The defense of private decency
Burris, Keith
MORE ON ORWELL. HIS VISION. & HIS LIMITS The defense of private decency KEITH BURRIS MOST PEOPLE know that Mr. George Orwell wrote a book called 1984 about a counter-Utopian, oligarchical...
...The first shot, however, was fired a year early with an essay by Mr...
...I believe he was not finally a very astute political scientist...
...Orwell ACTED the role of the English empiricist at times and had little use for the German or French existentialist movements...
...In the novels, curiously, one sees the simplifying polemicist and his extreme lack of kindness...
...Though he never tells us in 1984 how things got so far, and we may reasonably doubt (hope...
...The appetite of totalitarianism-control not only of actions, but of thoughts and emotions-is not portrayed better in any work of modern fiction or journalism...
...Won not only (perhaps chiefly) on the battlefields, but through the acquiescence to and imitations of totalitarian assumptions and methods by democratic states...
...But he did prophesy.e...
...George Orwell wrote a book called 1984 about a counter-Utopian, oligarchical collective in which Big Brother is always watching, and the average citizen is always anxious, manipulated, and alone...
...Hence the totalitarian virus in our world is not only fed on the death of common public spaces and the joy of citizenship, but on the constant threats to the plain and sheltered dimension of life in which people work out their individuality, aspirations, and cares...
...that they could not, he does understand how they began...
...Old James Madison trusted neither worker nor intellectual, nor, alone, common sense...
...He was not by temperament a modern man...
...And in the end, much more suddenly than anyone had foreseen, our efforts were rewarded, and down we came...
...At the end of 1984, the totalitarian circle closes: "a boot stamping on a human face forever...
...THERE ARE better books...
...His lack of, to use the term broadly, religious sensibility limited him as a creative writer and as a critic...
...This is probably, again, a lack of hope and humanity to balance an uncompromising view of man's evil...
...This lack of hope in Orwell is not evident in his journalism and essays...
...The direction of the world, Orwell knew, would be toward complexity, specialization, rationalization, and bureaucracy...
...In an era when men, especially intellectuals, were not satisfied with "bourgeois" happiness or the corny old civilities, he wrote a hair-raising story about what life would be like without either...
...ORWELL WAS a prophet all right, but not in the way people misuse and misunderstand the term today...
...He saw more clearly than any man in our century, the constant threat to personal liberty...
...He thought it would be the state exclusively that would limit our freedoms and it turns out that society itself has become bureaucratized...
...Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau, Shelley, Byron, Dickens, Stendhal, Samuel Butler, Ibsen, Zola, Flaubert, Shaw, Joyce - in one way or another they are all of them destroyers, wreckers, saboteurs...
...But unfortunately there had been a little mistake...
...Huxley was probably nearer the mark in some ways...
...He was not a saint, secular or otherwise...
...And he knew that such a situation would result in a natural tendency toward bigness and centralization...
...Podhoretz was countered in the New Republic by contemporary American socialist Irving Howe...
...I dislike big towns, noise, motor cars, the radio, tinned food, central heating and 'modern' furniture...
...And we are dimly aware that next year will be the time when we celebrate Orwell's dark portrait and relentless warning...
...This is what Orwell wrote in 1940: Religious belief, in the form in which we had known it, had to be abandoned...
...For two hundred years we had sawed at the branch we were sitting on...
...KEITH BURRIS teaches political science at Washington and Jefferson College in Pennsylvania...
...Anyone who sits down with the book and reads it seriously will think more than once about terming all that is bizarre or simply unpleasant in America "Orwellian...
...He hoped for a "liberal" socialism respectful of privacy and individual liberty...
...He did not understand the work of Evelyn Waugh or Graham Greene, for example...
...He was urging us to take precautions, to repent of our naivete and our foolishness...
...He held a simple and romantic view of the working man...
...And Orwell was wrong about capitalism going under, though right about centralization...
...Some of us use the term "Orwellian" to describe aspects of modern life which seem to us particularly abstract and dehumanizing...
...1984 is a portrayal of just that...
...Orwell would, I think, have opposed the American intervention in Vietnam, but would not have become an America-hater, and would have continued to cast a cold eye on the Russians...
...What is to George Orwell's everlasting credit is his understanding that the modern world not only tends to concentrate power (invidious enough from the viewpoint of any democrat), but that it does so at the expense of privacy...
...Man is doomed...
...the husband, father, friend, and finally, inner man...
...I like English cookery and English beer, French red wines, Spanish white wines, Indian tea, strong tobacco, coal fires, candlelight, and comfortable chairs...
...Orwell saw that there is something about modern civilization that is out of control...
...This part of the book was not as breathtaking as Orwell's lack of affirmation in it of even the slightest hope for return, renewal, and redemption...
