{"id":10628,"date":"2011-06-13T14:01:26","date_gmt":"2011-06-13T14:01:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2011\/06\/13\/a-fine-essay-on-george-orwell\/"},"modified":"2011-06-13T14:01:26","modified_gmt":"2011-06-13T14:01:26","slug":"a-fine-essay-on-george-orwell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2011\/06\/13\/a-fine-essay-on-george-orwell\/","title":{"rendered":"A Fine Essay on George Orwell"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Robert Gray, in The Spectator<\/em>, here<\/a>.  Excerpts:<\/span><\/p>\n

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Orwell, then, presented Catholics as either stupid or blinkered, dishonest or self-deceived. Yet he was very far from denying the need for religion. In his opinion socialists were quite wrong to assume that when basic material needs had been supplied, spiritual concerns would wither away. \u2018The truth,\u2019 Orwell wrote in 1944, \u2018is the opposite: when one\u2019s belly is empty, one\u2019s only problem is an empty belly. It is when we have got away from drudgery and exploitation that we shall really start wondering about man\u2019s destiny and the reason for his existence. One cannot have any worthwhile picture of the future unless one realises how much we have lost by the decay of Christianity.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Exactly right.  Would that the point were appreciated by the so-called New Atheists and their cyberpunk acolytes.  Were they to rid the world of religion, what would they put in its place, to satisfy the needs of the spirit for meaning and point in the teeth of time and transition?<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Prescriptive worldly counsel and other-worldly [hyphen added!] ideals were both anathema. \u2018No doubt alcohol, tobacco and so forth are things that a saint must avoid,\u2019 Orwell wrote in his essay on Gandhi, \u2018but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid.\u2019 \u2018The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price<\/a> of fastening one\u2019s love upon other human individuals.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Part of what attracts me to Orwell is his intellectual honesty.  He sees the problem, one that superficial atheists and dogmatic believers alike often paper over.  The baubles and trinkets of this all-too- transient life cannot satisfy anyone with spiritual depth, which is presumably why Marxists and other leftist activists of a less superficial stripe  invent a pie-in-the-future ersatz which is even less believable than the promises of traditional religion.  But on the other hand, the dogmatic certainties projected by the will-to-believe flabbergast the critical intellect and appear as so many idols set up to avoid nihilism at all costs.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Yet seven months before Orwell died, he wrote to Buddicom, insisting that there must be some sort of afterlife. The letter, unfortunately, is lost, but Buddicom remembered that he had seemed to be referring not so much to Christian ideas<\/a> of heaven and hell, but rather to a firm belief that \u2018nothing ever dies\u2019, that we must go on somewhere. This conviction seems to have stayed with him to the end: even if he did not believe in hell, he chose in his last weeks to read Dante\u2019s Divine Comedy.<\/span><\/p>\n

In his will Orwell had left directions that he should be buried according to the rites of the Church of England. Of course no one was better qualified to appreciate the beauty of the Book of Common Prayer; nevertheless the request surprised some of his admirers. A funeral was duly held at Christ Church in Albany Street; and David Astor, responsible for the arrangements, asked if his friend\u2019s body might be interred in a country churchyard, at Sutton Courtenay, in Berkshire.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Appealing to both Right and Left, invoked by both, Orwell is owned by neither.  He was his own man, a maverick.  Hats off.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Robert Gray, in The Spectator, here.  Excerpts: Orwell, then, presented Catholics as either stupid or blinkered, dishonest or self-deceived. Yet he was very far from denying the need for religion. In his opinion socialists were quite wrong to assume that when basic material needs had been supplied, spiritual concerns would wither away. \u2018The truth,\u2019 … Continue reading “A Fine Essay on George Orwell”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[413,505,139],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mavericks","category-orwell","category-religion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10628","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10628"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10628\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}