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The Bully Pulpit

~ (n): An office or position that provides its occupant with an outstanding opportunity to speak out on any issue.

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Tag Archives: George Orwell

Orwell Reflects on His School Days

30 Thursday Nov 2017

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography

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Tags

Biography, education, England, Essay, George Orwell, Such Such Were the Joys

“It was about a year after I hit Johnny Hale in the face that I left St Cyprian’s for ever. It was the end of a winter term. With a sense of coming out from darkness into sunlight I put on my Old Boy’s tie as we dressed for the journey. I well remember the feeling of emancipation, as though the tie had been at once a badge of manhood and an amulet against Flip’s voice and Sambo’s cane. I was escaping from bondage. It was not that I expected, or even intended, to be any more successful at a public school than I had been at St Cyprian’s. But still, I was escaping. I knew that at a public school there would be more privacy, more neglect, more chance to be idle and self-indulgent and degenerate. For years I had been resolved — unconsciously at first, but consciously later on — that when once my scholarship was won I would ‘slack off’ and cram no longer. This resolve, by the way, was so fully carried out that between the ages of thirteen and twenty-two or three I hardly ever did a stroke of avoidable work…

I base these generalizations on what I can recall of my own childhood out look. Treacherous though memory is, it seems to me the chief means we have of discovering how a child’s mind works. Only by resurrecting our own memories can we realize how incredibly distorted is the child’s vision of the world. Consider this, for example. How would St Cyprian’s appear to me now, if I could go back, at my present age, and see it as it was in 1915? What should I think of Sambo and Flip, those terrible, all-powerful monsters? I should see them as a couple of silly, shallow, ineffectual people, eagerly clambering up a social ladder which any thinking person could see to be on the point of collapse. I would no more be frightened of them than I would be frightened of a dormouse. Moreover, in those days they seemed to me fantastically old, whereas — though of this I am not certain — I imagine they must have been somewhat younger than I am now…

I have never been back to St Cyprian’s. Reunions, old boys’ dinners and such-like leave me something more than cold, even when my memories are friendly. I have never even been down to Eton, where I was relatively happy, though I did once pass through it in 1933 and noted with interest that nothing seemed to have changed, except that the shops now sold radios. As for St Cyprian’s, for years I loathed its very name so deeply that I could not view it with enough detachment to see the significance of the things that happened to me there… And if I went inside and smelt again the inky, dusty smell of the big schoolroom, the rosiny smell of the chapel, the stagnant smell of the swimming bath and the cold reek of the lavatories, I think I should only feel what one invariably feels in revisiting any scene of childhood: How small everything has grown… Now, however, the place is out of my system for good. Its magic works no longer, and I have not even enough animosity left to make me hope that Flip and Sambo are dead or that the story of the school being burnt down was true.”

__________

Pulled from the ending of George Orwell’s essay “Such, Such Were the Joys,” first published in 1952 in the Partisan Review. It’s thought he wrote the essay a few years prior, sometime in early 1947, just before he started working on Nineteen Eighty-Four. There’s a lot of gold in the essay, but I especially like that understated, forgiving note on which he ends.

There’s more like this:

  • Julian Barnes assesses his memory of childhood friends
  • Donna Tart on the immense power of a teacher who believes in you
  • Orwell’s biographer, Christopher Hitchens discusses his mom

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What Liberals Still Have to Conserve

07 Thursday May 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, Political Philosophy, Speeches

≈ Comments Off on What Liberals Still Have to Conserve

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democracy, Fascism, George Orwell, Government, history, Homage to Catalonia, John Maynard Keynes, speech, Thinking the Twentieth Century, Tony Judt, Twentieth Century History, What Is Living and what Is Dead In Social Democracy?

Tony Judt

“The left, to be quite blunt about it, has something to conserve… The rise of the social service state, the century-long construction of a public sector whose goods and services illustrate and promote our collective identity and common purposes, the institution of welfare as a matter of right and its provision as a social duty: these were no mean accomplishments.

