Though Cowards Flinch

This is a cross posted entry by James Bloodworth

In 1947 George Orwell wrote that ‘every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly and indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it.’

Today, many right across the political spectrum like to pick and choose from Orwell according to taste, stressing either the democratic, socialist or anti-totalitarian aspect of his work at the expense of the multitude – the resulting ‘legacy’ depending very much upon the political persuasion of those doing the accounting.

Christopher Hitchens, the one-time darling of the left, has in recent years uncomfortably skirted this same political dividing-line. He has at once attracted the scorn of his former comrades for his alleged shuffle to the right, while in the process gathering a substantial number of followers whose admiration rests almost entirely upon the premise of him having ‘come to his senses’.

On the surface, the nature of Hitchens’s politics depends, in a similar fashion to Orwell’s, almost entirely upon whom one is talking to.

His latest effort, Arguably, is a collection of essays spanning the past decade on politics, literature and religion. The prose (which is unsurprisingly of an extremely high standard, even if at times Hitchens employs rather too much Look-at-me vocabulary) comes with an added element of tragedy due by the fact that Hitchens was diagnosed with terminal cancer before he wrote a substantial proportion of it. This may, in fact, be Hitchens’s very last book.

Hitchens’s reputation as controversialist par excellence was cemented in recent years with his repudiation of the left and his articulate opposition to monotheism. Importantly, were Hitchens alone in rejecting the conventional left/liberal, post-9/11 politics, his bravado and bluster would likely be much less potent. (Hitchens’s politics were never about posture alone; but one should not underestimate the importance of showmanship to the Hitchens brand). As it happened, there were others on the left who also viewed the attempt on the back of 9/11 to conflate John Ashcroft with Osama Bin Laden as crass moral equivalence; or as Orwell put it 70 years before: ‘the argument that half a loaf is no different from no bread at all’.

The problem with the notion that Hitchens, after 9/11, simply did the obligatory shuffle to the right, or as David Horowitz puts it (underwhelmingly, considering his own political trajectory), had ‘second thoughts’, is that a substantial proportion of the left really did climb into bed with reaction during this period, and continue to do so whenever a group points AK47s in the direction of the United States and its allies.

This was not confined to the debased remnants of Stalinism, either. The editorial of the liberal-left New Statesman of 17 September, 2001, written by then-editor Peter Wilby, appeared to blame Americans themselves for the 9/11 attacks – for ‘preferring George Bush to Al Gore and both to Ralph Nader’. A few weeks later, the Oxford Academic Mary Beard wrote approvingly in the London Review of Books about the ‘feeling that, however tactfully you dress it up, the United States had it coming’.

Arguably, however, also shows Hitchens at his dogmatic worst; and at times he resembles Isaac Deutscher’s description of the ex-Communist who, having recanted on his previous belief system, is ‘haunted by a vague sense that he has betrayed either his former ideals or the ideals of bourgeois society,’ and who ‘tries to suppress his sense of guilt and uncertainty, or to camouflage it by a show of extraordinary certitude and frank aggressiveness’. In Hitchens’s essays on Iraq, as Jonathan Freedland points out: ‘The absence of evidence (of WMD) is deemed not to be evidence of absence but, on the contrary, evidence of the presence of WMDs in the immediate past.’

While it may be simplistic to simply write Hitchens off as a ‘Neo Con’, he has very little to say on traditional left-wing domestic concerns, such as economic or social policy; and it seems increasingly clear, if only by omission, that interventionism is not the only ‘consensus’ that Hitchens now uncritically accepts.

In a 2008 interview with Prospect, Hitchens, a man who lives in extremely comfortable surroundings in Washington, showed a thinly-veiled contempt for those whose lives are made bearable by the British benefits system, dismissing the welfare state as ‘little more than Christian charity’. In a recent article for Slate in the aftermath of the UK riots, Hitchens also appeared to take the establishment line that the unrest was ‘sheer criminality’ (as one Tweeter put it at the time – ‘yes, we know it is sheer criminality; the question is why are our youngsters sheer criminals?’). While much of the British left is right now busy mobilising against the greatest cut in living standards in a generation, in the same article Hitchens glibly put ‘the cuts’ in brackets and ridiculed the term as an ‘all-purpose expression… used for all-purpose purposes’.

Writing Hitchens off as a Neo-Con or a free-market zealot is a rather pointless exercise; it is, however, necessary to acknowledge that he no longer notices or much cares for the struggles of the working class. If it is not part of the dramatic fight against totalitarianism (which I have no wish to downplay), then it does not seem to appear on Hitchens’s radar.

