Observations on Free Speech
If you think a Twitter ban is Orwellian, then you really have been leading a charmed, privileged, and entitled life. And clearly fear that the times are a-changing.
I don't much support bans, for the reason that in the normal course of things, it is the Left in politics that suffers. That said, there really is a need to reclaim free speech from the hands of the fanatics, the people who, in asserting the right to say anything, flood the world with words that invert meanings, debasing standards so that it becomes less and less possible to say anything meaningful and truthful. In economics, Gresham's Law holds that bad money drives out good. It is the same with words - bad words drive out good.
I've exchanged words with said people. They are words down the drain. Because there are no standards of evaluation by which to hold truth-claims to account. This assertion of free speech as the right to say anything, even and especially the downright false, is an attempt to remove standards and hence leave money and power without check and constraint. How ironic that such people would cite Orwell in their defence, turning his own words inside out and against him.
I have a feeling that the situation is far worse than this graphic portrays it as. There are people, so confirmed in their prejudice that Orwell, on account of being a critic of the Soviet Union, was anti-socialist, that they think him their ideological ally. You only have to read him, with brain cells engaged, to see that Orwell is in invitation into critical thinking with respect to all political claims and positions.
Orwell is hard to pigeon-hole politically. He was certainly critical of many of the political forms that socialism assumed in his day. But if you read "Road to Wigan Pier" - my neighbouring town - and "Homage to Catalonia," it soon becomes clear that he affirmed socialist values, and argued that socialism is plain common sense, the realisation of the social nature of human beings. Orwell would most certainly be horrified by his being cited by people whose licentious fear and hatred of each, any, and every form of collective endeavour has them demonising anyone who seeks to check their licence as 'socialist.' They may have read Orwell, but they have read only to confirm their criticisms of socialism as totalitarian. I wonder what they would make of Orwell's celebration of Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War as the "first time he had ever seen the working class in the saddle." One fundamental reason he criticised the Soviet Union as totalitarian was because the working class - the exploited, subaltern class in the capitalist west - remained the exploited, subaltern class in the East.
But here is my take - truth is a friend of those who seek justice and equality, and the scourge of those who defend concentrations of power. That democratisation by way of knowledge certainly constitutes the old impulse of socialism. The pioneers of socialism pursued knowledge in the name of freedom, seeking to uproot all the forms of mystifying consciousness that sustained humanity's self-oppression. Free speech is fine, but good speech is better. Individuals may be free to say what they like, but the old teaching held that they take care in the words they use. Isn't this rather traditional teaching with respect to the proper use, rather than abuse, of God's most precious gifts?
Orwell supported free speech, but didn't make a fetish of it.
No more than liberals in the classic tradition did. Every liberal worthy of the name drew the clear distinction between liberty and licence. Like John Stuart Mill, in his classic "On Liberty," Orwell recognized that the right to free speech also came with the responsibility to use it well, being mindful of its consequences. Society has a right to intervene to check the misuse of that speech to harm others. This is the classic statement of free speech within liberalism. Somewhere along the way, the individual has been detached from society and social context so that free speech has been fetishised as the fundamentalist creed of libertarians. I hold a view that once liberalism sheds its metaphysical underpinnings, as it did in the twentieth century, then it becomes a purely conventional and political doctrine and, in so doing, invites this kind of libertarian fundamentalism. But it is a corruption and a degeneration, the kind of thing that those who subscribe to the simplicities of Ayn Rand engage in. I am not a liberal, I am a critic of liberalism. But I recognize that liberalism has a long and honourable tradition, in that line leading from John Locke to John Stuart Mill and beyond. I think liberal freedoms are not enough, but are to be enriched by a substantive ethic grounded in a more rounded ontology. The figure of the discrete pre-social individual who contracts in or out of society to defend and advance private interests is the corruption that works to undermine much that is worthy in liberalism. Libertarianism is a decadent form of liberalism, the form liberalism takes when it loses touch with core principles. It is striking how many libertarians are fundamentalists on many points, and so very quickly flip into becoming authoritarians.
