A Wiki Project is under way (click here to go there) to formulate a New Constitution for some version of a reconstituted United States of America -- whether Before the Fall or After the Revolution Comes, or some other catastrophe strikes, or just noodling about Building a Better Future, one of my persistent themes, especially this year of Revolution and Upheaval.
Some of those who pass by this blog may not know about it and might want to participate. There is plenty of room, and I'm told that everyone is welcome to visit, to check things out, and if they register, to participate just as fully as or as little as they want.
While there are many different perspectives and points of view being expressed already, I'd say the unifying theme is anti-Imperialism.
In "Why I Write" (1946), George Orwell put together a remarkably honest dictum on the topic of his ongoing literary activities.
Writers, after all, have plenty of motivations -- much like actors and circus clowns -- with the upshot, for many, that they want to Do Good. Somehow. And writing is the way they have found to do it.
Let's let Orwell speak for himself:
[After a lengthy and humorous description of his background and how he came to writing, he states his personal (and generalized) motivations...]
(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen — in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all — and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.
(ii) Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.
(iii) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.
(iv) Political purpose. — Using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.
It's hard to argue with Orwell on those four broad motivational points; every writer I've known has shared them to one degree or another, and these motivations are shared by many other professionals as well. I mention actors and circus clowns in part because of my own long association with such people through the Show Business (one of my previous careers), and by and large, they share many of the same motivations as writers and so many others who seek to have some kind of impact on people.
Egoism is the main point. Orwell, to his everlasting credit, is fully aware of his own egoism in becoming a writer. Makes no bones about it. His insight that the mass of humanity is not particularly egocentric, selfish or self-obsessed is interesting. From the indications of his writing in this essay and other works, he came to this insight through his contacts with the lower classes of Britain, the servile masses of Burma, and his experiences in Europe between the Wars -- particularly during the Spanish Civil War. "They" -- the unselfish masses -- are not like "us:" The egoists. The self-obsessed. The Writers.
Further to his credit, Orwell does not judge the unselfish mass of humanity to be lesser than himself and his kind. For his time and his culture, that is amazing.
But in other works, such as "Notes on Nationalism," he proposes that the British intelligentsia -- of which he is of course a part, though he insisted on his own independence of mind -- is largely captivated with the notion that the Oppressed Peoples of the Empire and the World are actually better than their Betters who rule over them with guns, an iron rod and the lash.
How is an Empire established and how is it maintained and ruled? There were only ever a handful of British colonial officers ruling over vast seas of Natives around the globe, and how it was done is of some interest today as American and British Ruling Class interests conspire to put Our Brown Brothers under the gun, the iron rod and the lash once again in a sort of cracked reimposition of the Empire in those areas where the Lessons of Democracy obviously didn't take.
How could a handful of British soldiers and colonial officers have managed it?
Given that the reimposition is being handled by relatively even fewer Americans and Britons -- leaving out the other nations' few and proud -- than the deed was first done, we may wish to reflect on how it was managed to begin with and that may differ from the way it is being done now.
Attacks on the weak was one of the most obvious means the Empire was established and maintained. Flattery of the strong didn't hurt. And evaluating every contact in the field of interest on the basis of how it could be used to advance the aims of the Companies and the Crown was fundamental.
We see much the same going on now in the attacks launched against the weakest states and peoples: Iraq and Afghanistan most prominently, but including Somalia and the few enclaves of the Palestinians and other Lesser Peoples of the Middle East. Probing for weaknesses in the Other is ongoing, and more and more states and peoples will be added to the list of territories to conquer as time goes by. Iran, of course, is in the gunsights as we speak, and there will be more weak and weakened states to be gathered in to the New Empire.
Flattery of the strong was one of the keys to British success in building its Empire in the 19th Century. While weak Native states and tribes would be attacked brutally and mercilessly, strong ones would be flattered and persuaded with gifts and the preservation of status, revenues and control. By this means, loyalty was purchased or otherwise obtained. Thus, for example, India could be ruled effectively through Native agents, simply by convincing a sufficient number of Native princes to submit to the Crown and be rewarded. It worked well enough so long as the Natives did not rebel, but as is the way of these people, rebellion was commonplace, and each one became harder and harder to suppress.
Finally, as Britain trolled the earth for new conquests, their agents evaluated every contact they made with the Natives on the basis of how those contacts could be used to advance their aims and ambitions. They became very adept at recognizing who could be used to their advantage, who could be ignored, and who would have to be taken on and defeated.
All of these factors and more are once again in play as Anglo-American Imperial might asserts itself.
