George Orwell
As I Please
Tribune, 24 December 1943 Reading
Michael Robertss book on T. E. Hulme, I was reminded once again of the dangerous
mistake that the Socialist movement makes in ignoring what one might call the
neo-reactionary school of writers. There is a considerable number of these writers: they
are intellectually distinguished, they are influential in a quiet way and their criticisms
of the Left are much more damaging than anything that issues from the Individualist League
or the Conservative Central Office.
T. E. Hulme was killed in the last war and left little completed
work behind him, but the ideas that he had roughly formulated had great influence,
especially on the numerous writers who were grouped round the Criterion in the
twenties and thirties. Wyndham Lewis,
T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, Malcolm Muggeridge, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene all probably owe
something to him. But more important than the extent of his personal influence is the
general intellectual movement to which he belonged, a movement which could fairly be
described as the revival of pessimism. Perhaps its best-known living exponent is Marshal Pétain. But the new pessimism has
queerer affiliations than that. It links up not only with Catholicism, Conservatism and Fascism, but also with Pacifism (California brand
especially), and Anarchism. It
is worth noting that T. E. Hulme, the upper-middle-class English Conservative in a bowler
hat, was an admirer and to some extent a follower of the Anarcho-Syndicalist, Georges
Sorel.
The thing that is common to all these people, whether it is
Pétain mournfully preaching the discipline of defeat, or Sorel denouncing liberalism, or Berdyaev shaking his
head over the Russian Revolution, or Beachcomber delivering side-kicks at Beveridge in the Express,
or Huxley advocating non-resistance behind the guns of the American Fleet, is their
refusal to believe that human society can be fundamentally improved. Man is
non-perfectible, merely political changes can effect nothing, progress is an illusion. The
connexion between this belief and political reaction is, of course, obvious.
Other-worldliness is the best alibi a rich man can have. Men cannot be made better
by act of Parliament; therefore I may as well go on drawing my dividends. No one
puts it quite so coarsely as that, but the thought of all these people is along those
lines: even of those who, like Michael Roberts and Hulme himself, admit that a little,
just a little, improvement in earthly society may be thinkable.
The danger of ignoring the neo-pessimists lies in the fact that
up to a point they are right. So long as one thinks in short periods it is wise not to be
hopeful about the future. Plans for human betterment do normally come unstuck, and the
pessimist has many more opportunities of saying I told you so than the
optimist. By and large the prophets of doom have been righter than those who imagined that
a real step forward would be achieved by universal education, female suffrage, the League of Nations, or what not.
The real answer is to dissociate Socialism from Utopianism. Nearly
all neo-pessimist apologetics consist in putting up a man of straw and knocking him down
again. The man of straw is called Human Perfectibility. Socialists are accused of
believing that society can be and indeed, after the establishment of Socialism,
will be completely perfect; also that progress is inevitable. Debunking such
beliefs is money for jam, of course.
The answer, which ought to be uttered more loudly than it usually
is, is that Socialism is not perfectionist, perhaps not even hedonistic. Socialists
dont claim to be able to make the world perfect: they claim to be able to make it
better. And any thinking Socialist will concede to the Catholic that when economic
injustice has been righted, the fundamental problem of mans place in the universe
will still remain. But what the Socialist does claim is that that problem cannot be dealt
with while the average human beings preoccupations are necessarily economic. It is
all summed up in Marxs saying that after Socialism has arrived, human history can
begin. Meanwhile the neo-pessimists are there, well entrenched in the press of every
country in the world, and they have more influence and make more converts among the young
than we sometimes care to admit.
From Philip Jordans Tunis Diary:
We discussed the future of Germany; and John [Strachey] said to an
American present, You surely dont want a Carthaginian peace, do you? Our
American friend with great slowness but solemnity said, I dont recollect
weve ever had much trouble from the Carthaginians since. Which delighted me.
It doesnt delight me. One answer to the American might have been,
No, but weve had a lot of trouble from the Romans, But there is more to
it than that. What the people who talk about a Carthaginian peace dont
realize is that in our day such things are simply not practicable. Having defeated your
enemy you have to choose (unless you want another war within a generation) between
exterminating him and treating him generously. Conceivably the first alternative is
desirable, but it isnt possible. It is quite true that Carthage was utterly
destroyed, its buildings levelled to the ground, its inhabitants put to the sword. Such
things were happening all the time in antiquity. But the populations involved were tiny. I
wonder if that American knew how many people were found within the walls of Carthage when
it was finally sacked? According to the nearest authority I can lay hands on, five
thousand! What is the best way of killing off seventy million Germans? Rat poison? We
might keep this in mind when Make Germany Pay becomes a battle-cry again.
Attacking me in the Weekly Review for attacking Douglas Reed, Mr
A. K. Chesterton remarks: "My country right or wrong" is a maxim
which apparently has no place in Mr Orwells philosophy. He also states that
all of us believe that whatever her condition Britain must win this war, or for that
matter any other war in which she is engaged.
The operative phrase is any other war. There are plenty of
us who would defend our own country, under no matter what government, if it seemed that we
were in danger of actual invasion and conquest. But any war is a different
matter. How about the Boer War,
for instance? There is a neat little bit of historical irony here. Mr A. K. Chesterton is
the nephew of G. K. Chesterton,
who courageously opposed the Boer War, and once remarked that My country, right or
wrong was on the same moral level as My mother, drunk or sober. |