These people are a menace to liberalism. They take core liberal principle and assert them at extremes in the deliberate attempt to negate liberal practice. Liberalism needs to recover and hold its nerve and defend itself against the corruption and debasement of its values and principles. Whether it can, given its much vaunted agnosticism on the good, is something I doubt. The need for something more substantive is now clearing. But in the first instance, classical liberals who worked before the decadence set in are very clear that the right of free speech is not a right of some to abuse others, incite conflicts, inflict harm. Even JS Mill, who stated the liberal position at its most individualistic against the encroachment of the state, was clear on society's right to intervene to protect the public good.
I have read Rand. It didn't take long. She is a joke, dealing with comic-book caricatures. I can see the appeal. The shallow and the superficial love the simplicities of her cult of selfishness. That so many Christians praise her never ceases to amaze me, given that the only God she recognized was her own divine "I." She openly identified religion as an "affront to reason." But when individuals become curved in on themselves, no doubt they would be inclined to believe that the ego that they hear speaking so loudly to them, telling them that greed and stupidity is good, is God. It isn't.
I've read Locke, Mill et al in depth, for the reason that they are substantial thinkers further of time and reflection. All of them would have identified this fundamentalist assertion of free speech for what it is - the fetish of libertarians who seek to turn the world into a sophist anarchy of the rich and powerful. They were committed not only to free speech, but good speech in the context of truth-seeking. They would have given the libertarians short shrift. As did Orwell. And as, indeed, do I. Those who can be found complaining the most about fact-checking bias will be found to be the ones who abuse free-speech the most by peddling lies, untruths, falsehoods, and half-truths. The solution is not a ban. It is better to be able to see and identify these people in the open and be on our guard. Some people call for more education. The problem is that very many of the abusers are educated. Some call for greater science teaching. Many of the abusers are qualified in the sciences. Some call for a greater focus on the humanities. Again, many of the abusers have backgrounds in the humanities. They've been to school, and many have armfuls of qualifications. Dante's Inferno is full of individuals who sinned wittingly and knowingly in order to serve their ends. The solution is a return to the moral and intellectual virtues to create a society of truth-seekers. The idea would be for each and all to be fact-checkers as part of a mutual pursuit of and commitment to truth. I would have more sympathy for those complaining about censorship and being fact-checked had I not observed them over the years repeatedly peddling untruths or drawing misleading conclusions on the basis of half or merely quarter truths, deliberately eliminating the whole truth. I wouldn't ban them, I would allow them to keep exposing themselves and make it plain and public that they misuse the highest human faculties of reason, speech, communication, and connection. That should be done in the open, rather than having certain authorities intervening to do it for us - and maybe somewhere down the line against us too. Basically, it's a call to people to stop abusing free speech and deliberately testing its limits. But, deep down, I have a feeling that certain folk really are out to negate and nullify and neutralize the truth and its media, dissolving the public realm and ending the possibilities of communication for the very reason that trust between people in human exchange has been destroyed.
A quick look around FB reveals that the worshippers in the cult of greed and stupidity are still posting away to the faithless. They believe in nothing other than their oafish selves, except that the way they seize on any old reassurance that comes their way - fairly wealthy, moderately educated charlatans pushing their buttons and keeping them in line - suggests that they are not reassured at all. What horrible universes they must live in, always having to sneer, deride, abuse, and divide. Mean and ugly, in fact. I really should stop looking at this seething mass of reactionary putrescence. But you can't avoid it on social media. You keep checking for signs of redemption. But no, its ugliness and malice all the way down. Infinite regress? No. It ends in enclosure in the cold frozen heart isolated from warmth and affection. You actually feel as though you have lost something every time you come into contact with these people. I'm writing on Dante, and something that is noticeable is the way that the joy that comes from love is increased by being shared. I think this is the clue. These people are idolaters; they worship money and power, and in their miserable meagre minds money and power are diminished by being shared. So there they are on social media every day, rejecting and unravelling commonalities, stamping the boot on the human heart and the human face every day, inciting division and hatred, and then saying it's not them, it's the others. I love that these people think George Orwell is on their side. Their greed and stupidity in their idolatry blinds them to the fact that Orwell was actually a democratic socialist. He said so often enough. I should know. I've actually read him in depth. These characters know him as a critic of the Soviet Union, and since the Soviet Union equates with socialism - in their prejudices - then Orwell must be an anti-socialist. It's bog standard syllogistic reasoning that gets major and minor premises wrong. You know why Orwell criticised the Soviet Union? Because he was a socialist. Much that he wrote in Animal Farm and 1984 came from socialist and anarchist sources. Who do you think Orwell was fighting with in the Spanish Civil War? (You do know he participated in the Spanish Civil War?) Who do you think Orwell was fighting against? (Clue, he was fighting against the fascists).
