While obviously famous for his literary masterpieces such as Animal Farm and 1984, George Orwell was likewise an accomplished journalist and columnist. Having written on political issues for several news agencies during the Second World War (including the BBC), some of his best work was reserved for the subject of everyday happenstances and natural phenomena. Towards the end of his life, he became widely reputed for his insightful thoughts and reflections in his weekly column As I Please, which served as a mosaic for all things that held some kind of special meaning for him. As it happened, his reflections spoke to the hearts of countless readers of his generation, and they continue to live on as timeless educational gems.
As any artist does, Orwell was a master at seeing through the rigid constructions of human society and was able to identify profound, and often unflattering, truths about the social creature as a whole. He recognized human behavior in its many fronts, ultimately building a literary career out of his depictions of that very behavior in its collective manifestation on the world stage (it should be noted that several of his more readable books are non-fictional accounts of the ‘everyman’ set against the all-too familiar backdrops of poverty, injustice, idealism and war). Orwell’s specialty, it can be argued, was the behavior of society as a whole, particularly the engine of socialization and its effects on the masses.
In a September 1941 issue of the publication Horizon, Orwell wrote an interesting piece entitled The Art of Donald McGill. For context, Donald McGill was a British illustrator who became famous for his somewhat ‘naughty’ postcards. During a time of heavy censorship in the UK, McGill’s cartoon depictions of scantily-clad women, drunken old men and obese marital partners garnered a lot of negative attention from the authorities – ultimately resulting in some legal penalties for the artist (he was eventually accused of breaking the Obscene Publications Act of 1857). The artist himself persevered, however, and his postcards went on to become a national treasure in their own right, and they continue to be adored by enthusiasts and collectors alike.
No stranger to controversy himself, Orwell took a rather insightful interest in McGill’s work – not idealizing the sexualized humor so much as paying homage to the important balance that McGill’s depictions brought to society. As he explains in his Horizon article, Donald McGill represents a welcome – if not necessary - departure from the suffocation of incessant conservative ideals. Not that Orwell was promoting moral depravity, of course. If anything, the esteemed writer fought (and most likely died) fighting for justice and the restoration of human dignity and wellness. But what he saw in McGill’s work was an interesting pushback to what – at the time – would have been a strong social baseline that was rooted in traditional Christianity. Again, Orwell was not an enemy of Christianity, but he was adamantly suspicious of what religious ignorance can do to a society if left to its own devices.
Orwell underscores his point by relating the sensation of McGill’s postcards to the novel Don Quixote. While Quixote is depicted as having unusually lofty ideals and a virtually untouchable form of ethics, his squire Sancho Panza is seen as having a more robust, down-to-earth and guttural view of life. Over the course of their adventures together, these two polarized men eventually start to influence one another’s perspective – thus altering the course of their ambitions altogether. From Orwell’s perspective, McGill’s artwork served as a necessary ‘Sancho Panza’ to the otherwise Quixote-like loftiness of English society. He argued that McGill’s depictions, though highly exaggerated, are actually speaking to something inherently human that resides in each of us, though it is strongly indoctrinated against at the same time.
As such, the messages derived from the postcards are not the actual ideal, but to ignore their significance is to ignore an essential element in the human make-up.
As he describes the postcards’ social phenomenon in Horizon:
What they are doing is to give expression to the Sancho Panza view of life, the attitude to life that Miss Rebecca West (British writer and journalist who covered the Nuremberg Trials) once summed up as ‘extracting as much fun as possible from smacking behinds in basement kitchens’. The Don Quixote-Sancho Panza combination, which of course is simply the ancient dualism of body and soul in fiction form, recurs more frequently in the literature of the last four hundred years than can be explained by mere imitation. It comes up again and again, in endless variations…Evidently it corresponds to something enduring in our civilization, not in the sense that either character is to be found in a ‘pure’ state in real life, but in the sense that the two principles, noble folly and base wisdom, exist side by side in nearly every human being. If you look into your own mind, which are you, Don Quixote or Sancho Panza? Almost certainly you are both. There is one part of you that wishes to be a hero or a saint, but another part of you is a little fat man who sees very clearly the advantages of staying alive with a whole skin. He is your unofficial self, the voice of the belly protesting against the soul. His tastes lie towards safety, soft beds, no work, pots of beer and women with ‘voluptuous’ figures. He it is who punctures your fine attitudes and urges you to look after Number One, to be unfaithful to your wife, to bilk your debts, and so on and so forth. Whether you allow yourself to be influenced by him is a different question. But it is simply a lie to say that he is not part of you, just as it is a lie to say that Don Quixote is not part of you either, though most of what is said and written consists of one lie or the other, usually the first.
