Road to Wigan Pier, or, "Oh, Eric, no" · 11:54pm Aug 25th, 2020
Turns out Road to Wigan Pier - a book by George Orwell, though this one's without the pseudonym, so it's really written by Eric Arthur Blair, so I'm going to call him Eric to refer to the person and Orwell as his brand - is actually two books in one. The first half is thorough reporting on the poverty of coal mining communities in Britain during the 1940s, a very interesting look into the poverty of the very recent past:
But there is no doubt about the deadening, debilitating effect of unemployment upon everybody, married or single, and upon men more than upon women. The best intellects will not stand up against it. Once or twice it has happened to me to meet unemployed men of genuine literary ability; there are others whom I haven't met but whose work I occasionally see in the magazines. Now and again, at long intervals, these men will produce an article or a short story which is quite obviously better than most of the stuff that gets whooped up by the blurbreviewers. Why, then, do they make so little use of their talents? They have all the leisure in the world; why don't they sit down and write books? Because to write books you need not only comfort and solitude—and solitude is never easy to attain in a working-class home—you also need peace of mind. You can't settle to anything, you can't command the spirit of hope in which anything has got to be created, with that dull evil cloud of unemployment hanging over you.
The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn't. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'.
And then there is the queer spectacle of modern electrical science showering miracles upon people with empty bellies. You may shiver all night for lack of bedclothes, but in the morning you can go to the public library and read the news that has been telegraphed for your benefit from San Francisco and Singapore. Twenty million people are underfed but literally everyone in England has access to a radio. What we have lost in food we have gained in electricity. Whole sections of the working class who have been plundered of all they really need are being compensated, in part, by cheap luxuries which mitigate the surface of life.
The typical post-war factory is not a gaunt barrack or an awful chaos of blackness and belching chimneys; it is a glittering white structure of concrete, glass and steel, surrounded by green lawns and beds of tulips. Look at the factories you pass as you travel out of London on the GWR; they may not be aesthetic triumphs but certainly they are not ugly in the same way as the Sheffield gasworks. But in any case, though the ugliness of industrialism is the most obvious thing about it and the thing every newcomer exclaims against, I doubt whether it is centrally important. And perhaps it is not even desirable, industrialism being what it is, that it should learn to disguise itself as something else. As Mr Aldous Huxley has truly remarked, a dark Satanic mill ought to look like a dark Satanic mill and not like the temple of mysterious and splendid gods.
[...] Its real evil lies far deeper and is quite ineradicable. It is important to remember this, because there is always a temptation to think that industrialism is harmless so long as it is clean and orderly.
The hoary legend of Communism leading to Fascism ... The element of truth in it is this: that the appearance of Communist activity warns the ruling class that democratic Labour Parties are no longer capable of holding the working class in check, and that capitalist dictatorship must assume another form if it is to survive.
The second half, though, Eric goes a bit off the deep end, denouncing everyone and declaring enemies of - well, just about everyone, really:
In addition to this there is the horrible—the really disquieting—prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words 'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist and feminist in England.
Bit of a weird list of things to find reprehensible, isn't it? But, he does, and thinks you should too;
Of course, as I have suggested already, it is not strictly fair to judge a movement by its adherents; but the point is that people invariably do so, and that the popular conception of Socialism is coloured by the conception of a Socialist as a dull or disagreeable person. 'Socialism' is pictured as a state of affairs in which our more vocal Socialists would feel thoroughly at home.
This does great harm to the cause. The ordinary man may not flinch from a dictatorship of the proletariat, if you offer it tactfully; offer him a dictatorship of the prigs, and he gets ready to fight. There is a widespread feeling that any civilisation in which Socialism was a reality would bear the same relation to our own as a brand-new bottle of colonial burgundy bears to a few spoonfuls of first-class Beaujolais.
We live, admittedly, amid the wreck of a civilisation, but it has been a great civilisation in its day, and in patches it still flourishes almost undisturbed. It still has its bouquet, so to speak; whereas the imagined Socialist future, like the colonial burgundy, tastes only of iron and water.
Hence the fact, which is really a disastrous one, that artists of any consequence can never be persuaded into the Socialist fold. This is particularly the case with the writer whose political opinions are more directly and obviously connected with his work than those of, say, a painter.
(-Eric Arthur Blair, AKA George Orwell, Socialist, Author)
If one faces facts one must admit that nearly everything describable as Socialist literature is dull, tasteless, and bad. Consider the situation in England at the present moment. A whole generation has grown up more or less in familiarity with the idea of Socialism; and yet the high-water mark, so to speak, of Socialist literature is W. H. Auden, a sort of gutless Kipling,[1]and the even feebler poets who are associated with him. Every writer of consequence and every book worth reading is on the other side. I am willing to believe that it is otherwise in Russia— about which I know nothing, however—for presumably in post-revolutionary Russia the mere violence of events would tend to throw up a vigorous literature of sorts. But it is certain that in Western Europe Socialism has produced no literature worth having.
