Introductory Notes
Deliberate under-achievement

 

This is a voyeuristic tale from my personal border country. It comprises stories that originate in the views from the insubstantial bridge which has spanned from my life to the many daily distortions I have encountered. It deals, principally, with the landscape of social, political and, on rare occasion, military power; especially the vicious combination that characterised 350 years of racist rule in southern Africa. In so doing it also, perforce, touches on the many other distressing, inhumane, everyday worlds over whose boundaries I have glimpsed.

Despite all that, I’ve been fortunate: all has not been gloom, exploitation. Upsetting as they have undoubtedly been, none of these experiences has overwhelmed me; including, gratifyingly, the brutal apartheid years through which I lived in my home country, South Africa. Since early teens and up to the present - as one has now reached the one-time distant 80s - I have been sustained by the dictum which some attribute to Romain Rolland, others to Antonio Gramsci: “pessimism of the mind, optimism of the will.” Whoever proclaimed it first, that sober, sobering aphorism has bolstered me time and time again.

I have also been buttressed by my emphatically comfortable white, male, ever-privileged, bourgeois existence - a life-long condition. Material well-being is anything but all-embracing: it can readily be breached by pressing matters of conscience - by emotional, intellectual and, above all, morally rooted realisations. They can, and do penetrate even the most smug of socially fortified carapaces. Such understandings are customarily born of frequently witnessed, inexorably impinging deprivations; of close or distant injustices, of constant affronts to human dignity. As a Jew, I need little instruction in these phenomena: recognising and, for members of the expressly forceful majorities who oppose, resisting discrimination has been a characteristic response world-wide, over centuries.

So, like many of my middle-class, my easily dismissed fellow ‘soft intellectuals,’ I have long lived with an unendingly nagging socio-political conscience. “Ah,” I sense the coarse, the stereotypical reaction, “yet another super-sensitive, high-minded, publicly paraded bleeding heart.” Possibly. But, at minimum, I have thereby been spared the bloodless, unfeeling heartlessness of taken for granted, institutionalised indifference.

Why do I invoke the vaguely remembered phrase “always on the outside looking in”? Why call on a borrowed, purportedly jaunty early 1930s musical-hall ditty? Why disinter those pain-ridden years; a period of a particularly devastating, widespread economic crash? Why highlight that in a monograph title? Why, if not that I have been … well, not quite on the far-off, outer margins of social power but where one can, with minimal effort, remain looking in. Where one is tolerated, not banished.

Since the years following my barmitzvah - that male, supposed watershed age of thirteen - I have remembered my readings from a pair of books given to me by a concerned, loved uncle. They are George Bernard Shaw’s Black Girl in Search of God and, even more influentially, his An Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism. The first introduced me to the notion of retiring from an abyss-like, universally terrible world, the idea of “cultivating one’s garden,” compellingly adapted by GBS from Voltaire. The second spoke, still speaks, convincingly of Shaw’s thoroughly analysed grasp of social injustice - its sources, continuities, effects and, most definitely, the necessity consistently, openly to oppose.

I have attempted to resolve the apparent contradictions embedded in these two concepts by abjuring conventionally endorsed ambitions to be ‘at-the-centre,’ to seek a seat among ‘the leaders’ - to be on the inside looking out. I have sought, rather, to find reward, satisfaction, in reaching for egalitarian, for what I believe to be inter-personal relations of a libertarian socialist nature. William Morris urged himself and those close to him to practice their socialist ideals daily, so that they would feel “at home” when they arrived in that future. Viva Morris. Living “on the outside looking in” has seemed an appropriate stance; one that is compatible with active, social and/or political involvement and, simultaneously, by-passes the often aloof, unequal, haughty snares of putatively comradely leadership.

With an uniquely marked exception - namely, my time in the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) during the 1970s and 80s - I write as one who has consistently evaded the enticements of, the power associated with, social and/or political leadership. Throughout those efforts, I have not, certainly not, been a total outsider and not, as assuredly, aspired to being a public figure, a ‘people’s hero.’ Like my early mentor, Bernard Shaw, I “pity those who need heroes.” In so doing, they become institutionalised subalterns, they undermine, turn from their own heroic, distinctively human capabilities.

