A Tribute to George Orwell

George Orwell is not only my favorite novelist, but he’s also a man that I deeply admire on a personal level. He did not simply write about his anti-totalitarianism, he lived it. So often, intellectuals are quick to warn the public that things are a good deal more complicated than they appear. Often they are right, but, on some important political questions, this sort of analysis has been dead wrong. Orwell stood out because he was willing to point out when a certain matter was actually a great deal simpler than his fellow writers were letting on (Hitchens). Notably, Orwell saw the evil at the core of Stalin’s regime. Many other European intellectuals spent decades praising of defending Stalinism and spent decades more apologizing for or justifying its crimes. Orwell’s lucidity and perception put him on the winning side of that argument. Orwell’s life was, in many was, the triumph of a common man with an uncommon drive and sense of justice.

The events of George Orwell’s life shaped his political and moral views and, thereby, influenced his most famous works of literature. Eric Arthur Blair, who later adopted the pen name George Orwell, was born on 25 June 1903 in India. When Eric was only one year old, his mother took him and his sister to England while his father, who was a British civil servant, remained in India. As a result, Eric rarely saw his father during his childhood and youth. His mother, who came from aristocratic ancestors but lacked the resources to maintain all of the expected aristocratic heirs, sent Eric to St. Cyprian’s boarding school at the age of 5. Young Eric helped make this possible by earning a scholarship. Orwell later wrote a memoir about his time at St. Cyprian’s entitled Such, Such Were the Joys. There he explains that he came to see St. Cyprian’s as a microcosm of totalitarian state. Eric felt that he was under constant surveillance, that the strong were allowed to dominate the weak, and that the education he received there was entirely superficial.

After leaving the boarding school and attending Eton College for a number of years, Eric opted to join the Indian Police Service rather than pursue a university degree. As a member of the service, Eric was stationed in Burma. Witnessing the evils of imperialism and racism first-hand, Blair would later write a novel entitled Burmese Days along with several essays about the period. At age 24, Blair returned to Britain, resigned from the Indian Police Service, and decided to become a writer. Always a man keenly aware of social injustice, Blair began a study of the “underclass” in Paris and London. To gain a depth of experience and understanding about the poor, Blair often lived and dressed the part of a tramp himself. On the topic he wrote a number of eye-opening essays, including “How the Poor Die,” along with the first book to bear the pen name George Orwell—Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) (Hitchens, 18). After years of speaking for the disenfranchised, Orwell began his famous fight against fascism—on the battlefield and in print. In December of 1936, he traveled to Spain and joined the anti-fascist forces there. In Spain, Orwell aligned himself with the left-leaning anti-fascist forces. Notably, however, he was one of the first to see the evil nature of Stalinism, while many of his leftist colleagues were still praising the USSR as a modern utopia. Of course, the intellectual battles were only part of the danger in Spain. On the battlefield, Orwell suffered a gunshot wound to the neck. Thankfully, he recovered from the injury and returned to England, then a nation already anxious that war would again consume Europe. When Britain did indeed declare war in 1939, Orwell was deemed unfit for military service because of his tuberculin lungs. Even so, Orwell assisted in the war effort in any way he could.

Throughout much of the war, Orwell labored on his scathing and controversial satire of Stalinism, Animal Farm. Orwell struggled to find a publisher willing to print such a comprehensive rebuke of the “Soviet allies,” and some potential publishers petitioned Orwell to make political changes to the text, which he refused. Eventually, Orwell found a publisher and the novel was published in 1944. Five years later, in 1949, Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, was published. The book was released to popular and critical acclaim, but Orwell did not live to enjoy much of it. The next year, Orwell died in a London hospital due to complications from tuberculosis at the age of forty-six. His impact, however, only increased after his death. In fact, his books even had an impact behind the Iron Curtain. For example, Nineteen Eighty-Four was secretly circulated among dissenters within the inner circle of the Communist Party in Ukraine. Those who read it were shocked that a man from England who had never traveled to the USSR could understand so thoroughly the psychology of totalitarianism (Hitchens). In his 46 years, Orwell diagnosed and helped defeat the three primary political crises of the 20^th century: imperialism, Stalinism, and totalitarianism (Hitchens). His warnings, however, will never lose their resonance or importance so long as there is one totalitarian regime upon the earth or one democracy at risk of devolving into totalitarianism—that is to say, forever. As Christopher Hitchens puts it, “Not bad for one short lifetime.”

George Orwell provides an inspiring example of a man who stood up against oppression, even when it made him unpopular with his peers. Orwell was not an uncommon genius. He was simply a man with a deep sensitivity to injustice and a dogged determination to maintain his intellectual freedom. He has shown that it does not take an Einsteinian mind or a Herculean body to stand against the horrors of totalitarianism and oppression. Orwell would have been the first to admit that he possessed neither. Rather, it takes people of decent intelligence and moral fiber who refuse to deny that 2 + 2 = 4. Orwell has left the rest of us with no excuses.

Cited:  Hitchens, Christopher. 2002. Why Orwell Matters. New York: Basic Books.
Note: This essay contains elements adapted from an essay I submitted for PL SC 320 (Amer. Politics Through Literature) with Professor Byron Daynes at BYU.

Christ and the Culture Wars

This quote by Steven Colbert prompted a lively Facebook debate that focused primarily on whether or not the government should use tax revenue to care for the poor as a matter of principle. My view on this question has evolved over the years, but I'm not going to weigh in on that debate today. I think people of faith can be of the opinion that the government should use tax revenue to help the poor and others can be of the opinion that assistance to the poor should be handled entirely by private charities and, of course, many are somewhere in between along the spectrum. What no Christian can reasonably disagree about is that we have a clear moral responsibility to help the poor.

The problem is, Christians in public life in generally are entirely consumed with Culture War issues like gay marriage, abortion, prayer in schools, etc. to the exclusion of almost everything else. It seems to me that the priorities of American Christians are sorely out of order if they are spending almost all of their time and resources fighting the battle against gay marriage and very little on actively helping the poor.

American Christianity has become more American than Christian. I'm still somewhat baffled by the religious right's love of Ayn Rand--an atheist who preached that sharing and altruism were actually immoral. The Virtue of Selfishness is one of her most famous works. If she had, perhaps, applied this only to economics I could perhaps get on board (and I think many people mistakenly believe that she is only talking about economics). She, however, is literally arguing that selfishness in all facets of life is the ideal way to live. How is that at all compatible with what Christ actually taught? It isn't.

The American myth (using myth in the true sense-not as a representation of falsehood, but rather as a commonly understood symbol that is evoked to represent a culturally understood truth) of the self made man has been highjacked by many members of our society and turned into an excuse to abdicate our responsibility to the poor. No man is an island an no one got where he is purely out of his own efforts. The hyper-individualistic, hyper-antagonistic form of the "Christianity" adopted by some American Christians seems to me to be far removed from anything Jesus of Nazareth would have preached. Some American Christians seem to define themselves more by the people they dislike than by the people they love. I'll add my voice to the calls for civility and unity.