(George Orwell, AKA Eric Arthur Blair, Author of 1984 and Animal Farm)
But it gets better;
This, then, is the superficial aspect of the ordinary man's recoil from Socialism. I know the whole dreary argument very thoroughly, because I know it from both sides.
Oh, really, Eric? Eric, you just wrote "There is a widespread feeling that any civilisation in which Socialism was a reality would bear the same relation to our own as a brand-new bottle of colonial burgundy bears to a few spoonfuls of first-class Beaujolais." Eric, you just wrote;
That was what we were taught—the lower classes smell. And here, obviously, you are at an impassable barrier. For no feeling of like or dislike is quite so fundamental as a physical feeling. Race hatred, religious hatred, differences of education, of temperament, of intellect, even differences of moral code, can be got over; but physical repulsion cannot. You can have an affection for a murderer or a sodomite, but you cannot have an affection for a man whose breath stinks—habitually stinks, I mean. However well you may wish him, however much you may admire his mind and character, if his breath stinks he is horrible and in your heart of hearts you will hate him.
Eric. Please. Come on.
This is about the point where he starts going on a very weird anti-technology bent, claiming that automation would make everyone soft and weak and useless.
All mechanical progress is towards greater and greater efficiency; ultimately, therefore, towards a world in which nothing goes wrong. But in a world in which nothing went wrong, many of the qualities which Mr Wells regards as 'godlike' would be no more valuable than the animal faculty of moving the ears. The beings in Men Like Gods and The Dream are represented, for example, as brave, generous and physically strong. But in a world from which physical danger had been banished—and obviously mechanical progress tends to eliminate danger—would physical courage be likely to survive? Could it survive? And why should physical strength survive in a world where there was never the need for physical labour? As for such qualities as loyalty, generosity, etc., in a world where nothing went wrong, they would be not only irrelevant but probably unimaginable. The truth is that many of the qualities we admire in human beings can only function in opposition to some kind of disaster, pain or difficulty; but the tendency of mechanical progress is to eliminate disaster, pain and difficulty. In books like The Dream and Men Like Gods it is assumed that such qualities as strength, courage, generosity, etc., will be kept alive because they are comely qualities and necessary attributes of a full human being. Presumably, for instance, the inhabitants of Utopia would create artificial dangers in order to exercise their courage, and do dumb-bell exercises to harden muscles which they would never be obliged to use. And here you observe the huge contradiction which is usually present in the idea of progress. The tendency of mechanical progress is to make your environment safe and soft; and yet you are striving to keep yourself brave and hard. You are at the same moment furiously pressing forward and desperately holding back. It is as though a London stockbroker should go to his office in a suit of chain mail and insist on talking medieval Latin.
He comes back to this, making this wild assertion;
Mr Wells would probably retort that the world can never become foolproof, because, however high a standard of efficiency you have reached, there is always some greater difficulty ahead. For example (this is Mr Wells's favourite idea—he has used it in goodness knows how many perorations), when you have got this planet of ours perfectly into trim, you start upon the enormous task of reaching and colonising another. But this is merely to push the objective further into the fixture; the objective itself remains the same. Colonise another planet, and the game of mechanical progress begins anew; for the foolproof world you have substituted the foolproof solar system—the foolproof universe. In tying yourself to the ideal of mechanical efficiency, you tie yourself to the ideal of softness. But softness is repulsive; and thus all progress is seen to be a frantic struggle towards an objective which you hope and pray will never be reached. Now and again, but not often, you meet somebody who grasps that what is usually called progress also entails what is usually called degeneracy, and who is nevertheless in favour of progress.
Okay, so, there are some in my audience that might be tacitly agreeing with Eric's tracts here. Eric's a bright little bunny in other parts of the book, after all. Maybe I, as a fruit-juice drinking, sandal-wearing, vegetarian, feminist prig... well, maybe I'm just personally offended by these truth bombs he's dishing out.
To which I reply; These beliefs in hardness and softness means that he literally can't even imagine hobbies, as a concept, in 2020. His worldview doesn't allow for the existence of computer games. Seriously, the conclusions he draws from these ideas are absolutely bizarre:
The function of the machine is to save work. In a fully mechanised world all the dull drudgery will be done by machinery, leaving us free for more interesting pursuits. So expressed, this sounds splendid. It makes one sick to see half a dozen men sweating their guts out to dig a trench for a waterpipe, when some easily devised machine would scoop the earth out in a couple of minutes. Why not let the machine do the work and the men go and do something else? But presently the question arises, what else are they to do? Supposedly they are set free from 'work' in order that they may do something which is not 'work'.