That these accomplishments were no more than partial should not trouble us. If we have learned nothing else from the twentieth century, we should at least have grasped that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences. Imperfect improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances are the best that we can hope for, and probably all we should seek. Others have spent the last three decades methodically unraveling and destabilizing those same improvements: this should make us much angrier than we are. It ought also to worry us, if only on prudential grounds: Why have we been in such a hurry to tear down the dikes laboriously set in place by our predecessors? Are we so sure that there are no floods to come?

A social democracy of fear is something to fight for. To abandon the labors of a century is to betray those who came before us as well as generations yet to come. It would be pleasing—but misleading—to report that social democracy, or something like it, represents the future that we would paint for ourselves in an ideal world. It does not even represent the ideal past. But among the options available to us in the present, it is better than anything else to hand. In Orwell’s words, reflecting in Homage to Catalonia upon his recent experiences in revolutionary Barcelona:

There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.”

__________

Pulled from Tony Judt’s speech “What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?”, given at New York University in October 2009, the same month he became paralyzed from the neck down due to ALS.

You’ll find a modified version in his excellent collection of conversations with Timothy Snyder Thinking the Twentieth Century.

Listen to it:

Read on:

  • Orwell discusses what the left is ashamed of
  • Hitchens reflects on his long and painful acceptance that utopias don’t exist
  • Gore Vidal obliterates Ayn Rand

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George Orwell: What the Left Is Ashamed Of

21 Saturday Mar 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Freedom, Politics

≈ Comments Off on George Orwell: What the Left Is Ashamed Of

Tags

British politics, England, George Orwell, Left Wing, Left-wing Intelligentsia, Liberalism, Pacifism, Patriotism, public opinion

George Orwell

“They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. In the 
general patriotism of the country they form a sort of island of dissident 
thought. England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals 
are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always 
felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman 
and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse 
racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably 
true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of 
standing to attention during ‘God save the King’ than of stealing from a 
poor box. All through the critical years many left-wingers were chipping 
away at English morale, trying to spread an outlook that was sometimes 
squashily pacifist, sometimes violently pro-Russian, but always 
anti-British. It is questionable how much effect this had, but it 
certainly had some. If the English people suffered for several years a 
real weakening of morale, so that the Fascist nations judged that they 
were ‘decadent’ and that it was safe to plunge into war, the intellectual 
sabotage from the Left was partly responsible. Both the New Statesmen and 
the News Chronicle cried out against the Munich settlement, but even they 
had done something to make it possible. Ten years of systematic 
Blimp-baiting affected even the Blimps themselves and made it harder than 
it had been before to get intelligent young men to enter the armed 
forces. Given the stagnation of the Empire, the military middle class 
must have decayed in any case, but the spread of a shallow Leftism 
hastened the process.”

__________

From George Orwell’s essay, written during the blitz of 1941, “England Your England”. It can be found in his essential collection of essays Facing Unpleasant Facts.

Don’t extrapolate too far with this one. Still, half a century later, some on the left in America face a similar charge.

More Eric Blair:

  • Orwell on the unavoidable problem with nationalism
  • Orwell, Einstein, and Steinbeck in agreement: the evils of militarism

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The Problem with Nationalism

19 Thursday Feb 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Essay, Politics, War

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Tags

Essay, George Orwell, Nationalism, Notes on Nationalism, Patriotism

George Orwell

“All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side.

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. […]

Moreover, although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge, the nationalist is often somewhat uninterested in what happens in the real world. What he wants is to feel that his own unit is getting the better of some other unit, and he can more easily do this by scoring off an adversary than by examining the facts to see whether they support him. All nationalist controversy is at the debating-society level. It is always entirely inconclusive, since each contestant invariably believes himself to have won the victory. Some nationalists are not far from schizophrenia, living quite happily amid dreams of power and conquest which have no connection with the physical world.”

__________

From George Orwell’s essay “Notes on Nationalism,” published in May 1945.

More prophetic words for the politics of today:

  • Joseph Conrad identifies the two main traits of terrorists (1907)
  • Schumpeter sees there’s always a reason for empires to invade (1919)
  • Brandeis writes that a government’s contempt for law is contagious (1928)
  • Raymond Chandler observes a newspaper is a business — nothing more (1953)

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What Happens When They Return?

