In writing about all the turmoil in the Middle East, some pundits like to refer to the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. This revived my interest in George Orwell, who volunteered for the (government) Loyalist side. In fact I checked out a 1300+ page collection of essays and magazine articles that he wrote during his short lifetime.
It struck me how important it used to be that public intellectuals (like Orwell and Arthur Koestler) were not tenured professors or think-tank intellectuals. They put their beliefs into practice. You might disagree with their politics as I certainly do, and as they eventually did, later in life. But there was real integrity in an intellectual pushing back from his desk, and suffering the mud and stink of real war. Both were in physical danger. It's something that would never happen today.
Imagine the suburban comfort of the interventionist today: their McMansions in northern Virginia or in fashionable areas of Maryland. They might have tenure at a university, or they might draw a comfortable salary at some neocon think-tank. Their children won't be drafted. None of their friends or near-relatives is in the military. Their spouse has a good-paying job for some federal agency.
And yet, even in the late 1930s it was rare for an intellectual to have experienced war directly. For instance, leftist intellectuals in England were more eager for war with Germany than were their counterparts in France. Orwell pointed out:
It struck me how important it used to be that public intellectuals (like Orwell and Arthur Koestler) were not tenured professors or think-tank intellectuals. They put their beliefs into practice. You might disagree with their politics as I certainly do, and as they eventually did, later in life. But there was real integrity in an intellectual pushing back from his desk, and suffering the mud and stink of real war. Both were in physical danger. It's something that would never happen today.
Imagine the suburban comfort of the interventionist today: their McMansions in northern Virginia or in fashionable areas of Maryland. They might have tenure at a university, or they might draw a comfortable salary at some neocon think-tank. Their children won't be drafted. None of their friends or near-relatives is in the military. Their spouse has a good-paying job for some federal agency.
And yet, even in the late 1930s it was rare for an intellectual to have experienced war directly. For instance, leftist intellectuals in England were more eager for war with Germany than were their counterparts in France. Orwell pointed out:
[In France] war means to him something quite different from what it means to a middle-class Englishman. It means a notice on the wall, "Mobilisation Generale," and three weeks later, if he is unlucky, a bullet in the guts.
Of all the left-wing journalists who declare day in and day out that if this, that and the other happens "we" must fight, how many imagine that war will affect them personally?
But these people, who have been born into the monied intelligentsia and feel in their bones that they belong to a privileged class, are not really capable of foreseeing any such thing [as a big scale air-raid of the modern type.] War is something that happens on paper, and consequently they are able to decide that this or that war is "necessary" with no more sense of personal danger than in deciding on a move at chess.
Our civilisation produces in increasing numbers two types, the gangster and the pansy.Orwell and Koestler grew intellectually and emotionally during their direct involvement with the Spanish Civil War. Without such experience, could they ever have produced the adult writings that they did? The deskbound intellectual is just a professional spectator, a perpetual college sophomore who thinks he understands the world just because he's read books.
And it is, of course, precisely because of the utter softness and security of life in England that the yearning for bloodshed -- bloodshed at a far distance -- is so common among our intelligentsia.
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