Do Humans Want to be Good?

All Art is Propaganda:

 Critical Essays 

by George Orwell

“On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.”   ― George Orwell, All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays









All Art is Propaganda is a collection of George Orwell's essays bound by the theme of philosophical and aesthetic commentary. It includes such masterpieces as "Propaganda and Demotic Speech," "Charles Dickens," and "Rudyard Kipling." Of particular interest in our political enthused year are the essays addressing the nature of propaganda; both directly in "Propaganda and Demotic Speech," and somewhat tangentially in "Politics and the English Language," the latter of which is more important and contains many insightful statements like "if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. Bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better."

I hope that some of the many readers of Orwell's novels will take the time to savor their fine prose. Orwell's essays are always both enlightening and interesting on each of the disparate topics he addresses. The usage of political speech in the twenty-first century is proof enough of Orwell's claim. Thoughtful criticism, such as Orwell's, is woefully lacking in our current day, particularly among practicing politicians and their supporters.

Rhetoric as an Art

Persuasion, Seduction, and Con-jobs:

Rhetoric and Propaganda

a lecture by Michaelangelo Allocca

"The broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily," is chilling, even if you don't know that Hitler said it in Mein Kampf, about the efficacy of the "big lie."  Yet the nature of rhetoric as an art which sways audiences through emotional seduction, at least as much as through rational persuasion, has been recognized as far back as Socrates. (from the introduction to the lecture)

George Orwell wrote in 1944 that "Only a few exceptionally gifted speakers can achieve the simplicity and intelligibility which even the most tongue-tied person achieves in ordinary conversation." ("Propaganda and Demotic Speech").  While his point was that most speakers are unable to produce a speech in reasonably conversational English, his argument suggests to me a question:  what makes powerful speeches effective, above and beyond simplicity and intelligibility?

Last Friday Michaelangelo Allocca, Staff Chair and Instructor, Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults , the University of Chicago, presented a lecture that provided an answer to that question.  The lecturer opened with a quote from William Penn on the potential for misuse of rhetoric:  "There is a truth and beauty in rhetoric; but it oftener serves ill turns than good ones.”  Throughout the lecture he used references to thinkers from the age of Socrates and Aristotle to the present one, thus providing a tour guide to the basics of rhetoric and propaganda with examples from "a few exceptionally gifted speakers". 
The lecture continued with the quote from Hitler (above) and a definition of propaganda proposed by Antonio Gramsci, the Italian linguist, sociologist, and Marxist theoretician.  He equated propaganda with the world view of a power structure.  In Gramsci's terms use of the media as propaganda enable a certain world view.  A popular example provided in the lecture was the Super Bowl as a cultural event.  

We can trace the origins of speech and rhetoric back to Classical Greece with in the dialogues of Plato.  For example, in the Phaedrus he describes speech as a type of seduction, an instance of the power of Eros in human lives.( Phaedrus, 258d)  The discussion in this dialogue highlights the connection between speech making and love.  Plato's student Aristotle defined rhetoric based on his observations in his book entitled On Rhetoric.  Here Aristotle categorized rhetoric into three types of persuasion, namely:  those derived from the character (ethos) of the speaker, when speaking he shows himself fair minded and trustworthy;  those derived from emotion (pathos) aroused by a speaker in an audience;  and those derived from true or likely argument (logos).  Rhetoric is seen as a sort of offshoot of, or counterpart to, dialectic.    Further, Aristotle identified types of rhetoric by the purpose for which it was used.  There are also three of these:  parliamentary  or deliberative regarding an action in the future;  judicial regarding an action in the past;  and praise or blame without judgement of a past or future action (epideictic).  



The lecture continued with examples from literature and history.  In Shakespeare's drama Julius Caesar we see Brutus followed by Mark Antony both making effective speeches demonstrating these principles.  Yet, there are modern examples in the speeches of Adolf Hitler (as documented in the film Triumph of the Will and elsewhere) and John F. Kennedy's inaugural address.  Perhaps the best examples of great rhetoric can be found in the speeches of Abraham Lincoln.  This was an enlightening and rhetorically pleasing lecture that truly demonstrated its subject.

All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays,  George Orwell.  Harcourt, 2008.

On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse,  Aristotle, George A. Kennedy, trans.  Oxford University, 1991.

Selections from the Prison Notebooks,  Antonio Gramsci.  International Publishers, 1971.