18 Wednesday Feb 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview, War

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Tags

Cider with Rosie, Douglas Murray, foreign policy, George Monbiot, George Orwell, interview, Islam, Jihadism, Laurie Lee, politics, terror, Terrorism, War

Kurds2

Interviewer: I’m wondering about your take on the British-born Muslims leaving to wage Jihad abroad. Of course we should be concerned about what they’re going to do while they’re there, but how big of a concern is it for when they return?

Douglas Murray: Obviously it’s a real concern. I don’t think it’s being overhyped; to the contrary, I don’t think people realize how dangerous a thing this could be.

We’ve been quite lucky in recent years. I don’t say that lightly. A lot of people who’ve been involved in plots in this country have had the desire but not the capability. I’m thinking of the second set of attempted suicide bombings in July 2005, where the chemicals were mixed incorrectly so four additional bombs didn’t go off in the heart of London.

Or take, say, the Detroit airline bomber, Abdul Mutallab, who tried to ignite the device in his underwear which just ended up burning his genitals off. But you know, we were lucky that that didn’t go off, because if so we wouldn’t be laughing about the underwear bomber — we’d be mourning the thousands of people on the plane and on the ground in Detroit who were killed on Christmas Day.

So a lot of these people haven’t had the technical knowledge that the IRA did, say, at the end of their campaign in the 1980s.

But there is a real risk in Syria of jihadis going out and, aside from anything else, connecting with people who actually do have the technical know-how, who do have the expertise, and then coming back.

There are various reasons why it might not play out like that, though. For one, there is a large likelihood that nearly all of the people who go out will be killed. There are believable rumors that there are squads of executioners specifically roaming Syria and now Iraq in order to find foreign fighters and machine gun them immediately. Because they don’t want these foreign fighters and actually realize foreigners are part of the problem — that they come to do bloodthirsty things and boast about it then go home.

So a lot of these people won’t return, and I don’t shed a tear for any of them.

But I do think there’s a question which is worth pondering about why anyone would end up in that situation.

There’s some historical revisionism about it. There was an awful, lamentable George Monbiot column in The Guardian earlier this year, saying the jihadis that have gone out to Syria are no different from those who went out to fight Franco with international brigades in the 1930s. He even went on to say that British jihadis are the Laurie Lees and George Orwells of this generation.

But I’m fairly sure that after a few months of chopping off peoples’ heads and killing innocent Muslims in Syria and Iraq, these guys aren’t going to come back and write ‘Cider with Rosie.’ They won’t even write ‘Sparking Water with Rosie’s Dad.’

And I think that part of the problem is precisely saying that these jihadis are like that — getting history wrong and getting the present wrong — and giving them an additional boost.

__________

Douglas Murray riffing in an interview last summer (these comments can be found 22 minutes in).

Go on:

  • Murray reflects on why terrorism works
  • Murray laments the excuses we give terrorists
  • Clive James asks what good is culture in the face of terror?

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Viktor Frankl on How Love Survived the Nazi Death Camps

28 Friday Mar 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, Psychology

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Auschwitz, concentration camp, Dachau, Elie Wiesel, George Orwell, Ghetto, Holocaust, Love, Man's Search for Meaning, Martin Gilbert, Primo Levi, psychology, Schindler’s List, Survival, The Holocaust, Theresienstadt, Viktor Frankl, World War Two, Yevgenia Ginzburg

Auschwitz

“As we stumbled on for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, dragging one another up and onward, nothing was said, but we both knew: each of us was thinking of his wife. Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife’s image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.

A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth — that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way — an honorable way — in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, ‘The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.’

In front of me a man stumbled and those following him fell on top of him. The guard rushed over and used his whip on them all. Thus my thoughts were interrupted for a few minutes. But soon my soul found its way back from the prisoner’s existence to another world, and I resumed talk with my loved one: I asked her questions, and she answered; she questioned me in return, and I answered…

A thought crossed my mind: I didn’t even know if she were still alive. I knew only one thing — which I have learned well by now: Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance…

Had I known then that my wife was dead, I think that I would still have given myself, undisturbed by that knowledge, to the contemplation of her image, and that my mental conversation with her would have been just as vivid and just as satisfying. ‘Set me like a seal upon thy heart, love is as strong as death.'”

