Orwell, motivation, politics, and art

George Orwell once wrote that what he most wanted to do was “make political writing into an art.” I think he had the right goal.

There are obvious social problems. The Palestinians are living as second-class citizens, enjoying fewer basic rights and economic opportunities as the Israelis. The Chechens, as well, are living an apartheid nightmare, with constant fear of sudden, and unjustified, imprisonment. Others, like the people of the Darfur, are subject to systematic genocide. And the people of North Korea are essentially locked away in a dark-room of a country, where, because they don't know how the people of other states are doing, their leaders can continue the lie that they're well and fine. Many are aware of these problems. But they differ on how to solve them.

Some think we need to be logical. We need to appeal to reason and law to get people more involved. If we let people know how rational it is to be interested in the oppressed and mistreated of the world, they will be moved to act. Cold hard reason can move mountains, they tell us. I don’t think so.

People are not moved by reason. People are moved by their sentiments, their passions. You can’t give me a rational argument to prove why I should save my mother from drowning, resting assured I'll be compelled to act accordingly. But if put in that situation, my adrenaline, my instincts, my memories of being taken care of as a child, or whatever it is, will push me to save her in spite of myself. I’ll be moved by something wordless and not subject to rational analysis.

So people are moved more by their feelings or sentiments, than their rationality (that faculty which makes us think coherently and logically). If you want people to become more involved in the work of helping the mistreated - those who deserve but are denied what most people in North America and Europe, and isolated parts of other continents, take for granted and take as natural– you need to speak to their sentiments. Abstract principles are empty and won’t get anyone off the couch. Images, descriptions, representations in evocative and emotionally charged mediums, though, can reach our gut, our sentiments. I’m thinking of documentaries, photographs, literature, paintings, poems, and music. Artists with an eye on social issues are much better at improving things than people realize.

I think this is what Orwell had in mind. He did the right thing criticizing totalitarianism and state repression by creating a work of fiction with a main character the reader could identify with. He gave no arguments for why totalitarianism is wrong. He just showed us what that system was doing to the main character of his novel. We had someone to sympathize with, and his suffering became ours, in a way.

This is how the artist moves us to do good things. The artist makes us identify with people we initially saw as too different and too far away, by letting us hear, see, and smell their horrible conditions. And once you’ve really imagined yourself in their shoes, with a little help from a good piece of social art, it’s hard to ignore them any longer.