It’s difficult to say when and how my children first became aware of the concept of a prison. It was certainly very early, well before they started school. There were imaginative games, where one or both of them would end up in gaol. There was also the worry that some minor infraction might lead to their imprisonment, followed by parental assurances to the contrary.
Looking back at their early childhood, I’m struck by how often, and how easily, the thought of incarceration made its way into their lives. I think, for instance, of some of the classic children’s books which we read them, which showed or at least implied that the ‘bad guy’ would face their just desserts in prison. I think too, of the film adaptation where a beloved talking bear is falsely imprisoned. Of course, the bear escapes and clears his name, with the help of some rough – but redeemable – fellow inmates. Nevertheless, the film ends with the ‘real’ criminal behind bars.
What strikes me most is how the ambient presence of prisons in our culture makes it difficult to talk about what a society without prisons would look like. Conversation with my children about serious wrongdoing invariably circles around the idea that both justice and community safety are best served by locking wrongdoers away: even as we discuss what might motivate, or indeed force, someone to commit a crime, or how we might make someone better, incarceration remains a kind of imaginative baseline – the standard against which alternative responses must be measured.
That is not to say that such constrained imagining is solely, or even primarily, the province of children. Indeed, my kids have been relatively quick to accept as a real possibility a society which does something other than imprison people – one that pours its resources into building systems of care, support, and safety rather than systems of punishment and profit. My own awakening to these possibilities, as an adult, was much slower, and more resistant. After all, if my children had been absorbing the common wisdom about prisons for the first few years of their lives, I had been absorbing it for far longer – long enough that when I first heard of prison abolition, I dismissed it out of hand. Quite frankly, the idea seemed impossible – dangerous even. One imagines that those who opposed the abolition of slavery might have felt the same way.
How, then, did I come to change my mind? Contrary to the post-Enlightenment philosophical tradition – and contrary to the norms of public debate – I was not convinced through strictly rational means, namely, through the presentation of new facts. Nor was I moved through sentiment, even though that is the primary tactic of many humanitarian and social justice campaigns.
If it wasn’t reason, and it wasn’t feeling, then what was it? Perhaps we can approach the question from the other direction: what prevents radical shifts in thought and belief? What, in other words, constitutes ‘received wisdom’ – that category of knowledge that seems to precede conscious thought, and resist our attempts to query its basis, let alone think beyond it?
A useful, if unconventional, place to start answering these questions is the work of the largely forgotten Vietnamese philosopher, Tran Duc Thao. Born in Thái Bình, a city in the north of Vietnam, Thao came of age during the height of French colonial rule in what was then known as Indochina. Like many other bright students of the colony, Thao continued his studies in the imperial centre, moving to Paris at the age of 19. There, he studied at the elite École Normale Supérieure, working under the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. At the same time, Thao became involved in anti-colonial struggle, and published articles criticising French colonial policy in the new journal established by Merleau-Ponty along with Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Temps Modernes. Indeed, the newly liberated French government – desperate to regain its overseas empire – imprisoned Thao for his anti-colonialism in the months following the end of World War II.
It is in one of Thao’s articles for Les Temps Modernes that we can find an alternative account of ‘received wisdom’ – or what he called cultural horizons. In that article, titled ‘On Indochina’, he wrote that the anti-colonial struggle between the Vietnamese and their French colonisers could not be resolved through rational conversation. Although the two communities could be presented with the same facts – facts about Vietnamese suffering – the colonised and the coloniser derived diametrically opposed meanings. According to Thao, each community produces meaning within their own, distinct, cultural horizons. Contrary to common assumptions, we do not directly or objectively experience a world of facts: instead, we all filter so-called ‘reality’ through the stories and the ways of living of the communities to which we belong.
For each of us, this communal horizon determines what we receive as wisdom – or, as Thao puts it, the line in our heads between what we think is ‘purely possible’ – utopias and daydreams – and what is ‘effectively possible’: that which might actually be achieved through action.
In the context of colonial Vietnam, this meant that a French person – even a liberal-minded one – would typically assimilate information about Vietnamese poverty, or lack of education, or even physical degradation at the hands of French colonists, to their colonial horizon. That is, they would understand these ‘facts’ in relation to the twinned pillars of belief in linear, progressive history, and a global racial hierarchy that placed Frenchmen (and other western Europeans) at the forefront of civilisational progress. More specifically, colonial facts were necessarily understood within a worldview in which the ‘backwards’ Vietnamese people were, should, and indeed, must always be under French ‘tutelage’. In other words, stories about Vietnamese suffering, within a colonial horizon, only authorised more rather than less French intervention: more French aid, more French education, more French laws – in short, a more perfect, and therefore more controlling, colonisation.
In contrast, the Vietnamese understood the same facts within a horizon that included a free, independent Vietnam – a Vietnam that had never been colonised – not merely as an abstract idea, but, in Thao’s words, as ‘a project effectively experienced, the very project of their existence, that which defines their existence’. An important part of the Vietnamese cultural horizon was, according to Thao, historical: it involved the memory of a past in which the Vietnamese were more than capable of governing themselves.
Neither reason nor feeling can bridge the chasm between two such mutually exclusive horizons. Is intercultural communication, then, possible at all? Thao’s article stops short of providing us with an answer to this. But the trajectory of Vietnamese anti-colonialism is somewhat sobering: unable to convince the French to leave, the Vietnamese had to win their independence through a long and bloody anti-colonial war.
This is not to say that the only way to shift received wisdom is through force of arms. But it does suggest that moving another’s cultural horizon requires more than words. In his later magnum opus, Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism, Thao argued that the great breakthrough of phenomenology was ‘its conclusion that the sensible is the foundation of all truth’. By sensible, Thao meant all the phenomena that our senses perceive. But, he went on, phenomenology was hitherto incapable of seeing that ‘this sensible life’ had a ‘material content’. If the cultural horizon of a given community is rooted in its ways of living, then those ways of living are in turn rooted in the specific material processes used to maintain and reproduce the life of the community: its labour relations.
Thus, to change the truth of the colonial worldview, the Vietnamese had to change the material conditions of that truth: they had to remove oppressive and exploitative French legal, economic and social structures so that they themselves – and the rest of the world – could experience a free and independent Vietnam as living project.
In the same way, a society without prisons remains little more than a ‘pure’ – that is, distant and abstract – possibility so long as it is imagined at the level of reasoned arguments. To change the received wisdom that imprisoning people is the only way to achieve justice, and the only way to keep us safe, we all have to experience other possibilities of justice and safety. And the only way for us to experience that is for us to begin – in big and small ways – to both imagine and do things differently.
