George Orwell

From Philosopedia

Orwell, George (pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair) (25 June 1903 - 21 January 1950)

A British novelist born in India, Orwell is remembered for his satirical novels, Animal Farm (1946), about the failure of communism, and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), a prophetic work which describes the dehumanization of man in a time when sociopolitical conditions are making human freedom difficult to achieve. Orwell’s fiction deals with the problems of human freedom.

He was seriously wounded in 1936, fighting with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War.

In Sweden, his Essays were published by the Verdandi Students’ Association and Hjalmar Öhrwall, included along with Claes-Adam Wachtmeister’s The Atheist Manual.

Arthur C. Danto has commented on Animal Farm’s symbolism:

• “A Fairy Story” is Orwell’s subtitle for the book, and it is made to order for a certain kind of illustration in which pigs can be shown as ridiculous, taking on more and more human attributes; and as evil, since they can, with a few wicked touches, serve as caricatures of various easily represented figures in Soviet history, which Orwell in part meant as the target of his allegory. The proportion that Orwell quite clearly had in mind - Soviet dictators are to human beings as human beings are to animals - makes Animal Farm a pessimistic book only if dictatorship is the inevitable result of political revolution, and if, again, revolutions are inevitably, as the word implies, circular. Orwell’s message was not to beware of revolution but to watch out for the pigs, who may try to take it over. Even then, had the animals’ revolution fallen into the hands of Snowball [the Trotsky figure] rather than the Stalin character in the book [Napoleon] - life might have been as rosy as its promise in the speech of old Major [the utopian idealist], which ignited the misanthropy and the discontent of the proletarian beasts who made the revolution and endured its bitter consequences.

One character in Animal Farm is Moses, the tame raven who represents Orwell’s satirical view of organized religion in dictatorships:

• Moses, who was Mr. Jones’s especial pet, was a spy and a tale-bearer, but he was also a clever talker. He claimed to know of the existence of a mysterious country called Sugarcandy Mountain, to which all animals went when they died. It was situated somewhere up in the sky, a little distance beyond the clouds, Moses said. In Sugarcandy Mountain it was Sunday seven days a week, clover was in season all the year round and lump sugar and linseed cake grew on the hedgerows. The animals hated Moses because he told tales and did no work, but some of them believed in Sugarcandy Mountain, and the pigs had to argue very hard to persuade them that there was no such place.

Orwell has been criticized for having provided names of suspected Communists to M16, the Secret Intelligence Service. He also was on record for his suspicions of Jews: Deutscher (Polish Jew); Driberg, Tom (English Jew); Chaplin, Charles (Jewish?); homosexuals (“pansies”); blacks (Paul Robeson, “very anti-white. [Henry] Wallace supporter”); vegetarians, peaceniks, women in tweed skirts and, in Alexander Cockburn’s words, “others athwart the British Way.”).

Although he was not a member of the British Humanist Association, he was a subscriber to its publications and is generally revered by rationalists, freethinkers, and secular humanists. He reviewed some Rationalist Press Association books, but Anatole France’s and Mark Twain’s books he found to have been written by “bigoted atheists.” Nietzsche was right, he wrote in 1940, about Christianity: “You can smell it - it stinks.” In one of his notebooks, not published until after his death, Orwell wrote, “Recently I was reading somewhere or other [about] an Italian curio-dealer who attempted to sell a 17th-century crucifix to J. P. Morgan. Inside it was concealed a stiletto. What a perfect symbol of the Christian religion.”

Timothy Garton Ash, reviewing The Complete Works of George Orwell (20 volumes, edited by Peter Davison, 1998), commented upon Orwell’s Englishness, his love of what the English poet Craig Raine “memorably calls ‘the beauty of facts.’ If he had a God, it was Kipling’s ‘the God of Things as They are.’ ”

Arthur Koestler called Orwell a “reverent atheist.”

Bernard Crick called him “a clear Humanist, even a Rationalist with a pronounced anti-Catholicism, even though one with an ironic attachment to the liturgy, the humane political compromises and the traditions of the Church of England.”

Antony Flew wrote that “anyone seeking a paradigm of Humanist values can scarcely do better than to look to Orwell.”

Orwell, in Richard H. Rovere's Reflections on Gandhi, is quoted,

• One must choose between God and Man, and all 'radicals' and 'progressives,' from the mildest liberal to the most extreme anarchist, have in effect chosen Man.

“I direct that my body shall be buried (not cremated) according to the rites of the Church of England in the nearest convenient cemetery,” he wrote in a will made three days before his death. “Here,” wrote Nicolas Walter, “Orwell follows the familiar pattern of so many freethinkers who were brought up in the Church of England, may have lost all belief in its doctrines and all respect for its practices, but still keep a nostalgic affection for the Authorised Version of the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and Humans Ancient and Modern.”

Orwell, a virtual invalid for the last three years of his life, wrote in sanitariums in which he was hospitalized. In October before dying of tuberulosis in a London hospital, Orwell married his second wife, Sonia Brownell, assistant editor of the literary magazine, Horizon. She was at his bedside during his final moments. His first wife had been Eileen O'Shaughnessy, who had died in 1945 while undergoing routine surgery. The two had adopted a three-week old boy they named Richard Horatio Blair. Obituaries highlighted the fact that Orwell had given the English language "Big Brother" and "thought police,"

{Timothy Garton Ash, “Orwell in 1988,” New York Review of Books, 22 October 1998; CE; Arthur C. Danto, “ ‘Animal Farm’ at 50,” New York Times Book Review, 14 April 1996; FFRF; TRI; TYD; Nicolas Walter, New Humanist, December 1998}