The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell
I wish I had something super insightful to say about this book that has not already been said already, but I probably don’t. Nevertheless, one of my goals for 2019 is to read 19 books and write something about them, even if I do a bad job at it.
The Road to Wigan Pier is divided into two parts: the first part details an eye-opening and heart wrenching nonfictional depiction of the plight of coal miners in early 20th century England, and the second part is Orwell trying to make the case for Socialism.
I think the first part is an amazing execution of a social documentary through the medium of writing. It reminded me why Orwell is considered one of the best writers of our time.
The second part is Orwell making the case for socialism while critiquing its most avid proponents. Maybe if I had read this book when I was back in college, with all the idealism of a young radical liberal and no knowledge at all of the millions of corpses claimed by those damn murderous socialists in the USSR, I may have bought his argument for socialism hook, line, and sinker. At the same time, Orwell did not make a one-sided sell of socialism. In fact, he presented a very nuanced critique of socialism, or more accurately, intellectual socialists whom I see as the radical leftists SJWs of today.
He describes these people as ideological, arrogant, hypocritical and resentful.
“The truth is that, to many people calling themselves Socialists, revolution does not mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves; it means a set of reforms which ‘we’, the clever ones, are going to impose upon ‘them’, the Lower Orders. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to regard the book-trained Socialist as a bloodless creature entirely incapable of emotion. Though seldom giving much evidence of affection for the exploited, he is perfectly capable of displaying hatred – a sort of queer, theoretical, in vacua hatred – against the exploiters. Hence the grand old Socialist sport of denouncing the bourgeoisie. It is strange how easily almost any Socialist writer can lash himself into frenzies of rage against the class to which, by birth or by adoption, he himself invariably belongs.”
In Orwell’s time, the struggle may have been between classes but in our time, it has morphed into a racial/identity type of class distinction. This excerpt specifically makes me think of those self-hating middle-class White liberals, what the left deem as “White allies” and what right-wingers pejoratively call people with “White guilt” and thus feel he may be absolved of his “participation” in the oppression of minorities if he denounces his own racial group and self-flagellate (figuratively, of course). Of course, it’s not just White liberals. This also applies to those “male feminists” who denounce all masculine traits as oppressive to women and “on behalf of all men,” apologize to women for things they’ve never actually done themselves. By doing this, the denouncer feels himself morally superior of those he denounces and it is much easier to hate someone when you feel you have the better moral argument.
I was also struck by this passage as well:
“Under the capitalist system, in order that England may live in comparative comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation – an evil state of affairs, but you acquiesce in it every time you step into a taxi or eat a plate of strawberries and cream. The alternative is to throw the Empire overboard and reduce England to a cold and unimportant little island where we should all have to work very hard and live mainly on herrings and potatoes. That is the very last thing that any left-winger wants. Yet the left-winger continues to feel that he has no moral responsibility for imperialism. He is perfectly ready to accept the products of Empire and to save his soul by sneering at the people who hold the Empire together.”
Conservatives often make fun of the socialist who is protesting capitalism while drinking Starbucks and tweeting about their activism on their iPhones, unaware of the irony (or maybe they don’t care?) This is also true with the environmentalist (I should know this well because I used to be one of them.) I thought it immoral that our consumption and way of life caused such negative impacts on the environment. So, I tried to cut whatever I could to limit my “impact.” I didn’t eat meat, brought my own shopping bag, used public transport, only bought used clothing, and more. Probably one of the most radical thing I did was forgo regular shampoo & conditioner sold in drugstores (something about the sulfates in them which poison aquatic life) and made my own, from “natural” ingredients… Needless to say, my hair looked OILY all the time and smelled like apple cider VINEGAR for a good few months. And let me tell you, I DID feel a sort of smugness during this time for my environmental activism. But when push comes to shove, when I could not justify the hypocrisy of why I chose to FLY from the US to Japan and back several times in a year while studying abroad, an action that equals to a whole YEAR of driving, I started to doubt my sincerity towards the cause. I can’t claim to truly care about the environment and take unnecessary trips to foreign countries – especially in the age of instantaneous Internet connection.
Okay, sorry, I went totally off-topic. Anyway, I just want to introduce one last quote from Orwell regarding mechanization. He wrote this in 1938 but it rings true even more in current day 2019. It’s a long quote, but it’s really worth reading.
“For man is not, as the vulgarer hedonists seem to suppose, a kind of walking stomach; he has also got a hand, an eye, and a brain. Cease to use your hands, and you have lopped off a huge chunk of your conscious-ness. And now consider again those half-dozen men who were digging the trench for the water-pipe. A machine has set them free from digging, and they are going to amuse themselves with something else – carpentering, for instance. But whatever they want to do, they will find that another machine has set them free from that. For in a fully mechanized world there would be no more need to carpenter, to cook, to mend motor bicycles, etc., than there would be to dig. There is scarcely anything, from catching a whale to carving a cherry stone, that could not conceivably be done by machinery. The machine would even encroach upon the activities we now class as ‘art’; it is doing so already, via the camera and the radio. Mechanize the world as fully as it might be mechanized, and whichever way you turn there will be some machine cutting you off from the chance of working – that is, of living.”
I think our modern society takes for granted how hard life has been for everyone before us, and how life was basically physical work for a majority of human civilization. It is thanks to the Industrial Revolution and capitalism that we have been freed from a lot of this physical work, yet it’s also important to realize the noble and inherent value of actually doing things for yourself (or others), with your own two hands. This is a good reminder for me since I always make the excuse of being clumsy with my hands to avoid doing something by myself.
However, even in this, Orwell cautions us to not fall into the trap of thinking just because we can do something by ourselves that we can call it our own, since most of the hard work has been done for us.
“Here am I, working eight hours a day in an insurance office; in my spare time I want to do something ‘creative’, so I choose to do a bit of carpentering – to make myself a table, for instance. Notice that from the very start there is a touch of artificiality about the whole business, for the factories can turn me out a far better table than I can make for myself. But even when I get to work on my table, it is not possible for me to feel towards it as the cabinet-maker of a hundred years ago felt towards his table, still less as Robinson Crusoe felt towards his. For before I start, most of the work has already been done for me by machinery. The tools I use demand the minimum of skill. I can get, for instance, planes which will cut out any moulding; the cabinet-maker of a hundred years ago would have had to do the work with chisel and gouge, which demanded real skill of eye and hand. The boards I buy are ready planed and the legs are ready turned by the lathe. I can even go to the wood-shop and buy all the parts of the table ready-made and only needing to be fitted together; my work being reduced to driving in a few pegs and using a piece of sandpaper. And if this is so at present, in the mechanized future it will be enormously more so. With the tools and materials available then, there will be no possibility of mistake, hence no room for skill. Making a table will be easier and duller than peeling a potato. In such circumstances it is nonsense to talk of ‘creative work’. In any case the arts of the hand (which have got to be transmitted by apprenticeship) would long since have disappeared. Some of them have disappeared already, under the competition of the machine. Look round any country churchyard and see whether you can find a decently-cut tombstone later than 1820. The art, or rather the craft, of stonework has died out so completely that it would take centuries to revive it.”
Anyway, all of this is just really interesting food for thought. I know I rambled on and on from one idea to another, but at least I wrote something, even if it’s bad, it’s still better than writing nothing.
