Doris Lessing died today at age 94. She was and is one of the better novelists of the 20th century, who among other things was not that prissy. She wrote literary novels, beloved by the feminists, and then wrote good Science Fiction. And she did not stick to the orthodoxy espoused by team women. From the Guardian in 2001.

“I was in a class of nine- and 10-year-olds, girls and boys, and this young woman was telling these kids that the reason for wars was the innately violent nature of men.

“You could see the little girls, fat with complacency and conceit while the little boys sat there crumpled, apologising for their existence, thinking this was going to be the pattern of their lives.”

Lessing said the teacher tried to “catch my eye, thinking I would approve of this rubbish”.

She added: “This kind of thing is happening in schools all over the place and no one says a thing.

“It has become a kind of religion that you can’t criticise because then you become a traitor to the great cause, which I am not.

“It is time we began to ask who are these women who continually rubbish men. The most stupid, ill-educated and nasty woman can rubbish the nicest, kindest and most intelligent man and no one protests.

Not any more. Men have lost their patience, and they have stopped being knightly, for it is not reciprocated: when women are nasty we push back. Hard. Misandry is as much a sin as Misogyny — and it damages the hater more than the hated. For hatred closes your mind. Lessing again, in an essay on political correctness.

There is obviously something very attractive about telling other people what to do: I am putting it in this nursery way rather than in more intellectual language because I see it as nursery behavior. Art — the arts generally — are always unpredictable, maverick, and tend to be, at their best, uncomfortable. Literature, in particular, has always inspired the House committees, the Zhdanovs, the fits of moralizing, but, at worst, persecution. It troubles me that political correctness does not seem to know what its exemplars and predecessors are; it troubles me more that it may know and does not care.

Does political correctness have a good side? Yes, it does, for it makes us re-examine attitudes, and that is always useful. The trouble is that, with all popular movements, the lunatic fringe so quickly ceases to be a fringe; the tail begins to wag the dog. For every woman or man who is quietly and sensibly using the idea to examine our assumptions, there are 20 rabble-rousers whose real motive is desire for power over others, no less rabble-rousers because they see themselves as anti-racists or feminists or whatever.

A professor friend describes how when students kept walking out of classes on genetics and boycotting visiting lecturers whose points of view did not coincide with their ideology, he invited them to his study for discussion and for viewing a video of the actual facts. Half a dozen youngsters in their uniform of jeans and T-shirts filed in, sat down, kept silent while he reasoned with them, kept their eyes down while he ran the video and then, as one person, marched out. A demonstration — they might very well have been shocked to hear — which was a mirror of Communist behavior, an acting out, a visual representation of the closed minds of young Communist activists.

Again and again in Britain we see in town councils or in school counselors or headmistresses or headmasters or teachers being hounded by groups and cabals of witch hunters, using the most dirty and often cruel tactics. They claim their victims are racist or in some way reactionary. Again and again an appeal to higher authorities has proved the campaign was unfair.

In more moral times, you were supposed to leave the petty bullying and jealousies of the nursery in the nursery. When you moved out of early childhood, you were expected to moderate your desires and consider others. Those who were children of the empire, as Lessing was (the empire did have a left wing, after all) imbibed this with their mother’s milk. The current politics of identity does not confuse them: it repels them.

Now Doris Lessing was no Christian. She was a pagan, a progressive and a feminist, but in her the echoes of that Victorian Christian consensus remain. This is the height from which progressivism has fallen. Our current rejection of any form of rigour as some form of oppression has consequences. Lessing saw this in the country of her birth, Zimbabwe

“You have the jewel of Africa in your hands,” said President Samora Machel of Mozambique and President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania to Robert Mugabe, at the moment of independence, in 1980. “Now look after it.”

Twenty-three years later, the “jewel” is ruined, dishonored, disgraced.

Southern Rhodesia had fine and functioning railways, good roads; its towns were policed and clean. It could grow anything, tropical fruit like pineapples, mangoes, bananas, plantains, pawpaws, passion fruit, temperate fruits like apples, peaches, plums. The staple food, maize, grew like a weed and fed surrounding countries as well. Peanuts, sunflowers, cotton, the millets and small grains that used to be staple foods before maize, flourished. Minerals: gold, chromium, asbestos, platinum, and rich coalfields. The dammed Zambezi River created the Kariba Lake, which fed electricity north and south. A paradise, and not only for the whites. The blacks did well, too, at least physically. Not politically: it was a police state and a harsh one. When the blacks rebelled and won their war in 1979 they looked forward to a plenty and competence that existed nowhere else in Africa, not even in South Africa, which was bedeviled by its many mutually hostile tribes and its vast shantytowns. But paradise has to have a superstructure, an infrastructure, and by now it is going, going—almost gone.

One man is associated with the calamity, Robert Mugabe. For a while I wondered if the word “tragedy” could be applied here, greatness brought low, but Mugabe, despite his early reputation, was never great; he was always a frightened little man. There is a tragedy, all right, but it is Zimbabwe’s.

Mugabe is now widely execrated, and rightly, but blame for him began late. Nothing is more astonishing than the silence about him for so many years among liberals and well-wishers—the politically correct. What crimes have been committed in the name of political correctness. A man may get away with murder, if he is black. Mugabe did, for many years.

Zimbabwe is a tragedy for many: I see the sadness in friends and colleagues who have been able to get out. They rejoice that they are safe, but the beauty of Africa is lost to them: for many of them forever, because in Southern Africa there is a white holocaust. And in part, that is the fault of the West: only in part — for every wide boy that Ilana Mercer talks about is a moral agent, and has to account for his actions to the Almighty.

But we need to mourn the passing of Doris. Her Caponean cycle, which begins with Shikasta, is worth reading. She had a spine. She accepted the consequences of her actions. And she was not afraid to tell the truth. In these fallen times, that makes her an exemplar rather than a scandal. And when we see the consequences of the left, we have to mourn the heights from which we fell.

UPDATE:

Ballista74 points out that Christian women are not immune.

So-called Christian women rebel against the Lord by putting her Personal Jesus ahead of the real one. They are lifted up in their pride. They are excused in their sin, being allowed to sin rampantly and repeatedly. Instead of rebuking these women and tearing down these goddesses, the churches and groups like Boundless are there to support them in their pride and self-righteousness, provoking men to rebellion as well by the sin of Adam. Actually expecting a good Christian woman of virtuous and sound character that is proven out in her life becomes “shallow expectations” of those who need to become “man enough to love a real woman”. Men are just supposed to man up and marry those sluts. Men just won’t grow up because they actually demand women of virtue who have something positive to offer.

We may be saved, we may be forgiven, we may rise. But we are in this world, we are fallen, and we have to,every day, deal with the sin that besets us. We can sing, but the implication is that each day we rise for Christ and choose to live for Christ. And that includes accepting the roles we have and the structure that entails.