But what is work and what is not work? Is it work to dig, to carpenter, to plant trees, to fell trees, to ride, to fish, to hunt, to feed chickens, to play the piano, to take photographs, to build a house, to cook, to sew, to trim hats, to mend motor-bicycles? All of these things are work to somebody, and all of them are play to somebody. There are in fact very few activities which cannot be classed either as work or play according as you choose to regard them. The labourer set free from digging may want to spend his leisure, or part of it, in playing the piano, while the professional pianist may be only too glad to get out and dig at the potato patch. Hence the antithesis between work, as something intolerably tedious, and not-work, as something desirable, is false.
No, like, for real, this is going to keep going, but I want to really stress here; Orwell doesn't really get that the professional pianist having more time to plant potatoes, and the potato-grower having more time to play piano, is not a contradiction - he doesn't understand that doing things for fun and for a living changes the context you approach that activity, because he's still seeing them as fundamentally the same thing. The context is irrelevant.
This is especially bizarre given that the first half of the book is largely about the horrors of coal mining in the industrializing era.
I'll try not to interrupt this next bit, but I will editorialize where he makes wildly inaccurate assertions. If Eric doesn't like it, he can sue me.
The truth is that when a human being is not eating, drinking, sleeping, making love, talking, playing games or merely lounging about—and these things will not fill up a lifetime[citation needed]—he needs work and usually looks for it, though he may not call it work. Above the level of a third- or fourth-grade moron, life has got to be lived largely in terms of effort. For man is not, as the vulgarer hedonists seem to suppose, a kind of walking stomach; he has also got a hand, an eye and a brain. Cease to use your hands, and you have lopped off a huge chunk of your consciousness.
And now consider again those half-dozen men who were digging the trench for the water-pipe. A machine has set them free from digging, and they are going to amuse themselves with something else—carpentering, for instance. But whatever they want to do, they will find that another machine has set them free from that. For in a fully mechanised world there would be no more need to carpenter, to cook, to mend motorbicycles, etc., than there would be to dig. There is scarcely anything, from catching a whale to carving a cherry stone, that could not conceivably be done by machinery. The machine would even encroach upon the activities we now class as 'art'; it is doing so already, via the camera and the radio. Mechanise the world as fully as it might be mechanised, and whichever way you turn there will be some machine cutting you off from the chance of working—that is, of living.
At a first glance this might not seem to matter. Why should you not get on with your 'creative work' and disregard the machines that would do it for you? But it is not so simple as it sounds. Here am I, working eight hours a day in an insurance office; in my spare time I want to do something 'creative', so I choose to do a bit of carpentering—to make myself a table, for instance. Notice that from the very start there is a touch of artificiality about the whole business, for the factories can turn me out a far better table than I can make for myself. But even when I get to work on my table, it is not possible for me to feel towards it as the cabinet-maker of a hundred years ago felt towards his table, still less as Robinson Crusoe felt towards his.[citation needed] For before I start, most of the work has already been done for me by machinery. The tools I use demand the minimum of skill. I can get, for instance, planes which will cut out any moulding; the cabinet-maker of a hundred years ago would have had to do the work with chisel and gouge, which demanded real skill of eye and hand. The boards I buy are ready planed and the legs are ready turned by the lathe. I can even go to the wood-shop and buy all the parts of the table ready-made and only needing to be fitted together, my work being reduced to driving in a few pegs and using a piece of sandpaper. And if this is so at present, in the mechanised future it will be enormously more so. With the tools and materials available then, there will be no possibility of mistake, hence no room for skill. Making a table will be easier and duller than peeling a potato. In such circumstances it is nonsense to talk of 'creative work'.
If Eric hadn't spent so much time calling everyone who read Marxist theory a wanker, he might have learned enough about Marx's theory of alienation to understand that creative work is also necessarily about expression, about self-determination, and not just about skill. Skill is a form of expression, but it's not all of it. Theory of Alienation is, at the bare minimum, a great Wikipedia page to read.
As a note here, this is why consumer choice is a kind of palliative - even if you aren't tied to the creation of things, you can still derive a concrete identiy from your consumption choices. Fashion is a great example of this; There is so much variety and combination in clothing you can pick from that you can still accomplish a lot of personal expression in your outfit choices even if you never touch a sewing machine in your life.
Or, in other words; Writing on a laptop instead of with a quill nib I cut myself has made the work of writing far easier, but what it has removed is the extra difficulty between me and the expression parts of the work. Not all difficulties are rewarding to overcome, and resolving them doesn't make the work less meaningful.
