Category: George Orwell

Misread misanthrope or principled truthteller? Louis Menand and Leon Wieseltier battle over the legacy of George Orwell. Only recently in my readings (in Menand’s Metaphysical Club and James Livingston’s Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy) have I encountered this notion that the pragmatism of the Progressives (such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, and John Dewey) eventually leads to the same moral relativist conclusions as post-structuralism (in fact, Livingston argues that much of the postmodern devotion to figures like Foucault and Derrida is mainly a reflection of the European indifference to, if not ignorance of, American scholarship – James and Dewey came to the same philosophic conclusions decades earlier.) And, indeed, Herbert Croly’s 1909 The Promise of American Life, considered the bible of the Progressive moment, attacks abolitionism for much the same reasons as Louis Menand – that it was dangerous and destructive in its reliance upon absolute moral certainty. (Sadly, to say the progressives had a moral blind spot when it came to America’s racial dilemma is an understatement.) But, then again, the “prophetic pragmatism” of Cornel West is cleary infused with a moral sense that is based on certain underlying truths. (“Like Foucault, prophetic pragmatists criticize and resist forms of subjection, as well as types of economic exploitation, state repression, and bureaucratic domination. But these critiques and resistances, unlike his, are unashamedly guided by moral ideals of creative democracy and individuality.”) So, I’d say that, while I fall somewhere between Menand and Wieseltier on the subject of Orwell, and while I usually find Wieseltier to be a pompous ass (his own attack on Cornel West comes to mind), in the end I side with those who say keep the aspidistra flying. To paraphrase Orwell, all truths may in fact be equal, but some truths are more equal than others. It may involve some intellectual doublethink, but one can recognize that a truth may have some basis in subjectivity and still hold it – and fight for it – with conviction.