Viktor Frankl

__________

From Viktor Frankl’s psychological chronicle of the Holocaust Man’s Search for Meaning.

Frankl was a successful 37-year-old neurologist and therapist on the day he was deported from his home in Vienna to the Nazi ghetto Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia. Two years later, in October 1944, Frankl and his wife Tilly were transported to Auschwitz, then processed as slave laborers, split up, and sent off — Victor to a worksite bordering Dachau and Tilly to Bergen Belsen in Germany, where she soon died. Frankl would not come to know of her fate until after American soldiers liberated his camp in April, 1945, nor was he aware then that his mother Elsa, father Gabriel, and only brother, Walter, had also met the same fate at Aushwitz and Theresienstadt.

Last week I began flipping through Martin Gilbert’s much acclaimed historical survey The Holocaust. I like to think I have some of what Orwell called “a power of facing” unpleasant facts, and that my stomach is tough enough to digest even gruesome or taboo truths about the world. I’ve never walked out of a movie or play, or had to shelf a book, for the sole reason that it was just too horrifying to handle. Gilbert’s text, however, broke this streak; by the time I had reached about the two-hundredth page – less than a third of the way into this oppressive text – I felt so enervated that I had to put it down. I don’t think I’ll ever read it again.

It is, nevertheless, an excellent book – rigorously sourced, clearly organized – and in my brief reading of it (I didn’t even get to the really bad stuff) I alighted on two discrete lessons about the Holocaust. Number one: the Holocaust is something we cannot discuss without euphemism. To say someone “lived” in a ghetto or “died” in a concentration camp is to wash over essentially every splinter of truth which made up those experiences. If the scenes in Gilbert’s Holocaust are rated NC-17, then Schindler’s List, in all its terror, looks naïvely PG.

Part of the reason for this discrepancy between the reality of the Holocaust and its representation stems from the fact that, by definition, those that got it the worst are not the ones who survived to tell us their stories. Moreover, as the above excerpt from Frankl attests, the lucky few who made it past the Spring of 1945 are a minority who, through some combination of fortune and resilience, came out the other side. This is a highly unrepresentative sample, given that the traits which often carried you through to that fateful spring – cunning, adaptability, inconspicuousness – also would color your witness to the events themselves. Moreover, the luminaries that possessed the fortitude to then write about this trauma are an especially tenacious and incandescently perceptive minority of that minority – a tiny sliver who defended not only their lives, but also their humanity. Just as Solzhenitsyn and Yevgenia Ginzburg are not emblematic of the faceless millions churned through the charnel pit of the Gulag, Victor Frankl (and Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, etc. etc.) are not “average” human beings in any sense of the term. They are the most exceptionally principled and shrewd of an already-exceptional group of survivors.

In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn gives this graphite-hard instruction for surviving in a prison camp:

So what is the answer? How can you stand your ground when you are weak and sensitive to pain, when people you love are still alive, when you are unprepared? What do you need to do to make you stronger than the interrogator and the whole trap?

From the moment you go into prison you must put your cozy past firmly behind you. At its very threshold you must say to yourself, ‘My life is over, a little early to be sure, but there’s nothing to be done about it. I shall never return to freedom. I am condemned to die — now or a little later. But later on, in truth, it will be even harder, and so the sooner the better. I no longer have any property whatsoever. For me those I love have died, and for them I have died. From today on my body is useless and alien to me. Only my spirit and my conscience remain precious and important to me.’ Confronted by such a prisoner, the interrogation will tremble.

Only the man who had renounced everything can win that victory. But how can one turn one’s body to stone?