Orwell, in a reply (dated 15 November, 1943) to an invitation from the Duchess of Atholl to speak for the right-wing British League for European Freedom, stated that he didn’t agree with their objectives. Acknowledging that what they said was ‘more truthful than the lying propaganda found in most of the press’, he added that he could ‘not associate himself with an essentially Conservative body’, that claimed to ‘defend democracy in Europe’ but had ‘nothing to say about British imperialism’. His closing paragraph stated: ‘I belong to the left and must work inside it, much as I hate Russian totalitarianism and its poisonous influence in this country.’

Hitchens, like many British journalists of his generation, has spent much of his career in the shadow of Orwell. He has also spent perhaps a small proportion of it waiting for his very own Orwell moment – a moment when he could take on his own side in the way Orwell took on sections of the left over its appeasement of Stalinism. Despite the bluster and fear-mongering (not-to-mention the genuinely repulsive politics of the Jihadi movement), Islamism is not Nazism or Stalinism; and Hitchens, however good his prose may be, is no Orwell. In defending the gains of liberal democracy against its totalitarian enemies, Orwell never dumped his own politics.

Due to having some time on my hands, for a change, I checked a bunch of fiction books out of the local library. The first was Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel, Lolita. This is a strange book, repeatedly referred to as one of the defining English-language novels of the 20th Century and I’m still not quite sure what to think.

The plot is relatively simple: Humbert Humbert, ephebophile, marries the mother of a twelve year old girl Dolores Haze. Following the death of her mother, Humbert kidnaps Dolores, known as Lolita, and tours the United States while indulging in a sexual relationship with her.

If literature is simply there to tell us something about ourselves, or about our world, then the character of Humbert Humbert certainly does that. His wit is incisive, deadly even; his manipulative nature worthy of any Machiavelli and his ruthlessness total, yet also totally concealed from all but his unfortunate victims.

In everything that Humbert does, he is inescapably human and we can recognise in him many things that feature regularly in our somewhat more banal lives. No one who has ever wondered about where our moral perspectives on any subject come from can fail to be moved by Humbert’s rationalisation for his heinous actions.

What I cannot reconcile for myself is that my perspective on this book boils down to something so monochrome as condemnation for Humbert, disgust at the eloquence and erudition of his perversion and sympathy for the young girl who cried herself to sleep as soon as she believed Humbert to have succumbed to it himself.

Surely there is something more? If anything the beautiful prose and dry sardonicism (e.g. Humbert’s initial, easy dismissal of Charlotte’s advances) further irritated me, as did the conclusion to Martin Amis’ Observer review, ‘You read Lolita sprawling limply in your chair, ravished, overcome, nodding scandalized assent’.

Rubbish. Amis approach to Nabokov’s oeuvre in Koba the Dread, that Lolita is a study in tyranny is much nearer the mark. Perhaps it is the bloody single-mindedness in me that is causing my failure to appreciate a great literary endeavour, but tyranny is to be resisted at all occasions, not to be gloried in, which is what such prose feels like.

What I found intriguing is that Humbert’s use of treats, of permissions withheld or granted, of money to enforce his control…all of these are standard parenting methods. The only thing that Humbert has done differently to a ‘normal’ parent is extend his dominance to the sexual sphere as well as the more traditional areas of behaviour.

With tyranny in mind, Humbert’s self-deception as regards his relationship with Lolita can be read as a metaphor for the relationship of the privileged Party with its subservient people in Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany or the various other totalitarian regimes of the 20th Century. As Humbert justifies his exploitation of Lolita by her supposed corruption (suggested, for example, by her seduction of him, after a prolonged ‘courtship’), so too these privileged elites maintained themes of paternalism and almost-divine election.

Nabokov’s Lolita is comparable to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in some respects. Neither offers the possibility of redemption to its protagonists; tyranny is all-encompassing and either extends onwards to infinity (thus Orwell) or destroys everyone it touches – Humbert, Lolita, Charlotte, Valeria, Quilty and Lolita’s child – even after it has released them from its immediate grip, by distorting the course of their lives. The solipsism of Humbert is the analogue to the ultimate capitulation of Winston Smith, each reflecting the great divides of our time.

Tyrant and tyrannised, or state tyranny and the tyranny of patronage and private property.

It is a thoroughly depressing book. There is no Yossarian escaping on a raft, no Krymov whose victimisation by the state cannot annihilate the forward-looking character of the novel Life and Fate, gazing past the Russian fall into the hands totalitarianism, towards the core of the communist ideal. There’s no Jake Barnes who, despite having been visited in both public and private spheres with disaster, still lives and learns, emerging wiser than when he began. This is where the pathos of the novel emerges; in how people deal with the knowledge of futility.

