Category: essays

Monthly essays

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Time marches on, and the coming backlash against the internet is getting ever closer. I ended my last post on this subject with idle speculation about the internet would be downgraded to banal or actually evil:

The current crop of tech-lovers are certainly not evil themselves, and we haven’t yet seen anything that is both clearly evil and fundamentally tied to internet-enabled communication. Wikileaks, though, gives us an interesting glimpse at what may be to come. If a ponce like Julian Assange can embarrass the most powerful country in the world and get away with it, then it’s possible that someone who’s smart, ambitious, and evil could do something similar in a way that would be really disastrous. Our e-Hitler could easily get the sympathy of most of the world’s hackers and geeks, who would gladly participate in an open-source world-domination project written in Python if it were framed in the right way. And if that happened, you’d better believe that the rest of the world would turn against the tech-lovers right quick.

However, that’s a far-fetched scenario, the sort of random thing I was able to come up with in a few minutes of theorizing. Recently I read an article about Jaron Lanier in the Smithsonian that suggests a more plausible avenue to internet evil:

At last we come to politics, where I believe Lanier has been most farsighted—and which may be the deep source of his turning into a digital Le Carré figure. As far back as the turn of the century, he singled out one standout aspect of the new web culture—the acceptance, the welcoming of anonymous commenters on websites—as a danger to political discourse and the polity itself. At the time, this objection seemed a bit extreme. But he saw anonymity as a poison seed. The way it didn’t hide, but, in fact, brandished the ugliness of human nature beneath the anonymous screen-name masks. An enabling and foreshadowing of mob rule, not a growth of democracy, but an accretion of tribalism.

It’s taken a while for this prophecy to come true, a while for this mode of communication to replace and degrade political conversation, to drive out any ambiguity. Or departure from the binary. But it slowly is turning us into a nation of hate-filled trolls.

Well. Once you put it that way, it seems obvious, doesn’t it?

By this time, it’s a commonplace that internet comment threads, especially those about politics, are a cesspool of hatred and vilification. Everybody knows this. Political orientation doesn’t matter, either: left-leaning and right-leaning comment crowds are equally vitriolic, equally contemptuous of those who disagree, and equally devoid of serious thought and intellectual rigor. There are exceptions, here and there. I know that in my head I keep a short list of sites where I’ll dare to read the comment threads. But basically everything else is guaranteed to be like dipping my face into a toxic pit of filth and hatred.

We all know this. But have we really considered what it means when the internet becomes the dominant arena of political discussion? I can carry on a cordial discussion of politics with my neighbor, but I won’t risk a discussion of politics with basically anyone, unless I’m well-prepared with a flame-retardant suit and some sharpened mots justes of my own. Is this what we want? It seems pretty clear that the spread of the internet is making our political dialog stupider, angrier, and more extreme—in other words, that the internet is actively making the world a worse place.

At the end of the article, Lanier suggests that we could see the internet’s capacity for mass action set up a legitimately evil mass movement, an echo of the outbreaks of popular cruelty that found their expression under fascism and communism. I’m afraid to say, that sounds really plausible. It also sounds like something that I don’t want to see.

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I did my best to ignore the news after the Newtown shootings. The story fell into the category of news which neither affects me directly, nor is something that I can help. The only purpose of the news was to make me sad and angry, and to offer no release. I hate this kind of news. I think that nothing good comes of turning such crimes into national media events, and I would recuse myself from it entirely if I could.

The political reactions in the following days have been even worse. For the most part, they’ve been so infuriatingly predictable. We must eliminate guns; we must put guns in the hands of every schoolteacher; we must fight mental illness; we must bring God back into schools. I don’t know whether any of these things will help, though I doubt it. Yet it’s not the banality of these responses which gets to me, but rather the frantic grasping which all of them represent.

Something terrible has happened, see, and now we feel we have to do something. It does not matter whether the things we do are actually helpful or reasonable. We must stir ourselves up into activity, to find something to do which will plaster over the hole of fear and vulnerability which this atrocity has revealed. We will frantically call for action, ensure that something gets done, and so reassure ourselves that we have done our part, have beaten back danger, and have earned the right to slumber again.

If you really want to know what I think should be done, I will defer to Megan McArdle, who is consistently one of the most intelligent and reasonable voices on the internet:

But beyond the strange calls to make serial killers pray more and outlaw things that are already illegal, the most interesting thing is how generic they were. As soon as Newtown happened, people reached into a mental basket already full of "ways to stop school shootings" and pulled out a few of their favorite items. They did not stop to find out whether those causes had actually obtained in this case….

What Lanza shows us is the limits of the obvious policy responses. He had all the mental health resources he needed–and he did it anyway. The law stopped him from buying a gun–and he did it anyway. The school had an intercom system aimed at stopping unauthorized entry–and he did it anyway.

I understand that we want to do something. But sometimes we must consider the fact that there is nothing to be done.

