I remember the feeling of reading one of my childhood favs tearing hard into another one of my favs Orwell's review of CS Lewis' Mere Christianity, which he said was not only intellectually worthless but "sinister"
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This highly educated Oxford don adopting this avuncular, charming, informal tone to reassure the plebs that the world isn't complicated, it's simple That this reactionary theistic worldview the Church has shoved down our throats for centuries is common sense, it stands to reason
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This disbelief in progress - moral progress, intellectual progress, material progress ("I have seen both, in an egg, we call it going bad in Narnia") This dismissal of the idea that the human race, over time, continues to learn things
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Hence everything that's happened since Aquinas wrote the Summa Theologica is just modern fluff and nonsense It's all heresies refuted by theologians long ago You can forget about it The truth is obvious, it's common sense, it's what we've always known for a fact
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This brand of conservatism - its sheer *laziness*, the smugness of its incuriosity and intellectual indolence - Orwell had no respect for He straight up did not think it could survive the 20th century, period, not with the massive constant change outside your window
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Hence the "right wing", as such, just isn't there in 1984 He predicted the Tories, the Church, old school tradcons, just wouldn't survive, they'd crumble and vanish and the choice was authoritarian vs liberatory revolution
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That was a massive miscalculation on his part, and it's why I think 1984, despite being a classic, is such a flawed book The fact that Orwell hated conservatives so much and yet conservatives adopted him so readily obviously means he fucked up
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Yes and no Orwell had his blindspots and his contrarian turn after WWII does indicate in some ways he was revving up to follow the same socialist-to-reactionary pipeline Hitchens did
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Had he not died young it's possible he'd have followed that hippie-punching impulse where it led him Especially with the ongoing disappointment that turned many socialists neocon, that capitalism never actually collapsed under its own weight
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He did hippie-punch, a lot, The Road to Wigan Pier has a lot of that obnoxious Anna Khachiyan energy where he goes OFF on how the vegetarians and the polycules and the weirdos are holding back the left Falling into that reactionary "It's just COMMON SENSE this is bullshit" stuff
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That said, he did apparently hate Lewis enough that modern conservatives *making him into the next CS Lewis* -- "speaking up for common sense and traditional knowledge in the face of progress gone mad" -- is deeply ironic
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Replying to @arthur_affect @kareem_carr
One little catch: 2 + 2 = 5 isn't progress.
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