Yet the lesson from the failures of the British Empire was never really learned either in Westminster or in DC. No, in those realms, the Empire was a success, and withdrawal from Imperial control was only made necessary by other events. For example, the two world wars.
Just look at India today if you need an example of the success of the Empire. It is free, self-governing, democratic and an economic powerhouse. Any former colonial officer would say it is so because of the example of the British. Had India not been put under the Crown, think what a mess and what a failed state -- or states -- it would be today.
So God Bless the Queen, and don't you forget it.
But the Imperial Road is the wrong road according to Orwell. The road of liberation and Democratic Socialism is the right road.
I think it is fair to assert that George Orwell (né Eric Blair) was one of the strongest influences on English-speaking anti-Establishmentarians and contrarians in the 20th Century. His influence became even more profound after his death in 1950, growing significantly the closer we came to the iconic year of 1984, and then growing still more, it seems, the farther beyond that year global affairs continued.
To read him now is to delve into a world view that is in many respects quaint and anachronistic, in other respects frighteningly prescient.
Yes, the world today is the direct descendant of the world Orwell knew and wrote about so extensively between the world wars, during World War II, and for a few years in its aftermath. The physical, social, economic, psychological, artistic, technological, philosophical and political shocks and upheavals of the era seem to be neverending in retrospect. It was a world turned upside down over and over and over again, with hundreds of millions put to the screws by the various nationalist, imperialist and liberationist ideals, goals, and objectives of the ruling classes and multiple tens of millions sent to their graves by wars and suffering or to the ash pits of anonymous extermination in the various genocides of the era.
Looking backwards, it's amazing anyone had anything but a dystopian view of the first half of the 20th Century, and more amazing still that anyone could keep their sanity through the rest of the century.
And yet here we are. To yak about it, to yak about some of the leading lights of the times, and to consider what went wrong, what went right, and where to go from here.
The recent G8/G20 meeting in Toronto -- for good and ill -- is an example of the direct globalist development that can trace its origins to governmental reaction to the horrors unleashed during the first half of the 20th Century by the Powers That Be (whatever and whomever they might have been) acting out of, let's say, fervor for their own nationalist interests in contrast to all other interests.
The periodic "G" summits, and the commonalities of the ruling classes world wide that are found and developed within the context of these social and political fora, are the chief characteristic of elite rule today, in strong contrast to the way these things were not done in Orwell's time. The constancy of struggles -- the constancy of nationalist struggles between more-or-less giant polities and overweening political philosophies that characterized Orwell's time simply don't have a parallel today, in part because the global ruling elites have found far more common purpose with one another than they have found benefit in continuing ancient rivalries pitting peoples against peoples.
I for one would like to think that Orwell's influence was at least as strong on the ruling classes as it was on the Proles who took to his works and his cynical, almost hopeless, voice so strongly, especially after World War II.
Eric Blair was born in 1903 in British India where his father was an Imperial functionary (in the Opium Department wouldn't you know); his mother had grown up in Burma where her French father had... business... interests. Yes.
Blair was removed from India in 1904 by his mother who returned with him to Britain while his father stayed on in Imperial service for the British Raj in India.
(As a side note, and not to make too much of it, my father was born in the same era as Blair, into the American counterpart of Blair's "lower-upper-middle-class," and though there was no counterpart to the Imperial Service and the British Raj for most Americans to aspire or gravitate to, there were plenty of class and generational commonalities of interest and focus nevertheless.)
Despite Blair's class and the Imperial Service of his father, the family was not wealthy enough to send him to public school or university without scholarships. Ultimately, he went to Eton, but not to university; instead, he joined the Imperial Indian Police (for service in Burma, where his grandmother still lived.) He was in Burma from 1922 to 1927, returning to England after he contracted Dengue fever. He left the Imperial Service upon his return to his home in Britain.
To put it charitably, he was disgusted with the British Raj and the monumental levels of oppression of the Natives that was absolutely necessary to maintain the British Lords of the Empire in the style, comfort and convenience to which they were so thoroughly accustomed. He hated what he had to do as a representative of the Authority of that Empire, he hated what it did to the British people, and most of all, he hated what it did to the servile masses of Burma and the Empire in general.
It was a disgust widely shared among the British intelligentsia which Blair/Orwell soon joined as a writer -- with a specific eye on the condition and plight of the Lower Orders, a long and storied genre of British literature.
I've spent a little time on Orwell's background because his perspectives and insights cannot be divorced from his nationality, class and experience, and his predictions, prescriptions and conclusions grow out of what he knew. That's the fundamental truth of who he was, what he wrote about, and how he came to understand the Ways of the World the way he did.