I could be wrong about this. Perhaps there is a simple and obvious law that could be passed which would make this sort of disaster less likely. If such a thing exists, then I am all for it.

But even the existence of such a fix would not really solve the whole problem, would it? We can cover over this flaw in the legal or mental health system, this time. But there will be other holes. There will be lapses in attention and people who slip through the cracks, and disturbed and evil people will exploit these flaws. There are a lot of things we cannot know about these tragedies, but one thing is for sure:

This will happen again.

This will happen again.

What a disgusting truth.

We might—maybe—succeed in making these horrors less common, which would certainly be progress. But we will never eliminate them. And this fact, the essential ineradicability of evil and murder, is what really gets at me. How is it tolerable that any parent should have their child destroyed by a madman? Why is anyone so depraved or damaged as to do this? Why should anyone suffer so much as to want this, and why should they inflict their suffering on so many others?

And I remember that the sorrow of one parent who loses a child is not really different from the sorrow of twenty parents who lose their children. What shocks us during these times is the number of the dead. But children die every day, one by one, and their parents weep for them just as much.

There could be a disturbed young man here in my town. Tomorrow he could steal a weapon, go to the preschool, and kill my boys. There is nothing I could do to stop him.

This is the fear that haunts the calls to action. This could happen to any of us. And if it did, there is nothing we could do about it—but we desperately wish that there was.

I vividly remember the first Ash Wednesday after my oldest was born. I was an Anglican at the time, and I was attending the service which marks the beginning of Lent with my son, who was almost a year old at the time. At the end of the service, we came forward for the imposition of ashes.

The priest came to me and crossed my forehead with ash, saying "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return." This is the usual formula, and I’ve heard it enough times that it’s lost most of its emotional impact.

Then he turned to my precious, innocent, sleeping infant boy. And he marked his forehead with ash, and said, "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return."

It was like an ice pick to my heart.

I want my children to be safe, happy, and healthy. I do everything that I can to ensure that this is the case. But there is a limit. There are things I cannot control, and will never be able to control. It could be a man with a gun. It could be a car on an icy patch of road. It could be a disease.

At the end, all you can do is hope, and pray, and love.

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In my previous posts about toddler language acquisition, I’ve largely talked about my younger child, who is currently aged two-and-a-half. You might think this is because my older child, aged four-and-a-half, has already passed most of the more interesting milestones.

This is the opposite of the truth.

Our oldest son Ciprian has had severe language acquisition delays, for reasons that no one knows. For whatever reason, he never passed the linguistic level of a typical two year old, knowing about two dozen single words, and that’s all. He never progressed to simple two-word sentences, he acquired new words very slowly if at all, and his pronunciation remained idiosyncratic and difficult to understand. This was combined with a variety of difficult behavior issues, such as an obsession with running water (he would turn on the water in the sink and watch it for hours if we’d let him), and self-harming when he was frustrated or angry.

It’s hard to overestimate how frustrating this was. When he wanted something, Ciprian would simply shout "Give give give" over and over, and you would have to guess what he wanted from context. (He also didn’t know how to point to request things, an essential pre-linguistic skill that he never mastered.) If you couldn’t figure it out, then you had to prepare yourself for a bout of screaming and self-harming.

Earlier this year, shortly before his fourth birthday, we said enough was enough and sought help from his pediatrician, and then the child psychologist that she referred us to. Unfortunately, all we got was a bunch of negatives: he isn’t autistic, his hearing is fine, and he isn’t cognitively impaired. The technical term they deployed was just "developmentally delayed", without any suggestion of the reason. This was less than encouraging. Eventually, the best thing we could do was just to enroll him in a preschool to give him more opportunities for stimulation, and talk to the school district about special education. The local district offers pre-K special education for qualifying students, and after their assessment they quickly assigned him a speech therapist and an early childhood specialist.

This was the best thing we’ve ever done for Ciprian.

It’s now six months later. While it would be great to say that things changed overnight, the reality is that we saw only marginal improvements for the first several months. His self-harming behavior decreased and his overall mood improved, but we only saw incremental additions to his vocabulary and no significant breakthroughs in his overall language. That was, until about six weeks ago, when for some reason the floodgates opened.

It feels like his vocabulary has doubled or tripled. He’s added a variety of English and Romanian words, and has started to use them more appropriately, where before he would indiscriminately apply the few words he used to virtually everything, making it very difficult to discern what he actually wanted. He’s become scrupulously polite, always saying "please" and "thank you" when making requests, in both English and Romanian. But most importantly, he’s started actually using sentences. Now, he actually says "I want cookie" when he wants something, and life is good.

His sentences aren’t grammatical yet. For the most part they’re two- and three-word collocations. And there’s still a long ways to go—he isn’t remotely like a normal four-year-old yet, and his little brother is significantly ahead of him. But for the first time in years, it feels like we’re actually getting somewhere.

So what am I thankful for this year? I’m thankful for a fifty-item vocabulary, for two-word sentences, and for my awesome kid Ciprian.

