EMPATHY, ORWELL AND MRS SEARLE'S RECIPE IAN BROWNE This paper forms part of a larger paper written in collaboration with Viorella Manolche senior leturer at the Institute of Political sciences and International Relations at the Ion C Bratianu University in Bucharest, which should appear later this year. The jointly written paper will only appear in Romanian, so this is my part of that paper, in English. It won't appear in English anywhere else. There are many excellent studies of Orwell's thought available in English, but none that I know of in Romanian. However, I hope that there is something original in this paper in that it looks at how Adam Smith's conception of sympathy from The Theory of Moral Sentiments can help us understand how Orwell understood the relationship between morality and politics. As always, I welcome comments and suggestions. Please feel free to contact me at ianbrowne1311@gmail.com Abstract: Orwell was a political writer who needed to see, touch, feel, smell and taste what he took to be reality, before it could affect him. Although Orwell had no interest in philosophy, his moral and political sensibility grew out of his direct experience of working class life. I suggest that this made a Orwell a more philosophical writer than he imagined himself to be, in that his moral and political attitudes arose from his moral sensibility, a combination of direct experience, sympathetic identification and moral understanding, as understood by the Scottish Enlightenment, and in particular, by Adam Smith. In this sense, sitting down beside the fire, having a relaxed conversation, drinking tea, and, above all, eating a slice Mrs Searle's cake were integral to the development of Orwell's political sense. Keywords: Orwell, empathy, sympathy, Adam Smith, socialism, The Road to Wigan Pier Orwell was profoundly political writer. Not everything he wrote was about politics, but politics infused almost everything he wrote. He himself stated in Why I Write that every serious word he wrote after 1936 was against totalitarianism and in favour of democratic socialism. But, despite his commitment to socialism, Orwell's approach to politics was anti intellectual. He had very little interest in political theory and none at all in philosophy. His approach to politics could be called, perhaps slightly inappropriately given Orwell's indifference towards philosophy, empiricist. For Orwell, the facts speak for themselves. One couldn't understand something unless one had experienced it, and at his most naive, Orwell seemed to think that experiencing something was enough to understand it. In order to understand the world, Orwell had to see, to hear, to touch, to smell and to taste the world. In a much quoted passage in a letter to Henry Miller, written in August 1936, he said ‘I have a sort of belly to earth attitude and always feel uneasy when I go away from the ordinary world where grass is green, stones hard etc.’ Quoted in Ben Clarke, Orwell in Context - Communities, Myths, Values, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, p. 126. Facts, unfortunately, don't speak for themselves. But for Orwell, for whom facts did speak for themselves, facts, the data of raw experience, already had a political quality. The way people lived, their opportunities, their sense of who they were and what mattered to them were facts. And the political implications of these facts was intrinsic to their nature. And if you looked hard enough you could see it. For Orwell, you just had to see, in practice, how the Empire worked to realise it was, in Orwell’s words, “a racket”, and you just had to see how ordinary people lived to understand that capitalism was “a racket”. Gerald Graff, “Orwell and the Class Racket”, Salmagundi, 70/7, spring/summer 1986. What stopped people seeing these facts as they really were, facts already infused with political implications, was their position in the class system or in the Imperial system – those class and imperial prejudices that shaped the way they viewed the world, which prevented them from experiencing the world as it really is. When Orwell resigned from his job with the Indian Imperial Police in 1927, he was, in a way, renouncing his past. He was trying to dispense with those prejudices that prevented him from seeing the world as it was. In some ways, Orwell spent, the rest of his life looking for a sense of place that he could recognize and accept, a sense of place that would enable him to see how things were and would show him how things should be. Orwell's career as a writer after 1926 is the story of his attempts to find that sense of place based on the direct experience of the world as it is. He found this place in a fusion of Englishness and socialism. This argument is found in Robert Colls, George Orwell, English Rebel, Oxford University Press, 2013, to whose book this essay is heavily indebted. When Orwell wrote The Road to Wigan Pier all the different conceptions of what constituted Englishness were bound up with experience. To be English and to understand what it was to be English, one had to experience Englishness as a lived phenomenon. But whose experience defined Englishness? Was it the sort of forward looking modernity that Orwell inveighs against in Coming Up For Air, or a backward looking Englishness, trying to recapture a pre-modern England? Was it the experience of those who lived in the industrial north or the rural south? Was the experience of the poor, or of the rich? Orwell was acutely aware of all the many gradations of class, and of the opportunities and limitations that defined membership of each class. He placed himself with a carefully considered exactitude, in the lowest stratum of the upper middle class. And although he had dressed as a tramp in England and experienced aspects of life as an outsider, he had never had any real experience of working class industrial life. As for regional differences in