It’s a brutal reflection from a man who somehow managed to eventually pull his spirit of humanity back through this cold, purposely-mangled interior-of-ice. Frankl took the opposite approach – he accentuated his warmest impulses, though crucially this was only an interior process – yet he speaks about how many survivors took the Solzhenitsyn route. His prescription for surviving a concentration camp: turn to fire or ice inside. Those who went lukewarm were gone in hours.

“What is to give light must endure burning.” – Viktor Frankl, neurologist, psychologist, father of existential psychology, holocaust survivor. Frankl, who survived until 1997, was born this week in 1905 in Vienna, Austria.

Viktor Frankl

Viktor Frankl and Wife

Viktor Frankl and Wife

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‘We Don’t March’: Einstein, Orwell, and Steinbeck on the Evils of Militarism

28 Tuesday Jan 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Freedom, History, Political Philosophy, War

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

Albert Einstein, Albert Einstein: His Life and Universe, America and Americans, Bertrand Russell, conflict, democracy, England Your England, Eugene Debs, Fascism, Genus Americanus, George Orwell, Government, John Steinbeck, March, Marching, Military, nonfiction, Pacifism, Patriotism, peace, politics, protest, Rosa Luxemburg, Socialism, Spectacle, Walter Isaacson, War, Why I Write

Albert Einstein

“When troops would come by, accompanied by fifes and drums, kids would pour into the streets to join the parade and march in lockstep. But not Einstein. Watching such a display once, he began to cry. ‘When I grow up, I don’t want to be one of those poor people,’ he told his parents. As Einstein later explained, ‘When a person can take pleasure in marching in step to a piece of music it is enough to make me despise him. He has been given his big brain only by mistake.'”

Albert Einstein, as described in chapter 2 (“Childhood, 1879-1896”) of Walter Isaacson’s biography Einstein: His Life and Universe.

George Orwell

“One rapid but fairly sure guide to the social atmosphere of a country is the parade-step of its army. A military parade is really a kind of ritual dance, something like a ballet, expressing a certain philosophy of life. The goose-step, for instance, is one of the most horrible sights in the world, far more terrifying than a dive-bomber. It is simply an affirmation of naked power; contained in it, quite consciously and intentionally, is the vision of a boot crashing down on a face. Its ugliness is part of its essence, for what it is saying is ‘Yes, I am ugly, and you daren’t laugh at me’, like the bully who makes faces at his victim.

Why is the goose-step not used in England? In the British army… the march is merely a formalized walk. It belongs to a society which is ruled by the sword, no doubt, but a sword which must never be taken out of the scabbard.”

George Orwell, reflecting in a segment from his essay “England Your England,” which is published in his collection of essays Why I Write.

John Steinbeck

“It is a strange thing how Americans love to march if they don’t have to. Every holiday draws millions marchers, sweating in the sun, some falling and being carted away to hospitals. In hardship and in some danger they will march… but let the Army take them and force them to march, and they wail like hopeless kelpies on a tidal reef, and it requires patience and enormous strictness to turn them into soldiers.

Once they give in, they make very good soldiers; but they never cease their complaints and their mutinous talk. This, of course, does not describe our relatively small class of professional soldiers: they are like professionals in any army; but national need calls up the citizen soldier, and he is a sight. He kicks like a steer going in, bitches the whole time, fights very well when he is trained and properly armed…”

John Steinbeck, writing in his essay “Genus Americanus,” which can be found in his last published book, America and Americans.

__________

If you have additional references or ideas relating to this topic, please send them my way or post them in the comments section.

During the First World War, prominent public figures in all three of these men’s home countries were jailed for not marching in lock-step into the conflict. Because she opposed the war and had become one of the figureheads of the German socialist movement, Rosa Luxemburg spent most of the war in prison and was eventually murdered by German soldiers in 1919. In England, Bertrand Russell was thrown into Brixton Prison for six months for “passive resistance to military or naval service.” And in the United States, the famous union leader and five-time presidential candidate Eugene Debs was charged with ten counts of sedition for making an anti-draft speech on June 16th, 1918. He was eventually sentenced to ten years in prison and was disenfranchised for life.