The idea that Orwell was anti-socialist comes from people who read Ayn Rand rather than Orwell. (I doubt they read Rand, mind, other than kiddie-sized paragraphs which say socialism is for losers, those who envy the successful. I've read Rand and her 'objectivism.' It's cod philosophy for people who can't read. The most laughable thing of all is that the Christian right worship Rand. Interesting. Her only God is the "I" of the ego. She condemned religion as an "affront to reason." There is no notion of service to others and sacrifice in her cartoonish writings.
The view of Orwell as a right wing anti-socialist stems from the fact he was critical of fellow socialists in "The Road to Wigan Pier" - so am I, and for the same reasons. And he was critical of Stalinism - so were many socialists. The first writing I ever did was reviewed by the Socialist Party of Great Britain: "He does an effective demolition job on Lenin and the Bolsheviks." I did, too. From a socialist perspective. The politics of Lenin et al were antithetical to socialism. Orwell was far from being alone in advancing a left-wing critique of the Soviet Union. He drew upon the work of Syndicalists, Trotskyites, anarchists and other socialists in criticising the totalitarianism he saw on the horizon. Lewis Mumford called it the Megamachine. Those who reduce this to anti-socialism are people who, in the name of freedom, are creating the psychological meanness and social disconnection which establishes the perfect conditions for authoritarianism. And that's putting it mildly. They submit so very easily to images and idols of power, so long as they crush all that is holy, humane, and decent. This is what Orwell saw coming. He would have found the fact that these people are citing his name in support utterly vomitable, Orwellian in fact.
But if people really are still stupid enough to believe that Orwell was a right-wing anti-socialist, then we can be sure that the problem is less one of stupidity and political bigotry - they are the people openly condemned.
I don't even need to do any research on this. A modicum of reading and education is enough. I read Orwell back in the 1980s, Homage to Catalonia and Road to Wigan Pier. The former is about the Spanish Civil War, where Orwell spent much of 1936-1937 fighting for the Left, specifically with a Marxist/Communist militia. He disliked the Communists, distrusted their motives, saw them frequently betray the workers to Moscow. But it strengthened his commitment to the working class and to socialism. His criticism of the Soviet Union stemmed from this socialist commitment. At one stage he described the atmosphere in the socialist-anarchist area of Catalonia as being his ideal of a realized socialist society. He celebrated Barcelona as the first time he had ever seen the working class in the saddle. (I'm going from memory, so I need to look up the quote - the issue right wing distorters of truth and decency is not worth five minutes of my time).
In the essay ‘The Lion and the Unicorn,’ published in 1941, Orwell argued for a thoroughgoing socialist transformation as a condition of winning the war against Nazi Germany. The subtitle of the book was "Socialism and the English Genius." (The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius). That's my kind of socialism, being an English genius and all that. Better than being a Randian American libertarian.
Do we need a translator to interpret this quote from George Orwell?
"Every line of work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for Democratic Socialism."
I think that quote is simple enough even for virulent US right-wing Randians to understand. I know that when you present them with plain truth they start to cherry-pick facts, ignore facts, distort evidence, twist logic - and then claim that facts and logic, like God, are on their side. If angels exist, they would surely be weaping.
That quote comes from Orwell's essay "Why I Write" in 1946.
The poor man, desperately ill, took the trouble to make his views and motivations plain, simple, and incontrovertible. And now we get some of the most "Orwellian" miscreants on the planet citing Orwell in their support.
Orwell was more than prepared to criticize people who were nominally on the left, for the reason he wanted names to conform to realities. He knew how easily people could lose sight of the principles through a fetishism of the symbols. It happens all the time in religion and politics. He saw Stalinism not as socialism but as a perversion of Socialism, just as I see many of the things done in the name of religion not as religion but as a perversion of religion. That perversion is all the worse when religion is subordinated to political ideology.