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In 1908, the poet T.E. Hulme gave a famous speech at in which he laid out the programme for modernist poetry, inveighing in vigorous language against rhyme and meter. His influence was already considerable by that time, and his address would both solidify his position and influence English literature for the rest of the 20th century:

Regular metre to this impressionist poetry is cramping, jangling, meaningless, and out of place. Into the delicate pattern of images and colour it introduces the heavy, crude pattern of rhetorical verse. It destroys the effect just as a barrel organ does, when it intrudes into the subtle interwoven harmonies of the modern symphony. It is a delicate and difficult art, that of evoking an image, of fitting the rhythm to the idea, and one is tempted to fall back to the comforting and easy arms of the old, regular metre, which takes away all the trouble for us.

Metered verse was, for Hulme and the other modernist poets, a crutch and an obstacle to authentic poetic expression. And rhyme, though already failing by the time that Hulme gave his speech, lost any chance of its survival as a vigorous part of modern poetry by this salvo. The edicts of Hulme and his influential cabal of modern poets (including Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and others) effectively directed the mainstream of English-language poetry (and, to a large degree, its prose) for the rest of the century.

All of which is preamble to something I heard a few weeks ago on This American Life. They commemorated the passing of one of their frequent contributors David Lakoff, with this excerpt from his new novel. Written in verse. In rhyming verse.

It was sadness that gripped him far more than the fear
that, if facing the truth, he had maybe a year.
When poetic phrases like “eyes, look your last”
become true, all you want is to stay, to hold fast.  
A new, fierce attachment to all of this world
now pierced him. It stabbed like a deity-hurled
lightning bolt, lancing him, sent from above, 
left him giddy and tearful. It felt like young love.

Listen to the whole episode here..

And I could only think: rhyme is back, baby.

Of course one admittedly quirky novel doesn’t make a trend. But it’s one of several examples I’ve met lately of significant literary projects written in rhyming verse, which does suggest that there’s something in the water. Part of it is the hipster mentality—all of the examples that I’ve heard have been rhyming couplets, the cheesiest form of rhyme, the literary equivalent of wearing your dad’s chunky black glasses and plaid sweater vest. Part of it is 21st century remix culture, playing on old discredited poetic forms just for contrast and quirk.

And some of it is the inevitable tendency of "progress" to turn on its ancestors. (This is something that I’ve remarked on before,) Once you embrace novelty and progression as literary virtues, you set yourself up to be rejected a few generations down the line once your radical, progressive views have become commonplace. I don’t know if there’s any forceful rejection of unrhymed poetry going on here, and there certainly doesn’t seem to be any kind of organized pro-rhyme school of poetry coming together. Literature in the early 21st century does not seem to lend itself to that sort of movement-building. Instead, it’s just that rhyme is becoming hip. And being hip is a more powerful motivator than being progressive ever was.

Which brings me to my real point: "progress" and "novelty" are terrible things to hold as literary virtues. Hipsterism is better, but only a little.

(Also, rhyme is awesome, but I still don’t think I want to read an entire rhyming novel.)

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Some time ago at Tor.com there was a re-watch of all of the Pixar films to date, in preparation for the upcoming release of Brave. The reviewer had this to say about Wall-E:

More than anything else, Wall-E is a movie about the importance of appreciating and creating art—without it, we are cut off from each other, and from ourselves. As far as depictions of dystopian futures are concerned, the movie is rather gentle—nothing about the cushy Axiom is likely to traumatize small children… but at the same time, its indictment of a culture entirely devoted to the mindless consumption of “entertainment” with no artistic merit or intellectual value is chilling the more you think about it.

This was an interesting analysis, mostly because it doesn’t match up with my own feelings about the film. I don’t think that this analysis is wrong, necessarily, but I would not have thought to linking Wall-E primarily to art. It seems to me that Wall-E is largely a film about love.

Wall-E decorates sleeping Eve for Christmas.
The most striking scenes in Wall-E are his early interactions with Eve, which present a beautiful picture of love and devotion which persists in the face of rejection by the beloved. Wall-E loves Eve from the moment he meets her, but his love is not a shallow infatuation or self-serving obsession. Rather, he attempts to serve her and woo her, and his efforts are not dissuaded by her disinterest. His persistence never impinges on her or threatens her. He conquers her resistance with his devotion, but he does it without invoking any of the territorial or aggressive overtones that that word sometimes brings.

He most clearly demonstrates this in the scenes after Eve discovers the plant and shuts down, when Wall-E is required to protect and tend for her. During this time, Eve has not yet reciprocated Wall-E’s devotion, but he cares for he anyway, even though she’s unconscious and unaware of his actions. This, more than anything, is what proves Wall-E’s worthiness of Eve: he cares for her, not to impress her or possess her, but for her own sake. And this selfless love is what eventually brings Wall-E to the Axiom and sets in motion the redemption of the human society there.