But I speak too soon; Eric's about to be wrong about that too:
But it may be said, why not retain the machine and retain 'creative work'? Why not cultivate anachronisms as a sparetime hobby? Many people have played with this idea; it seems to solve with such beautiful ease the problems set by the machine. The citizen of Utopia, we are told, coming home from his daily two hours of turning a handle in the tomatocanning factory, will deliberately revert to a more primitive way of life and solace his creative instincts with a bit of fretwork, pottery-glazing or handloom-weaving. And why is this picture an absurdity—as it is, of course?
God, imagine showing Eric the front page of Reddit on any given day of April 2020.
Because of a principle that is not always recognised, though always acted upon: that so long as the machine is there, one is under an obligation to use it. No one draws water from the well when he can turn on the tap. One sees a good illustration of this in the matter of travel. Everyone who has travelled by primitive methods in an undeveloped country knows that the difference between that kind of travel and modern travel in trains, cars, etc., is the difference between life and death.
The nomad who walks or rides, with his baggage stowed on a camel or an oxcart, may suffer every kind of discomfort, but at least he is living while he is travelling; whereas for the passenger in an express train or a luxury liner his journey is an interregnum, a kind of temporary death. And yet so long as the railways exist, one has got to travel by train—or by car or aeroplane. Here am I, forty miles from London. When I want to go up to London why do I not pack my luggage onto a mule and set out on foot, making a two days' march of it? Because, with the Green Line buses whizzing past me every ten minutes, such a journey would be intolerably irksome. In order that one may enjoy primitive methods of travel, it is necessary that no other method should be available. No human being ever wants to do anything in a more cumbrous way than is necessary. Hence the absurdity of that picture of Utopians saving their souls with fretwork. In a world where everything could be done by machinery, everything would be done by machinery. Deliberately to revert to primitive methods, to use archaic tools, to put silly little difficulties in your own way, would be a piece of dilettantism, of pretty-pretty arty and craftiness. It would be like solemnly sitting down to eat your dinner with stone implements.
Look, there's a lot more I could say about this book, good and bad, but I'd like to end on a final note about Eric and his bullshit here, taking a bit from the first part of the book again;
A workingclass bachelor is a rarity, and so long as a man is married unemployment makes comparatively little alteration in his way of life. His home is impoverished but it is still a home, and it is noticeable everywhere that the anomalous position created by unemployment—the man being out of work while the woman's work continues as before—has not altered the relative status of the sexes. In a working-class home it is the man who is the master and not, as in a middle-class home, the woman or the baby. Practically never, for instance, in a working-class home, will you see the man doing a stroke of the housework. Unemployment has not changed this convention, which on the face of it seems a little unfair. The man is idle from morning to night but the woman is as busy as ever—more so, indeed, because she has to manage with less money. Yet so far as my experience goes the women do not protest. I believe that they, as well as the men, feel that a man would lose his manhood if, merely because he was out of work, he developed into a 'Mary Ann'.
Throughout Orwell's body of work are great essays. A spicy take courtesy of Neon Czolgosz; Politics and the English Language is probably the best guide to writing erotica out there - though Orwell would hate it being used in that way, it's definitely the best one I've found. His Lion and the Unicorn series is downright prophetic in explaining exactly how, and why, Fascism was doomed to lose the second world war, and in other ways it reads like it was written yesterday.
But his analysis always breaks down in the same places, for the same reasons. When he's wrong, he's not a little-bit wrong, he's great big whacks of wrong. Seriously, a close friend of his sent him out to Wigan Pier to get some of this through Eric's thick skull - when the friend read the second half of the book, he ended the friendship.
There's a reason that Orwell's works are quoted more by chauvinists than by socialists. He was a class-fetishisizing imperialist who wildly misjudged how well he dealt with those aspects of his psyche, and he was brimming with what we might call today 'toxic masculinity'.
When he made that observation of why working class women knuckled under in those situations, his first judgement was that it was to preserve the fragile masculinity of their husbands and not, as other contemporaries would write, to prevent arguments and fights in already tense and miserable situations. I would like to stress that it wasn't until just after this book was published that women could even pursue a divorce if their husband cheated on them - even though husbands could always divorce wives who did.
It wouldn't be for another 32 years for no-fault divorce legislation that Eric writes that women did the housework without complaint for their husband's sake.
This isn't a minor problem, either, this isn't a case of #cancelling Orwell - these flaws are glaring through his body of work, and they lead what would otherwise be a brilliant analyst into being blinded by his prejudices and making hilariously wrong conclusions. His ideals of hardship and masculinity led him to denouncing a future of leisure, made him believe the idea of hobbies in times of plenty were absurdities.
