Orwell and Simplicity

I have been living in retrospective nostalgia for the life n times of George Orwell this last week, when I read Homage to Catalonia, and discovered the very good BBC Arena documentary which interviews dozens of interesting and important characters from his life, who were still alive at the time (1983 but also with snippets of interviews from earlier on with Cyril Connolly, David Astor, Malcolm Muggeridge, and others). Imagine having a group of friends and acquaintances like that. (I think of all these I most enjoyed aesthetically the bits of interview with Muggeridge, who i’m just reading now also had an India connexion something I explored a bit in an older blog entry). For a number of reasons including my own tramping days and idealism and eastern influences and squalid life and outsider-looking-in status I feel a lot of comraderie with George.

Orwell’s warnings about totalitarian states and are obviously very relevant now as many have noticed with the sudden terrifying rise of real tyranny in the USA, and also with what’s happening in Palestine which is so fresh a horror it’s impossible to really look at, it’s like looking into a fresh wound before the blood has even started seeping out. I was thinking in bed early this morning that the world as we know it, really is going to end soon (or has), but in the warm light of day i’ll put that aside as a kind of night terror, though it feels much less impossible than it used to.

Well go on Alaric what do you mean by that?  That the world will end? Well it’s interesting what Orwell wrote about the bomb, and his conviction that it meant the actual end of civilisation – he was horrified by the future. I think I can feel that horror at times too. Those bombs are all still out there, sleeping in their bunkers. In fact there are many more and worse bombs than in Orwell’s time. Not only that but the madman is in the white house. What more tinder do we need? What spark is about to fly? And beside this tinder lies the inexorable continuation, indeed acceleration, of climate destruction and our society’s general disregard of it, which is a dead end road to literal extinction. The storms are coming, the fires are coming. That’s a simple statement of scientific fact now. As is the fact that US democracy is lost – and that the only way out of all this now is through, through the conflict that is being set up, through the fire. The critical year might be this year, or next year, or it might be fifty years away. But the reconciliation between reality and the road we’re on is coming.

Then there’s the feeling of a more general moral hollowing out – the wash of AI slop – the loss of the wise old voices, moral guideposts, a framework for society that was held up for us to believe in by the oracles of yesteryear like George. I know there are new voices, they just don’t speak to me in the same way. Maybe I am just too satisfied with the mirage that I used to believe, in an old world. My kids play on computer games where the game within the game is often to scam the other players out of their stuff. It’s the law of the playground, the jungle. When I offer the old certainties of the life, they sometimes sound tired and tasteless, even in my own ears. Learn things, go to university or travel, be brilliant at something. What is the point when the world is going to be on fire soon. What, actually, is the game of life going to be in 20-30 years? Just basic survival, by whatever means necessary? All the habits of our society feel like the twitchings of an insect in its death throes. None of that really matters now.

Back to George, in a roundabout way his fears are blossoming into reality except that of nuclear Armageddon. Huxley was a bit closer in predicting the current method of control though, in the west it is not the boot but the soma, the dopamine of scrolling through modern life that seems to keep us neutralised and obedient. We sleep on silk pillows. It might be true then, that a global internet black-out would really awaken and enrage the masses as we all suddenly went cold turkey on our social media habits. But how could we organise without it? We would be forced into a world that was suddenly, paralytically local.  I don’t even know most of my neighbours. Many of them are as foreign to me as people from another land and time. I mean, it might be a good thing if I was forced to speak to them.. if we were forced to see eye to eye rather than swallow the narratives we are fed online, the narratives of hate and fear.

What we are dealing with is extremism. Extremism in the quest for purity – racial purity, national purity – that is at the core of the totalitarian mind. It is the cunning lure of the simplicity of purity that captures thought and drives the zeal of action for today’s fascists. For we can’t deny that the fascists have a real zeal about them. They have a beautiful clarity that comes from their simplified views of the world. And purity itself has a hallowed nature – who doesn’t feel attracted to it? There is a beauty in the purity of a sound, or a colour. It’s an ideal. But the cruelty comes when we apply an ideal of purity to the world – the real, messy world of nature, of people. For here on earth, purity does not and has never existed except by some fleeting chance. The closest we get to it is in the structure of a mineral, a diamond or topaz – a beautiful but hard cold sterile thing. Life to flourish needs mess, it flourishes in compost, disarray, in steaming bogs. I am reminded of the Buddhist image of the beautiful lotus blooming out of the muck pond. Think of the contrasting sterility of the rows of monoculture farming, which is destructive to nature, to its insects and soils.

The human condition, the human spirit, by its true nature really is the most impure thing of all. Purity does not apply to humans! This is why the fascist ideal, and also the religious extremist who seeks spiritual purity, is fundamentally destructive when applied to humans and society. It is a disease of the mind, the tyranny of a thought that drives people to commit horrors though its false promises and beguiling simplicity. The mind loves a simple idea that it can grasp – but isn’t it folly to think that our meagre weak minds can grasp at the greater truth of things with a single thought!? Weed out this thought of purity. It is a lie, the tongue of a devil. Embrace mess.

Or rather, embrace whatever comes. Because whatever comes, in fact, it contains the sparkle of the sun or the moon or the stars. The ideal does exist but it is present everywhere already, it does not need to be imposed. This perfect moment is pure in itself. George was good at noticing moments, the reality on the ground of big ideas playing out in filth. The filth of the trenches in Spain, the filth of the London blitz, the delightful filth of the garden in Jura. The filth of his own lungs, filling up with blood as he whispered his last warnings.  That’s where the perfect – the truth – is found.