Wall-E amongst the garbage
But how does this relate to the films ecological and anti-consumerist themes? At first glance, Wall-E’s love does not seem like an answer to the environmental catastrophe of the Earth and the pleasant tyranny of the Axiom. But this is a false conclusion. Consumption is the opposite of love, and the excesses of consumption can only be righted be relearning what it means to love.

Consumption is self-oriented. Consumption is about fulfilling ones own desires and disregarding the broader consequences. Consumption is individual rights, profit-seeking, and competition. Consumption can only think of love as acquisition, and could not fathom Wall-E’s care for Eve, which she can neither reciprocate nor even remember. The Earth that Wall-E leaves has been rendered a waste by the excesses of consumption, and the Axiom that he comes to is one in which all human interaction has been replaced by consumerism. People talk to each other on the Axiom, but only through screens and advertising. Wall-E’s advent on the Axiom knocks a pair of humans out of their flying chairs and into a romance, foreshadowing the upheavals of the entire society which occur at the end of the film. The repudiation of consumption can only come through the recovery of love.

The end of the film shows us the human society returning to love as a social principle. A sustainable society requires that we act with love, not just for those nearest, but to those who cannot remember or reciprocate, the unborn and the dead. The work of reclaiming the ruined world is a work of love for those who will come after, while the work of preservation is an act of love and honor for those who came before.

In another, more predictable film (cough Avatar), our ecologically ruined world might be contrasted with some pristine native paradise, showing us the difference between what we are and what we could have been. Wall-E does something better. It shows us what we could become, but then says I will show you a better way.

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The Man Who Was Thursday
The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I don’t think I’m nearly creative or audacious enough to write something like The Man Who Was Thursday. I could barely believe that I was reading it.

Ostensibly, this is the story of Gabriel Syme, a gentleman, a poet, and a lover of law and order. In the first chapter he takes up an argument with another poet Lucian Gregory, an anarchist poseur. They argue heatedly but ineffectually, and both of them dismiss the other as harmless. However, the evening turns strange when Gregory swears Syme to secrecy, then conducts him to the underground lair of the European Council of Anarchists, where he reveals that he belongs to a cabal of anarchist terrorists, all of whom have taken up disguises as harmless bourgeois dilettantes to throw the police off their scent. Syme then reveals to Gregory that he is in fact a member of the police force, who has been drafted into a secret cadre of police intellectuals commissioned to prevent crimes arising from bad philosophy.

Both of them swear to keep the other’s secret. The anarchist parliament convenes, and Gregory’s election proceeds as predicted, until Syme intervenes. He contrives to pass himself off as a representative of the Council’s president, discredits Gregory, and has himself elected to the council in Gregory’s place.

This double deception is indicative of the whole absurdist tone of the book. People disguise themselves as exactly what they are, fight bitterly with their allies, and collude with their enemies, and by the end of the book even the ridiculous premise described above turns out to be something other than the truth. After Syme is elected to the Council of Anarchists, he becomes privy to a plot to kill both the Czar and the Prime Minister of France with a bomb, and sets out to somehow derail the assassinations without revealing himself to the rest of the group. His attempts result in him being chased by an octogenarian through a London snow storm, a duel with the Marquis of St. Eustache, a desperate flight through the French countryside, and a battle with an anarchist horde at the seashore. None of these incidents are what they seem at first, and all of them are accompanied by further revelations about the true nature of the characters and organizations in the story.

This structure is both the novel’s strength and its greatest weakness. By the third iteration of "this person is not what they seem", it becomes fairly obvious what the general direction of the story is, and some of the final twists in the main plot seemed rather perfunctory. However, as the plot dissolves into obfuscation, a larger and more pressing mystery comes forth, like a shape looming out of the fog: Who is the President of the Council of Anarchists, and what does he actually want? The answer to this question is strange, unexpected, and beautiful. Finding it out also involves a hijacked hansom cab, an elephant, and a hot air balloon.

In many ways, this novel feels like a spiritual predecessor to The Prisoner. As in The Prisoner, the story’s conceit revolves around hidden identities and double-crosses, and as with The Prisoner the novel’s ending does not resolve the plot in any literal manner. Rather, as the story nears its conclusion it ascends out of its novelistic trappings into something like a fairy tale, offering a conclusion which addresses the novel’s questions spiritually and philosophically. Not all readers will like the ending, but I doubt many will doubt its audacity and originality.

If you like Chesterton, you will doubtlessly like this book. If you don’t like Chesterton, you may enjoy this anyway, if nothing else as an example of how to write a cosmic comedy in the guise of a police thriller.

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Chuck Wendig has this to say:

You learn early on how to write. But for most authors it takes a long time to learn how they in particular write. Certain processes, styles, genres, character types, POVs, tenses, whatever — they will come more naturally to you than they do to others. And some won’t come naturally at all. Maybe you’ll figure this out right out of the gate. But for most, it just takes time — time filled with actual writing — to tease it out.

