Facing Unpleasant Facts

I mentioned Orwell the other day, and Ducky cautioned me, “Have to watch it with Orwell. He doesn't go for the simple answer. He was no Libertarian.”

This is what’s wrong with America. Everybody is supposed to stay in their own camp and only listen to their own orthodoxy. A libertarian reading a socialist? Careful! It’s also telling. The shabby arguments of the left reveal that they rarely crawl out of their dark, cramped ideological box.

I am an Orwell fan, having read many of his essays and a few of his lesser-known works.  Of course I know he cannot be properly categorized as a libertarian.  He was a man of the left who believed in using the power of the state for the good of humankind, but being a lover of liberty, he also looked upon government with a jaundiced eye.

Facing it, always facing it!

Orwell's greatest gift, perhaps even greater than his pen, was his power of observation and clear-eyed analysis.  Christopher Hitchens writes...

‘Facing it — ’ as Captain MacWhirr says so memorably in Joseph Conrad’s ‘Typhoon’,‘always facing it — that’s the way to get through.’

‘I knew,’ said Orwell in 1946 about his early youth, ‘that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts.’ Not the ability to face them, you notice, but ‘a power of facing’. It’s oddly well put.

A commissar who realizes that his five-year plan is off-target and that the people detest him or laugh at him may be said, in a base manner, to be confronting an unpleasant fact. So, for that matter, may a priest with ‘doubts’. The reaction of such people to unpleasant facts is rarely self-critical; they do not have the ‘power of facing’. Their confrontation with the fact takes the form of an evasion; the re-action to the unpleasant discovery is a re-doubling of efforts to overcome the obvious.

The ‘unpleasant facts’ that Orwell faced were usually the ones that put his own position or preference to the test.  (Christopher Hitchens - Why Orwell Matters)

George Orwell did not write from an ideological position and he was blessedly free of dogma. If anything, he could be called a humanist.  A man of the left, he went to Spain to fight the fascists and came away disgusted with communists.

The whole barracks was in the state of filth and chaos to which the militia reduced every building they occupied and which seems to be one of the by-products of revolution. In every corner you came upon piles of smashed furniture, broken saddles, brass cavalry-helmets, empty sabre-scabbards, and decaying food. There was frightful wastage of food, especially bread. (Homage to Catalonia)

Being caught in a communist purge of the organization he belonged to sealed the deal for him. He went from being a fascist-fighting combat veteran to a hunted criminal, in danger of being jailed and shot by the people he thought he had been fighting for. Despite this, he stated that he held no animus towards Spain or Spaniards.  Indeed, what has struck so many upon reading Homage to Catalonia is his emotional detachment from it all.

For an even greater example of writing with emotional detachment, to the point of displaying sympathy for your tormentors, see his memoir of boarding school life, Such, Such Were The Joys.

He forever remained a socialist, but spent much time examining and plucking the motes from his own eyes. Although perhaps not consciously so, he also helped his larger society do the same. He could write painful observations about the poor and the downtrodden, but he did it without the sentimentality of a Steinbeck, and he did not fetishize and coddle them as nanny-state progressives do today.

He faced unpleasant facts and adjusted his views accordingly. Have you ever changed your mind or abandoned a cherished view after facing unpleasant facts?