Road to Wigan Pier, Part 2

Orwell’s accusation of post-war England, a society not greatly different than our own, is sobering.

But it is no use saying that people like the Brookers are just disgusting and trying to put them out of mind. For they exist in tens and hundreds of thousands; they are one of the characteristic by-products of the modern world. You cannot disregard them if you accept the civilization that produced them.

He continues in the second part of Road to Wigan Pier, and mutatis mutandis, again chills the blood of any American reader:

The same streak of soggy half-baked insincerity runs through all ‘advanced’ opinion. Take the question of imperialism, for instance. Every left-wing ‘intellectual’ is, as a matter of course, an anti-imperialist. He claims to be outside the empire-racket as automatically and self-righteously as he claims to be outside the class-racket. Even the right-wing ‘intellectual’, who is not definitely in revolt against British imperialism, pretends to regard it with a sort of amused detachment. It is so easy to be witty about the British Empire. The White Man's Burden and ‘Rule, Britannia’ and Kipling's novels and Anglo-Indian bores — who could even mention such things without a snigger? And is there any cultured person who has not at least once in his life made a joke about that old Indian havildar who said that if the British left India there would not be a rupee or a virgin left between Peshawar and Delhi (or wherever it was)? That is the attitude of the typical left-winger towards imperialism, and a thoroughly flabby, boneless attitude it is. For in the last resort, the only important question is. Do you want the British Empire to hold together or do you want it to disintegrate? And at the bottom of his heart no Englishman, least of all the kind of person who is witty about Anglo-Indian colonels, does want it to disintegrate. For, apart from any other consideration, the high standard of life we enjoy in England depends upon our keeping a tight hold on the Empire, particularly the tropical portions of it such as India and Africa. Under the capitalist system, in order that England may live in comparative comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation — an evil state of affairs, but you acquiesce in it every time you step into a taxi or eat a plate of strawberries and cream. The alternative is to throw the Empire overboard and reduce England to a cold and unimportant little island where we should all have to work very hard and live mainly on herrings and potatoes. That is the very last thing that any left-winger wants. Yet the left-winger continues to feel that he has no moral responsibility for imperialism. He is perfectly ready to accept the products of Empire and to save his soul by sneering at the people who hold the Empire together.

I should like to think even among the “detached right-wingers” there is a more appropriate sobriety regarding the Imperium Americana; perhaps we are only more naïve. Yet as regards third-world debt, political autonomy, and international safety, we have recapitulated the passive attitudes Orwell here criticizes. What, then, is to be done? Orwell says,

And all the while everyone who uses his brain knows that Socialism, as a world-system and wholeheartedly applied, is a way out. It would at least ensure our getting enough to eat even if it deprived us of everything else. Indeed, from one point of view, Socialism is such elementary common sense that I am sometimes amazed that it has not established itself already. The world is a raft sailing through space with, potentially, plenty of provisions for everybody; the idea that we must all cooperate and see to it that everyone does his fair share of the work and gets his fair share of the provisions seems so blatantly obvious that one would say that no one could possibly fail to accept it unless he had some corrupt motive for clinging to the present system.

He provides us, however, with his own rebuttal while answering an objection to socialists.

For instance, I have here a prospectus from another summer school which states its terms per week and then asks me to say ‘whether my diet is ordinary or vegetarian’. They take it for granted, you see, that it is necessary to ask this question. This kind of thing is by itself sufficient to alienate plenty of decent people. And their instinct is perfectly sound, for the food-crank is by definition a person willing to cut himself off from human society in hopes of adding five years on to the life of his carcass; that is, a person but of touch with common humanity.

For if indeed, “the world is a raft sailing through space”—and that image is the real shock of his argument—then we probably could, indeed, make some revolution that would ensure fair distribution of the raft’s resources. But as he says, it would cut us off from human society to achieve that hope; or to put it another way, enacting socialism in the present day would require us to sacrifice that “common humanity” which would be the only worthwhile end of socialism…for it certainly can’t be “adding five years to various carcasses.”

This is the argument that refutes Wigan Pier. There is yet, contained within that paragraph, the revelation of a deeper misunderstanding. Is the world a raft sailing through space? The whole pragmatism of the socialist scheme rests on the assumption that the visible world is “all there is,” and any ideas about how to make it better must start from that common assumption. The Christian idea, which, despite resistance from entrenched American/Capitalist interests, would probably resemble socialism fairly closely in its full working-out, takes a very different first premise than “sailing on a raft through space.”

Even among those poor souls which believe some Platonic heaven awaits disembodied souls (to be transported there by rapture) there remains the confession that defeats secular socialism: Lord have mercy on me, a sinner. Contained within that one sentence are the two truths that the secular socialist could not succeed without: Original Sin, and Mercy. To design some political scheme for men which does not recognize these two character truths is as misguided as building a terrarium for fish. It is, no matter how well engineered, a failure to grasp what a man is. Orwell, understanding imperfectly that there remained yet some shortcoming, proposed a direction by which his ideas might (had they survived) met the Kingdom halfway to the water: to abandon the blind secularist allegiance to progress and seek justice.

The question of Kingdom politics deserves, sometime later, its own entry; especially as to how Original Sin makes a difference, or to put it another way, What is a Man? For now I feel obliged to paste the Orwell quotes that weren’t vital to the topic at hand, but are too well-written to be omitted entirely. I’ve found, to my perpetual frustration, that I can’t write about political subjects without falling into stale rhetoric. Road to Wigan Pier is worth reading just to hear these subjects discussed intelligently, even if you don’t agree with the point.

