Bookshops v Libraries

When I worked in a second-hand bookshop — so easily pictured, if you don’t work in one, as a kind of paradise where charming old gentlemen browse eternally among calf-bound folios — the thing that chiefly struck me was the rarity of really bookish people.

George Orwell - Bookshop Memories (1936)


For myself, public libraries possess a special horror, as of lonely wastes and dragon-haunted fens. The stillness and the heavy air, the feeling of restriction and surveillance, the mute presence of these other readers, “all silent and all damned,” combine to set up a nervous irritation fatal to quiet study.

Kenneth Grahame – Pagan Papers (1894)

Friendly

A very brief fictional musing on alternatives versions of Orwell’s 1984. One where, for example, technology allows the iron fist to have several layers of velvet glove.

Thursday May 4th 2124

I clattered out of the dining hall to find my bicycle had already rolled in from Central. It was to be an exciting day for me, I had to attend a training course in another city, a course all about explaining things to large numbers of people. My ambition at the time was to be a Friendly Explainer you see.

We set off as a trainee group and soon found ourselves cycling through agricultural areas. Very pleasant cycling it was too, in spite of the aroma and the flies. Every now and then I spotted patches in the cycle track showing it was a full-sized road before Reconstruction. This kind of thing was important for me to remember because as an Explainer I would have to explain such things.

The city we were cycling to is called Wotanole. I didn’t know it and thought at the time what an unusual name it is. Friendly Historians have done their research on the name of course, and as a Trainee Explainer I had already learned that their explanation goes like this –

Before Reconstruction many people who lived in the city or just worked there, had an old official name for it, but apparently when talking to their friends they often referred to it as Wotanole. Therefore Best Friend decreed that Wotanole should be the official name after Reconstruction.

After about forty kilometres we stopped at a Friendly Station for bicycle recharging and some food which was very welcome after a long ride. The food came in a bowl as it usually does, but at the time it still felt strange eating away from what was my Friendly Locality.

I ate the food of course, but after we resumed our journey and the terrain became more hilly, I thought in future I’d unfriend that food if I could. Fortunately for me my friendly implant chased that thought away before it could do any lasting damage.

When we arrived at Wotanole we heard from one of the Best Friend information channels that a technical problem would require our friendly implants to be updated. Of course this still happens quite regularly, but even in those days I sometimes wished I could unfriend those updates.

No botox for Winston

Botox could reduce anxiety and depression

Botox injections that stop people frowning could help reduce negative emotions such as fear and anger as well as treat depression and anxiety, according to a new scientific study.

Researchers found that botox injected into the forehead area relaxed facial muscles and prevented a "negative feedback loop" between the face and brain.

Maybe it's the way I make connections, but on reading this I was immediately reminded of Winston Smith having to make sure his facial expression did not lead to "negative feedback loops." Rather more serious feedback loops in his case, but maybe the comparison is not wholly unwarranted.  

Winston turned round abruptly. He had set his features into the expression of quiet optimism which it was advisable to wear when facing the telescreen.

George Orwell - 1984 (1949)

The rise of written-off anachronisms

The energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions — racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of war — which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off as anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed so completely in themselves as to have lost all power of action.

George Orwell - Wells, Hitler and the World State (1941)

I've used this quote before, but it's what we are seeing now of course – written-off anachronisms which were never written-off at all. Which we should have known and guarded against but our elites were too busy with personal sound bites, virtue signalling, celebrity culture, climate change, gender politics, racism, diversity, equality, sabotaging merit, screwing up education and just lately grossly overreacting to a virus.

And let us not forget – abusing, side-lining and censoring those who have been pointing out the foolishness of it for decades.

The energy that actually shapes the world

The energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions — racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of war — which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off as anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed so completely in themselves as to have lost all power of action.

George Orwell - Wells, Hitler and the World State (1941)


Seems about right at the moment.

All animals are equal...

...but some are more equal than others.

George Orwell’s famous slogan in Animal Farm is still relevant today and perhaps it always will be, but what exactly do we expect from modern slogans about equality?

To begin with, allow me to make a minor discursion into the realms of blogging. The people responsible for the blogs in my blogroll and those who leave comments here and elsewhere are some of the most intelligent people I’ve ever encountered. No that’s not flattery, it is an assertion about many educated people who have seen something of life and have drawn worthwhile conclusions.

I don’t necessarily have a personal allegiance to all those worthwhile conclusions, but as they are rooted in lives different to mine that isn’t important. What is important is that a decent education and a few decades of experience seem to produce many people worth listening to, far more than we ever come across in the mainstream media.

In a hierarchical society this feels odd, because the governing classes and their chosen experts are still supposed to hold the aces as far as informed thinking is concerned. The trouble is we know this is not the case. So much so that it has become somewhat embarrassing.

Equality is a political mantra which seems just as likely to prevent genuine equality as promote it. As in Animal Farm, the equality mantra can be subverted and used to promote inequality. One thing we have learned since the digital world shook up mass communication is how limited our governing classes really are. They should be smart but don't seem to have the time or the inclination. Or they leave it to tame experts who gave up on smart in favour of plausible because that is how the political winds blow.

An important driver for all this seems to be time. Many people seem to spend a considerable amount of time mulling over the infinite complexities of real life. Not in a concentrated session of deep thinking, but at odd moments throughout the day. Any pause in the flow of daily life and the musing self seems to wake up, pick up a thread and follow it until daily life resumes its sway. It may only be a few minutes, it may be longer and the threads may not join up, but it seems to be a common habit which over time adds up to a rounded point of view.

