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Volume 8, Number 3 (1984) reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum George Orwell - A Political Assessment JOHN J. BONSIGNORE Department of Legal Studies, University of Massachusetts-Amherst trembling - I feel strongly enough about his immortality that I don't want him to turn over in his grave on my account. That uses and misuses of his work will inevitably proliferate in the year 1984 gives me little consolation. Whatever the current casualness with which Orwell's name is invoked, there ought to be no general license to be careless.1 Orwell wrote well and always found correlation between corruption in the use of language and corruption in thought and politics; words precede, accompany, and follow political regimes, making the preservation of clear communication a matter of life and death.2 I can imagine Orwell as a phantom editor blue-pencilling his w ay across this essay, upset not only about what I say but how I say it. Most readers of Orwell are struck by his unusual honesty, finding him virtuous or possessing a "crystal spirit.""3 Many feel about Orwell the way Orwell felt about an Italian militiaman of no distinctive status who was simply risking his life for freedom in the Spanish Civil War: But the thing that I saw in your faceIn an age like ours, words like virtuous stick in our throat and crystal spirits are spoiled by nihilism or cynicism. To write about people of virtue and spirit borders on both audacity and quaintness. Fortunately, Orwell would be the first to take himself down from an exalted position and invite a merciless critique of his work. He always put the quest for truth before polite deference, and his personal search across a variety of life-styles and political ideologies make his writing more and more contemporary. In 1939, Orwell wrote an essay on Charles Dickens (CE I. 413) to orient Dickens "socially, morally and politically," a task not unlike the one undertaken here. Like Orwell, Dickens has had readers of various political persuasions and each group selectivelyl perceives what Dickens "meant." Conservative school techers could embrace Dickens as a treasury of the best of English life--colorful characters , puddings, steaming roasts with potatoes underneath, hot toddies, and warming pans. Meanwhile, Marxists found in Dickens a running critique of law, government, education and business, that led back to the corrupting effects of class privilege ind private property. Orwell considered Dickens a radical, but not in the sense that Marxists use the term. For Dickens, social problems come down to a failure of human character, a lack of decency, too much selfishness, or a tyrannical disposition that needed transforming. Marxists say that there can be no reformation of character or change of heart without a change of structure. Orwell acknowledged this point, but found that Dickens had hit upon vital ingredients missed by Marxists: "What is the use of changing the system before you have improved human nature?" (CE I, 428) Orwell thought it unfortunate that "the moralist and the revolutionary are constantly undermining one another" (CE I, 428). For all of their explosion of moral imperatives, the Marxists had failed to solve the central problem of political order -- "how to prevent power from being abused" (CE I, 428). To reckon with the corrupting effects of power, Marxists would have to come to terms with the personal and return to what is central in Dickens. This longish digression into Orwell's essay on Dickens provides a way into assessing Orwell's own work, socially, morally and politically. His writings show the constant, reciprocal relationship between person and system; between character and structure; his earlier work being predominately about the preservation of core personal value in settings not conducive to their sustenance, his later works centering more and more on structural change and political ideologies. While this rough division :of his writing breaks down at every turn, it can help mark the increasing maturity and complexity of his work over the course of :his life. In "Such, Such Were the Joys" (CE IV, 330), Orwell tells of his family background and his early education, when as the son of a civil servant, he went on scholarship to a preparatory school. It was at St. Cyprians that Orwell first encountered the stratified society of England. Constantly shifting rules made it impossible for any other than the rich or well-born to succeed. At too tender an age he learned lessons from which we would want to spare our children: Virtue consisted in winning; it consisted in beingOne might think that as a very bright child, Orwell might win at intellectual games, but just when he might gain such victories, the rules were shifted to the economic-social plane where contempt for "braininess," poverty and physical weakness applied, leaving Orwell the perpetual loser in a game that was rigged. This story anthologizes injustices in all its forms, from arbitrary rule making and enforcement, to systems shot through with bias and unearned privileges. Orwell was being schooled into his place in the stratified English order: "I had no money, I was weak. I was ugly, I was unpopular, I had a chronic cough, I was cowardly, I smelt," (CE IV, 361) but he was also learning about the economic-social-political forces arrayed against all disadvantaged people everywhere. That he survived at all in a place designed to kill him off attests to his own resilience, and to the indomitability of the human spirit. Given ample reasons to hate himself, Orwell instead began to build a resistance to authority on a firm if ironical base. He could despise himself but he need not dislike himself! He began to listen to his feelings: "at the middle of one's heart, there seemed to stand an incorruptible inner self who knew that whatever one did! -- whether one laughed, or snivelled, or went into frenzies of gratitude for small favors -- the only true feeling was hatred" (CE IV, 351). If as a schoolboy he could see no further way out for the weak in a world governed by the strong, he could later in his life see an imperative for all disadvantaged people: "break the rules or perish . . . the weak have the right to make a different set rules for themselves" (CE IV, 362). His essay on St. Cyprians tells us as much about what holds unjust orders together as what makes them collapse or be weakened by constant rebellion. Orwell and his family were captivated by the promise of success that comes from passing examinations and attending a good university. For people from a background with restricted life chances, it was either putting up with a school like St. Cyprians or becoming "a little office boy at 40 pounds a year" (CE IV, 356). Likewise, the school needed Orwell, though never admitting so, to maintain some academic credibility, even if in the end intellectual values were subordinated to the quest of rank, wealth and power. After winning a scholarship to Eton, Orwell resolved to "slack off" and "cram no longer," a resolution so fully implemented that he says, "from the age of thirteen to twenty-two or three I hardly ever did a stroke of avoidable work" (CE IV, 363). The education of Orwell, for all his hatred of it, left permanent effects. While he never could accept the snobbery and unwarranted advantages of the upper classes or the slavish adoration of upper class values by the middle class from which he came, he nevertheless often spoke, felt and acted like the person he had been trained to become. He could resist his social position as an upwardly mobile member of the middle class, but his family origins, his education and the associations accompanying them would stay with him all his life and impose subtle parameters on how wild his political thinking could be. Also significant was the fact that Orwell never seriously tried