If you’d like to read more from Steinbeck, check out another selection from America and Americans, in which he points out a curious paradox at the heart of how Americans appraise their presidents: “The President must be greater than anyone else, but not better than anyone else…”

Steinbeck

Or, see more from Isaacson’s biography of A.E., including a page describing Einstein’s obsession with identifying the causality behind the laws of nature. “When I am judging a theory… I ask myself whether, if I were God, I would have arranged the world in such a way?”

Albert Einstein

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Does Two Plus Two Equal Four?

02 Tuesday Jul 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Literature, War

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

1984, Adolf Hitler, Albert Camus, Assignment in Utopia, Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand, Don Juan, Emmanuel Joseph Sieyè, Eugene Lyons, French Revolution, Fyodor Dostoevsky, George Orwell, God and the State, Hermann Göring, Ivan Turgenev, John Galt, La Peste, Mikhail Bakunin, Molière, Napoelon, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Notes from the Underground, peace, Poems in Prose, prayer, Stalin, stupidity, The Plague, Victor Hugo, violence, War, What Is the Third Estate?, Winston Smith

Albert Camus“When a war breaks out, people say: ‘It’s too stupid; it can’t last long.’ But though the war may well be ‘too stupid,’ that doesn’t prevent its lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves…

The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole men are more good than bad; that, however, isn’t the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance which fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. There can be no true goodness, nor true love, without the utmost clear-sightedness…

There always comes a time in history when the person who dares to say that 2+2=4 is punished by death. And the issue is not what reward or what punishment will be the outcome of that reasoning. The issue is simply whether or not 2+2=4.”

__________

From Albert Camus’s The Plague.

Other Attempts at Two Plus Two:

In a display of ridiculous, zealous fidelity to Hitler, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring once proclaimed, “If the Führer wants it, two and two makes five!”

In Assignment in Utopia, Eugene Lyons near-surreal account of life in the Soviet Union, there is a chapter titled “Two Plus Two Equals Five”. This slogan was a favorite or Stalin’s and was frequently repeated in Moscow at the time; it refered to the dogmatically held belief that the Five Year Plan would be finished in four years.

In his collection Poems in Prose, Ivan Turgenev’s poem Prayer disputes the logic of petitions to the divine:“Whatever a man prays for, he prays for a miracle. Every prayer reduces itself to this: Great God, grant that twice two be not four.”

In being petitioned on his deathbed to return to the Russian Orthodoxy of his youth, Leo Tolstoy said, in what some claim to be his final words, “Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six.”

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith declares: “In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy… If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?”

In the opening of Notes from the Underground, an unnamed protagonist (The Underground Man) reasons for several pages about whether two pus two does add to four. Dostoyevsky makes clear that the purpose of this is not ideological, but rather an extension of man’s solipsistic desire for free will beyond the confines of time, space, and even hard logic. “I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing,” admits the narrator, “but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.”

In 1852, Victor Hugo was outraged by what he saw as a glaring hypocrisy in his fellow Frenchmen, who were so eager to endorse the liberal values of Napoleon III while overlooking the authoritarianism of his coup d’état. Hugo declared, “Now, get seven million five hundred thousand votes to declare that two and two make five, that the straight line is the longest road, that the whole is less than its part; get it declared by eight millions, by ten millions, by a hundred millions of votes, you will not have advanced a step.”

(This was borrowed from the Catholic clergyman Emmanuel Joseph Sieyè, who, writing in “What Is the Third Estate,” observed that, “…if it be claimed that under the French constitution, 200,000 individuals out of 26 million citizens constitute two-thirds of the common will, only one comment is possible: it is a claim that two and two make five.”)

In God and the State, Mikhail Bakunin described the Deistic worldview: “Imagine a philosophical vinegar sauce of the most opposed systems, a mixture of Fathers of the Church, scholastic philosophers, Descartes and Pascal, Kant and Scottish psychologists, all this a superstructure on the divine and innate ideas of Plato, and covered up with a layer of Hegelian immanence accompanied, of course, by an ignorance, as contemptuous as it is complete, of natural science, and proving just as two times two make five; the existence of a personal God.”