The joy of it is not to be found in new certainties, but new possibilities, not in joining a popular narrative but in standing apart to avoid the crap, not in some indecisive waffle but in insights which may be no more than finding a better word or phrase. Even these tiny steps are pleasing, encouraging enough to explore further and even make a slight shift in perspective. Sometimes that does happen, that shift in perspective. Gosh – how radical is that?

A grotesquely overweight man lumbers into the supermarket, a car brakes sharply, a van roars by, popular music blares from a passing car, another terrorist incident takes the media by the throat, the aroma of coffee stirs a memory, a child’s cry stirs another, a politically correct loon has yet another rant about something unimportant, a financial scandal erupts, a bee buzzes past the window and a politician says something silly - again.

All these mundane happening and countless others stimulate the musing mind and it is surprising how often the results are worthwhile. Surprising because we mainly hear from those who have less to say but a public platform from which to say it.

So what has that to do with equality? To my mind this issue has been growing for many decades. The internet has merely given it a good hard nudge. The covert message embedded in the political notion of equality is that even a whole lifetime of experience, knowledge, understanding and analysis is worth nothing if you are not on the official stage where some are more equal than others.

You are intelligent and you have a lifetime of experience to draw on. I know that and so do you, but the political game cannot accept it. The effects of mass education, mass communication and economic growth have outstripped our antiquated political ways. Not completely because a few people still read the Guardian and many more watch TV. In their obsolete world we still have our intellectual superiors and their ideas must outweigh ours because that is the very essence of hierarchy.

And yet many of us look on with ever increasing incredulity while those who are more equal than we will ever be strut their ignorant stuff on a profoundly unequal stage. 

Orwell was right

source

Below is a quote from Quine, a single sentence with which you may agree, disagree or reserve judgement. To my mind the sentence is problematic for two reasons. The first is that if accepted as true, then it has a fundamental influence on one’s personal philosophy.

There are so-called logical connections, and there are so-called causal ones; but any such interconnections of sentences must finally be due to the conditioning of sentences as responses to sentences as stimuli.

Willard Van Orman Quine - Word and Object

The second problem is that Quine’s sentence is true.

Obviously that doesn’t mean everyone has to accept it as true. It is rooted in commonly observed human behaviour, but no doubt many people have other standpoints on which they prefer to secure their personal philosophy.

Yet from early childhood we develop mental causal networks where one sentence causes another to pop out of our repertoire of responses. We are trained to give normative responses in order to use language effectively, so naturally enough that is what we do for the rest of our lives.

Citizens of the monolithic and tightly controlled political culture envisaged by George Orwell in his novel 1984 find it difficult or impossible to stray beyond political norms because their repertoire of responses has been so ruthlessly limited by the regime.

Winston Smith only achieves a glimpse of what freedom might mean via his work on altering newspaper reports, his constant exposure to physical evidence that all available information is being made to conform to current political narratives.

Smith’s awareness that things have been different gives him a limited ability to see that there are alternatives to official narratives. Unfortunately for him, he only sees what may be a deliberately constructed alternative – Goldstein’s ideology of dissent.

Without Smith's exposure to physical evidence, we may assume he would never have strayed that far. Even without the full implementation of Newspeak, he would have had insufficient exposure to any standpoint beyond established political norms. He and his fellow citizens cannot think out of the box if the box is all there is.

So Orwell was right. In a monolithic totalitarian culture, Newspeak is not only possible, but may even be inevitable.

The bleak delights of Blogworld

It would seem that human beings are not able to describe, nor perhaps to imagine, happiness except in terms of contrast.

George Orwell - Why Socialists Don't Believe In Fun

There are numerous reasons to blog, but I’m sure one of them is the pleasure to be found in contrast. We all know all about it, but allow me to set the basic scene via a familiar experience.

One of the pleasures of walking through a peaceful snowy landscape, quite apart from the exhilarating beauty, is returning home to put the boots away, hang up the coats to dry and light the fire. The kettle comes into it too.

It’s partly the contrast between snowy cold and snug warmth. Both pleasurable in themselves, but back home the pleasure is enhanced no end simply by coming in out of the snow. Especially as night closes in. 

Both experiences need not be pleasurable of course. Walking home from the dentist for example. Rarely is there so much quiet enjoyment from walking home.

Yet maybe we with our soft lives are not able to savour sweet contrasts as in earlier times. As Orwell says in the essay quoted above, Dickens knew how even poor people could glean a great deal of enjoyment from the warmth of fleeting pleasures. Not merely the appeal of a crust of bread to someone who is starving, but further up the scale of destitution too.

The inability of mankind to imagine happiness except in the form of relief, either from effort or pain, presents Socialists with a serious problem. Dickens can describe a poverty-stricken family tucking into a roast goose, and can make them appear happy; on the other hand, the inhabitants of perfect universes seem to have no spontaneous gaiety and are usually somewhat repulsive into the bargain.

George Orwell - Why Socialists Don't Believe In Fun

I suspect most of us live comfortable lives with no personal experience of Dickensian contrasts, but maybe blogging sometimes provides us with an alternative. 

We roam an angst-ridden landscape as a counterpoint to those comfortable lives. A mental cold shower where the comforts of real life are all the more pleasing when we leave the delightfully bleak scenery of Blogworld.

So I think I’ll finish off with coffee and dark chocolate.