to alter who he was. His overall life plan was an extension of the strategy he adopted to cope with St. Cyprians: accept personal givens and operate from there. Radical reconstruction of the psyche as a prelude to politics was never part of Orwell's makeup. Orwell's ensuing career as a police officer in imperial Burma resulted in a brilliant story-essay "Shooting an Elephant" (CE I, 235) and a novel, Burmese Days (1934), both of which show the working of empire and imperialism. In Burma, Orwell learned another painful lesson: it is utterly impossible to be a good person while working to uphold a bad regime. What is integral to self must yield to service to country, one's job, and by ironic turn, the sometimes impossible demands of the oppressed people themselves. In "Shooting," Orwell has been called out to investigate an elephant on a rampage. When he catches up with the animal, he finds it calmed down and eating grass with a "grandmotherly air." He immediately knows that he should not harm it, but he has an ,elephant gun and a crowd of 2,000 Burmese expect him to take decisive action. The British empire requires the shooting since the white man cannot lose face in a setting that calls for domination. The Burmese also require the killing, to get meat, make a fool of the British for senselessly killing a now harmless and valuable animal, or because they too have been conditioned to expect certain acts of police officers. The big loser in the event is Orwell himself. He cannot act upon his hatred of empire and his unenviable place on it -- "I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it the better. Theoretically --- and secretly, of course -- I was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British." Nor can he act on his political affinity for the Burmese -- "All I knew was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible. With one part of my mind I thought of the British raj as an unbreakable tyranny clamped down upon the will of a prostrate people, with another part I thought the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts" (CE I, 236). Systems persist because they ultimately do not depend upon fully-willing participants. Orwell's personal preferences yielded to his professional role, the needs of empire and the pressures of the Burmese. Students who read Orwell's story blame the killing of the elephant on defects in Orwell's character. They think that if they were in his place, they would have simply walked away from the crowd of 2,000 people, following their internal judgments and competently doing their job. Orwell was not so naive. He was willing to face the harsh fact that person and role can be irreconcilable. Burmese Days shows the day to day life of empire rather than a dramatic episode. Flory, a young timber buyer, resolves to avoid the superficial life led by most colonials -- hanging around the European club, drinking too much, and thumbing through old magazines from England. He befriends a Burmese intellectual and goes as native as the context allows. His life is complicated by a largely unrequited romance with a pretty, but quite vacuous, daughter of another Britisher. A combination of his love affair and Burmese intrigue push him back toward British values which he embraces/ despises. Flory loses his love to a handsome, classy but impoverished, equally vacuous cavalry officer. He abandons his Burmese friend, showing weakness when he most needed strength. Lost in his romantic failure and ethical conflicts, he commits suicide (Flory is the only character of Orwell's stories and novels who does not pick up the pieces and struggle on). In real life, Orwell made a different exit. Some grim findings were beginning to pile up for him. At school he was unable to be himself because of adult constraint. As a policemen he could not act on his beliefs, because beliefs within empire are inevitably contradictory and provide no solid starting place for moral action. Is there wonder why upon his return from Burma, he would try to drop out, leave England and sever all connection with systems of power and privilege? Off the wheel of English action he might find a virtuous life. Three major works, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), A Clergyman's Daughter (1935) and Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) record Orwell's wanderings and experimentation with what we would call "alternative life styles." Down and Out documents poverty in France and England. Poverty, Orwell learns, is not the simple life distant observers think it to be. For the poor, the simplest decision -- what to eat, how to pay for a place to live, what to wear, and how to get around -- involve endless calculations. Will it be bread or a little tobacco? Should the oil lamp be returned to get the deposit back? This will produce a little money for food, but then there will be nothing to heat the food or give some light. If clothing is pawned, how can one look presentable enough to get work, even the lowest kind? Orwell, after becoming nearly destitute, landed a job as a plongeur, or dishwasher. Plongeurs live at the margins of the world of work: long hours, low pay, drinking as much as wages permit, and living asexually with no real prospects of ever marrying or establishing a family. Being poor may offer a rough equality and escape from exploitative roles, but in the end it simply means becoming debilitated, demoralized, and numb. A vow of poverty may be politically correct, but suicidal. In Keep the Apidistra Flying, Orwell raises the question of whether an artist can avoid selling out to bourgeois employment. Gordon Comstock, the hero, wants to use poverty to keep his heart pure and enhance his creativity as a writer. He initially refuses to become a poet for enterprise -- the New Albion Publishing Co. -- an ad agency that "creates" jingles like "Q.T." "Sauce keeps hubby happy," preferring to take non-jobs, be his own person, and write poetry on the side. The postulates of poverty resurface, and instead of being freed from the tyranny of money and materialism, Comstock becomes preoccupied with making ends meet. Creativity dries up instead of flourishing and life becomes a dreary round of getting fed, keeping warm, paying rent, and scraping up enough for a very occasional date. Having already reached the limits of his experiment, Comstock s really waiting for something that will "force" him to take conventional work. A Miss Waterloo, whom he has been seeing occasionally, becomes pregnant and duty requires working at his old job -- writing copy for the Queen of Sheba Toilet Requisites Company. Down and Out and Aspidistra add more painful items to Orwell's growing list of what cannot be done in life. Personal virtue turns out to be a luxury like a fancy car. Only the rich can afford to be gracious, aesthetically alert and politically sensitive. Only the wealthy who have plenty of money and the discretion it brings can renounce the importance of money. People from the middle class must pick their poison: sell their souls for a little money, a family, a flat and an aspidistra plant; or, become downwardly mobile to the cold filth at the edge of the economic order. The rebellion of the artist is one against the world, and the world wins: (Comstock) was coming back to the fold, a repentant. A Clergyman's Daughter is written in the same vein. Dorothy Hare, the heroine, came from the same background as Orwell himself, the daughter of an impoverished, but class-conscious Anglican clergyman. Her life in a small village entailed a mixture of tension over money and endless rounds of church work -- running fund raisers, directing children's plays and keeping up the morale of parishioners who seemed to be forever drifting away from her father's church. After a local scandal, in which she is wrongfully accused of having an affair, she is stricken with amnesia and regains