As far as I can tell, I have never done a post here on the Free Speech Movement and Mario Savio at UC Berkeley, though I know I have posted extensively on the topic elsewhere, including at Glenn's Place.
William Timberman, who used to hang out frequently over at Glenn's, took his leave from there some time back after a particularly ugly and unfortunate series of insults from some of the other posters that were both uncalled for and offensive on their face. WT was at Berkeley when the Free Speech Movement was roiling and shutting down the campus, and he had many insights about what was going on to share, and while not there, I wasn't that far away when it was happening and I could not simply ignore the student uprising.
The events of the fall and winter of 1964 in and around Sproul Hall and elsewhere on campus were electrifying, and they were, I believe, the trigger for the student revolts all through the remainder of the 1960's.
The Free Speech Movement was a Liberationist movement, modeled in some ways on the Civil Rights Movement, and it would become the nucleus of the Anti-Vietnam War Movement. At issue was the University's prohibition of (unauthorized) 'political activity' on or near campus. It was a patent infringement of First Amendment rights, one of many that were commonplace at the time (to put it mildly), and the spontaneous student uprising caused by the University Administration's decision to enforce its ban on (unauthorized) 'political activity' on Bancroft Avenue outside Sather Gate (students marching through pictured above) led to nationwide student protest and turmoil climaxing -- but not ending -- with the Kent State (Ohio) shootings in 1970.
The First Amendment and Free Speech was of course central to the protests at Berkeley, but the firebrand speeches of Mario Savio caught the attention of the crowds at the campus and the media and were a sensation then as they still are. The First Amendment dispute was merely one of many Liberationist issues that would eventually be raised during the Berkeley protests. Mario's most famous speech, the one given to the crowd on the steps of Sproul Hall just before they occupied the building on December 2, 1964, is a masterpiece of Liberationist polemic.
"There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part.
"And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop.
"And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all."
It's still an inspiration for many who fight for Liberation.
After much tumult, many arrests, and the periodic shut down of the University, the University yielded to many of the demands of the students, though not all. Not that, by that point, the Genie of student protest could be put back in the bottle.
Liberationist protest became a central focus of the 1960's times of troubles. The Free Speech Movement was a model of how to do it.
Communitarianism, characterized and characatured by the Hippies, soon became another thread in the protest movements of the era. But while the Liberationists tended to be confrontational with Authority, the Communitarians tended to withdraw from confrontation or to try to mediate confrontation with Peace, Love, and Flowers.
An iconic event that combined Liberationist and Communitarian approaches to protest was the "Levitate the Pentagon" March on October 21, 1967.
But it was all a very long time ago.
Nevertheless, the twin currents of liberation activism and communal withdrawal continue to move through American society and politics. The current effort to expand marriage rights to same sex couples is a Liberationist case in point.
Communitarian efforts are by no means absent, but they are far lower key than current Liberationist activism. And there is, I believe, a reason for it, quite apart from the inherent modesty of Communitarianism itself.
It goes back to the Free Speech Movement and the campus upheavals it inspired. Liberationism was deeply threatening to the entire power structure of the mid- and later-1960's, and that power structure fought back hard. Ultimately, however, success in curbing Liberationism would be found in controlling it through co-option, which was the genius of early and later Reaganism. Ronald Reagan was inaugurated governor of California in January 1967, something that is largely forgotten. He came into office on a vow to bring the student rebellion to a halt, and to ensure it never happened again. His initial approach to the rebellion was to release the hounds in a manner of speaking, but soon enough, he was adopting a lot of Liberationist rhetoric, but using it to press for liberation from nasty government regulation of economic interests, and freedom for his particular brand of Conservative politics. It was brilliant. Americans are still under the spell of that kind of Liberation.
On the other hand, Communitarianism largely vanished from widespread public view with the commercialization and subsequent fading away of the Hippies and after some really terrible incidents that seemed to come out of the communes and the community movements that once were proliferating. The Tate-La Bianca murders, for example. Yet the spirit of Communitarianism is strongly bonded with much of what passes for Liberal and Progressive politics -- in the Environmental movement especially, but by no means limited to it.
There is a very strong irony in that the Free Speech Movement originated as a protest of the suppression of students' political speech by the University; last week, the Supreme Court passed a law by essentially declaring that Corporate political speech had been suppressed for lo, these many years (over a century), and their Liberation from this unconscionable suppression was the highest good the court could conceive. It required no Movement, no masses protesting. All it required was a simple majority of Radical ideologues on the Supreme Court, five Men In Black. And the Liberation was done.
