put nuclear power nations against aspiring ones, while environmental destruction threatens all nations regardless of their arsenals.  Writing in the shadow of nuclear testing and the cold war, she understood something profound about how we face civilizational threats—and how easily we retreat into either "the pleasurable luxury of despair" or hollow platitudes.

Her words remind us that in times when madmen hold switches of destruction, artists, writers and individuals bear a special responsibility: not to turn away from the nightmare, but to help us imagine what living might look like beyond the pressure of constant suffering. In our age of social media blast and fake news  and simultaneous outrage on anything , her call for "the small personal voice" speaking truthfully to individuals feels like a lifeline.

Beautiful excerpt below edited by Maria Popova speaks to anyone trying to hold onto hope and humanity while the world seems to teeter on the edge. Lessing knew that understanding the madman—recognizing him as part of ourselves—is the first step toward dealing with him.

This introduction contextualizes the historical parallels while emphasizing the timeless relevance of her insights about courage, responsibility, and the power of authentic individual voices in times of crisis.

Against the Pleasurable Luxury of Despair and the Aridity of Self-pity: Doris Lessing on the Artist’s Task in Trying Times

Born in present-day Iran (then Persia) months after the end of the First World War and raised on a farm in present-day Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia), Doris Lessing (October 22, 1919–November 17, 2013) was fourteen when she dropped out of school and eighty-eight when she won the Nobel Prize for Literature, her long life spent writing keys to “the prisons we choose to live inside.”

In 1957 — the year the British government decided to continue its hydrogen bomb tests, the year the pioneering Quaker X-ray crystallographer Kathleen Lonsdale composed her short, superb insistence on the possibility of peace — Lessing examined the responsibility of the writer in a precarious and fragile world menaced by dark forces, a world in eternal need of those lighthouses we call artists.

In what would become the title essay of her collection A Small Personal Voice (public library) — an out-of-print treasure I chanced upon at a used bookstore in Alaska — she writes:

Once a writer has a feeling of responsibility, as a human being, for the other human beings he influences, it seems to me he must become a humanist, and must feel himself as an instrument of change for good or for bad… an architect of the soul…

But if one is going to be an architect, one must have a vision to build towards, and that vision must spring from the nature of the world we live in.

In a passage speaking of her time and speaking to ours, evocative of what James Baldwin so astutely observed in his magnificent essay on Shakespeare (“It is said that his time was easier than ours, but I doubt it — no time can be easy if one is living through it.”), she adds:

 

We are living at a time which is so dangerous, violent, explosive, and precarious that it is in question whether soon there will be people left alive to write books and to read them. It is a question of life and death for all of us… We are living at one of the great turning points in history… Yesterday, we split the atom. We assaulted that colossal citadel of power, the tiny unit of the substance of the universe. And because of this, the great dream and the great nightmare of centuries of human thought have taken flesh and walk beside us all, day and night. Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares and this is no time to turn our backs on our chosen responsibilities, which is what we should be doing if we refused to share in the deep anxieties, terrors, and hopes of human beings everywhere.

She distils the essence of our task in troubled times:

The choice before us… is not merely a question of preventing an evil, but of strengthening a vision of good which may defeat evil.

There are only two choices: that we force ourselves into the effort of imagination necessary to become what we are capable of being; or that we submit to being ruled by the office boys of big business, or the socialist bureaucrats who have forgotten that socialism means a desire for goodness and compassion — and the end of submission is that we shall blow ourselves up.

Although the looming apocalypse of Lessing’s time was nuclear and that of ours is ecological, the experience she describes is familiar to anyone alive today and awake enough to the world we live in:

Everyone in the world now has moments when he throws down a newspaper, turns off the radio, shuts his ears to the man on the platform, and holds out his hand and looks at it, shaken with terror… We look at our working hands, brown and white, and then at the flat surface of a wall, the cold material of a city pavement, at breathing soil, trees, flowers, growing corn. We think: the tiny units of matter of my hand, my flesh, are shared with walls, tables, pavements, tress, flowers, soil… and suddenly, and at any moment, a madman may throw a switch and flesh and soil and leaves may begin to dance together in a flame of destruction. We are all of us made kin with each other and with everything in the world because of the kinship of possible destruction.

Noting that history has rendered not only plausible but real “the possibility of a madman in a position of power,” she holds up a clarifying mirror:

We are all of us, at times, this madman. Most of us have said, at some time or another, exhausted with the pressure of living, “Oh for God’s sake, press down the button, turn down the switch, we’ve all had enough.” Because we can understand the madman, since he is part of us, we can deal with him.

Observing that we will never be safe until we bridge the gap between public and private conscience, she returns to the role of the artist in a world haunted by the madman’s hand on the button:

The nature of that gap… is that we have been so preoccupied with death and fear that we have not tried to imagine what living might be without the pressure of suffering. And the artists have been so busy with the nightmare they have had no time to rewrite the old utopias. All our nobilities are those of the victories over suffering. We are soaked in the grandeur of suffering; and can imagine happiness only as the yawn of a suburban Sunday afternoon.

Indicting as cowardice our reflexive ways of confronting the gap — by indulging in “the pleasurable luxury of despair,” or with hollow manifestos and platitudes that “produce art so intolerably dull and false that one reads it yawning and returns to Tolstoy” — Lessing locates between them the still point of courage:

Somewhere between these two, I believe, is a resting point, a place of decision, hard to reach and precariously balanced. It is a balance which must be continuously tested and reaffirmed. Living in the midst of this whirlwind of change, it is impossible to make final judgments or absolute statements of value. The point of rest should be the writer’s recognition of man, the responsible individual, voluntarily submitting his will to the collective, but never finally; and insisting on making his own personal and private judgments before every act of submission.

We are all of us, directly or indirectly, caught up in a great whirlwind of change; and I believe that if an artist has once felt this, in himself, and felt himself as part of it; if he has once made the effort of imagination necessary to comprehend it, it is an end of despair, and the aridity of self-pity. It is the beginning of something else which I think is the minimum act of humility for a writer: to know that one is a writer at all because one represents, makes articulate, is continuously and invisibly fed by, numbers of people who are inarticulate, to whom one belongs, to whom one is responsible.

Noting that the artist — unlike the propagandist, unlike the journalist, unlike the politician — is always communicating “as an individual to individuals, in a small personal voice,” she prophecies the age of Substack:

People may begin to feel again a need for the small personal voice; and this will feed confidence into writers and, with confidence because of the knowledge of being needed, the warmth and humanity and love of people which is essential for a great age of literature.

If you are here at all, reading this, you are feeding the confidence of this one small personal voice while also feeding that part of you refusing the conformity and commodified despair of the stories sold by those who make themselves rich by impoverishing our imagination of the possible.