(Warning: the rest of the post at link, as well as nearly everything ever written by ol’ Wendig, is NSFW.)

So, Chuck is exactly right here. And this is one of the hard things for newbie writers to grok — or at least, it was hard for me to accept. There were lots of books written by Famous and Successful writers, people who have sold way, way more books and stories than I probably ever will, and they tell you the way to do it. And who are you to disagree?

(Actually, pretty much every writing book I’ve ever read says that you may do it differently. But eager young writers looking for the keys to the kingdom tend to overlook those.)

And in that vein, I’d like to tell a story about how I broke through five years of writers’ block.

I got two pieces of advice as a young writer. The first was not to just write one thing. Don’t just have The Novel that you work on for years and years and years, as that leads to stagnation and spinning your wheels on something that just isn’t gonna work. The second was to recognize that you have a million words of garbage to write before you write something worthwhile, so you should just accept the fact that your first n stories/novels are going to suck.

Unfortunately, these interacted in a really bad way in my head. My problem was that I had The Novel that I wanted to write. It had been occupying headspace in my thoughts for over a decade, and I loved it. But I knew I should write other things as well, and I knew that if I just plunged into The Novel without any experience it would probably suck. So I tried to write other things: short stories, flash fiction, and one or two novellas. None of them were bad, but none were very good. And then, after a while, my well of ideas (other than The Novel) dried up. I was blocked. I didn’t write anything at all for about five years.

Over this time I continued to think about The Novel, but I knew I still wasn’t good enough to write it properly. And I still felt the itch to write something, but I didn’t have the ideas and the motivation to work on anything else. Until, one day, I literally woke up and thought to myself, “Screw this. I’m just gonna write the novel.”

I wrote four chapters (about 50 pages) before I went to bed that day.

I finished the novel in 2-3 months. And guess what? It wasn’t very good. It wasn’t terrible, either, but all of the problems that the writing books said I would have showed up, especially bad pacing and flabby prose. I spent probably another year polishing it, and then a long time trying to submit it and get editors or agents interested. But they all turned it down, for very good reasons, and the book was eventually trunked.

But in the meantime something interesting happened: once I had actually written the big novel that had occupied my mind for so many years, I found I had lots of other stories to write. My writers’ block was destroyed by the simple act of writing the story that I wanted to write, and not worrying about doing it “right.”

That was several years ago. I will eventually return to that first novel and do it in the way that it deserves, but in the meantime I have lots of other things to write.

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So I finally finished The Road to Wigan Pier, as I blogged previously. And did I say this wasn’t a political book? Ha ha! I guess that shows how far I had read, since the second half of the book is entirely concerned with politics, specifically Orwell’s apologia for Socialism.

This, in and of itself, is not something that I would name among Orwell’s mistakes. Orwell makes it abundantly clear that he believes the only real alternatives available to men in his age are Socialism and Fascism, and between the two of them he chooses Socialism. This is a defensible choice, as it’s the choice that the major Western powers all took, banding together to crush fascism utterly, but allowing Socialism (or at least its doppelganger Stalinism) to persist for the next sixty years.

But along the way, Orwell makes two significant errors which are indicative of his time and prejudices. The first is a simple error of fact: Orwell believed that the British were getting smaller, on average:

… [I]t is probable that the physical average has been declining all over England for a long time past, and not merely among the unemployed in the industrial areas. This cannot be proved statistically, but it is a conclusion that is forced upon you if you use your eyes, even in rural places and even in a prosperous town like London. On the day when King George V’s body passed through London on its way to Westminster, I happened to be caught for an hour or two in the crowd in Trafalgar Square. It was impossible, looking about one then, not to be struck by the physical degeneracy of modern England. The people surrounding me were not working-class people for the most part; they were the shopkeeper–commercial-traveller type, with a sprinkling of the well-to- do. But what a set they looked! Puny limbs, sickly faces, under the weeping London sky! Hardly a well-built man or a decent-looking woman, and not a fresh complexion anywhere. As the King’s coffin went by, the men took off their hats, and a friend who was in the crowd at the other side of the Strand said to me afterwards, ‘The only touch of colour anywhere was the bald heads.’ Even the Guards, it seemed to me–there was a squad of guardsmen marching beside the coffin–were not what they used to be. Where are the monstrous men with chests like barrels and moustaches like the wings of eagles who strode across my child-hood’s gaze twenty or thirty years ago? Buried, I suppose, in the Flanders mud. In their place there are these pale-faced boys who have been picked for their height and consequently look like hop-poles in overcoats–the truth being that in modern England a man over six feet high is usually skin and bone and not much else. If the English physique has declined, this is no doubt partly due to the fact that the Great War carefully selected the million best men in England and slaughtered them, largely before they had had time to breed. But the process must have begun earlier than that, and it must be due ultimately to un-healthy ways of living, i.e. to industrialism. I don’t mean the habit of living in towns–probably the town is healthier than the country, in many ways–but the modern industrial technique which provides you with cheap substitutes for everything. We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine gun.

