What the discussion at CT finds even more provocative is the questions the book raises about how we understand concepts like individuality, autonomy, class, status, and group affiliation - ideas we tend to accept as static and not really subject to change:
Living in the US is more interesting still. The Irish experience – a small country where you very nearly know everyone, and everyone very nearly knows you (or at least, can place your family and mutual connections within a few minutes of starting to talk to you – Kieran had a post on this years ago) is probably quite foreign to most Americans. And getting away from it is liberating – it’s nice to live in a place where nobody knows about your background, and nobody would care if they did know. But there’s also a certain degree of comfort to knowing your place too. This is perhaps the source of the subtle horror that Walton detects in Ishiguro – the possibility that even if the clones could conceive of other possibilities than dying to have their organs harvested, they might not find these possibilities attractive. The disturbing element of Ishiguro’s work for left-liberals (and here, it might be interesting to trace out the relationships between NLMG and The Remains of the Day) is his suggestion that human beings may not want the kinds of autonomy that liberals presume they do, and that they might actively prefer to be defined by their social situation (even if this situation is one that we find distressing, upsetting and ethically unjustifiable).So the problem of how we live in the world becomes one of balancing our own personal desires and ambitions with what is socially acceptable, and more importantly, provides us with a sense of belonging. The implication is that freedom comes with a cost: you can go anywhere and be anyone, but you belong nowhere and therefore you are no one. What this suggests is that many people would rather choose what seems to be a self-limiting and what looks from the outside to be a coercive lifestyle if it gives them a sense of purpose and the security of knowing one's place.
Class therefore is one of the many ways that society regulates itself and maintains the status quo, by appealing to the individual's ego and anxieties (the human mind itself is a rationalization machine that helps regulate and justify our emotional impulses after all). This is why group identity trumps reason and rational argument in all sorts of unexpected ways including political affiliation, consumer choices, and social attitudes.
The challenge for "left-liberals" is to test where those limits are in the real world. Where does social situation trump individual choice? And when does our own sense of distress, anxiety and ethically unjustifiable behavior fail to recognize someone else's feelings of comfort, rationalization, and emotional fulfillment -- even and especially if those feelings are really just excuses for living in denial, masking one's dysfunctional beliefs, and living in relationships that are codependent and self-destructive.
Does this ultimately boil down to a game of "I'm OK, you're in a cult"?
(Incidentally, this is territory explored in Season 3 of The Wire, as Stringer Bell tried to step out of "the game" and into the MBA world of legitimate business. The consequence of that particular story line is that he ended up an outsider in both worlds and paid the price.)
