Navigating through the slender aisles of a used book store in Seattle´s Pike Market Place, I found a collection of Orwell’s essays. Along with some other volumes including The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson and Weber´s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, I proceeded to purchase them and quickly leave before I spent all by allotted per diem on books. As I happily turned the old yellowish pages, smelling that characteristic scent that reminded me of my father’s old books, I stumbled upon one of Orwell´s best known phrases. It is from his essay titled Charles Dickens, about how he sees Dickens’ face when he reads his novels:

“It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.” [i]

– George Orwell (“Charles Dickens” ,1939)

A recurring theme in Orwell’s writing, the criticism of abstractions is incredibly relevant today. Orwell often refers to the void in morality guidance left by the decaying following of the Church that created the space for European totalitarianism in the 20^th century. The decay of the church had led many to abandon it as the pinnacle of moral authority and that was exploited by other orthodoxies. These abstractions do not always take the shape and name of a religion, but can be secular as well. Orwell also criticized the arising intellectualism in the left that often got lost in utopian abstractions and forgot about the common man, a clash brilliantly portrayed in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). Today, we are experiencing a widespread renaissance of abstractions in our western politics, both from the left and the right, bringing Orwell’s judgment into urgent pertinence.

The week before the PLA embarked on our trip to the West Coast, a protest erupted in Vermont´s Middlebury College to prevent author and guest speaker Charles Murray from speaking. The protest turned into a mob surrounding Murray and the faculty supervisor, impeding their departure, and ending with the professor being attacked and sent to the ER with a concussion. Apparently, that was not enough and they were chased out from the restaurant they ate at that night. Despite these acts being a disgrace, what I found more interesting was the nature of the protest itself before violence became a part of it. [ii]

We are seeing this type of protest occur more frequently at universities which were supposed to be the pinnacle of exploration. A place to be exposed to challenging ideas, ideas you had to embrace or learn how to refute through empirical and reasoned debate. Now we see protests that prevent speakers from speaking, trumping the unalienable right to freedom of speech. We see protests that almost seem cult-like in their structure, with students shying away from engaging in debate to instead act as children and yell louder than others can speak. I personally could not be further from Murray’s ideas both in social and scientific terms, and as a result recognize the legitimacy of protesting him. Yet, we have now turned protesting into some sort of rite through which we can express a dissatisfaction that often is not even based on our own logical thinking and is just imposed by an ideological framework that others impose on us. On both sides of the political spectrum, we have given in to yet another form of conformist political activism.

Orwell dedicated much of his work to explain the rise of totalitarianism from the void left by Religion in Europe. He was confident that humans needed a framework to be united in terms of morality. As I explored in a previous blog, it is not always possible to equate law to morality and thus communities often fill this gap by exploiting the benefits of a high-order structure that guides morality. I recently read a refreshing article on the New Yorker titled Why Facts Don´t Change Our Minds. Elizabet Kolbert describes a series of psychological studies that show the limitations of reason. Some stunning results demonstrate the steadfast nature of our notions once established, prevailing to a significant extent even when immediately debunked. During our evolution process, reason developed as an evolved trait, “not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems or even to help us draw conclusions from unfamiliar data… [but to] resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups.” [iii] The article goes on to explain cognitive scientists Mercier and Sperber’s argument. As a species that evolved in a hyper-social scheme based on collaboration and interaction, we must try to understand the performance of reasoning in that context.

There are numerous studies that show humans have a high propensity to confirmation biases and how easily we condemn evidence against our own preconceived ideas as unconvincing or erratic. In the evolution process, reasoning was not a trait that evolved to create accurate and rational notions. Instead, it was a social trait to protect and advance one’s position in the community while avoiding being tricked by others. We are social animals and thus have a high tendency to organize in communities and reap the benefits of association. Our civilizations would never have amounted to what they are if it were not for us efficiently diversifying our skills and duties. However, there are downsides to not being able to think through everything ourselves, easily buying into community-accepted structures of belief that slowly take away from our own consciousness. It is inevitable to conform to certain guidelines and truths that we do not necessarily have proof for due to the hyper-social nature of our existence, but we must always be aware of this and handle group notions with caution.

Throughout history we have seen massive, often totalitarian, power complexes arise from an extreme desire for the comfort of a ‘movement’ or abstract orthodoxy that guides our actions and gives us answers. With reasoning being an evolved trait that helps us fit in and protect ourselves, we find the comforting harmony we long for in these abstraction structures that remove the need for reasoning and provide an impervious scope for our consciousness.  However, the catch is that what may start as an ideology that groups together certain beliefs to provide a basis for our reasoning, can often morph into a system that weeds out the self and removes the need for reason in a unified space. So, despite reasoning not being a flawless process to arrive at sound judgement it is probably the best we have and cannot allow it to be superseded by excessive orthodoxies of both religious and secular absolutism.

Orwell warns us of the danger of abstract orthodoxies in limiting our capability and willingness to think for ourselves. Yet, from his position of fervent defense of democratic socialism and his fight against social injustice, he harshly criticized the secular orthodoxy of some progressives and warned us about their increasing influence. Today, almost 70 years after his passing, we are witnessing how many are utilizing the frame of intersectionality as a secular abstraction to determine their beliefs without previous exploration. I personally find the concept of intersectionality very compelling, but see how many of those who claim to live by it often know close to nothing about the ideas they regurgitate. It is reaching a point, as we saw in Middlebury and many other colleges around the U.S., where even proposing that one must hear out and debate opposing ideas to reasonably refute them is deemed unacceptable. Protesters attacked science, portraying it as a way to legitimize social oppression presented as fact, and claimed there were very little true facts in the world today.[iv] I find these positions interesting and maybe could sympathize with them for certain cases given appropriate back-up, but the issue here is that they trumped Murray’s right to speak before he could even muster a word. They made claims about science being used to legitimize oppression with no real understanding of this issue and in an unrelated context. The whole event was marked by hostility, irrationality, and a somber ritualistic character.

We cannot turn intersectionality into a quasi-religious shell that prevents us from making the effort to investigate, reason and debate to search for truth, all while we drift from the issues in play and fall to a predetermined ritual of what we believe to be social activism. What Orwell considers abstractions that often absorb intellectual socialists can now be extended to the wider population and is the basis of populist movements from both left and right. We are moving away from empirical debate and exposure to uncomfortable ideas at a frightening speed, an attitude that will only make it easier to impose oppressive power structures upon us.

We now live in a time in which the President of the United States has declared open season on facts and the old guard Republican Party is slowly revealing an anemic agenda with a seemingly unique legislative commonality of cutting taxes. A time in which the Democrats, led by what I call ‘liberelites,’ are failing to appeal to the natural base of a progressive political party. We are at a turning point in the political life of our societies and the worse we can do is to fall into ideological boxes, refuse to listen and robotically chant slogans. We must truly worry about universities being taken by an orthodox abstraction unjustly deemed as liberalism. We must truly worry about large parts of the western world taken over by nationalist populism. These trends are corroding our capacity to reason and think for ourselves.

Read, study history, debate, learn how to structure logical arguments; Challenge yourself to think further, to question the origin of ideas and beliefs contrary to your own, to understand others and create common ground. If not, you will easily be swept up by the secular dogma of political populism. Let us all be Charles Dickens, let us all be the “type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies.”[v]

References

[i] Orwell, George. A Collection of Essays: Charles Dickens.

[ii] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6EASuhefeI

[iii] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds

[iv] http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/03/is-intersectionality-a-religion.html

[v] Orwell, George. A Collection of Essays: Charles Dickens.