experience, Orwell knew almost nothing about the north of England. He had almost certainly never been there before. For Orwell, England was rural England, the England, of “the crocus, the missel-thrush, the cuckoo, the blackthorn... toads mating, … a pair of hares having a boxing match in the young corn... ” George Orwell, “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad”, in The Collected Essays, Journalism And Letters Of George Orwell, Volume IV, In Front of Your Nose, 1945-1950, edited by Sonia Orwell And Ian Angus, Secker & Warburg, 1968. This was the England of his experience. In the north of England, in the industrial heartlands of England, in Wigan and Sheffield, Orwell discovered a different England, an England he had never expereinced. For a man to whom experience was central to understanding, this trip was to offer a new range of experiences to him. Orwell had accepted a commission from the Left wing publisher Victor Gollancz to write a book about the north of England. This was the book that became The Road to Wigan Pier. It was to be a book about the failure of capitalism. This was the period of the hungry thirties – a period in the north of England of mass unemployment and widespread poverty. Mining areas such as Wigan and Sheffield were particularly badly hit with one in four miners unemployed, and many families living on the 'dole' – financial assistance provided at the bare minimum, barely enough to cover rent and food, provided by the Public Assistance Committee (PAC). He arrived in Wigan on 11 February 1936 and left the north of England on 30 March. He spent a few days with his sister, and in total only 46 days with working class people. It would be a mistake to think that Orwell learnt much about the working class in this time. He stayed barely longer than a contemporary tourist might stay during two holidays in Tuscany. Orwell’s impressions of the physical environment were not positive. As he left Wigan by train to travel to Sheffield, he wrote “one always feels that the smoke and filth must go on for ever and that no part of the earth's surface can escape them... a crowded dirty little country [where] one takes defilement for granted”. George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, Penguin, 1978, p. 17. Wigan he continued, “seemed a world from which vegetation had been banished; nothing existed except smoke, shale, ice, mud, ashes, and foul water. But even Wigan is beautiful compared with Sheffield. Sheffield, I suppose, could justly claim to be called the ugliest town in the Old World.” The Road to Wigan Pier is divided into two parts - a report of his experiences in the north of England and a second part in which he reflects on his own understanding of socialism and the problems it faces in appealing to the middle class. The book is part of the long process of finding and constructing that sense of place that would enable him to see the world as it is, a process which lasted the rest of his life. When he went north, he was in the process of discovering what socialism meant to him, and what Englishness meant to him. And these two things , and the possibility of combining them were what preoccupied him for the remainder of his life. In the north of England, Orwell discovered a different England, one far removed from that which he was familiar with. It was like nothing he had ever encountered, and the ugliness of towns like Wigan, “a world from which vegetation had been banished; [where] nothing existed except smoke, shale, ice, mud, ashes, and foul water” Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, p. 18. was as far from the rural world of “the crocus, the missel-thrush, the cuckoo, the blackthorn... [and] a pair of hares having a boxing match in the young corn” as it is possible to get and still be in England. It wasn't the countryside or the environment that impressed Orwell. It was the people who impressed him. They suggested to him a different way of being English, a way far removed from anything he had previously experienced. Although Orwell, ostensibly the least philosophical of observers, may not have realised it there was more than mere empiricism in what he saw. To Orwell, it was seeing with his own eyes the lives of working class people in the north of England, going into a coal mine, tasting the coal dust in his mouth, that enabled him to understand what their lives were like, and what their lives lacked. What they lacked was fair pay for their dangerous health destroying work and a deceny material standard of living. What they had was a sense of solidarity and comradeship a willingness to help each other and a desire to try to live as morally decently and as fairly as circumstances permitted. Compare, for example, Orwell’s Burmese Days, which offers to the reader’s scrutiny the moral and intellectual lives of the middle classes who formed the basis of the imperial project. For him, this was what socialism was. It wasn't an ideological movement, based on Marxist doctrine, or indeed on much doctrine at all. It was an instinctive sense of what was right and what was fair. A husband and wife and three children trying to live on 32 shillings a week from the PAC wasn't fair. It wasn't right. It denied them the common decencies of life. But the working class had a sense of social solidarity and equality that he felt was absent from middle class life. The loyalties, feelings and values that gave the working class their identity offered Orwell a glimpse of a different and better way of living. As Steven Ingle puts it, “Orwell appeared to be captivated by what he took to be a living value system rooted in equality and emphasizing the traditional Christian values of decency and justice... These values were essentially pragmatic rather than ideological and they rose naturally from the culture of working people. The northern working-class was moved not by systems of ideas but by egalitarian fellow feeling, by a sense of common decency.” Steven Ingle, The Social and Political Thought of George Orwell - A reassessment, Routledge, 2006, p.57-8. But Orwell was not so unphilosophical as he supposed. Had he read him, he would have found the basis for his moral philosophy in Adam Smith, and in the importance that Smith attached in his moral philosophy to empathy, to the ability to enter into the emotional life of others, and to see the world through their eyes: “[a]s we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation… my thesis is that our fellow feeling for the misery of others comes from imaginatively changing places with the sufferer, thereby coming to conceive what he feels or even to feel what he feels.” Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Penguin Classics, 2010, Chapter 1, “Sympathy”. In the north of England, Orwell, educated at Eton, upper middle class, ex-Imperial policeman, writer, discovered what men very different from him felt. His “belly to the earth” approach, his desire to see what the northern working class saw, to hear what they heard, to taste what they tasted provided the direct experience which enabled him to develop a moral empathy with the working class. Despite his distaste for philosophy, his approach could hardly have been more Smithian. Orwell’s trip north was a direct experiment in Adam Smith’s methodology of cultivating the sentiments and empathy in order to develop moral understanding. And it was this form of empathy as a moral sentiment that made him want to change the existing order of things, the capitalist system, a system which denied to ordinary people the ordinary decencies of life. His socialism grew out of his “belly to the earth” moral empathy, and as Orwell said, almost everything he wrote after 1936 was a defense of socialism. In Sheffield he stayed with Gilbert and Kate Searle for three days. Recalling Orwell in the local newspaper, the Sheffield Telegraph, on February 2nd 1990, Kate Searle recognized the gap that Orwell had to cross to achieve empathetic moral understanding and the difficulties he faced, "He was a very jolly fellow, very intelligent – he’d been educated at Eton. He used to go out with my husband to a lot of socialist meetings in town. He wanted to see how both sides lived… I think he had good intentions in trying to write about the working classes but as I said to him you have to live with us for more than a week to find out what it's all about.." http://www.chrishobbs.com/orwellsheffield1936.htm Accessed 11 February 2017. The form of social equality that Orwell believed in was what he found in Spain, where, “[a]bove all, there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom. Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine.” George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, Penguin Classics, 2013, p.4., where in the army, fighting the fascists on the Aragon front, “[e]veryone from general to private drew the same pay, ate the same food, wore the same clothes, and mingled on terms of complete equality. If you wanted to slap the general commanding the division on the back and ask him for a cigarette, you could do so, and no one thought it curious.” Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, p.2 What Orwell found in working class life was the sort of solidarity and social equality that he found in Barcelona and on the Aragon front,. a tangible directly experienced socialism that you could touch and feel and taste in slapping a general on the back and sharing a cigarette with him. For Orwell, to whom experience was such a vital part of moral understanding, whose socialism was rooted in the everyday, in the ordinary, the taste of those shared cigarettes was, quite literally, the taste of socialism. But equality, liberty and justice did not mean a total change in people's lives – there was to be no building “new men” for Orwell. He liked the “old men”, he liked the working class just as it was. He saw life under English socialism not as becoming fundamentally different from life as it was in Wigan in 1936. It would be materially better, it would be safer. But the values and social life of the working class would remain the same. He envisaged this existing form of life and these existing values as being the foundations upon which English socialism could be built. “His [the working man’s] vision of the Socialist future is a vision of present society with the worst abuses left out, and with interest centring around the same things as at present – family life, the pub, football and local politics. As for the philosophic side of Marxism, the pea and thimble trick with those three mysterious entities, thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, I have never met a working man who had the faintest interest in it.” Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, p. 155. The pea and thimble trick, also known as the shell game (also known as thimblerig, three shells and a pea, the old army game) is portrayed as a gambling game, but in reality, when a wager for money is made, it is almost always a confidence trick used to perpetrate fraud. See Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_game As Robert Colls says, “If this is socialism - and Orwell never wavered from his view that it was - it will make bad things better but continue in the meantime to take its cue from the everyday. What might this mean for the miners exactly? Fewer accidents? More money? Hot baths? What miner did not want these things, socialist or not? And what about the women? What did they want? A modern kitchen? A night off? A back door? … local life, real people and actually existing pleasures.” Colls, p.67. In ‘Some Thoughts on the Common Toad’, Orwell explains the importance to himself of the simple pleasures of life – “the miracle of Persephone, which happens every March, the leaves thickening on the chestnut trees … the pleasures of spring … available to everybody, and cost nothing.” Orwell wants to maintain that these pleasures are non-political, and has a little fun at the expense of dogmatists and left wing intellectuals, who see writing about such things as a dereliction of socialist duty, because they lack the essential socialist element of class struggle – what Orwell dismissively refers to as “a class angle”. But then, as the piece develops, it turns out that these simple pleasures do after all have, if not a class angle, then at least a political angle. For Orwell, the ordinary simple pleasures of life are what a good society should guarantee to everyone. It cannot be stressed too strongly that for Orwell, socialism is not about class struggle, the dialectic, the expropriation of the expropriators and all those other elements of Marxist theory, “the pea and thimble trick” of the dialectic and its thesis, antithesis and synthesis. For Orwell, socialism is a moral creed, founded on justice, fairness and decency which promises everyone the opportunity to enjoy a decent life, where no one is excluded from the advantages of twentieth century life because they are born into the wrong class. Socialism for Orwell was simply life as it was, but with all the bad parts removed. Above all, it was enjoying the simple pleasures in life (the good parts), untainted by exploitation (the bad parts). As he wrote in Thoughts on the Common Toad, “I have always suspected that if our economic and political problems are ever really solved, life will become simpler instead of more complex… I think that by retaining one’s childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and – to return to my first instance - toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable.” In a famous passage, Orwell describes the working class family sitting round the living room fire. “winter evenings after tea, when the fire glows in the open range and dances mirrored in the steel fender, when Father, in shirt-sleeves, sits in the rocking chair at one side of the fire reading the racing finals, and Mother sits on the other with her sewing, and the children are happy with a pennorth of mint humbugs, and the dog lolls roasting himself on the rag mat — it is a good place to be in, provided that you can be not only in it but sufficiently of it to be taken for granted.” Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, p.204. And note the very Smithian distinction between being ‘in’ a place and ‘of’ a place. As Robert Colls points out, this idealised picture can only be an ideal, but nonetheless, it represents Orwell’s view of socialism. While the simple pleasures of a member of the lowest stratum of the upper class, raised in the rural south of England may include the pleasures of spring, the simple pleasures of the urban working class are different – the football pools, the pub, and a nice cup of tea. Indeed, what could be a simpler or more English pleasure than a nice cup of tea? See George Orwell, A Nice Cup of Tea, Evening Standard, 12 January 1946, accessed February 2nd 2016, at http://orwell.ru/library/articles/tea/english/e_tea But socialism wasn’t just present ways of life with all the bad parts removed. It was the simple everyday pleasures of the existing way of life, but with better bits added. Not just a cup of tea, but in Orwell’s conception of socialism, there was cake as well. Kate Searle gave Orwell her recipe for fruit loaf – flour, eggs, treacle, mixed fruit, sugar and lard or margarine. And as Orwell notes in his diary, it is even better with butter. From Orwell’s diaries. The recipe was left out of the The Collected Essay, Journalism and Letters edited by Ian Angus and Sonia Orwell. Orwell wrote the recipe in the diary that he kept of his trip, his notes which formed the basis of The Road to Wigan Pier. Available at: https://theroadtowiganpier.wordpress.com/page/3/ Lard would be the cheapest way to make the cake. Margarine would be a little more expensive. So there is a connection between Kate Searle’s recipe and Orwell’s socialism. That empathy that was central to Orwell’s moral and political life was founded on the direct experience of working class life. Socialism was existing working class life, but better. Orwell’s conception of Socialism was father sitting in front of the fire in his shirt sleeves, reading the racing finals, mother doing her knitting on the other side, pausing for a cup of tea and a slice of fruit loaf – nice when made with lard, but under a fairer and more egalitarian society, a socialist cake would be even better. It would be made with butter. Bibliography Clarke, Ben, Orwell in Context - Communities, Myths, Values, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007; Colls, Robert, George Orwell, English Rebel, Oxford University Press, 2013; Graff, Gerald, “Orwell and the Class Racket”, Salmagundi, 70/7, spring/summer 1986; Ingle, Steven, The Social and Political Thought of George Orwell - A Reassessment, Routledge, 2006; Orwell, George, “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad”, in Orwell, Sonia and Angus, Ian (eds.), The Collected Essays, Journalism And Letters Of George Orwell, Volume IV, In Front of Your Nose, 1945-1950, London, Secker & Warburg Limited, 1968; Orwell, George, The Road to Wigan Pier, Penguin, 1978; Orwell, George, Homage to Catalonia, Penguin Classics, 2013; Orwell, George, A Nice Cup of Tea, Evening Standard, 12 January 1946, available at http://orwell.ru/library/articles/tea/english/e_tea Pearce, Robert, “Revisiting Orwell's Wigan Pier”, History, 82, 1997; Smith, Adam, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Penguin Classics, 2010. Ian Browne studied philosophy at the Universities of Cambridge and St Andrews. He contributes to The Romanian Review of Political Sciences and International Relations and to Studii Filosofice. He is currently collaborating with Dr Viorella Manolache on a study of George Orwell's thought.