As he indicates by his allusions, Orwell seems to have gotten this idea from romantic images of what pre-Edwardian people were actually like, embellished by childhood memories. But there’s an abundance of evidence showing that people in Orwell’s age were already much bigger than they were before, and WWI wasn’t give more than a blip on the overall historical trend. Orwell states that his intuition "cannot be proved statistically", which is hardly an encouraging sign when making statistical generalizations.

The second error which Orwell commits is one of economics, and it concerns the relationship between technological innovation and profit. He states the following near the end of the book:

The Socialists are right, therefore, when they claim that the rate of mechanical progress will be much more rapid once Socialism is established. Given a mechanical civilization the process of invention and improvement will always continue, but the tendency of capitalism is to slow it down, because under capitalism any invention which does not promise fairly immediate profits is neglected; some, indeed, which threaten to reduce profits are suppressed almost as ruthlessly as the flexible glass mentioned by Petronius. [For example: Some years ago someone invented a gramophone needle that would last for decades. One of the big gramophone companies bought up the patent rights, and that was the last that was ever beard of it.] Establish Socialism–remove the profit principle–and the inventor will have a free hand. The mechanization of the world, already rapid enough, would be or at any rate could be enormously accelerated.

This is almost exactly backwards. Mechanization proceeds rapidly in a capitalist society precisely because it provides the opportunity for profits, and in the absence of a profit motive mechanization and innovation slow down or cease. The actual history of the world’s socialist states bears this out: they were rather quickly able to achieve a base level of industrial mobilization, but after that time their technical progress almost always lagged that of the West. The only exceptions were in military technology (and space exploration, the step-child of the military), where innovation was spurred on both sides by state rivalry rather than market forces.

It’s easy to see how Orwell made this mistake, though: Russia had, in the space of a few decades, turned from being a feudal, agrarian economy into being a competing member of the industrial world. Never mind that this development was essentially unrepeatable, depending on the forced migration of millions of serfs to the cities, and that it was accomplished by grotesque applications of force and the evisceration of whole provinces. (Mao would later condemn a few million of his countrymen to starvation attempting to repeat the trick.) From a certain point of view, the fact that this transition had occurred was proof of the common propaganda point that industrialization and science would speed up under Socialism.

Despite these errors, the book is very good. In fact, it’s rather shocking to discover that a Socialist apologetic could be as good as this was. Let Orwell’s mistakes merely be a reminder that the best writers were still capable of simple errors of fact.

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Today, I am lazy, and have outsourced most of my blog-writing duties to George Orwell. We continue our readings from Chapter 7 of The Road to Wigan Pier, with Orwell talking about the social conditions in the working-class areas of the industrial north:

Take for instance the different attitude towards the family. A working-class family hangs together as a middle-class one does, but the relationship is far less tyrannical. A working man has not that deadly weight of family prestige hanging round his neck like a millstone. I have pointed out earlier that a middle-class person goes utterly to pieces under the influence of poverty; and this is generally due to the behaviour of his family–to the fact that he has scores of relations nagging and badgering him night and day for failing to ‘get on’. The fact that the working class know how to combine and the middle class don’t is probably due to their different conceptions of family loyalty. You cannot have an effective trade union of middle-class workers, be-cause in times of strikes almost every middle-class wife would be egging her husband on to blackleg and get the other fellow’s job….

In a working-class home–I am not thinking at the moment of the unemployed, but of comparatively prosperous homes–you breathe a warm, decent, deeply human atmosphere which it is not so easy to find elsewhere. I should say that a manual worker, if he is in steady work and drawing good wages–an ‘if’ which gets bigger and bigger–has a better chance of being happy than an ‘educated’ man. His home life seems to fall more naturally into a sane and comely shape. I have often been struck by the peculiar easy completeness, the perfect symmetry as it were, of a working- class interior at its best. Especially on winter evenings after tea, when the fire glows in the open range and dances mirrored in the steel fender, when Father, in shirt-sleeves, sits in the rocking chair at one side of the fire reading the racing finals, and Mother sits on the other with her sewing, and the children are happy with a pennorth of mint humbugs, and the dog lolls roasting himself on the rag mat–it is a good place to be in, provided that you can be not only in it but sufficiently of it to be taken for granted.

This scene is still reduplicated in a majority of English homes, though not in so many as before the war. Its happiness depends mainly upon one question–whether Father is in work. But notice that the picture I have called up, of a working-class family sitting round the coal fire after kippers and strong tea, belongs only to our own moment of time and could not belong either to the future or the past. Skip forward two hundred years into the Utopian future, and the scene is totally different. Hardly one of the things I have imagined will still be there. In that age when there is no manual labour and everyone is ‘educated’, it is hardly likely that Father will still be a rough man with enlarged hands who likes to sit in shirt-sleeves and says ‘Ah wur coomin’ oop street’. And there won’t be a coal fire in the grate, only some kind of invisible heater. The furniture will be made of rubber, glass, and steel. If there are still such things as evening papers there will certainly be no racing news in them, for gambling will be meaningless in a world where there is no poverty and the horse will have vanished from the face of the earth. Dogs, too, will have been sup- pressed on grounds of hygiene. And there won’t be so many children, either, if the birth-controllers have their way….