consciousness among the down and out of London. The warmth and kindnesses of lower class life are appealing, but she finds herself with the wrong accent, and too much affinity for cleanliness and good order to be completely at home with migrant hop pickers and gypsies. She extricates herself from lower class life as soon as she is physically and mentally able. Like Orwell's other characters, she moves through the cycle of conflict, change (this time involuntary), failure, and reentry into her former community. She emerges with an enlarged consciousness, but the same old life chances. When Dorothy comes home, she does the same things she did before her departure; and, her travels have neither produced new demands for a meaningful life nor an abiding nihilism. She simply adopts a "be here now" resolution, as she resumes making costumes for a children's play. Were it not for two themes, A Clergyman's Daughter should go unread. During her recovery from being down and out, Dorothy takes a job as a teacher at a private school and we get some glimpse of Orwell's idea of educational reform. Dorothy's predecessor, a drunken disciplinarian, bequeaths to her a class that is totally jaded and demoralized. Dorothy rebuilds trust and makes the curriculum come alive by shifting the pedagogy from books and brute memory drills to "multimedia" projects. The uptake is enthusiastic: the children love Dorothy and Dorothy loves her work. Enter contextual constraint. The parents want more of the 3-R's, and the headmistress becomes fearful that parental upset might affect fees. She tells Dorothy to reinstate the old regime or leave. Only one step away from abject poverty, Dorothy chooses job security and undoes the progressive changes she has made. The classroom quickly reverts to the typical English torture chamber where teachers and students are both on the rack. A second noteworthy dimension concerns Orwell's attitude toward women. In this work and in all others, Orwell draws uniformly unflattering pictures of women -- who they are, what their potential as agents of change might be, how they relate to one another, and to men, and so on. Dropping back for a moment to Burmese Days, it will be remembered that the love of Flory's life was a pretty nothing. In Aspidistra, Miss Waterloo, while much brighter, epitomizes the straight life that sucks the lifeblood from the male artist (it is her pregnancy that officially ends Comstock's rebellion). In Dorothy Hare, we encounter the stereotypical sexless spinster, bloodlessly going about her religious duties. Even her eye-opening transformation was the involuntary result of amnesia, and her return home engineered by men. Orwell's own descriptions of the women reveal a consistent chauvinism: About Dorothy: She could never marry. She had decided long ago upon that.About Dorothy's fellow parishioner, Miss Foote: A tall rabbit-faced dithering virgin of thirty-five, whoAbout Dorothy's headmistress and landlady: .....she had no pleasures whatever. She never did anyAbout Miss Beaver, Dorothy's teacher friend: Miss Beaver was a prim little woman with a round body,About the greengrocer's wife: "dried up, shrewish" (CD, 250)The above fairly represents Orwell's portrayal of women not only In this work, but also across all his other works.4 If male characters are harshly drawn and do not stage effective rebellions, the women are a cut worse -- congenitally - mindlessly endorsing the most debilitating requirements of system. Coming Up for Air (1939) completes the pre-World War II cycle of rebellion novels. The central character, George Bowling, is a middle-aged man who sits more squarely with the middle class than either Gordon Comstock or Dorothy Hare. After only a few days of rebellion, he is wrenched back to family, kids, a house in the suburbs and his job at Salamander Insurance that pays enough but no where near too much. Orwell can ask questions about the middle class as a whole through this more mainstream character. What keeps the middle class loyal to a system where disproportionate returns go to those above them? Will the middle class resist the movement toward fascism that has already overtaken continents Europe? When Bowling stops to examine his life, he finds he has been robbed. The combination of his own physical deterioration (he is overweight and just been fitted for false teeth); a nagging wife who says little more than "but George you don't seem to realise! We've simply got no money at all! It's very serious!"; two boisterous children who give him no peace; his middle management job at Salamander; and a non-descript suburban tract house that can be "bought" but never owned outright, takes him to the brink. At the brink, he sees the new god that the middle class has come to worship: a queer sort of god. Among other things ... bisexual.Bowling's rebellion is premised on nostalgia. He wants to return his boyhood before World War I, when as the son of a small grain dealer, he lived in a bucolic village. His brief getaway takes him back to his birthplace which he finds virtually buried by land development and industrialization. He can scarcely find his way around an area he once knew intimately. He begins to speculate about the deterioration of life in his home town, and sees that it matches the changes in his own life and across all of England. In material terms he and his contemporaries are better off -- comfort, health, longer lives, bathrooms -- but spiritually there has been a decline. For his parents, material hardship was endurable: It's easy enough to die when the things you care aboutGeorge and Hilda Bowling have no such base. World War I wrecked village life, petty shopkeeping, local trades and small farming. The impending war with Germany would finish the job. What can the middle class do about it? Nothing. For the Bowlings, there is no political course which does not further destroy what little they have. There is Hitler on the right and Stalin on the left. George rejects a left speaker's call to arms against Hitler: A rather mean little man with a white face and a baldBowling expects a new round of patriotism, military buildup and war against Hitler, but where will that leave people like him? We're jumping straight into (war) like a rabbit divingThe least destructive ideology open to Bowling in face of capitalism, marxism and fascism appears to be pacifism! He says to a hot- blooded young man who wants to fight Hitler: "I went off the boil in 1916 . . . and so'll you when you know what a trench smells like" (CUA, 178). Across all of these essays and novels there is the same grim prophecy: the weak do not seem to be about to inherit the earth. Institutions, whether they are as large as an empire or as small as a classroom or the nuclear family are so saturated with the dominant ethos of wealth.