1984's pretty fucking gross because of it too. Seriously, if you haven't read it since you were a teenager - like I hadn't - consider going back to the first few chapters again and keeping in mind that Eric might have been a bit... well. I'll put this behind a spoiler warning.
“Tell me, what did you think of me before that day I gave you that note?”
He did not feel any temptation to tell lies to her. It was even a sort of love-offering to start off by telling the worst.
“I hated the sight of you,” he said. “I wanted to rape you and then murder you afterwards. Two weeks ago I thought seriously of smashing your head in with a cobble-stone.”
There's a degree that Winston is exaggerated, hyperbolic, a portrayal of how a man might think in this dystopia. But unfortunately they seem to reflect a lot of Eric's real views, based on the letters he wrote, among other things.
1984 and Wigan Pier share a similar flaw; The work acknowledges the oppression of women, then shows no further interest or curiosity in exploring it. Women are a footnote in Orwell's world view. His thoughts for the future are always for the men and the masculine in it, often enough that you might forget that they're half the population. He certainly seems to.
It's the same with his class prejudices, his racism, his imperialism. He's wrong a lot more often than he's right whenever these come into the mix, and it's honestly a tragedy.
Anyway, TL;DR, George Orwell was the Vaush of the 1940s.
Today I learned that trying to explain the concept of e-sports to George Orwell would probably make his head explode. Imagine, not merely a hobby in a time of automation, not merely one facilitated by technological devices, but one that has been turned around and made into a form of work all its own!
Also, I'd like to take a moment to appreciate "The citizen of Utopia... coming home from his daily two hours of turning a handle in the tomatocanning factory," because it's the kind of "calculating hyperdrive jumps with a slide rule" sort of vision of the future that I adore in its flagrant yet quaint inaccuracy.
But yeah, it's always important to recognize one's own biases and limited perspective. And maybe talk this kind of thing out with other people before making broad, sweeping statements about human nature. (Of course, those who think to check other perspectives probably aren't the sort of people who'd make broad, sweeping statements about human nature in general.)
Orwell was definitely a man of his times in many ways. To be fair, though, so were most of the socialist pundits of his day, and many were humourless, classist, sexist preachy, jackasses, most commonly from the aristocracy or upper class, and had a decidedly paternalistic attitude toward the working and underclasses; much like Orwell himself at times. And we can see a lot of his aversion to the socialist/communists in what he observed in the Soviet Union and experienced in the Spanish Civil War (Homage to Catalonia). It didn't help that Orwell was effectively a Trotskyite leaning toward left-libertarianism/anarchism, while the rest of the socialist/communist world was either Leninist/Stalinist, or some form of quasi-Tolstoy-ish pacifistic socialism (although Tolstoy himself was a Georgist).
His quote "that artists of any consequence can never be persuaded into the Socialist fold" is a bit backwards, but not entirely unfounded. The majority of the art community of the time was still mired in Academia (particularly the French), and thus the capitalist culture. There were those who rebelled, but they were the abstract artists and anti-artists -- the Futurists, the DaDaists, the Expressionists, the Surrealists, and many others. Those movements were just as vilified as by the communists as by the fascists; both of whom derided art for art's sake, and insisted it serve as propaganda to be considered legitimate.
Not that that's entirely different from many socialist thinkers of today. Inclusionary, intersectional socialist thinkers seem to be generally the minority, and younger.
Your quote from 1984 is a bit lacking in context as well. Prior to that exchange, Julia had been an icon for the Party, particular the prudish "Anti-Sex League"; and Winston at that time was rebelling strongly and violently against both. At the time he describes, she was the epitome of the oppression he was trying to escape; though his attitudes and methods in doing so proved puerile and childishly ineffectual.
But yeah, he was definitely still a man of his times and culture; with all the ingrained, unexamined prejudices and snobbery that implies.
That essay's not just a guide on writing erotica. My first thought was scientific literature. I haven't read too many books and papers, but it was enough that most of what he criticizes sounded familiar.
From that I'll conclude that scientists need to read more porn so they can write better papers.
I want to use a time to machine, force Orwell to play some video games and make him enjoy it.
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The more context I add to the 1984 quote the worse it gets. That's a shock-cut for sure, but the broader role the Anti-Sex league plays is to emphasize how women's sexuality is a resource men are being deprived of, and less in terms of what it means to the women. Which is why Julia is called "a rebel only from the waist down".
And I don't think it's really enough to say he was "a man of his times", because a lot of his prejudices were notable even given the historical context of them. Orwell sucked even relative to his time period,
I would also point out that many of the most significant people in cinema by that point were socialists or communists; Fritz Lang, Charlie Chaplin, Leo Kuleschov, Dalton Trumbo, etc. it's just that 'cinema' isn't often included in what's considered art.