Orwell regarded the ability to call the perversion of ideals out as a test of left wing intellectual integrity. He called it out himself and did so as a socialist. He was emphatically a Democratic Socialist throughout the period when he was writing his most important work, work that these odious right wing forces are now claiming to vindicate them and their virulent anti-socialism. Orwell had seen that virulence himself, and called it for what it was - fascism. He took part in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the socialists against the fascists.
And those who are unpersuaded by such patently obvious facts can only be described as virulent anti-socialists, in the manner described above. There's a name for them. The reality of them is bad enough.
The 'libertarians' - that's quite a neutral word for what they really are - who as Christians turned a blind eye to - and openly apologised for - Trump's quite overtly sinful behaviour are now telling us that Biden is "Catholic in name only." They are practised in this game of taking the ideals of others, ideals which inspire the creation of a better society in the future and using them as impossible standards in the present. Environmentalists are hypocrites, socialists are hypocrites, everyone with ideals beyond self-interest is a hypocrite. The approach reduces everyone down to the meanest level, everyone is selfish, everyone has a lust for power and money. That's what that approach sets out to achieve - a levelling down to baseness. And it's this that makes me certain that such people, although they frequently claim to be religious and Christian and love God and Jesus above all things, don't have a religious bone in their body. They establish an impossible ideal merely to abuse people who fall short of it as hypocrites. Heaven is not earth, the future society we are aiming to create is not now. It is perfectly possible to criticize the society one is in whilst working for its improvement, however compromised we may be by current institutions and relations. All these people can do here is shout "hypocrisy." It is the very antithesis of a religious view in which, aware as we are in falling short, show contrition and seek redemption. These people are merciless and unforgiving and trapping us within the Hell of immediacy and selfish impulse.
How on Earth is Biden supposed to govern as a Catholic? After Trump's patent disregard of Christian ethics was deemed allowable seeing as his job was one of politics and government? It's impossible and they know it. They just engage in apologetics for their own side, and damn and denounce the other side, citing impossible standards for others to live by, but not them. Because they are not hypocrites at all, seeing as they are so overtly base, selfish, mean, vindictive, malicious, and greedy. They are horrible and openly parade the fact; the others who claim to be nice, and hold up certain values to live by - they are hypocrites, because no one is nice and there are no values. That's the stripe of these people, and it is ugly to observe them day by day. I won't predict Hell for them, they are already in it.
As for Biden or anyone working in the Catholic tradition in the public square - it is impossible. That's not Biden's fault, that's capitalist modernity and a "free to choose" Milton Friedmanite economics for you. We live in an economic system that has turned the cardinal virtues into sins against the GNP. And this crowd love that, they worship mammon. Money is proof of success. That's why they despise and damn the poor, the poor not merely contradict notions that capitalism is the best of all possible worlds, their existence is a mortal sin against the cult of greed.
"Modern systematic politics, whether liberal, radical, conservative, or socialist, simply has to be rejected from a standpoint that owes genuine allegiance to the tradition of the virtues; for modern politics itself expresses in its institutional forms a systematic rejection of that tradition." (Alasdair MacIntyre).
You want Biden to govern in conformity with Catholic teaching? I know these characters all obsess over abortion. There is plenty to Catholic social teaching that will have them reaching for the smelling salts should they be exposed to it. Read on business ethics and the commitment to goods that are truly good and services that truly serve; read on treating all individuals as subjects, not objects, mere means to external ends. Read Pope John Paul II's call for "ecological conversion" and Pope Francis' "Laudato Si. Read on the commitment to peace, the denunciation of war, nuclear weapons, militarisation, the arms budget. I can't wait to hear calls from the right that Biden live up to Catholic teaching and cut US spending on arms. We have made new idols of money and power, argues Pope Francis. "We have created new idols. The worship of the ancient golden calf has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose."
That's basic Catholicism. And not a president or politician within reach of government can espouse such principles, let alone be elected, without being denounced as socialist. That reminds me, I saw one of these characters before the election referring to Kamala Harris as a "monster" for supporting the principle of equality. I'll mention the equality of all souls, too, in Catholic teaching.
I don't know if Orwell had any religious views. From memory, I don't think he did. But I do know he was a socialist. A very critical one - the best kind - and one committed to democracy and letting 'ordinary' folk have their own voice - the very best kind. He also had an allotment and kept a diary recording his afternoons working the land. He said it kept him sane.