Is this a convenient cover for personal ineptitude, a complacent retreat from communal, public responsibility? Some may so charge. For my part, I reject the notion, I do not wish even to argue its puerility. My adopted, Shawian standpoint has, consciously or otherwise, underscored most aspects of my life - my personal as well as public activities. It has stretched also to my working life, my career as an academic architect/sociologist. That offers a direct example.

When, in 1963, my wife and I were harried from our home in South Africa to political exile abroad, I was offered membership of a Cambridge college and an enviable academic post in the School of Architecture at that university. Then, as now, these prestigious appointments carried a deal of social and academic kudos, sufficient to ensure further nominations and, as a matter of right, privileged access to service on influential committees. A life on the inside. For largely, but not solely ideological reasons, I declined, soon after to take up an offer from what was then known as a College of Advanced Technology, a decidedly provincial institution. The cognoscenti will, of course, know that so-called ‘provincialism’ is a disabling social disorder in the upper reaches of British intellectual life. Thereafter, happily ensconced in ‘the provinces,’ I enjoyed more than a quarter-century of productive academic work, lecturing and later, sponsored research. Held to be academically on the outside, I was invited and able, when necessary, usefully to collaborate with ‘insiders.’

 

Further explanation

These preliminary comments have provided a hurried introductory glimpse into my shadowy chamber of values. I trust that, though succinct, they suggest something of what I am. But, they also warrant, I suspect, further summary data. They call for a similarly brief report on who I am. Who, readers will surely ask, is the person calling on the time and energy that they might devote to these inward-looking, autobiographic pages?

Sifting hurriedly through my recollections, I offer the following. I was born in Johannesburg,1925, of South African parents and have remained emotionally rooted in the region for more than three-quarters of a century. Rooted in, please note, not, distinctly not, unshakeably wedded to my home, my native nationality. I am, by conviction, not a nationalist, a patriot - would not be one in another country. I find no merit in those self-congratulatory, irrational, divisive sentiments; none that challenge my embedded commitment to internationalism.

My schooling, formal and informal, took place in Johannesburg; from primary through secondary education and into my alma mater, the University of the Witwatersrand. There too, as I search my memories, I recall that I repeatedly turned my back on authority, sought at times to resist its many manifestations. This flailing, often negative opposition appears to have centred on a firm refusal to attend on my teachers – a childish protest that came inappropriately from one who was to spend most of his adult years as a university lecturer.

In the early 1940s, I decided, despite a developing interest in pacifism and my father’s objections that I was too young, to join the South African Defence Force. I was, indeed, under the official age, seventeen years. Reasoning that our parents, familiar with our late-adolescent infatuation with the idea of being intrepid fighter pilots, a close friend and I ran off to join the navy - a cast-iron decoy we thought. The ploy failed, humiliatingly. We were dragged back to our respective homes; my fellow hero was bundled, unceremoniously, into his concluding term at high school and I to my first year as a student architect. In time my father relented. In any event, my boyish in absentia day-dreams about the gallant Battle of Britain hardly commended me as an exemplary student.

Off I went as a pupil-pilot to the air force where a new-found friend and I dedicated ourselves to ‘arranging’ - forging/smuggling - short-term leave passes. Further, we jointly adopted the ineffably conceited idea that we need not pay attention to the ‘lowly’ instruction presented to us. Our image of the Air Force training school was, on reflection, that of an English public school - hearty games played effortlessly by hearty youths. Both of us were subsequently “washed out,” packed off to a far, far less glamorous training school for navigators. There we consoled ourselves with the thought that, while pilots are mere taxi-drivers, navigators are the essential, the indispensable brains of bomber command. What price official and popular belief in the leading roles in which pilots were instructed? We dismissed that; we had looked ‘inside,’ found it flawed, or, more accurately, been found wanting by its leading members.

The war ending in those appalling, murderous events at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many ex-service men and women returned to university studies, I among them. There too I cruised placidly in the belief that the architectural fare on offer was to be digested effortlessly. It was only when I met my wife-to-be, when I matured rapidly via my efforts to catch up with her, that I settled into a discipline which I then grew increasingly, exponentially to love, in which I even came quietly to excel. Then, in 1948, a year prior to graduation, I was recruited as a navigator into the already revered Israeli Air Force.