Just how many copies of Wigan Pier did Ted Kaszynski have in his personal library? Those excerpts seem like they could have inspired the Unibomber Manifesto.
It's funny, I don't think I've ever actually read any of this man's work, which is weird. Especially considering how much science fiction I've consumed over the years. Anyway, from what you've presented here, it's almost as if Eric/George could see clearly at the large scale - whole societies, the endpoints and goals of economies or governments - but not the individual. Like, he pointed out all the flaws of capitalism and fascism in a heartbeat, but failed to comprehend the worth of women, or that people have an innate desire to create and better themselves.
5342934 I believe George Jetson would sympathize with the handle-turner, although I can't remember just exactly what his leisure time was taken up with. Certainly not gardening. Hm...
You could have stopped quite easily before the word 'But' and been perfectly accurate. Authors do not generally write simple self-inserts. They write characters based upon their own characteristics and those of others, and more importantly, within the context of their times. We do not write about Sophocles' great plays and bemoan how they do not hold a tallow candle to Hamilton, or complain about the mathematical inaccuracies of Charles Babbage's works when fed into the appropriate Excel spreadsheet. In addition, the definition of terms has changed greatly since Eric's time, for a socialist in these days transported back to his Wigan Pier would scarcely recognize the application. It is a tribute to his genius as a writer that he has placed certain concepts in such plain and simple words that even our school children of today recognize them in Animal Farm and such. To be honest, I've only read snippets out of Road, but I have read most of the Gulag Archipelago, which was quite a bit of work for a teenager, and opened my eyes considerably. And I'll admit to having learned mostly about Road from Jordan Peterson's lectures, because he was deeply affected by it too.
Well, I guess I feel a bit better that I never got around to reading 1984 etc.
As you say, his complete inability to comprehend doing something because you enjoy it is baffling. And he also seems to not understand the concept of setting yourself a challenge. Or accepting that there is a purpose to doing things beyond Being The Very Best Like No One Ever Was. By his argument if you aren’t the best craftsman in the world you might as well jump off a cliff.
And on top of basic misapprehensions about human nature, leisure, HARDNESS, etc the sexism is really gross.
The one thing that I haven’t seen mentioned is that he’s saying ‘look how awful the arts are under socialists’ and then demanding you compare it to the best of the entire canon of (western) literature and art. So a few thousand years of tradition against the artists in a relatively new movement. Even with equal or better proportions of great artists the old one will still win by shear numbers.
I think it’s interesting that he sees automation as fundamentally taking things away and giving nothing back, with an argument that could be used on literally everything until back before we were strictly speaking humans. He doesn’t see technology as adding capacity, or creating new opportunities. For a writer he shows a shocking lack of vision.
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I'll just say that the chunk of Wigan Pier he quotes at length - "But is it? 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." - didn't make the cut for this blog.
I laugh, because the reason it didn't make it into this blog is because by the point of the book he's dropping it in - and Pete omits all the specific examples Eric gives in the middle of it, which is fair enough, because they're miserable to slog through - it's hysterically hyporitical, and just outright pathetic. Like, Eric goes "they don't love anyone, only hate-" and then he denounces a bunch of people and calls George Bernard Shaw a fascist. That part, Peterson omits from his quote.
Look, I'll say here the problem with Pete and Eric's distillation of this is simple; There's no hypocrisy in middle class Marxists being uncomfortable around the poor and hating the rich. There's no contradiction, no failure in that, because they're pursuing a world where neither exist.
Here's a quote from the page before where Pete picks up;
Eric goes on a bunch of anti-intellectual tirades here, and is disgusted of anyone for wanting a 'softer' job, and softness in general. He hates the middle class, a lot, and literally fetishizes the hard-work labourer class. Not the working class as a whole - retail and administration jobs don't count as working class in his worldview, even though they're the vast majority of working class jobs in 2020.
In short, Eric's mad because he wants a hard-tacks working class world, which is why he's furious of the automation that could deny him that. What he despises is any socialist who'd want a world where what was available and normal to the middle class could be had by everyone.
And, I'm sorry, but what he loved about the poor he loved as a tourist. It was a life he could constantly comment on and then retreat from. He wasn't better than his contemporaries because of his willingness to go among them, he was going among them so that he could write a Noble Savage mythos for white people.