Even Humbert faces this, though he does so with his incisive, calculating rationality as when he considers Lolita’s inevitable move beyond the ‘prime age’ at which we find her during the story, and at which Humbert takes his greatest pleasure.

In this regard, the novel escapes my monochrome moralising and my utter detestation of Humbert, accentuated by his refusal to repent – a refusal the self-obsessed Humbert finds delectable, as evidenced by his toying with readers as though they are a mock jury – and failure to find his ass slapped in the electric chair for his crimes. Not far enough, however, for me to decide whether or not I enjoyed the novel.

Orwell’s ‘Notes on Nationalism‘ is one of his most interesting, most confused, essays. It attempts to assert the existence of a phenomenon in English society of 1945, “the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad’”.

Specific ideologies are identified as exhibiting this trait: “Communism, political Catholicism, Zionism, Antisemitism, Trotskyism and Pacifism.” Orwell goes on to separate these fanatic nationalisms from ‘patriotism’, love of place and way of life, unrelated to the morality of a people, and purely defensive in sentiment.

“Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception,” remarks Orwell, and nationalists will decide every question prima facie, in the interests of a competitive prestige for the entity into which they have sunk their individuality, rather than on the basis of evidence gathered by the disinterested, which should prove more accurate.

It should be obvious that Orwell’s methodology is confused and bears its own ideological connotations. The conflation of all these ideologies, ignoring their material context or aims, establishes by elimination a ‘normal’ world where everyone is rational and not prepared to die or kill in the name of ideas, rather than cold hard facts.

The ‘normal’ man exists in a value-free world where ideology is not ingrained into the very practices which make up one’s daily routine – not to mention the more obvious kind contained in the written word. Far from his consciousness being impacted by the conditions in which he lives, making him more or less amenable to certain facts and political ideas, man, in this vacuum-world, can stand apart, tally up all facts and select a political view accordingly. It is philosophical idealism.

Needless to say, of course, that ‘normal’ man doesn’t exist except in Orwell’s head. Nor, I would contend, does that pure “way of life” that Orwell argues can sustain a non-nationalistic ‘patriotism’. There is no borough, city, county, region, nation, federation or continent in the world which can draw a line around itself and declare that all the people on one side of the line share a “way of life” and all the people outside it do not share that way of life.

This is contrary to many of Orwell’s claims in ‘the Lion and the Unicorn‘, about the differences between nations. But cultures, national or otherwise, like religions or any body of shared ideas, traditions and practices, are syncretic – and in any one geographical location, there will be a polyglot of ideas and practices, some shared with people to the north of the dividing line, some with people to the south and so on. This polyglot cannot itself be defined as a “way of life”, for many reasons.

Seeing as it does not exist in a vacuum, no culture is stable. It changes over time. Seeing as it is subject to real, material pressures which limit or extend the capacity to engage in certain practices, no culture is shared universally in a society that permits inequality. Seeing as a culture is a combination of ideas and practices, and that these ideas and practices are unlikely to have set or shared boundaries, no culture escapes geographic amorphism.

I’ve dealt with this essay before, as it was once approvingly quoted to me over at Labour Members’ Net, but my views on the subject appear to have been deleted and, moreover, I have recently read Raymond Williams’ excellent short account of Orwell’s life and politics, particularly this patriotism, which deserves to be reproduced.

“England, whose England? In the Road to Wigan Pier…Orwell is describing the ‘two nations’, discovering how (in that middle class phrase) the ‘other half’ lives. He is at once compassionate and indignant, drawn and repelled. He is describing a country in which two-thirds of the population are working class people at a time of depression and wide-spread unemployment. All his active arguments and images are of contrasts, intolerable contrasts.

“‘England’, as any simple idea, has been destroyed by these contrasts. The single image of his childhood has been replaced by the particularities, the variations, the inequalities, of mine and mill, slum and council house, caravan site and slagshop, teashop and Tudor villa. This is an active England, an England to move through.

“The England of the later essays, written in wartime is different…leading to a particular climax which comes ‘as near as one can…to describing England in a phrase’: a family with the wrong members in control. Now Orwell was neither the first nor the last to say something like this. The statement’s interest is in where it comes on the scale of his development.

“There is not much sense of a family or of emotional unity in the depressed and suffering England of The Road to Wigan Pier. The emphasis there is on the realities and consequences of a class society. What happens, I think, is that Orwell first moves through two phases of response to ‘England’: the myth of his boyhood – the special people, the ‘family’ – is succeeded by the observations of his return – a scene of bitter and bleak contradictions.

