You know what I'm stuck on is how much Orwell hated CS Lewis' Mere Christianity for exactly this reason CS Lewis' whole job as a Christian apologist, defending a traditional and dominant ideology from challenge, was reassuring people in this way
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Replying to @arthur_affect @CorwinRowlette and
"This is what everyone already thinks and everyone already thinks it because it's logical and true, it's the evidence right in front of your face, 2+2=4, everyone trying to tell you it's more complicated than that is just fucking with you"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @CorwinRowlette and
And now, after his death, Orwell has been drafted into playing the SAME ROLE They use his work to say the same thing Hell, plenty of Christian conservatives straight up tell you "If you want to understand resistance progressive orthodoxy read Orwell and CS Lewis"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @CorwinRowlette and
Like holy shit Holy historical irony, Batman
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Replying to @arthur_affect @CorwinRowlette and
And yeah, I think that this is honestly Orwell's fault He genuinely had a steady rightward drift during the 1940s, he was becoming a reflexive left-puncher The real threat was always among revolutionaries, the existing conservative authorities were a joke, not worth mentioning
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Replying to @arthur_affect @CorwinRowlette and
1984 has O'Brien talk about the old religions and nations and capitalists as already defeated, dead and buried, ancient history Orwell seriously believed that was what was gonna happen, and happen soon - the old order in its death throes
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Replying to @arthur_affect @CorwinRowlette and
Which we now know in hindsight is nonsense - the old oppressors are still there and never lost power It's 36 years after 1984 irl and we very much do still have capitalists, they aren't some ghostly memory of guys in top hats and tuxes
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Replying to @arthur_affect @CorwinRowlette and
And that's why all the stuff in 1984 that aged poorly grates so much The paeans to common sense, to the past, to the memory of traditional ways of life People in the past had access to real truth and only the Party has destroyed it
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Replying to @arthur_affect @CorwinRowlette and
It's execrable stuff honestly Stuff that Orwell, in his earlier writing about people like Lewis (or like Wodehouse and Dickens) didn't believe There was an Orwell who saw how tacky and hollow and exploitable nostalgia is and it's a different guy than the one who wrote 1984
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Replying to @arthur_affect @CorwinRowlette and
But I mean yeah If all you had was 1984, out of context, you could easily put it on the shelf next to Mere Christianity and The Abolition of Man A Christian reading 1984 has no trouble seeing it as a defense of Christian faith against doubt
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That's the whole problem You spend all this time warning me about people trying to kill my natural conscience and my basic common sense and my born capacity for reason Then it turns out some people think all of that shit leads to the Bible as the revealed Word of God
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Replying to @arthur_affect @CorwinRowlette and
Turns out someone like Orwell, who thinks of that as superstitious nonsense holding people back, can't argue against it without asking you to question everything that seems obvious to you that underlies your worldview Which 1984 sloppily implied is something only bad guys do
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Replying to @arthur_affect @CorwinRowlette and
It's a quandary It's why 1984 is a very powerful and evocative novel but as an argument of any kind it's not that great Tailor-made for the "I AM RATIONAL AND YOU ARE BRAINWASHED, WAKE UP SHEEPLE" chuds we now live with every day
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