- privilege and power that even "apolitical" people find themselves immersed in politics. Many of the people who appear in these writings are simply trying to mind their own business - going to school, being a policeman, washing dishes, writing poetry, teaching school, or taking a job and raising a family. Things are out of the individual's hands, but nothing can be done about it. Rebellions, long or short-lived, end in capitulation to the system, even though the unbearable constraints of systems produce the rebellion in the first place. Whether dropping in or dropping Dut, the same inexorable rules govern life in general that Orwell Jistilled from his experiences at Crossgates: Life was hierarchical and whatever happened was right.Orwell had found through painful trial and error that politics a literally everywhere, even for those who want to keep free from politics. From the mid-1930's onward, Orwell turned more and more toward the study of social movements and alternative political ideologies to capitalism. He took this turn reluctantly: I am a writer. The impulse of every writer is to keepWorld War I, the Depression, the Spanish Civil War and the impending war against Germany had put Orwell in an age of forced choices -- socialism or fascism, pacifism or patriotism, anarchism or marxism? Escape had become impossible. with the Road to Wigan Pier (1937), a work commissioned by the Left Book Club on the unemployed in northern England. Wigan Pier is about the employed and unemployed poor, the difficulties of middle class people in making genuine relationships with the working class, and the failure of socialism to attract either the working class or the middle class, the two groups who seemed to stand to gain most from the elimination of the highly stratified English order. When he submitted the work for publication, the editors for the book club were so surprised and disappointed by Orwell's commentaries that they felt impelled to write a long preface disclaiming any connection between the views of Orwell and those of the club, concrete evidence of the split between Orwell and the regular English left which would persist until his death. Orwell seemed to have a knack for saying things that people did not want to hear, or to use his own words, "facing unpleasant facts."5 On the lives and times of the poor, Orwell found still another replay of what he had learned earlier when he himself was down and out. Life at the margins imposed by the dole or low wages was the result of a repressive economic order, but most poor people were too worn out to be politically active, let alone to lead the world toward a socialist millenium. At most, Orwell could disabuse right-wing readers of the idea that the best things in life are free, that people would rather be on welfare than work, or that coal miners make fabulous money. Orwell's middle class origins made satisfactory human relationships with workers enormously difficult. He was attracted to them and their families, but also felt he had a substratum of revulsion based principally on hygiene. What he liked was the fact that lower class people lived "without the deadly weight of family prestige hanging around their necks". (RWP, 115). Feeling no need to constantly impress others or stay one up in competitive struggles, working people could be more open, cooperative, and express their feelings more freely. He observed, "In a working class home . . . You breathe a warm, decent, deeply human atmosphere . - . (homelife) seems to fall more naturally into a sane and comely shape" (RWP, 117). Yet Orwell could not totally overcome what he had been taught -- the lower class smells. Some class prejudices can be overcome but others persist despite good faith efforts to change them: Race hatred, religious hatred, differences in education,As an intellectual matter, Orwell knew that cleanliness is closer to money than godliness, but he not so subtly held the poor responsible for being vile. He surrendered to his upbringing as true feelings that could not be altered. The lack of appeal of socialism grows out of these interclass antagonisms. Workers judge socialism by the people who are socialists and not by the socialist agenda. Socialists can idealize the working class, say that more property and power should be in workers' hands, and prophesy that the future is theirs, but socialism nevertheless does not appeal. Workers in 1936 England saw socialists as well educated people who spoke with accents, wore sandals, and babbled about dialectical materialism. This perception was not altogether different from the way that American hardhats responded to hippies in the 1960's. They believed that hippie politics was highly discretionary and insincere -- "Scratch a hippie and you find an M.G." The English middle-class was economically on virtually equal terms with the working class, but rejected socialism for status reasons. English stratification was premised not only upon money, but also upon "a shadowy caste system" which gave the middle class something to lose were society to become more egalitarian. Sometimes the class differences were ridiculously chimerical, but nevertheless real: Theoretically you (a middle class person) knew how toWhen socialists eulogized the working class they further irritated an already touchy middle class. Orwell used himself as an example: (H)ere I am with my middle class origins and my income hands you will only succeed in antagonizing me. For youBut Orwell went beyond this confession and took class antagonisms to the left intelligentsia itself, a move that must have enraged those who prefer to judge rather than be judged. We all rail against class distinctions, but very fewAccording to Orwell, the intelligentsia expected to have its cake and eat it too. Class privileges are to be enjoyed while the conscience is eased by saying that life based on such privileges must cease -- not now, but someday in the distant future. Orwell believed that unless socialism could be made more appealing, fascism would be inevitable. Socialists needed to find common ground across class lines by focusing on economic problems while keeping quiet about status differences. He believed that people from the working and middle classes face many of the same tyrannies and oppressions: All people with small insecure incomes are in the sameIn addition, socialism needed different exemplars drawn from the working class. Anti-bourgeois rhetoric had to be eliminated, as doing more harm that good. Status distinctions would eventually have to be eliminated, but not as a first step. Orwell's strategy for socialism looks about as frail as the one already in place. The ability to separate and sequence the issues of economy and social ranking seems impossible, since no question of economy can be broached without simultaneously raising questions of power and privilege maintained through heirarchy; the status network and the economic network are intertwined as Orwell himself acknowledges. His strategy might attract more middle class support, but it could hardly be called an overall solution. Just after finishing Wigan Pier, Orwell went off to fight in the Spanish Civil War against Franco, an experience that would widen his split with the English left, acquaint him first hand with the differences between anarchism and the marxism of the time, and deepen his fears about the growing threat of fascism. Almost by accident Orwell joined an anarchist brigade drawn principally from Barcelona. In Barcelona, workers activated by communitarian anarchist principles had taken over the government and the economy. They had occupied buildings, destroyed churches, and collectivized all enterprises that ranged in size and importance from communications through local barber shops. Even boot blacks had painted their shoe boxes with the red and black of the revolution, In addition, the government was run by Councils operating non-hierarchically. The material and political worlds had been coverted to become of by and for the people, one of the few moments in history when this has occurred. The anarchists had also made serious efforts to eliminate status differences that had always been reinforced through language and hierarchical organization. Orwell reports, that "Nobody said 'Senor' or 'Don' or even 'Usted:' everyone called everyone else 'Comrade' and 'Thou,' and said 'Salud' instead of 'Buenos dias.' Waiters and shopkeepers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal" (HC, 5). Orwell was most skeptical about serving in an anarchist brigade and whether an anarchist army could be an effective fighting force. Trained in the tradition of the British army, he believed order, obedience, and chains of command were indispensible, and anticipated either a degeneration into chaos, or the emergence of hierarchy. Neither occurred, and yet the anarchists held up their end in the battles against Franco. Orwell documented the workings of an anarchist army in some detail: The essential point of the system was the social equalityThus anarchism had its own discipline and was not unruly in every sense. Orwell observed that the anarchists depended on "political consciousness -- on the understanding of why orders must be obeyed; it takes time to diffuse this but it also takes time to drill a man into an automaton" (HC, 28). In a long fight revolutionary zeal could be more important to morale than the fear of superiors. At least this is what Orwell, at first the sceptic, came to believe. The Spanish Civil War thus had a number of levels of conflict. At one level there was the fight against Franco, the Catholic Church, large landowners and business. But within the civil war there was a revolution, if that does not sound too implausibly like a larger event being encompassed by a smaller one. Communists and anarchists were together in supporting the government against the fascists and Franco, but they were deeply divided over the direction and timing of the workers' revolution. The anarchists wanted to implement their vision of direct worker control immediately and the communists had a different vision that they said could not be implemented until the war against Franco had been won. Finally power settled everything and the government acting upon communist pressure jailed anarchists as enemies of the people. At the center of the anarchist philosphy was the immediate demand for direct control by the people of everything that affected their lives -- government, economy, and even the army. To the anarchists, the communists were nothing more than practitioners of "centralized authoritarianism" which could not be distinguished from other regimes in Spanish history. The communists argued that a worker revolution might come in the long run, but that for the moment a broadly based coalition, with less political purity, had to be formed to save the government from Franco. Orwell's impulse to write Homage to Catalonia came from his desire to set the historical record straight about the Spanish anarchists and the role of pro-Stalinist marxists in repressing the worker-peasant revolution that had occurred in Catalonia. The communists had launched a world wide propaganda campaign that had been uncritically accepted as reality in England and elsewhere. Apart from the deep disappointment over the fight between the anarchists and marxists over the conduct of the war and the ultimate repression of the anarchists, Spain was good for Orwell's soul. The Spanish anarchists had confronted the problems of socialism that Orwell had seen in Wigan Pier; economy and social stratification could be simultaneously addressed, even while fighting a war. He says, "There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for" (HC, 5). This is coming from Orwell, one of the more abiding pessimists of all time regarding the prospects for change toward freedom and equality. When he later used the phrase "true Socialism" he probably meant what the anarchists had in Catalonia. find no ready-made political position that appealed to him. On the left there were the pro-Stalinist marxists whom Orwell regarded as totally untrustworthy, especially with power. On the right there was the English imperial establishment -- exploiters who accepted "poverty, famine, war and disease as part of the natural order."6 Totalitarianism on the left and right, Hitler and continental fascists were still further to the right, having repressed all freedom of speech and individual liberty. To fight this fascism meant saving the English version of fascism - capitalist enterprise and empire.7 The unpromising political possibilities led George Bowling, Orwell's 1939 hero, to want to sit out the impending war beween England and Germany: there was nothing in it for ordinary people. Orwell's journals and published writing are filled with a steady villification of the English left. Their schooling made them permanently adolescent and their life cycles were totally predictable -- public school, university, a few trips abroad, and then London. As a result they had no real experience of work, war, suffering or death. Yet they presumed themselves superior and ready to assume direction of the country. Secure in liberal England, they could casually endorse left totalitarianism without knowing concretely what such a regime might really be like. Having rejected religion, they had found a new orthodoxy in marxism and had suspended all thinking. They became Russophiles and danced political pirouettes to keep up with shifts in Russian foreign policy.8 The English right was no better. As Hitler came to power, conservatives were not so appalled as one might assume from the fact that England later went to war against Germany under the leadership of the tory Winston Churchill. Hitler had made a deal with', German industrialists that gave capitalism a new if perverse life -- you make our war machine and we will let you own and manage. enterprise and make profits. We'll throw in a crack-down on leftists who threaten your power Powerful people in England went to war with Germany reluctantly.9 Orwell saw ultimate disaster for England whether it won the war or not: Every increase in the strength of the military machineWar meant augmenting the "fascising process" from which there would be no easy return. During the last years before the war, Orwell tried briefly to find a third way,10 -- a new politics that might be anti-war and anti-fascist, that would be "against the Left as well as the Right" (CEI, 386). He was not optimistic about being able to carry such a move off, but nevertheless believed in its urgency to the point of wanting to gather materials for an underground press. He says: Nothing is likely to save us except the emergence withinEventually politics in England came down to a simple question whose answer was dictated by nationality and patriotism rather than complex political analyses: "Do we fight Hitler or do we surrender" (CE I, 530)? Orwell went forward as an Englishman standing against Hitler, knowing better, but unequivocally choosing among evils. During the early years of the war when the defeat of England appeared to be imminent, Orwell saw a last hope for more egalitarianism and freedom. If in Spain there had been a revolution within a war, why could there not be the same in England? After all, the lower and middle classes were doing the fighting and making the sacrifices necessary for the war effort. Might they not exact a return, a leveling out of the highly stratified English order? Patriotism finally undid this hope. The war effort made internal rebellion unthinkable, and although enterprise and empire were permanently weakened by the war, the weakness was not attributable to class antagonism and produced no dramatic gains in equality or liberty.11 World War II did create a revolution, but not the type that might have been anticipated by commentators less astute than Orwell. The war augmented in historically unprecedented ways the power and penetration of the state. Propaganda was used by all sides to manage news -- to stage air raids when there were actually none, to minimize losses when they were heavy, and to report whatever else was needed to keep up morale. Orwell could understand the exigency and participated in a corner of the propagandizing work of the BBC, but he could also see the long run pernicious effects of useful lies: It is quite easy to imagine a state in which the rulingRadio meant that the state could make direct, immediate and daily contact with the consciousness of people. Orwell was unsure that human nature could withstand media pressures, and be counted upon as a citadel against the demands of a totalitarian state: The terrifying thing about the modern dictatorships is Another facet of unprecedented state power was weaponry -- rockets and the atomic bomb -- which made all citizens combatants and every place