The Man in My Basement by Walter Mosley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
(The following is less a review and more of an essay).
Which came first, civilization or inequality? At the risk of sounding like a pundit, I’d like humbly suggest that the conservative point of view is: civilization requires inequality. There needs to be a class system, a hierarchy which creates a scaffold on which civilization is maintained. And because this is intrinsically unfair, all kinds of (irrational) justifications are used to maintain these hierarchies, and the most pervasive of this is race.
It’s not a point of view I agree with, by the way, but it does bolster, for me, something I saw recently: “The system isn’t broken; it was built this way.” But who are the custodians of this system? It can’t be the idealists who rule from the top, and certainly can’t be the workers who slave at the bottom. Then who?
It’s the evil men who know this is how things works, and know that they must do bad things to good people to keep worse things from happening to everyone. However, the real problem is, these are human beings too, and unless they find sadistic glee in their work, they, too, will be overcome with existential angst.
Is there an out via self-punishment? That’s what we explore in The Man in My Basement. Can a man punish himself for the evil he must perpetrate? On the one hand, to do so he must become Christ-like. But how can someone who robs, rapes, and murders be even remotely Christ-like? And, as Camus points out in Sisyphus, once a person has accepted his punishment, it is no longer punishment—how can one willfully punish oneself without accepting it?
The only way, then, to truly punish oneself is submit to the very chaos that so-called civilization is supposed to protect us from. The Man in My Basement allows himself to be locked up, then goads his jailor for the purpose of giving up all control. And it works.
Except that the crime for which the man is punishing himself is not the robbery, rape, and murder of his fellow humans—no, his crime was the moment of compassion he displayed, which had the potential of destroying the systems that keep civilization erect. That moment of compassion, that succumbing to angst, was the real crime, which, if allowed to go unpunished, would have rendered all the other sacrifices pointless.
This is what I got out of reading Walter Mosley’s book. The Man in My Basement emancipates the main character not by freeing him from the history of slavery, but by freeing him from the purposelessness of his existence. By giving him a duty, as jailor, making him a willfull participant in the very civilization that required slavery in the first place, he allows him to accept his place, and by accepting it, he is no longer punished for his existence.
And I am still struggling with the irony of “making him a willful participant”