On objections to Socialists:

Question a person of this type, and you will often get the semi-frivolous answer: “I don’t object to Socialism, but I do object to Socialists.” Logically it is a poor argument, but carries weight with many people. As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.

On what the crank-Socialists are really after: (And apparently librarians and elementary school teachers as well)

Sometimes I look at a Socialist — the intellectual, tract-writing type of Socialist, with his pullover, his fuzzy hair, and his Marxian quotation — and wonder what the devil his motive really is. It is often difficult to believe that it is a love of anybody, especially of the working class, from whom he is of all people the furthest removed. The underlying motive of many Socialists, I believe, is simply a hypertrophied sense of order. The present state of affairs offends them not because it causes misery, still less because it makes freedom impossible, but because it is untidy; what they desire, basically, is to reduce the world to something resembling a chessboard.

On the growing economic blight of the middle class, a phenomenon we may be observing in our own country:

It hardly needs pointing out that at this moment we are in a very serious mess, so serious that even the dullest-witted people find it difficult to remain unaware of it. We are living in a world in which nobody is free, in which hardly anybody is secure, in which it is almost impossible to be honest and to remain alive. For enormous blocks of the working class the conditions of life are such as I have described in the opening chapters of this book, and there is no chance of those conditions showing any fundamental improvement. The very best the English-working class can hope for is an occasional temporary decrease in unemployment when this or that industry is artificially stimulated by, for instance, rearmament. Even the middle classes, for the first time in their history, are feeling the pinch. They have not known actual hunger yet, but more and more of them find themselves floundering in a sort of deadly net of frustration in which it is harder and harder to persuade yourself that you are either happy, active, or useful. Even the lucky ones at the top, the real bourgeoisie, are haunted periodically by a consciousness of the miseries below, and still more by fears of the menacing future. And this is merely a preliminary stage, in a country still rich with the loot of a hundred years.

On everyone I ever went to school with at Northwestern:

Meanwhile one can observe on every side that dreary phenomenon, the middle-class person who is an ardent Socialist at twenty-five and a sniffish Conservative at thirty-five.

On how the poor view public education:

And again, take the working-class attitude towards 'education'. How different it is from ours, and how immensely sounder! Working people often have a vague reverence for learning in others, but where 'education' touches their own lives they see through it and reject it by a healthy instinct. The time was when I used to lament over quite imaginary pictures of lads of fourteen dragged protesting from their lessons and set to work at dismal jobs. It seemed to me dreadful that the doom of a 'job' should descend upon anyone at fourteen. Of course I know now that there is not one working-class boy in a thousand who does not pine for the day when he will leave school. He wants to be doing real work, not wasting his time on ridiculous rubbish like history and geography. To the working class, the notion of staying at school till you are nearly grown-up seems merely contemptible and unmanly. The idea of a great big boy of eighteen, who ought to be bringing a pound a week home to his parents, going to school in a ridiculous uniform and even being caned for not doing his lessons! Just fancy a working-class boy of eighteen allowing himself to be caned! He is a man when the other is still a baby. Ernest Pontifex, in Samuel Butler's Way of All Flesh, after he had had a few glimpses of real life, looked back on his public school and university education and found it a 'sickly, debilitating debauch'. There is much in middle-class life that looks sickly and debilitating when you see it from a working-class angle.

On the silent assent to coal; what may be parallel to our reliance on oil:

Watching coal-miners at work, you realize momentarily what different universes people inhabit. Down there where coal is dug is a sort of world apart which one can quite easily go through life without ever hearing about. Probably majority of people would even prefer not to hear about it. Yet it is the absolutely necessary counterpart of our world above. Practically everything we do, from eating an ice to crossing the Atlantic, and from baking a loaf to writing a novel, involves the use of coal, directly or indirectly. For all the arts of peace coal is needed; if war breaks out it is needed all the more. In time of revolution the miner must go on working or the revolution must stop, for revolution as much as reaction needs coal. Whatever may be happening on the surface, the hacking and shoveling have got to continue without a pause, or at any rate without pausing for more than a few weeks at the most. In order that Hitler may march the goose-step, that the Pope may denounce Bolshevism, that the cricket crowds may assemble at Lords, that the poets may scratch one another's backs, coal has got to be forthcoming. But on the whole we are not aware of it; we all know that we 'must have coal', but we seldom or never remember what coal-getting involves. Here am I sitting writing in front of my comfortable coal fire. It is April but I still need a fire. Once a fortnight the coal cart drives up to the door and men in leather jerkins carry the coal indoors in stout sacks smelling of tar and shoot it clanking into the coal-hole under the stairs. It is only very rarely, when I make a definite mental-effort, that I connect this coal with that far-off labor in the mines. It is just 'coal'--something that I have got to have; black stuff that arrives mysteriously from nowhere in particular, like manna except that you have to pay for it. You could quite easily drive a car right across the north of England and never once remember that hundreds of feet below the road you are on the miners are hacking at the coal. Yet in a sense it is the miners who are driving your car forward. Their lamp-lit world down there is as necessary to the daylight world above as the root is to the flower.

Currently reading Iliad 5, Mark, Livy Book 2, the Summa Contra, Bede, the Apologia, Les Miserables, and the newest Dave Barry book (a gift from Pax).