George Orwell was one of the great writers of the 20th century and has a remarkable moral track record. Unlike practically every one of his contemporaries, he was - as Christopher Hitchens famously adduced - correct on the three great political issues of his time: opposed to imperialism, opposed to fascism, and opposed to Stalinism.
George Orwell was also in many ways closed-minded and pettily reactionary. He was casually anti-semitic, was something pretty close to an incel avant la lettre, and in common with most people of his generation, was essentially homophobic.
Here is a famous excerpt from the conclusion of perhaps the finest single piece of writing in his oeuvre. (Some source italics omitted because /pt/).
> In a way it is even humiliating to watch coal-miners working. It raises in you a momentary doubt about your own status as an 'intellectual' and a superior person generally. For it is brought home to you, at least while you are watching, that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior. You and I and the editor of the Times Lit. Supp., and the nancy poets and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Comrade X, author of Marxism for Infants—all of us really owe the comparative decency of our lives to poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full of coal dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel.
Now this is fantastic stuff, and its message is one that still seems to evade many 'leftists' today. Every self-described communist, or leftist, or radical who witters on about UBI or mutual aid while using such services as DoorDash would do well to consider its implications.
But I don't want to discuss that, I want to discuss the one ugly word that the modern reader cannot help but trip up over. The rather dated slur 'nancy' may no longer pack the punch of today's 'faggot', but it is essentially equivalent. If you doubt this, note that its usage here is a callback to a previous reference to 'Nancy poets', who, Orwell writes, with sardonic euphemism, 'scratch one another's backs'.
To my mind, there is nothing admirable (or, in the modern parlance, based) about this needless prejudice of Orwell's. It is a little crueller when one realises that he is not talking about homosexual poets as an abstraction, but a specific poetical set - Auden, Spender, and Isherwood (see picrel) - whom he held in personal and specific disdain. Rather, it is simply the mark of a human, flawed and limited, just like all the rest of us. It would be unimpressive if Orwell had been so perceptive simply because he was a Christlike figure of moral perfection. In fact, Orwell's moral excellence was the achievement of a blazing intellect that, despite being born into the same sort of blinkered petty bourgeois environment that was to produce legions of Nazis and Blimps in his generation, nonetheless managed to fight its way to the right conclusions, most of the time. The fact that Orwell was unreformed about gays, unreformed about women, was only proof that he was a man. Ecco homo!
What a shame then to see that in so many places this excusable failing, this mild stain of non-divinity, is erased. A search for the phrase:
> "and the poets and the archbishop of canterbury"
or its counterpart:
> "the poets may scratch one another's backs"
...will readily yield reams of results. Largely these results are from po-faced 'Marxist reading group' type websites, which can seemingly abide the incoherence of 'the poets' as a definite noun phrase, but draw the line at exposing their readers to the minor thought-crimes of a man born in imperial India one month after the invention of the aeroplane. What an irony, given that Orwell's most significant (not to mention eponymous) contribution to the world of ideas is the vision of a world in which all of history, and with it all of writing, is subject to eternal revision at the behest of a political authority which fundamentally does not trust people with the right to use their own brains.
George Orwell was also in many ways closed-minded and pettily reactionary. He was casually anti-semitic, was something pretty close to an incel avant la lettre, and in common with most people of his generation, was essentially homophobic.
Here is a famous excerpt from the conclusion of perhaps the finest single piece of writing in his oeuvre. (Some source italics omitted because /pt/).
> In a way it is even humiliating to watch coal-miners working. It raises in you a momentary doubt about your own status as an 'intellectual' and a superior person generally. For it is brought home to you, at least while you are watching, that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior. You and I and the editor of the Times Lit. Supp., and the nancy poets and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Comrade X, author of Marxism for Infants—all of us really owe the comparative decency of our lives to poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full of coal dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel.
Now this is fantastic stuff, and its message is one that still seems to evade many 'leftists' today. Every self-described communist, or leftist, or radical who witters on about UBI or mutual aid while using such services as DoorDash would do well to consider its implications.
But I don't want to discuss that, I want to discuss the one ugly word that the modern reader cannot help but trip up over. The rather dated slur 'nancy' may no longer pack the punch of today's 'faggot', but it is essentially equivalent. If you doubt this, note that its usage here is a callback to a previous reference to 'Nancy poets', who, Orwell writes, with sardonic euphemism, 'scratch one another's backs'.
To my mind, there is nothing admirable (or, in the modern parlance, based) about this needless prejudice of Orwell's. It is a little crueller when one realises that he is not talking about homosexual poets as an abstraction, but a specific poetical set - Auden, Spender, and Isherwood (see picrel) - whom he held in personal and specific disdain. Rather, it is simply the mark of a human, flawed and limited, just like all the rest of us. It would be unimpressive if Orwell had been so perceptive simply because he was a Christlike figure of moral perfection. In fact, Orwell's moral excellence was the achievement of a blazing intellect that, despite being born into the same sort of blinkered petty bourgeois environment that was to produce legions of Nazis and Blimps in his generation, nonetheless managed to fight its way to the right conclusions, most of the time. The fact that Orwell was unreformed about gays, unreformed about women, was only proof that he was a man. Ecco homo!
What a shame then to see that in so many places this excusable failing, this mild stain of non-divinity, is erased. A search for the phrase:
> "and the poets and the archbishop of canterbury"
or its counterpart:
> "the poets may scratch one another's backs"
...will readily yield reams of results. Largely these results are from po-faced 'Marxist reading group' type websites, which can seemingly abide the incoherence of 'the poets' as a definite noun phrase, but draw the line at exposing their readers to the minor thought-crimes of a man born in imperial India one month after the invention of the aeroplane. What an irony, given that Orwell's most significant (not to mention eponymous) contribution to the world of ideas is the vision of a world in which all of history, and with it all of writing, is subject to eternal revision at the behest of a political authority which fundamentally does not trust people with the right to use their own brains.