Curiously enough it is not the triumphs of modem engineering, nor the radio, nor the cinematograph, nor the five thousand novels which are published yearly, nor the crowds at Ascot and the Eton and Harrow match, but the memory of working-class interiors–especially as I sometimes saw them in my childhood before the war, when England was still prosperous– that reminds me that our age has not been altogether a bad one to live in.

One reads with horror Orwell’s description of the "Utopia" awaiting far in his future. A century from Orwell’s time is only twenty years from now. And while some of his vision has come to pass (invisible heaters, furniture of rubber, glass, and steel), horses are still with us, and so are dogs.

But now contrast Orwell’s discussion of the working-class family with this discussion of the British riots. Some things have gone better than expected. Some things have gone worse.

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George Orwell, it turns out, wrote things other than Animal Farm and 1982. For some reason (I can’t actually remember, now), I started reading Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier a few weeks ago. It’s a remarkable piece of writing. Orwell’s voice drew me in immediately, depicting with clear, compelling prose prose the miserable conditions in a working-class boarding house:

I never discovered how many bedrooms the house contained, but strange to say there was a bathroom, dating from before the Brookers’ time. Downstairs there was the usual kitchen living-room with its huge open range burning night and day. It was lighted only by a skylight, for on one side of it was the shop and on the other the larder, which opened into some dark subterranean place where the tripe was stored. Partly blocking the door of the larder there was a shapeless sofa upon which Mrs. Brooker, our landlady, lay permanently ill, festooned in grimy blankets. She had a big, pale yellow, anxious face. No one knew for certain what was the matter with her; I suspect that her only real trouble was over-eating. In front of the fire there was almost always a line of damp washing, and in the middle of the room was the big kitchen table at which the family and all the lodgers ate. I never saw this table completely uncovered, but I saw its various wrappings at different times. At the bottom there was a layer of old newspaper stained by Worcester Sauce; above that a sheet of sticky white oil-cloth; above that a green serge cloth; above that a coarse linen cloth, never changed and seldom taken off. Generally the crumbs from breakfast were still on the table at supper. I used to get to know individual crumbs by sight and watch their progress up and down the table from day to day.

The shop was a narrow, cold sort of room. On the outside of the window a few white letters, relics of ancient chocolate advertisements, were scattered like stars. Inside there was a slab upon which lay the great white folds of tripe, and the grey flocculent stuff known as ‘black tripe’, and the ghostly translucent feet of pigs, ready boiled. It was the ordinary ‘tripe and pea’ shop, and not much else was stocked except bread, cigarettes, and tinned stuff. ‘Teas’ were advertised in the window, but if a customer demanded a cup of tea he was usually put off with excuses. Mr. Brooker, though out of work for two years, was a miner by trade, but he and his wife had been keeping shops of various kinds as a side-line all their lives. At one time they had had a pub, but they had lost their licence for allowing gambling on the premises. I doubt whether any of their businesses had ever paid; they were the kind of people who run a business chiefly in order to have something to grumble about. Mr. Brooker was a dark, small- boned, sour, Irish-looking man, and astonishingly dirty. I don’t think I ever once saw his hands clean. As Mrs. Brooker was now an invalid he prepared most of the food, and like all people with permanently dirty hands he had a peculiarly intimate, lingering manner of handling things. If he gave you a slice of bread-and-butter there was always a black thumb-print on it. Even in the early morning when he descended into the mysterious den behind Mrs. Brooker’s sofa and fished out the tripe, his hands were already black. I heard dreadful stories from the other lodgers about the place where the tripe was kept. Blackbeetles were said to swarm there. I do not know how often fresh consignments of tripe were ordered, but it was at long intervals, for Mrs. Brooker used to date events by it. ‘Let me see now, I’ve had in three lots of froze (frozen tripe) since that happened,’ etc. We lodgers were never given tripe to eat. At the time I imagined that this was because tripe was too expensive; I have since thought that it was merely because we knew too much about it. The Brookers never ate tripe themselves, I noticed.