 

An Israeli Interregnum

Another debacle. Here, in this privileged branch of the country’s armed forces, I was desperately unhappy. The exemptions of its claimed and ceded entitlements irked, repelled rather than flattered. That was not what I had come for. So much so that, with three others, I ‘deserted’ to join the Palmach, a crack unit of decidedly rough, tough membership. My new colleagues had long been schooled in guerrilla warfare, particularly in unarmed combat. I learnt, rapidly.

We were leftist loners, trained to fight behind enemy lines in what would now be described as terrorist attacks. My comrades were, I thought, admirable. They were mostly volunteers, women and men drawn from left-wing kibbutzim. For me, this was bliss: few imposed distinctions between men and women, no officers and other ranks, each operation commanded by elected personnel who ‘resigned’ automatically on returning to our ever-shifting bases, all operations jointly planned and executed by the participants, an esprit that nurtured rather than dragooned one. It was socialist relations in action. But always ‘the enemy,’ principally impoverished peasants and desert nomads forcibly inducted into armed service. It was also a pitiless war - the relations of death. An explosive, terrible conjunction.

Within less than eight months, I was hopelessly disillusioned. My fine, courageous, intellectually sophisticated, ideologically alert, culturally involved companions were, like me, being brutalised by our martial prowess. We were well on the way to becoming swaggering militarists, self-announced heroes, arrogant racists, grossly unsympathetic ubermenschen, ruthless lords of the Palestinian world about us. I quit, travelled home, now bent on my architectural studies and, notably, on a freshly intensified commitment to participate ever more actively in the democratic struggles of my fellow South Africans.

 

A left-wing senator

Over the next decade or so, my unarticulated but evident suspicions of ‘the leadership,’ of those in authority, were hardened, cemented, re-enforced. A five-year spell in the pre- and then wholly underground Communist Party played no small part in that growing conviction. There I learnt of another aloof, especially distasteful arrogance. I was exposed to the marked ‘superiority’ of those purportedly practised in ‘the dialectic’ as against the ‘ordinary’ members. The latter, like me, were bewildered by their leaders’ always recondite, “theoretically-rooted” reasoning, their repeated, brusquely explained re-assessments, their bewildering reversals of policy, the bitter fights between ‘us’ and ‘them’ - not our capitalist opponents, but the hated Trotskyists and their supposedly pernicious fellow travellers.

We were being educated in hatred, schooled in distrust, made expert at exposing minute, concealed ideological deviations. We, like our also communist Fourth International antagonists, our specifically worst ‘enemies,’ believed ourselves to be the ever rightful accusers, invariably the innocents. Not surprisingly, I quit the Party; having maintained membership over the years because it was the sole, militant, influential non-racial opposition to apartheid, to three hundred years of segregationist orthodoxy.

Then political exile in Britain, specifically for my family and I, in Wales. There my wife found long-term, creative opportunities in BBC Wales and our two children an educationally and emotionally congenial environment. I settled immediately into what was soon to become the University of Wales Institute of Science and Technology (UWIST). Over time, I was encouraged by my exceptionally empathetic Head of Department to proceed successively from Senior Lecturer to Reader, from a personal chair to, eventually, an emeritus professorship. He enthusiastically supported my efforts to study and read for a PhD in the Department of Sociology and, with benign patience, indulged the reluctant leadership that flowed, oozed from me during my enforced spells as Dean of our faculty. That became expressly evident through my obligatory years as a member of the UWIST Senate.

This highly influential, powerful body comprised the most senior academics of the Institute. They were a select group; one whose members had, I soon realised, diligently honed their ill-concealed lusts for power, their petty-minded, self-serving efforts to control, to direct rather than encourage the junior members of staff and students … and much more. For me, they were, to put no gloss on the matter, thoroughly reprehensible - reactionary, ruthlessly ambitious, patently condescending to their supposed inferiors. They came to epitomise the venal counterpart of that appealing depiction ‘a community of scholars.’