EDIT: SPEAKING OF ERIC WRITING NOBLE SAVAGE MYTHOS:
Unfortunately, internet searches featuring "orwell" and "fascist" just brings up trash faffing the dead man's genitals straight off, so I can't properly quote or attribute this, but the best explanation I saw of Orwell was: in any other country in Europe, Orwell would have been quite properly and happily a fascist. Unfortunately for him, he was British, and in Britain only the socialists and communists had an organized and energetic mass movement. Fascism in Britain was just boring, inbred syphilitics who had already controlled the country for generations and so had no need for young firebrands. So poor Orwell had no choice but to cram his square peg into a round hole.
And before someone mentions Oswald Mosley, let me remind you that not only did he not organize any football clubs, but he gave up after getting owned by a few Jewish gangsters.
Although, for the people citing video games as a refutation of Orwell, this is simply missing the point. He lacked the imagination to predict video games or video game tournaments, but they are exactly what he means when talks about a sad future filled with simulated dangers for bored people who want to claim some degree of valor or power for themselves.
Not that Orwell was correct. The "hardest" men have, throughout all human history, been those who evaded labor by enslaving their fellows. From Spartans to SEALs and knights to samurai, the most important part of being "hard" is that you have hours each day to dedicate to working out and sparring so you can either stand toe-to-toe against others who do the same, or mow your way through dozens of poor goat farmers.
Although gaming ability might be useful in using drones to mow down dozens of poor goat farmers, so maybe I was wrong to say video gamers aren't modern day knights?
I've confused myself.
As a little aside, I can't not think of the article in The Economist from a month or two ago, in which the writer ranted against high-hourly-rate professionals insisting on pursuing the baking of bread after the relaxation of the lock down.
The issue the writer had was that a professional baker could make better, cheaper bread (taking into account the previously cited hourly-rate) and thus one was obliged to get that. No apparent value in pursuing inefficient (dare I say, "soft" ) hobbies, it seems.
Jesus Christ, I really had to read this one twice. If you don't ride a camel, you might as well be dead, and also God fuck I hate camels so much, I wish I would never have to ride a camel.
I read Animal Farm and 1984 as a teen and loved them, but as an adult I've consumed Orwell in the form of essays; All Art is Propaganda is genuinely a great book, I do recommend it, but -- yeah, Orwell definitely has big flaws, they show through the cracks often, and when he says something stupid he says things that are monumentally stupid.
Not to play armchair psychologist or anything, but I've always thought, y'know. There's this essay Orwell wrote, Such Were The Joys, a multi-chaptered look into his own childhood and the environment he grew up in -- one where class was everything, where you were worth as much as the money your father made, where starvation and physical suffering was meant to build character else you grow soft, where hygiene was always a choice, and thus those who were dirty chose to be dirty, and inspired feelings of repugnancy. And then I read these bits of Road to Wigan Pier, and like.
Hm. I see a pattern, is what I mean.
Luckily for Eric, we live in a time where every idiot of the past can, if so desired, be viewed through the rose-tinted glasses of the idiots of the present.
No matter what any famous or infamous historical figure might have said with the knowledge and experience of their time, there's always someone to be found who says the same or worse despite the knowledge and experience of ours, with the only difference being their relative success.
(That's not to say that the things he wrote were any less hilariously horrible, but I've never actually read anything by him because he's not really a thing in German general education so I can't really give any substantial opinion on him past what's already in this blog post. But we were already comparing him to the present in a few places so I figured I could go with that)
5342960
Having read a numbers of other writers from the Interregnum through Post-War periods, I can't accept that as true. Imperialist England, just coming out of the Victorian age and throughout the Edwardian, was violently racist, xenophobic, culturally chauvinistic, sexist, and profoundly classist as if attempting to retain the feudalism of the past. If anything, Orwell was, like Kipling, somewhat liberal for his time (although admittedly not to the degree that Kipling was). Just compare him to the likes of H. C McNeil or . One need only look back at the work of his immediate predecessors like Charles Dickens to see a similar socialist-leaning bent combined with a virulent racism, sexism, and xenophobia. Also of note are his contemporary Agatha Christie, also a profound racist, classist, and anti-Semite (people only familiar with adaptations of her work instead of the original novels miss this); or the poet Ezra Pound who was an outright fascist and ardent supporter of Mussolini.
And of the cinematic artists you mentioned, only one was British, Chaplin, and his socialism was never that prominent. And at any rate, he did most of his best known work in the US; and one exception does not disprove the rule.
Lev Kuleshov, like his contemporary Sergei Eisenstein, was very much the sort of propagandist that I noted was common to the Socialist/Communist artists of the day. The fact that their films are brilliant works of art does not make them any less propaganda than, say, Triumph of the Will or Birth of a Nation. Kuleschov's attempts to create films that did not serve that purpose were firmly repressed by the Soviet state. He was also highly influential in the creation of techniques beloved of the Soviet propagandist, a form of psychological manipulation later named the "Kuleshov effect".