a theatre of war. In fighting total wars "democracies" had to become more like their enemies further to the right, and in doing so were destroying liberal Christian culture (CE I, 525). World War II had made the individual and privacy anachronisms. By 1945, the makings for 1984 were already in place. the immediate post war years. As an allegory on the failure of the Russian Revolution, Animal Farm can be straightforwardly explained. The Russian revoluti6n, like the rebellion staged by the animals in the story, failed because power problems were never resolved. Old leadership was simply replaced by new leadership with the same impulse toward power. The "new" leadership capitalized on the old habits of obedience to authority and arrogated to themselves privileges that made them indistinguishable from their villainous predecessors. The experience of the animals with socialism confirmed the prophecies of the French writer Anatole France: "The world will get as much relief from socialism as a sick man gets from turning over in bed." To maintain support for a regime that looked less and less revolutionary, the pigs concocted a mixture of propaganda and force. They constantly reminded followers about the horrors of the old ways, adjusted facts to show how much progress was being made, and said that progress would be even greater were it not for the nagging threats of external enemies. The pigs maintained a little "army" not only to discourage attack from outside but also to control internal dissidents. Animal Farm, like 1984, remains a staple in high schools because of its strident anti-communist, anti-Russian stance. Students must also come away from the book with the idea that revolutions in general cause more heartache than they are worth. A new government can replace an old one, but life goes on pretty much the same, or even worse, if changes are too precipitous. (The American Revolution never seems to come up as an example of a successful revolution, nor is any attention paid to the central point of 1776 -- there are times when a government must be overthrown, by force if necessary.) Animal Farm teaches the opposite: it is a good political idea to stay put. To a large extent, Orwell is to blame for the quietism that the novel produces. As has been noted earlier, Orwell had no love for Russia and the English Left. In writing an allegory instead of a straight refutation of the Russian experience or the Stalinist version of marxism, Orwell leaves the impression that all revolutions are inherently flawed, discounting even his own experiences among Spanish anarchists who seemed to have successfully addressed power relationships while working toward greater equality and fiberty. Did Orwell actually believe that revolutions are doomed? Probably he did not, but virtually all of his writing is so pessimistic about the prospects for significant change, that one must strain to reach this conclusion. In reviewing the works of Arthur Koestler (CE III, 234), Orwell considered whether revolutions are "of their nature" bad, whether violent revolution is "a corrupting process," and whether revolutionary activity is the result of "personal maladjustment." Orwell answers with a weak no. He first disposes of revolutions as projections of neuroses, by saying that even if Marx's motives might be criticized, his analyses nevertheless can stand by themselves. He then argued that revolutions get a bad name because they are judged by such harsh standards; everything must fail if it is to be measured against the unattainable. According to Orwell there probably can never be a City of the Sun where "human beings are to be free and equal and above all ... happy, " yet "it is the dream of a just society which seems to haunt the imagination ineradicably and in all ages whether it is called the Kingdom of Heaven or the classless society ..." (CE III, 237). If revolutions are to bring happiness on earth, they must fail, even if this aspiration has been held by "socialists, anarchists, and heretics for hundreds of years" (CE III, 237). Undue pessimism could also be a reflection of the times -- the 1930's and World War II, a period notorious for "lies, hatred, cruelty, and ignorance." Orwell warned against projecting this era into the future: "It is quite possible (to think) that man's major problems will never be solved. But it is also unthinkable! Who is there who dares to look at the world of today and say to himself, "It will always be like this: even in a million years it cannot get appreciably better" (CE III, 243)? Instead Orwell clings to what he terms a "quasi-mystical belief" that all is not lost for now and always (CE III, 243, 244). Beyond this very general testimonial, he says practically nothing more concretely in favor of revolutions in all of his writings, with the small exception of the portions of Homage to Catalonia on communitarian anarchism. Orwell also considered another iron law of revolutions; that the means to power undo whatever good ends those who seek power may have had at the outset. In several essays, Orwell refers to Nietzsche: "He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself, and if thou gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into thee" (CE III, 230). To take over the farm the animals adopted the means of their enemies. Finally the presence of force kept "lower" animals subject. The pigs over time had developed an admiration for humans and replicated their style down to drinking, dressing, and walking on two legs. With the Russian Revolution, the more the revolution unfolded the more Russia looked like state capitalism with a huge army and police force to keep industrial order. Orwell seems to concur with Nietzsche that the wrong methods cannot be suddenly suspended. One would think that if violent means continually create new dragons, Orwell would have looked more kindly upon non-violence and pacifism. Not so. He lumps English pacifists together with the rest of the "pansy" left, not as Russophiles, but as self-indulgent fools. They led sheltered lives on an island protected by the British navy. In time of war their position became suicidal: totalitarian regimes were ready to roll over pacifists and non- pacifists alike. According to Orwell, the pacifists should have declared their loyalties, rather than trying to rise above the evil of war.12 Tolstoy and Ghandi both come in for criticism. About Tolstoy, Orwell says, "Tolstoy renounced wealth, fame and privilege: he abjured violence in all its forms and was ready to suffer for doing so; but it is not so easy to believe that he abjured the principle of coercion, or at least the desire to coerce others . . . Creeds like pacifism and anarchism which seem on the surface to imply a complete renunciation of power, rather encourage this habit of mind. For if you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics -- a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage -- surely that proves that you are in the right? And the more you are in the right the more natural that everyone should be bullied into thinking likewise" (CE IV, 301, 302). To Orwell, pacifists like Tolstoy might be fascists in disguise; they have simply discovered pacifism as a new means toward domination. In "Reflections on Ghandi" (CE IV, 463), Orwell wants to take Ghandi down from sainthood and examine the effectiveness of his politics of non-violence. He begins with a personal attack -- Ghandi's "homespun cloth, soul forces' and vegetarianism" (CE IV, 463) -- and adds a critique of sainthood: "Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is possible that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings . . . One must choose between God and man and all 'radicals' and 'progressives' from the mildest liberal to the most extreme Anarchist . . . have chosen Man" (CE IV, 467). Orwell, notwithstanding some weak disclaimers, is ready to