Notes on George Orwell Essays, Why Orwell Matters and More

“Facing Unpleasant Facts” (Orwell), “Why Orwell Matters” (Hitchens)

These are some of my notes from studying George Orwell’s non-fiction essays as well as notes from reading a couple of books about him. Facing Unpleasant Facts is a collection of Orwell essays put together by George Packer.

Orwell calls out writers “to whom murder is at most a word.” and who “can swallow totalitarianism because they have no experience of anything except liberalism.” ”Ours was the one-eyed pacifism that is peculiar to sheltered countries with strong navies… in ‘enlightened’ circles. 1914–18 was written off as a meaningless slaughter, and even the men who had been slaughtered were held to be in some way to blame…” Thus, Orwell acknowledges the necessity of war, sometimes. “When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention.” “…my ‘story’ ceased to be narcissistic in a crude way and became more and more a mere description of what I was doing and the things I saw.” “I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.” Life is a double edged sword; Packer in introduction says it demands of readers to have a “grown-upness about life — that you accept its complexities, “its refusal to provide happy endings, without losing or surrendering the ability to judge.” “…the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.” “The child thinks of growing old as an almost obscene calamity, which for some mysterious reason will never happen to itself. All who have passed the age of thirty are joyless grotesques, endlessly fussing about things of no importance and staying alive without, so far as the child can see, having anything to live for.” In “Shooting an Elephant,” Orwell is “an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys… For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the ‘natives,’, and so in every crisis he has got to do what the ‘natives’ expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. I had got to shoot the elephant.” “I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.” Points to the capacity for groups of humans to dehumanize one another, as they went through a hanging, had a drink together, with a man hanging nearby. “He is serving his country, which has the power to absolve him from evil. One cannot see the modern world as it is unless one recognizes the overwhelming strength of patriotism, national loyalty… as a positive force there is nothing to set beside it. Christianity and international Socialism are as weak as a straw in comparison with it. Hitler and Mussolini rose to power in their own countries very largely because they could grasp this fact and their opponents could not.” “Also, one must admit that the divisions between nation and nation are founded on real differences of outlook. Till recently it was thought proper to pretend that all human beings are very much alike, but in fact anyone able to use his eyes knows that the average of human behaviour differs enormously from country to country…” Orwell points out that some things the Nazis did could have happened only in Germany; Sowell says an event such as the Holocaust could have happened to any nation. “And above all, it is your civilization, it is you. However much you hate it or laugh at it, you will never be happy away from it for any length of time. The suet puddings and the red pillar-boxes have entered into your soul. Good or evil, it is yours, you belong to it, and this side the grave you will never get away from the marks that it has given you.” This echoes both Crime and Punishment as well as James Baldwin. On drifters who hang around in bookshops, “For all their big talk there is something moth-eaten and aimless about them.” They just wanted love, acceptance, someone to talk to, so they pretended to buy books, giving them “the illusion they were spending real money.” “Stamp-collectors are a strange silent fish-like reed, of all ages, but only of the male sex; women, apparently, fail to see the peculiar charm of gumming bits of coloured paper into albums.” “But the real reason why I should not like to be in the book trade for life is that while I was in it I lost my love books.” Orwell points to the love of a donkey who is abused by humans, but for a lack of social feeling for the brown man. “People with brown skins are next door to invisible. Anyone can be sorry for the donkey with its galled back, but it is generally owing to some kind of accident if one even notices the old woman under her load of sticks.” “Patriotism has nothing to do with conservatism. It is devotion to something that is changing but is felt to be mystically the same, like the devotion of the ex-White Bolshevik to Russia.” “I grew up in an atmosphere tinged with militarism, and afterwards I spent five boring years within the sound of bugles… I would sooner have had that kind of upbringing than be like the left-wing intellectuals who are so ‘enlightened’’ that they cannot understand the most ordinary emotions. It is exactly the people whose hearts have never leapt at the sight of a Union Jack who will flinch from revolution when the moment comes.” There is still “…a spiritual need for patriotism and the military virtues….” “Similarly such horrors as the Russian purges never surprised me, because I had always felt that-not exactly that, but something like that-was implicit in Bolshevik rule. I could feel it in their literature.” On the thin veneer that is society, he points out that during WWII, “…English people, ie. people of a kind who would be likely to loot shops, don’t as a rule take a spontaneous interest in foreign politics…” on those who attacked Italian shopkeepers, and on these same people who he painted as not-at-all interested in the goings-on of the war. “Nevertheless, nothing is causeless, and even the fact that Englishmen have bad teeth can tell one something about the realities of English life.” Orwell was not afraid to ask why, when civilization is. “And like everything else [England] can change only in certain directions, which hup to a point can be foreseen… certain alternatives are possible and others not. A seed may grow or not grow, but at any rate a turnip seed never grows into a parsnip. It is therefore of the deepest important to try and determine what England isbefore guessing what part England can play in the huge events that are happening.” You cannot address problems without knowing what they are. Orwell was bought into the left-idea that “…economic liberty, the right to exploit others for profit…” is not good, but that we should have other liberties, to determine how we want to live our lives. “One thing one notices if one looks directly at the common people, especially in the big towns, is that they are not puritanical. They are inveterate gamblers, drink as much beer as their wages will permit, are devoted to bawdy jokes, and use probably the foulest language in the world.” The “hypocritical laws” try to “interfere with everybody but in practice allow everything to happen.” He also says they are “without definite religious belief, and have been so for centuries” at least in England; “And yet they have retained a deep tinge of Christian feeling, while almost forgetting the name of Christ. The power-worship which is the new religion of Europe, and which has infected the English intelligentsia, has never touched the common people”. “In England people are still hanged by the neck… punishments obscene as well as cruel, but there has never been any genuinely popular outcry against them. People accept them… almost as they accept the weather. They are part of ‘the law,’ which is assumed to be unalterable.” Mirroring comments in Wigan Pier about fidelity to authority. “An illusion can become a half-truth, a mask can alter the expression of a face. The familiar arguments to the effect that democracy is just the same as” or “just as bad as” totalitarianism never take account of this fact. All such arguments boil down to saying that half a loaf is the same as no bread. In England such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they are very powerful illusions. The belief in them influences conduct, national life is different because of them. In proof of which, look about you… The sword is still in the scabbard, and while it stays there corruption cannot go beyond a certain point. The English electoral system, for instance, is an all but open a fraud. In a dozen obvious ways it is gerrymandered in the interest of the moneyed class. But until some deep change has occurred in the public mind, it cannot become completely corrupt. You do not arrive at the polling booth to find men with revolvers telling you which way to vote, nor are the votes miscounted, nor is there any direct bribery… [The hanging judge] is a symbol of the strange mixture of reality and illusion, democracy and privilege, humbug and decency, the subtle network of compromises, by which the nation keeps itself in its familiar shape.” “It follows that British democracy is less of a fraud than it sometimes appears. A foreign observer sees only the huge inequality of wealth, the unfair electoral system, the governing-class control over the Press, the radio and education, and concludes that democracy is simply a polite name for dictatorship. But this ignores the considerable agreement that does unfortunately exist between the leaders and the led. However much one may hate to admit it, it is almost certain that between 1931 and 1940 the National Government represented the will of the mass of the people. It tolerated slums, unemployment and a cowardly foreign policy. Yes, but so did public opinion.” Of Chamberlain, “And public opinion was behind him all the while, in policies that were completely incompatible with one another.” “It is safe to let a paper like Peace News be sold, because it is certain that ninety-five per cent of the population will never want to read it. The nation is bound together by an invisible chain. At any normal time the ruling class will rob, mismanage, sabotage, lead us into the muck; but let popular opinion really make itself heart, let them get a tug from below that they cannot avoid feeling, and it is difficult for them not to respond.” The rulers are “tossed to and fro between their incomes and their principles”. “The mentality of the English left-wing intelligentsia can be studied in half a dozen weekly and monthly papers. The immediately striking thing about all these papers is their generally negative, querulous attitude, their complete lack at all times of any constructive suggestion. There is little in them except the irresponsible carping of people who have never been and never expect to be in a position of power. Another marked characteristic is the emotional shallowness of people who live in a world of ideas and have little contact with physical reality. Many intellectuals of the Left were flabbily pacifist up to 1935, shrieked for war against Germany in the years 1935–9, and then promptly cooled off when the war started. It is broadly though not precisely true that the people who were most “anti-Fascist” during the Spanish civil war are most defeatist now. And underlying this is the really important fact about so many of the English intelligentsia — their severance from the common culture of the country.” “In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution…” “Patriotism and intelligence will have to come together again.” Intellectuals cannot regard all “physical courage as barbarous.” “…if you taxed all large incomes out of existence, it still would not make much difference to the taxes the rest of us would have to pay… [but] This argument… leaves out of account the effect of envy on morale, on the ‘we-are-all-in-it-together’ feeling which is absolutely necessary in time of war.” Thus, appearance trumps substance, in a strange way, due to this factor of human nature. This is the “people get angry” factor of Angrynomics.

