“THE WOUND HAS A TENDENCY TO GO SEPTIC”: Last night I re-read an incredible essay by George Orwell. Not one of his better-known ones. It’s “Notes on the Way,” in My Country Right or Left, the second volume of the indispensable “Essays, Journalism and Letters” compilations. I’m going to mostly just quote at you, with minimal commentary at the end. Orwell in bold, me in plain text.

Reading Mr Malcolm Muggeridge’s brilliant and depressing book, The Thirties, I thought of a rather cruel trick I once played on a wasp. He was sucking jam on my plate, and I cut him in half. He paid no attention, merely went on with his meal, while a tiny stream of jam trickled out of his severed oesophagus. Only when he tried to fly away did he grasp the dreadful thing that had happened to him. It is the same with modern man. The thing that has been cut away is his soul, and there was a period–twenty years, perhaps–during which he did not notice it.

It was absolutely necessary that the soul should be cut away. Religious belief, in the form in which we had known it, had to be abandoned. By the nineteenth century it was already in essence a lie, a semi-conscious device for keeping the rich rich and the poor poor. The poor were to be contented with their poverty, because it would all be made up to them in the world beyond the grave, usually pictured as something mid-way between Kew Gardens and a jeweller’s shop. Ten thousand a year for me, two pounds a week for you, but we are all the children of God. And through the whole fabric of capitalist society there ran a similar lie, which it was absolutely necessary to rip out.

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But unfortunately there had been a little mistake. The thing at the bottom was not a bed of roses after all, it was a cesspool full of barbed wire.

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Brotherhood implies a common father. Therefore it is often argued that men can never develop the sense of a community unless they believe in God. The answer is that in a half-conscious way most of them have developed it already. Man is not an individual, he is only a cell in an everlasting body, and he is dimly aware of it. There is no other way of explaining why it is that men will die in battle. It is nonsense to say that they ohnly do it because they are driven. If whole armies had to be coerced, no war could ever be fought. Men die in battle–not gladly, of course, but at any rate voluntarily–because of abstractions called “honour”, “duty”, “patriotism” and so forth.

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(“Time and Tide”, 6 April 1940)

The essay mostly speaks for itself–it’s distilled Orwell, the essence of the most pessimistic optimist ever to walk the earth. I do find it startling that he ignores the most obvious consequence of his struggle to ground the brotherhood of man without the Fatherhood of God: When you sacrifice your own life for the collective because there are no individuals, you have no reason not to sacrifice others’ lives also. I’ve discussed some of the epistemological problems of trying to link morality to abstractions elsewhere (and Orwell is simply wrong that “humanity” is not an abstraction–who counts as human? How do we know what would be “best” for them?). But this essay has amazingly stark, succinct clarity reminiscent of Samuel Beckett. You should read the whole thing–it’s not much longer than what I typed out. (I couldn’t find it online.) Recquiescat in pace.