A Shared Literary Vision

The Same Man: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in Love and War 
by David Lebedoff

"They would always lead completely different lives. But they both would devote those lives to writing. And though they wrote for different readers and in different voices, they left us a shared vision of their own time, and ours." (p xv)

Lebedoff takes the reader on a well researched, quick but sufficient journey through the lives and ideas of his two subjects, and in its biographical endeavors, the book succeeds admirably. However, Lebedoff's analysis lacks depth. The last chapter contains a list of comparisons between the two. The greatest enemy they saw was, as Waugh put it, "the Modern Age in arms." They hated totalitarianism with a passion but saw that even if totalitarianism was defeated, civilization as they knew it would remain in danger. Lebedoff writes: "What both believed—their core, who they were—was that individual freedom mattered more than anything else on earth and reliance on tradition was the best way to maintain it." But reliance on tradition and a belief in objective reality and objective truth was in decline. They also shared a trust in the common sense of the common man against the condescension of an upper-middle class. He ends his catalogue of ideological similarities: "It was in the freedom and courage to choose one's own life that Orwell and Waugh were most nearly the same". That their lives were deliberately chosen is the most valuable legacy that both offer to us now, in our own so-busy time."biographical endeavors, the book succeeds admirably.
Both writers saw the need for man to believe in a moral code, but Orwell thought he could have morality without religion . He wrote to Waugh that he liked Brideshead except for "hideous faults on the surface," one of these being the book's Catholic themes. But Waugh did not believe that morality would last without faith. For him, the days of spending Christianity's cultural and moral capital without embracing its creeds were coming to a swift end.
David Lebedoff's The Same Man is strongest when it tells the story of Waugh's and Orwell's lives, and useful when it shows the similarity of their critiques of modern society. Though exactly opposite in their beliefs about the root of the matter—Orwell chose this world, Waugh the next—the two men respected one another highly, perhaps in part because of their striking similarities. Both had willed themselves into being as writers and had consciously constructed personas. Orwell was the socialist proletarian whose Etonian accent and manner always gave him away, and Waugh was the country squire, whom few would ever mistake for a real aristocrat. Lebedoff’s project in his book is to explore this seeming paradox: Despite standing in the starkest opposition to each other in some respects, Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell were in other respects the same man.

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Struggle to Love Big Brother

1984
by George Orwell


This is another of the great novels that I first tasted as a teenager in high school. It was then, almost two decades before the title year of this novel, that I first realized part of what made it great -- the ability of Orwell to create a nightmarish world that literally brought the pages of the book to life was evident to me even in my first youthful read. The closest experience that I can recall from about the same time in my life was my first viewing of Orson Welles' film "Citizen Kane" which had the same effect on me, even though I saw it on television. This is the classic text for the will of the individual to maintain his privacy and free will, and how easy it is at the end of it all to just try to blend in and go with the flow to avoid making things even worse by speaking out.
“Thought police, Big Brother, Disinformation, Orwellian” are all words which have entered our vocabulary from the publication of 1984. One purpose of this novel was to warn against a future where the government spies on the people, where independent thought is forbidden and where people are forbidden to love. While Orwell initially was writing about the Communist and Socialist regimes that have since fallen, the novel’s issues and ideas are pertinent today throughout the world.
Orwell has a brilliant imaginative mind and the result is a book written in 1949 that maintains its ability to scare you with the terror of Big Brother. Winston is everyman and his fears mirror those of millions who have suffered under the tyranny of absolute despotism. But if that all there was it would be merely a good book. Only in later readings have I found this to be more of an allegory than a tale of the future, especially as I have now lived more than two decades past 1984. A novel for anyone concerned about his world today.
“But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”

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Fugard's Island

Winston

The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites.

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four

When you go to the quarry tomorrow, take a good look at old Harry. Look into his eyes, John. Look at his hands. They've changed him. They've turned him into stone.

Athol Fugard, John Kani, & Winston Ntshona, The Island

When I think about the play, The Island, and the character of Winston I can't help but remember he is named Winston. And ever since Orwell's novel, Nineteen Eighty-four, came out in 1948 Winston has stood for the twentieth century every man who stood against the state. The author's surname is a contemporary byword for personal privacy lost to the state, and the adjective 'Orwellian' connotes totalitarian thought and action in controlling and subjugating people.
Just as in Orwell, Fugard and his collaborators write of the power of the totalitarian state to subjugate its people one at a time. In The Island we see another Winston, another every man standing against power, just as Antigone did against Creon many centuries before the age of Winston. The power of free thought and the author will continue to triumph over those who would use power for power's sake.