Why Orwell Matters is by Christopher Hitchens (I did not finish this one)

• “He would appear never to have diluted his opinions in the hope of seeing his byline disseminated to the paying customers; this alone is a clue to why he still matters”
• “’I knew,’ said Orwell in 1946 about his early youth, that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts.’… The reaction of such people [as a commisar or priest] to unpleasant facts is rarely self-critical; they do not have the ‘power of facing’. Their confrontation with the fact takes the form of an evasion; the reaction to the unpleasant discovery is a redoubling”
• “[Racialism] is a way of pushing exploitation beyond the point that is normally possible, by pretending that the exploited are not human beings.” -Orwell. This was an economic argument and during a time where people of color were explicitly oppressed. I would counter that today, the neo-racists continue racialism and that the idea people of color are not complete human beings (per McWhorter), but instead of being explicitly oppressed, they must be protected by the white saviors (White Fragility).
• Orwell learned Burmese and Hindustani and Shaw-Karen in Burma. He “felt contempt for those British settlers… who spent a lifetime in the region without acquiring any but a few peremptory words of command for servants.” Orwell was a man with great social feeling.
• Hitchens points out that people like to “attribut[e] to him the outlook that he attributed to others” in his writing, such as that the lower classes smell.’ He aroused in the left intelligentsia an intense dislike because he never had a “Stalinoid” phase.
• Chris Hitchens on North Korea and similarities to 1984, “These are details; what was entirely unmistakable was the atmosphere of a society where individual life is absolutely pointless, and where everything that is not absolutely compulsory is absolutely forbidden.”
• “But what he illustrates, by his commitment to language as the partner of truth, is that views do not really count; that it matters not what you think, but how you think; and that politics are relatively unimportant, while principles have a way of enduring, as do the few irreducible individuals who maintain allegiance to them.”

“But what happens when intellectual integrity obligates you to become the unwelcome truth-teller to colleagues and friends… Then it’s not so easy to criticize, because then you pass from merely being a critic of power to a “’conscience.’ A conscience is a critic from within. Yet a conscience criticizes not in order to weaken, but to strengthen his or her own side, to hold it to the highest possible standard, even higher than that of the opposing party. A critic who is also a conscience insists that truth comes before beauty, power, or any other value or attribute. That scale of commitment is not so easy to maintain faithfully, which is why we seldom find writers of the caliber of George Orwell and Albert Camus.” -John Rodden, Becoming George Orwell.