My rare appearances at Senate’s regular meetings were scarred by its members’ explicit disdain for what, earlier, I had, probably innocently, taken to be scholarly discourse. A duly respected inner circle of venerated leaders in action? In invariably self-seeking action; now, especially where university benefactors were concerned, marked by excessive, Uriah Heep humility; now, on internal matters, pompous, snobbish, scornful. Leadership?

That disappointment was relieved, by-passed by my growing commitment to CND, then, mid-1970s, the most significant organisation of the many whose supporters sought to oppose the politico-military scramble to nuclear war. The urgent pressures of this overwhelming task pushed me, willy-nilly, onto the leading committees of CND Wales and, later, the national executive of British CND. In both instances, while views differed widely, while debates were frequently heated - as befitted the profound ideological and related divergences among the participants - we found common ground for our overriding, shared goals.

Meanwhile the leaders and led of a world that has - seemingly resolutely - turned from grass-roots, searching democratic participation, continued their power games, their vaunted, exploitative devotion to individualistic competition, their now globalised exploitation.

Enough of these intemperate depictions. One could extend this dispiriting list, pursue the moralising sermon. One could, as I shall do later, include the experiences of retirement back home. For now, enough.

 

Excuses?

This distilled series of selected milestones provides a frame of reference within which to locate the episodes that follow. The latter will explore, in a probably less chronologically fixed manner, details of the dissenting life I have led … and, more frequently than not, relished. They will, as well, examine - without, I trust, academic bombast and esoteric word-play - notions such as leadership by ‘experts,’ libertarian socialism and the architectural concepts to which reference will surely be made. Before that, two seemingly peripheral issues, the one a possible misapprehension, the other a precaution.

First, I claim no distinctive virtue for my dissenting voice, faltering as it is. Conformity is, clearly, less disruptive, more comfortable, comforting. Dissidence tends to induce argument; it lends itself to suspicions of dyspeptic, attention-seeking polemics. Generally, consensus is acclaimed, desirable, discord is condemned, disruptive. Acquiescence, passivity is blessed, open resistance divisive … and so on and on.

Who, then, would be a dissenter, an intellectual and social loner? It makes for frustration, irritation, anger, brooding enmity. Its indulgence is all too often short-fused. It is even said to contribute to high blood-pressure, cardiac and similar disturbances. Yet it also enables one, like Galileo confronting inquisitorial interrogation, to announce confidently, “here I stand, I can do no other.” Dissent is customarily founded on principled, analysed, regularly challenged and thus constantly re-assessed viewpoints. It is rooted. On a far more trivial but nevertheless welcome level, it militates against unappealing company; from, inter alia, gushing dinner-party guests to determinedly genial hosts. Indeed, invitations to such affairs, become increasingly rare. Passionately argued discussion is, quite simply, not among the preferred dishes. Dissenting analysis is, in short, an apparently imperishable curate’s egg: good in parts, not in others. Take your choice.

And the circumspect precautionary note? These introductory comments and the more discursive that are yet to come, have and will have been subjected to cautious pruning, attempted removals of personal indulgences which threaten veracity. Regrettably, that difficult process - summarily amputating one’s carefully nurtured ideas and words - does not guarantee accuracy. Quite the contrary, it may well strengthen the ever-sprouting embellishments of autobiographic memory. The judge, as ever, is she or he who cares to plunge into an author’s bramble-filled swamp.

Return for a moment to the opening sentence of this introductory note. In extending that statement, I re-affirm the point: this is a personal memoir, not an academic volume cast in a learned mode. An adult lifetime of university reportage has been respectfully put aside. Apart from the one or two documents of that type I have published in each year of retirement, I am now grown weary of those justifiably punctilious procedures. The context has changed. No more carefully referenced assertions, citations, proposals; no more cautiously constructed abstracts; no extensive bibliographies. No, I promise myself, specialist terminology, recondite formulations, in-group definitions. None of this. The context has changed, conclusively. Now I find - and most readers are unlikely to object – a release in writing without these otherwise essential impedimenta.

Now, let slip the dogs of dissent.