In other words, Orwell is saying that duality is a defining feature of the human being. This, I believe, is what lies at the heart of Orwell’s article. Obviously, we’re not living in quite the same conditions as those of war-time England, but this message of duality is no less relevant for us today. If anything, we could argue that Western society has gone in the reverse direction in the decades since World War Two, in that flippant sexuality and the depravity of human expression are practically now celebrated things – whereas traditional virtue, morality and honor are oftentimes ridiculed. Either way, I would argue that most of us aspire to courage, decency and dignity, but our intentions are all too easily obscured by a baser appetite. It’s why we feel inspired when watching cinematic depictions of heroes such as William Wallace (Braveheart), Maximus Meridius (Gladiator) and Oskar Schindler (Schindler’s List), yet we likewise relish in the crude frivolities of the likes of Adam Sandler, Seth Rogan and Dave Chappelle. There is something strangely alluring in the narratives of this latter group, even though – in a heartbeat – we would much prefer to be associated with wise warriors and noble leaders. This is because we admire depictions of great sacrifice and unusual bravery. There is something in these portrayals which pulls at a very ancient string within our hearts, though we struggle to make full sense of it – apart from the simple fact that human beings, when given the correct information and a clear opportunity, ultimately want to do the right thing.
In some ways, you could say that we are a species that is constantly at war with itself. The desire for virtue and justice runs deep in our blood, yet our senses are equally – if not more so in this current generation of instant gratification – distracted by sexualized and comedic appetizers. To this, I’m sure Orwell would express a firm assurance that the baser appetite isn’t necessarily something to be feared so much as understood for what it is. As he goes on to explain:
A dirty joke is not, of course, a serious attack upon morality, but it is a sort of mental rebellion, a momentary wish that things were otherwise. So also with all other jokes, which always centre round cowardice, laziness, dishonesty or some other quality which society cannot afford to encourage. Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice. It has to demand faultless discipline and self-sacrifice, it must expect its subjects to work hard, pay their taxes, and be faithful to their wives, it must assume that men think it glorious to die on the battlefield and women want wear themselves out with child-bearing. The whole of what one may call official literature is founded on such assumptions.
If anything, a society built upon morality and social discipline is ideal, as Orwell is basically pointing out. The thoughtful arrangement of society is what fuels good direction in a people, so long as that arrangement is open to learning. Irreverence, for that matter, shouldn’t be seen as a threat to that arrangement so much as a natural pressure valve; a benign expression of stress release. In fact, to deny such expression renders a society no better than the fascist regimes of Orwell’s day (and no one could argue that he was one of the most qualified observers of society to make this point). As far as today’s standards are concerned, one only has to think of some of the more communistic regions of our world – places where any type of deviant expression is met with severe penalties.
But on a more practical level, I would suggest that The Art of Donald McGill helps us appreciate the fundamental importance of poking fun at ourselves. At best, it is a literary call for thinking people to be honest about their faults while never forgetting the higher calling of a functional community. Even more so, it is an encouragement for us to be realistic about our imperfections as humans while simultaneously striving to be better versions of who and what we are. And Orwell realizes that this is not an easy calling, by any means, which is why the pressure valve of irreverence plays such an interesting role as it does. As he shares:
…high sentiments always win in the end, leaders who offer blood, toil, tears and sweat always get more out of their followers than those who offer safety and a good time. When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic. Women face childbed and the scrubbing brush, revolutionaries keep their mouths shut in the torture chamber, battleships go down with their guns still firing when their decks are awash. It is only that the other element in man, the lazy, cowardly, debt-bilking adulterer who is inside all of us, can never be suppressed altogether and needs a hearing occasionally.
While I will forever promote the concept of self-sacrifice in the name of a higher cause, I think it’s foolish to deny that there’s a self-serving glutton who shares the real estate of our own human nature. That part of us definitely exists, and while some may argue that it should be constantly warred against, I would suggest a simpler approach. We just need to acknowledge it for what it is. Acknowledge it, and maybe try to understand it. It doesn’t have to define us, but it can help us appreciate that we are not self-sustaining machines of virtue either. We are mortal creatures made in the image of God, and are therefore engaged in a continuous adventure to understand our mortality while striving for something higher.
I would suggest that we need a reason to get up in the morning, go about our business and show up to our various responsibilities. We need to believe in something that is so much greater than our squishy packet of limited cognition and an ever-decaying body, partly so that the necessities of functional living do not become tragically mundane and pointless. And while on this journey, we would also do well to appreciate that we’re going to stumble and fall along the way. It’s inevitable. As the English poet Alexander Pope famously wrote, “Good-Nature and Good-Sense must ever join; To err is Human; to Forgive, Divine.” Perhaps this is best applied to our own personal selves, specifically when it comes to the notion of self-forgiveness. Duality being our nature, it’s essential that we resist the harm of thrashing ourselves during those moments where we fall from our highest principles. It’s much better to recognize the fall itself, appreciate that it wasn’t our finest hour, and then pick ourselves up again…even though the temptation will be to just stay down.
In the end, Donald McGill’s ‘saucy’ postcards may be nothing more than what they appear to be: a collection of cheap jokes based on primitive tastes and unrestrained lusts. But as Orwell invites us to consider, their place in society might just serve as a reminder of our deep-seated need to measure the nobility of our output with a little dose of self-effacement.
Or putting it another way, dare to live a life of higher meaning and purpose, but take time to laugh at yourself.
Take time to breathe, and always remember your mortality.
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