[…] It struck me that this place must be fairly normal as lodging-houses in the industrial areas go, for on the whole the lodgers did not complain. The only one who ever did so to my knowledge was a little black-haired, sharp-nosed Cockney, a traveller for a cigarette firm. He had never been in the North before, and I think that till recently he had been in better employ and was used to staying in commercial hotels. This was his first glimpse of really low-class lodgings, the kind of place in which the poor tribe of touts and canvassers have to shelter upon their endless journeys. In the morning as we were dressing (he had slept in the double bed, of course) I saw him look round the desolate room with a sort of wondering aversion. He caught my eye and suddenly divined that I was a fellow- Southerner. ‘The filthy bloody bastards!’ he said feelingly. After that he packed his suit-case, went downstairs and, with great strength of mind, told the Brookers that this was not the kind of house he was accustomed to and that he was leaving immediately. The Brookers could never understand why. They were astonished and hurt. The ingratitude of it! Leaving them like that for no reason after a single night! Afterwards they discussed it over and over again, in all its bearings. It was added to their store of grievances.

On the day when there was a full chamber-pot under the breakfast table I decided to leave. The place was beginning to depress me.

This isn’t a book of advocacy, exactly. As far as I’ve read, Orwell concerns himself with journalistic, nearly novelistic depiction of the work and lives of the British working class, and he does not spend time arguing for any particular policy or politics. He doesn’t need to. His book accomplishes its purpose merely by presenting the lives of the proletariat in vibrant, grim detail, creating the potent mix of sympathy and revulsion evinced by the quoted paragraphs above. Political action is left as an exercise to the reader.

I came across this book fortuitously, as I had also just started reading Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China by Leslie Chang, an account of the lives of the working class in the new industrial China, specifically the city of Dongguan. The similarities are numerous. Like the miners in Orwell’s account, the girls in the factories that Chang visits work long hours, live in crowded, uncomfortable dwellings, work for astonishingly low wages, and are subject to a variety of abuses and indignities at the hands of management. Such conditions are universal in the annals of the global proletariat.

But the differences are even more indicative. First, the cleanliness. Orwell evokes the omnipresent filth of the British slums, but the dormitories that Chang visits are tidy and always smell faintly of bleach. The girls are so pressed for time that they bathe only occasionally, but neither do they spend hours doing hard labor at the coal face. They may not be adequately protected from industrial chemicals, but they do not inhale air that’s black with coal dust.

Chang’s girls live in what seems like an enormous, unisex high school. Most of them are in their teens or early twenties, and they live in an environment where they only see each other, living in an isolated social bubble, almost entirely cut off from the rest of the city. They only contact their families occasionally, though most of them send money home. They may have boyfriends and friendships, but the conditions in Dongguan are so chaotic and fluid that few of these relationships last long. Impermanence is the rule of the new China.

Orwell’s mining families, on the other hand, have at least the advantage of being families. They have permanent residences, small and miserable as they are, and they have neighbors and relatively stable social arrangements. In this sense, they seem to have it better than the factory children of China. The girls in Chang’s book seem so lonely. Orwell’s slums have many vices, but loneliness does not seem to enter them.

In yet another serendipitous coincidence, last week This American Life ran a story about the factories where iPhones are made, with excerpts from a hilarious, moving story about a man who went to China to see them for himself. The second half of their podcast included a defense of sweatshops from Paul Krugman, who offers the familiar apologetic: the miserable factories one currently finds in China and elsewhere are an important stepping stone towards First World prosperity, and as bad as they are, they are still an improvement over the poverty of subsistence agriculture.

I don’t know exactly what to say to this defense, but I find it deeply dissatisfying. I want to push back; I want to ask whether it is really an improvement to move from plowing behind an ox for twelve hours a day to laboring in a factory for sixteen. I want to know whether the social chaos, gross inequality, and rank exploitation of industrial China are really describable as progress. It seems to me that a peasant farmer may be poorer in monetary measures than a factory worker, but he has a dignity that the wage slave does not. I could be wrong about all of these things. But I wonder.

Most of all, I cannot shake the stench of complicity off of myself. I own a bevy of Chinese-manufactured devices. Who doesn’t? Is it even possible to live in the world today without profiting from sweatshop labor?

I turn again to Orwell:

The most dreadful thing about people like the Brookers is the way they say the same things over and over again. It gives you the feeling that they are not real people at all, but a kind of ghost for ever rehearsing the same futile rigmarole. In the end Mrs Brooker’s self-pitying talk–always the same complaints, over and over, and always ending with the tremulous whine of ‘It does seem ‘ard, don’t it now?’–revolted me even more than her habit of wiping her mouth with bits of newspaper. But it is no use saying that people like the Brookers are just disgusting and trying to put them out of mind. For they exist in tens and hundreds of thousands; they are one of the characteristic by-products of the modern world. You cannot disregard them if you accept the civilization that produced them. For this is part at least of what industrialism has done for us. Columbus sailed the Atlantic, the first steam engines tottered into motion, the British squares stood firm under the French guns at Waterloo, the one-eyed scoundrels of the nineteenth century praised God and filled their pockets; and this is where it all led –to labyrinthine slums and dark back kitchens with sickly, ageing people creeping round and round them like blackbeetles. It is a kind of duty to see and smell such places now and again, especially smell them, lest you should forget that they exist; though perhaps it is better not to stay there too long.