5343045
You're also not taking into account the profound differences in culture of the time. England was very much mired in a deferential culture; and as noted, was deeply stratified along class lines, to a degree that the US never really achieved despite its striving to do so. Orwell also exhibited strains of the Pastoralism which was quite popular in the UK since the Romantic period onward, from Blake's "dark satanic mills" to Tolkien's Middle Earth; especially among those who, like Orwell and Tolkien, had witnessed firsthand the horrors of industrialized warfare.
And, again, Orwell was very much a product of that intense class stratification; and his disdain for his own countrymen is hardly unique to him, it was a common attitude evinced by many of his contemporaries. As for his railing against smell, well, again Orwell is far from the only artist to incorporate his own psychological hangups or fetishes into his work. The writing of his time, on both sides of the pond, was littered with them.
guess 70 years quite a time, for new technologies (but this may not last for much long - you can only invent radio and telecommunication once, and after some time it saturates everything and hit some limits). There might be some interesting developments in next 70 years, even related to person/person feeling/thoughts exchange.... but ..you see, mainline culture defined humans, so they carry it forward en-masse... Yes, today we hear more talk about supporting poor, but talk is not very easy to translate into actual change, and after change finally happens (hard-won, often after decades of work, literally. And burnout and turn-away-out are real things ... humans try to play with socialist-ish ideas but sometimes return to majority's views. there is influx of younger humans, but relative power still on old's side.. inertia of social currents.) regressions still easily can occur ...
I honestly wish Orwell had never written 1984.
Whatever his intentions, what it ended up being was a kind of mind poison that just makes a person obsessed with this very particular version of the future without understanding anything about the man who wrote it or why, so it just produced a whole generation of paranoid conspiracy nerds who cite anything they don't like as the approach of Big Brother and it's just exhausting.
5343495
What, are you telling me you don't enjoy having conservatives telling us how they're persecuted for "wrongthink"? Or how they dismiss criticism as "thought policing"?
5343583
I think you misunderstand why I was highlighting that passage, or what I was highlighting it for.
My point is that Eric is able to figure out he has prejudices, identify them, outline them. But because he's able to do that, he thinks he's overcome them a lot better than he has, when they're obviously still deeply internalized.
The problem isn't that I don't understand his arguments, and I don't think he's an idiot. What I'm disagreeing with is the subtext more than the text. More than what the ideas on the page are, I disagree with the ideas they imply, and I disagree with his motivations in presenting them.
A lot of the subtext is that Eric thinks most of his allies are prigs and he's trying to cultivate an alliance with the people who agree. And the funny thing is, he succeeded. I understand his intentions here were to present the ideas with a strong emotional drive, believing that the right reasoning would follow... but they didn't, and won't. His ideas are a lot more popular outside the left than inside it for a reason, and the emotional thrust of it means that the tone of his ideas are internalized and not their substance. 5343495 put the outcome perfectly. Any leftist whose work gets funded by the CIA for anti-leftist propaganda has a shitty approach to leftism, frankly.
I'll quote his friend Harry here, the one that made him go out to Wigan Pier in the first place, and the one that tore up the friendship based on the results.
I don't care how many times leftists fail and fail again because the game's rigged and the odds suck. These are ideas you believe in because they're right, and not because they win, and it behooves us to call fault with the game, not with our team.
im pretty sure his rat trap in 1984 freaked him out so much he just wanted to get rid of technology altogether.
i read a story once on the writeoff (dont laugh at me) about this exact dilemma once, and came at it with a much better perspective imo. short story short starlight poofs a cake into existence while aj takes the whole day to make the cake. starlights giving her this look like "you could have just asked me to make it". aj just laughs and eats her misshapen, lovely, homemade cake.
... where was i going with this.
the point is, humans were made to do things "the hard way". we love to experiment and challenge and have fun with ourselves and theres no way in hell machines are going to stop us from hand sewing a three piece suit just because we want to goddammit.
.....
and i just read the part below the paragraph that says basically the same thing but better.
fuck.
you were *so close*
listen. my mom is currently watching a survivor show right? and so far its like five fucking seasons of insane people willingly going into the mongolian (winter) wilderness to fend for themselves. one lady almost got killed by a cougar, shrugged it off and went "hey. i saw the the puma so it means im alive :))))".
anyways.
hahahahahahahahahahahahaah
sidenote, i completely forgot about that 1984 scene. my teacher explained it as you did, how a man in that time might see women, but it still heavily put me off. and it always seemed that " The work acknowledges the oppression of women, then shows no further interest or curiosity in exploring it. " :/
Eric go on Red Scare