exclude Ghandi from the human race. Ghandi's satyagraha, or nonviolent warfare through strikes, disruption ot transport and other acts of civil disobedience presented more trouble since Ghandi and others did get England out of India without firing a shot. Orwell argues that Ghandi's methods might work against the British in a context of free speech and assembly, but would never work against totalitarian regimes where political opponents simply disappear in the middle of the night. Moreover, if such methods work domestically, they are of dubious worth internationally where there are fewer inhibitions to the use of force. Orwell had to acknowledge that in a world of push button warfare and rocketry, the methods of Ghandi were beginning to look practical (CE IV, 468ff). Orwell thus leaves little more than an impasse regarding violent and nonviolent means for bringing about change. On the right and left, there are totalitarian regimes that appear to be willing to use force without compunction. They have to be met by force even if meeting them means becoming more totalitarian in turn. Then there are the pacifists who are of simple minds and not so pure hearts who in trying to avoid becoming dragons are willing to be eaten by actual dragons. When Orwell chose among these evil options, his position became virtually indistinguishable from that of the ruling order of England which he elsewhere freely criticises. He gazed into the abyss of English liberalism and would eventually find it gazing into him. hero, lives in Oceania, one of three totalitarian regimes that control the entire world. They are perpetually at war but dare not fight a total war because weaponry has become so lethal. Each stays fully mobilized and uses external threats to maintain internal control.13 Guns have been substituted for butter everywhere. Institutional food must be washed down with "victory gin" to make it all palatable. Monumental government buildings tower over grotty tenement houses where drains are forever clogged and hallways reek of bad food. Complaints about living conditions would bring immediate arrest, torture and even death. Even thinking in such terms, if tipped off in attitude at work or in the wrong facial expression can bring out the thought police. For Smith and other members of the outer party, life is especially ascetic. Under other political circumstances, he might have been a journalist or a creative writer, but under INGSOC (English socialism) he is a government hack, working in the Ministry of Truth, the agency for state lying. His life is full of incongruities: by day he rewrites history and by night he might have to scrounge for razor blades, a pair of shoelaces or some darning thread to mend his worn out clothes. When we first encounter him, he has no family, no lover, and no friends because as a good party member he is expected to be a monkish devotee of the state. Officially there is unprecedented unity of all people -- everyone is called comrade -- but actually everyone is alone and highly suspicious that others might turn them in to the police. The Ministry of Truth has as its overall mission the remaking of human consciousness. Private worlds and individual thought detract from the public works and collective thought and are therefore treasonous. The inner party should do the thinking, the outer party the implementation, and the far more numerous proles are to tag along, whipped into patriotic frenzy when necessary, but by and large left alone as harmless. Until the transformation of the psyche has been completed, the Ministry of Love must use fear and force to check deviance. Both agencies support the Ministry of Peace which makes war and the Ministry of Plenty which manages the trickle of consumer goods that are barely enough to sustain life. With the artist turned state publicist all things are possible. Huxley's Brave New World was premised on genetic engineering and psychoactive drugs. Orwell's anti-utopia is premised on the chief by-product of World War II, psychic manipulation by propaganda, disseminated continually through new media -- two-way television, hidden microphones, and loudspeakers. In 1984, the state has perfected the capability of reaching in and touching the individual mind. Smith has a small part in the state's manipulation of all language and symbols. He "updates" old newspapers, bringing them in line with the current needs of the state -- rewriting old speeches to make prophecies square with actual results; doctoring statistics and timetables for production; creating heroes, and banishing one-time heroes into oblivion if they have fallen out of favor since the newspaper was first published. When he is through, the "old" newspaper can be reprinted and placed on file as history. Smith notes that his work does not simply involve replacing truthful accounts with lies. There have been so many overlays upon actual events that Smith simply adds fresh falsifications to an already fanciful base. All reality has become capriciously relative, the only constant being that the inner party always was, is now, and always will be, infallible. What else makes history so important to the regime? Accurate history gives people independent anchoring points for their thought. Through history they can get a more solid fix on whether government programs have lived up to claims. Without documentary evidence people are left with their bare memories which may fade and cannot outlive them. One of the reasons why Smith wants to keep a diary is so there will be at least one non-governmental record, but he cannot know if his small voice will be heard or whether it will have any meaning. Others at the ministry do comparable work. A co-worker Syme is preparing a dictionary of' newspeak, the language of Oceania. The linguistic goals of the state are to make language so stylized and sterilized that there will no longer be a vocabulary for sedition. To commit thoughtcrime requires words which, if the work of Syme and others is successful, will no longer exist. Treason will have been nipped even before the bud. Until the psyche has been fixed like the breed of hornless cows that Orwell had earlier spoken about, half-way measures would have to be taken. For example, the slogans Freedom is slavery or Ignorance is strength are needed only so long as there is some understanding of what freedom and slavery mean or the difference between ignorance and awareness, between strength and weakness. When these conceptions have been drained of their history and meaning, the slogans can safely be discarded. Similarly, with doublethink -- the requirement that two contradictory ideas be held in mind at the same time, (e.g. that there is no morality and that the state is the source of all morality). Eventually when there is no vocabulary for rival moralities, contradictions will disappear and the need to doublethink will no longer be present. When the psyche has become the exclusive terrain of the state, there will be no need to further colonize the mind. Until people like Winston Smith become servornechanisms of the state, they remain a threat. This proves to be true. Smith rebels, by keeping a diary -- demanding privacy; having an illicit love affair -- dividing his loyalty between another person and the state; and reading forbidden books -- consorting with enemies of the state. After arrest, torture and brainwashing, Smith is deemed fit to reenter society. To the dismay of readers, the state is again correct. Fully rehabilitated, Smith loves Big Brother! Orwell had another title for 1984 -- The Last Man in Europe. He saw ominous forces bearing down on artistic freedom, individual thought and personal privacy. Earlier totalitarian governments had been content to control bodies and let the spirit roam. Modern states were not so inclined and had the technology to make total control of the person possible. Smith as the last