“But then, in a third phase, he creates a new myth which until quite recently has remained effective. Qualifying the original image with the facts of the economic and social inequality, he creates the sense of an England of basic ordinariness and decency, a ‘real England’, ‘an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past’, in which it can be seen almost as an accident, or at least as an archaism, that the ‘wrong members’ of the family are in control.”

This is an image obviously lacking in historicity. It is easy to mine a selective past for features exhibited in the present, and to weave them into a narrative that sets up the present context in a way that recommends itself. This is what writers from the Levellers to Tom Paine did with the ‘Norman Yoke’, to embed a theory of lost rights into English history, and grant the commonweal an equally ancient lineage to the divine right of kings.

In reality, evidence for the ‘Norman Yoke’ is hotly contested, and even when the term was first coined in 1642, citations of biblical precedent were more often heard for the equality of man, than was a Saxon golden age. Christopher Hill reminds us of John Ball’s words from the 1381 Peasant Revolt, “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the Gentleman?” This mining of the past – any past, real or imagined – is a recurrent motif.

Orwell’s monolithic England, of past, present and future, is no less unhistorical, no less unable to accept a dynamic model of society – subject to all sorts of pressures and consisting of all sorts of processes, which themselves change over time, some of which are exerted or expressed in contradiction to one another.

Raymond Williams is more gentle than I:

“Orwell’s great influence since the 1940′s owes as much to this powerful image [of a family with the wrong members in control] as to any other single achievement. And it would not be so powerful if it did not contain some truth. Orwell’s emphasis on the depth of civil liberties in Britain and on the feelings that support them is, in the world as he knew it, and as we continue to know it, justified.

“His furtherness of the gentleness and mildness of much ordinary English life, on these qualities being positive achievements in a world of much killing and anger, is again reasonable. Certain kinds of informality, friendliness and tolerance in much of every day English life support his emphasis on ‘decency’ as a virtue. But it is possible to know and acknowledge all these things and still, in analysis, go either way.

“Orwell is nearest to what I believe to be the truth when he describes these characteristics as part of a genuinely popular culture that ‘must live to some extent against the existing order’ (CEJL, II, 59). Or again when he speaks of a ‘subtle network of compromises’, of adjustments through which certain virtues, certain achievements, are maintained alongside certain evident and radical injustices. (…)

“It can never be enough to say that certain virtues exist alongside certain injustices, as if they were contrasting facts of the natural world (on which, in his social imagery, Orwell so commonly draws). In a society, these facts are relationships of an active, historical, developing kind. And it is this kind of reality which Orwell’s image of England obscures.”

I don’t necessarily agree with Williams that Orwell’s views must contain some degree of truth in order to be powerful, or at least they need not necessarily be true in the ‘patriotic’ way in which Orwell understood them.

Rather I think Orwell’s views were and are socially acceptable, and it is no accident that Orwell’s later, less radical work, garnered more publicity than his earlier writings. Here Orwell identified traits which some people like to see in themselves and in their country, certifying these as in some way English much in the way that the English character is often cited as the reason for England’s relative passivity in the face of tumult and revolution in Europe.

We should remember that Britain, at this time, had just fought a war for its own independence and the freedom of other nations from the tyranny of Nazism. The order of the day – which firmly tied one end of the mainstream Left to the national Establishment – was national unity in the face of opposition. The election of a Labour government belied the national unity a little, ditching the face of that unity with indecent haste.

Yet it should come as no surprise that, with ‘nations’ very firmly a part of national discourse, people liked to feel that theirs had been worth defending; that it had consistently stood up for civil liberties at home and abroad, that the war had been a principled opposition to Nazism, rather than an opportunistic war brought on by inability of the British ruling class to reconcile their interests with the ruling class of Germany, Italy and Japan.

In reality, that is to say in documented history, civil liberties in this country have ebbed and flowed. From the days of the militias, when habeas corpus could be suspended, to the Official Secrets Act to the emergency war powers used by governments in the inter war years while the country was nowhere close to being involved in a war, civil liberties have fallen and risen and fallen again, and popular sentiment has often had other things to think about.

Similarly the gentleness and mildness of the English character, and the contrast with other nations. I’m sure much gentleness and mildness did and does exist in the English character – civility and kindness and generosity of spirit in the most unlooked for places. But that is not to say that one can separate these off from other, less admirable qualities, which are evident throughout the shared history of these islands. This is Williams’ key point.

Nor, a point which Williams misses, is it to say that these qualities or even a certain combination of them, is exclusively English and therefore something which makes England an actual entity rather than an ideological rallying call to a self-selecting group of people, a group much smaller than the sum of all the English. The overall point at stake is the validity of nation as a useful analytical category and on all counts, I think it fails the test.