In Atlas Shrugged, John Galt says, “the noblest act you have ever performed is the act of your mind in the process of grasping that two and two make four.”

In Molière’s play Don Juan, the protagonist is asked for a state of what he believes to be true. His answer is that he thinks two plus two equals four.

If anyone knows any more of these, send them as a message or post them in the comments section…

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New Bibles for a New Babel

23 Tuesday Oct 2012

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, Photography, Religion

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Christianity, Christopher Hitchens, Ecclesiastes, George Orwell, Job, King James Bible, Philipians, Saint Paul, Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, the Bible

Charles Bridge, Prague

“Four hundred years ago, just as William Shakespeare was reaching the height of his powers and showing the new scope and variety of the English language, and just as ‘England’ itself was becoming more of a nation-state and less an offshore dependency of Europe, an extraordinary committee of clergymen and scholars completed the task of rendering the Old and New Testaments into English, and claimed that the result was the ‘Authorized’ or ‘King James’ version. This was a fairly conservative attempt to stabilize the Crown and the kingdom, heal the breach between competing English and Scottish Christian sects, and bind the majesty of the King to his devout people. ‘The powers that be,’ it had Saint Paul saying in his Epistle to the Romans, ‘are ordained of God.’ This and other phrasings, not all of them so authoritarian and conformist, continue to echo in our language: ‘When I was a child, I spake as a child’; ‘Eat, drink, and be merry’; ‘From strength to strength’; ‘Grind the faces of the poor’; ‘salt of the earth’; ‘Our Father, which art in heaven.’ It’s near impossible to imagine our idiom and vernacular, let alone our liturgy, without them. Not many committees in history have come up with such crystalline prose…

A culture that does not possess this common store of image and allegory will be a perilously thin one. To seek restlessly to update it [The Bible] or make it “relevant” is to miss the point, like yearning for a hip-hop Shakespeare. ‘Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward,’ says the Book of Job. Want to try to improve that for Twitter? And so bleak and spare and fatalistic—almost non-religious—are the closing verses of Ecclesiastes that they were read at the Church of England funeral service the unbeliever George Orwell had requested in his will: ‘Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home. … Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern. / Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was.’

Charles Bridge, PragueAt my father’s funeral I chose to read a similarly non-sermonizing part of the New Testament, this time an injunction from Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians: ‘Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.’

As much philosophical as spiritual, with its conditional and speculative ‘ifs’ and its closing advice—always italicized in my mind since first I heard it—to think and reflect on such matters: this passage was the labor of men who had wrought deeply with ideas and concepts. I now pluck down from my shelf the American Bible Society’s ‘Contemporary English Version,’ which I picked up at an evangelical ‘Promise Keepers’ rally on the Mall in Washington in 1997. Claiming to be faithful to the spirit of the King James translation, it keeps its promise in this way: ‘Finally, my friends, keep your minds on whatever is true, pure, right, holy, friendly and proper. Don’t ever stop thinking about what is truly worthwhile and worthy of praise.’

Pancake-flat: suited perhaps to a basement meeting of A.A., these words could not hope to penetrate the torpid, resistant fog in the mind of a 16-year-old boy, as their original had done for me. There’s perhaps a slightly ingratiating obeisance to gender neutrality in the substitution of ‘my friends’ for ‘brethren,’ but to suggest that Saint Paul, of all people, was gender-neutral is to re-write the history as well as to rinse out the prose. When the Church of England effectively dropped King James, in the 1960s, and issued what would become the ‘New English Bible,’ T. S. Eliot commented that the result was astonishing ‘in its combination of the vulgar, the trivial and the pedantic.’ (Not surprising from the author of For Lancelot Andrewes.) This has been true of every other stilted, patronizing, literal-minded attempt to shift the translation’s emphasis from plangent poetry to utilitarian prose…”

Charles Bridge, Prague

__________

From Christopher Hitchens’s essay about the beauty of the King James Bible and the triviality of so many modern Biblical translations. When the King Saved God: a recommended read for anyone with an interest in Christianity, literature, history, words, language, or the church.

The photographs were taken on the Charles Bridge in Prague.

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