...Norman Podhoretz in the January, 1983 edition of Harper's magazine...
...He saw the totalitarian disease, not, perhaps, in all of its forms, but most definitely in all of its strength and persistence...
...Partly because of the times he lived in, which saw the rise and conquests of historical fascism and totalitarianism, and partly because of the sort of person he was, Orwell foresaw what G.K...
...And, in fact, I think his essays are both of a higher quality of craftsmanship and humane sensibility...
...Orwell was trying to help us see the labyrinths of the twentieth century and the temptation such a century would present...
...American democracy has been threatened both by elite and mass fascist tendencies at various points in our history, and usually saved by constitutionalism...
...In the face of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, one might reasonably, after all, imagine man's capacity for inhumanity to his fellows as virtually limitless...
...And Burgess does have a sense of humor and religion (are these related, I wonder...
...Chesterton in an earlier time had called "the abolition of man...
...His journalism was not, nor did he mean his fiction to be, a palm reading or a weather report...
...Consequently, there was a long period during which nearly every thinking man was in some sense a rebel, and usually a quite irresponsible rebel...
...He could have made an idea and a book on "organization man" stand up and sing...
...While I am inclined to think his initial judgment about Jean-Paul Sartre (which was low) may become a more commonly accepted one, even in academic circles, there is in his reaction to these movements something of the crude positivist...
...Podhoretz claims that if Orwell were alive today, he would be not a socialist (he had been a rather unfaithful and unorthodox one in his time...
...The thing at the bottom was not a bed of roses after all, it was a cesspool full of barbed wire...
...It was here that Orwell showed himself an artist and a man of fairness, empathy, and contradiction...
...He apparently had trouble being non-serious, having fun, not feeling a sort of generalized, perhaps class-based guilt...
...Orwell should have read him, when worrying about how to slow the totalitarian tide...
...We ought also to remember that the book portrays life after the conquest of totalitarianism world-wide, and imagines what life would be like if the Stalins and Hitlers had won...
...This may explain the blackness and rage one finds in his novels, particularly 1984...
...Orwell's strength as a thinker and a writer sprang from his ordinary decency...
...The book remains the most effective nightmare description ever written of the totality of absolute rule by the modern state...
...but that brand of American former socialists called neoconserva-tives...
...According to Howe, Orwell believed that socialism was inevitable and the only relevant question is whether or not it can become humane...
...Literature was largely the literature of revolt or of disintegration...
...Anthony Burgess wrote a book a few years ago that looked a good deal more like the end of the road the West is now heading down...
...what is lacking in the book may be its greatest flaw...
...It was not merely taste that made him a contemporary Jeremiah...
...Orwell, if he were alive today, would make a worthy opponent for the multinational corporation...
...These are persons committed to competitive social justice, a welfare state of vigor but limited aspiration and power, and an extremely skeptical view of the USSR...
...But he paid little attention to how such an arrangement might be guaranteed...
...Both words matter...
...Though itmay at times turn trivial, or partisan, "Orwell talk" helps us to focus upon the central political and social questions of this century...
...But George Orwell understood first and best what the modern world would make of a society once it had lost its love of freedom and of the private simple joys old-fashioned liberty allowed men...
...But he did prophesy...
...Listen to this self-description: Outside my work the thing I care most about is gardening, especially vegetable gardening...
...Totalitarianism in America will not come by The Party and the boot, but out of excessive comfort, passivity, and indolence...
...He was a prophet in the true sense of the Old Testament...
...He took Marxist notions of class too seriously...
...He made prosaic domesticity seem poetic and common sense heroic...
...If Hannah Arendt was the chronicler of totalitarianism who most clearly saw its destruction of the public and of the citizen, it was Orwell who saw most cogently its destruction of the private...
...Even when he was too hopeless about the future, too sure about humanity's inherent distaste for freedom and civility, too angry to see ways out or away from destruction, he did see the world, the rich, amoral, and too often barbarous modern world, with clarity...
...As with Camus, Orwell understood that the stakes had been raised, and tragically, foolishly, made political...
...This sort of talk, and the discussions that will continue throughout this and next year in classrooms, in print, yes, even at cocktail parties and on radio call-in shows, is good...
...But it is not only what is in 1984 that is bothersome...
...Orwell was the last of the Victorian liberals, the men who most valued clear thought, pure language, and individuality...
...Some critics have complained in various ways that Orwell carried the sadism of The Party functionary, O'Brien, too far in the book, thus marring it...
...He saw that we had not assimilated the power and scope of technology...
...He understood that this kind of progress had far outstripped man's moral and reflective development...
...According to Orwell's friend, the British novelist Anthony Powell, Orwell was in some ways rather stern and priggish...
Vol. 110 • May 1983 • No. 10