man in Europe tried to hold out against these awesome forces, but in the end got crushed like other Orwellian heroes before him. What stands between the individual and the onset of a totalitarian state to end all totalitarian states? For Orwell the answer is the liberal state which for all its fascistic warts at least maintains some protection of free speech, individual freedom and privacy. His vision took him straight back to political quietism and support of English political and legal order.14 Liberalism was the least among evils in a world that looked more and more evil. Like the professional gambler holed up in a small town, he had to set his sights lower and play for smaller political stakes than revolution. times. Personal rebellion fails and rebels must inevitably work their way back into the cultural mainstream and accept the prevailing political economy. More generally based uprisings do not work either. Leadership can be changed but the hierarchical form persists, leaving people about as well off, and sometimes worse off, than they were before. Revolutionary regimes may bring some material equality, but will generally tolerate less free speech and privacy than can be had under liberally-oriented regimes. In the end Orwell retreated to liberalism-individualism as the only available political option. He would make a push on conscience here and press for more justice there, but from the structural angle his politics after the onset of World War II become less revolutionary. Despite writing on political subjects virtually all of the time, his writings became less political and more the expression of his creativity, in an age when politics had become the only subject matter for literature. Left liberalism suited his character most completely. He loved England and its traditions too thoroughly to become the consummate Iconoclast that more radical politics would have required. He loved nature too much to want it destroyed by the planners of scientific socialism. He loved people too much to want to hate those who did not see the light of the regular English left. And he loved life -- especially the good joke -- too much to accept the grim asceticism that political zealots seemed to require. In general he could not generate enough malice to be willing to kill for an idea. His description of Dickens describes himself: Well in the case of Dickens I see a face . . . of a man about forty with a small beard and a high color. He isSome general conclusions of contemporary relevance can be derived from Orwell's work. The central difficulty of our times is warfare and the mentality that is required to keep a populace on a war footing perpetually. The grand delusion of America is that militarization can proceed at no cost in material or spiritual terms. We can fight wars and devote more and more resources to warfare without damaging our standard of living or upsetting our mental aplomb. Nothing could be farther from the truth. As Orwell indicated from the late 1930's onward. A military machine requires a military mindset: the military industrial complex becomes a psychological complex as well. Our proliferating militarism rationalizes more and more extensive national and international policing in the interest of "national security." People intuitively know that butter is better for them than guns and must be either persuaded or coerced into thinking the contrary. With computers, the government has an even more impressive array of media at its disposal to make further penetration into the individual psyche and personal privacy. The next decade or two may find us hunting for the last person in the United States. Orwell saw greater and greater emphasis on the material to the ,exclusion of the spiritual and aesthetic. It was out of the desire for spirituality that the left in England sought out fresh orthodoxies and marxism. We seem to be suffering from the same anemia and vainly look to fundamental religion, tinselized Christmases, travel through the window of a Winnebago, and soap operas about millionaires to fill the voids in our souls. Instead of probing for national character in Boy's Weeklies and the Art of Donald McGill as Orwell did, modern essayists might try the National Enquirer, Fantasy Island, Dallas and Loveboat to find the spiritual-aesthetic center of America. Orwell often sought respite from the urban intellectual life in the bucolic village or in his garden where he grew vegetables and flowers. At times he seemed ready to trade a novel for a good chicken coop, and might have dropped totally out of sight in 1939 if he had not been so poor and in ill health. His impulse to try to get away from it all matches the mood of our own times when around long weekends and holidays, places of work are ruthlessly abandoned, and people must drag themselves back after a few days of decent living. of Orwell, including his books, essays and correspondence (as found in the four volume set compiled by his widow and Ian Angus) were used. I was tempted to read literary criticisms and the number of contemporary commentaries about Orwell, but preferred to spend more time on primary materials and to work out for myself an adequate interpretation of a writer who has had profound effects upon me as a person and who has been a major influence on the way I teach about law and legal order. To save space, unless the footnotes are detailed, there will be an abbreviated parenthetical note in the text so that readers can determine sources. At the end of the footnotes, there is a listing of Orwell's works for additional bibliographical information. 2. Politics and the English Language (CI IV, 127), The Prevention of Literature (CE, IV, 59). 3. Woodcock, George. The Crystal Spirit: A Study of George Orwell. (1966). 4. Hilda, George Bowlings' wife in Coming Up for Air, typifies the middle class married woman who focuses on home economics and does a little experimentation with food fads, book clubs and spiritualism. One of the two female horses in Animal Farm, Mollie, prefers ribbons in her forelock to consciousness. Clover, however, is an exception to the Orwell rule and knows what has happened during the leadership of the pigs. Julia, the heroine in 1984, is an accomplice to Winston Smitli in his crime of love and sexuality, but whenever there is a discussion of politics, she falls asleep; she is a creature of the body rather than the mind. 5. See generally, "Why I Write" (CE 1, 1-7). 6. Review of Sheed, Communism and Man (CE 1, 384, 385). See also, "Not Counting Niggers" (Uh 1, 394), Review of Atholl, Searchlight ~jn Spain (CE 1, 344). 7. CE I, 284. 8. CE I, 513, 517; CE II, 74, 7S. 9. CE II, 79, 80; 354. 10. CE I, 331. 11. CE II, 49, SO; 214, 215; 276, 277. Orwell does advance a theory of change through decay of the ruling class, a loss of will to rule (CE II, 69). 12. See e.g., CE I, 537; III, 113, 289, 295, 374; IV, 410. 13. On Orwell's fear of an atomic war see "You and the Atom Bomb," CE IV, 6-10. On the post-war array of nations and their allegiances, Orwell had been intrigued by the work of James Burnham on the managerial revolution and international relations. See CE IV, 160-181, 313-326. 14. See e.g. CE IV, 37, 62; CE 11, 62, 63. WORKS. OF ORWELL AND FOOTNOTE GUIDE DO - Down and Out in Paris and London, 1933. BD - Burmese Days, 1934. CD - A Clergyman's Daughter, 1935. KAF - Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 1936. RWP - The Road to Wigan Pier, 1937. HC - Homage to Catalonia, 1938. CUA - Coming Up for Air, 1939. AF - Animal Farm, 1945. 1984 - Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949. Collected Essays, Journals and Letters, edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus: CE I Volume 1: An Age Like This (1920-1940). CE II Volume 2: My Country Right or Left (1939-1943). CE III - Volume 3: As I Please (1943-1945). CE IV - Volume 4: In Front of Your Nose (1945-1950). |
