Robin:

Hello, Agnes.

Agnes:

Hi, Robin.

Robin:

What should we talk about?

Agnes:

We've already decided what we're going to talk about.

Robin:

Yeah. But the listeners don't know.

Agnes:

About The Road to Wiggum Pier. Okay. So what question would you like to raise about this text? Or do you wanna maybe just maybe describe it for our listeners? Because they've all many of them won't have read it.

Robin:

Right. So, George Orwello, famous author of 1984 and Animal Farm, He this is earlier in his life, a bit earlier. This is 1937 when this book comes out. And he sees himself as a socialist, and he was, paid by a socialist leaning organization to go do this, trip to a industrial town to live there and experience it and write about, you know, their lives as a way to induce sympathy for these people.

Agnes:

Multiple towns. Think he goes to Okay. In the North Of England.

Robin:

Right. 20,000,000

Agnes:

towns and then places where there's a lot of people out of work.

Robin:

Right. And he does, and he writes that up, and it has the kind of effect that is intended. But then on reflection, he adds a whole other section of his book where he thinks about this whole process of what it is that makes people like or not like socialists and want to join them or not. He basically thinks it's just really obvious if you think about it. The socialism is great, although he doesn't clarify what it exactly it is, but he has some interesting arguments about what are some of the obstacles that put people off about socialism. And I I say there's three of them. We you know? But, I I see this as a nice example of, say, politics isn't about policy. If you hear the book is about socialism, you might think he discusses anything at all about the trade offs of socialist policy, but he has no interest in that whatsoever. But what he does think about is how people feel about socialism in terms of being willing to identify it or associates it with or not. And he's insightful in that, and he presents some of his own internal conflicts, about these issues because he has different high level thoughts about what he should feel than what he decides he does feel.

Agnes:

So maybe it's worth distinguishing conceptually socialism from the prince class abolition. Because a lot of this text is about, trying to abolish the snobbery that the higher class people feel in relation to the lower class people, including abolishing that in oneself and the very, very deep roots of that inside of, a person whose whole sensibility and tastes have been developed in a high class, way and then correlatively abolishing the disdain that the lower class people feel for the high class people and the the thought that such people could never be included into their world. And so, yeah, one idea is socialism, but it's sort of more specific idea is something like communion across class lines and the social and cultural difficulties that that presents when someone concretely tries to do it as Orwell does. And what he says at a certain point is that he's first tried to commune with, like, tramps and vagrants and, drunkards and that class of people. And he said that was easy. It was even with his fancy accent. If he wore dirty clothes and he went to the places where they were, they were very welcoming, and they, they they they were hap they were enough of outsiders that he was he could be one of them almost immediately. Whereas to get inside of a lower class household, to be welcomed into a home, and then even if you were in the home, to feel like you were of them, he saw was very was very difficult.

Robin:

Right. So like I said, there were these three different lines of things that were obstacles to socialism. And you're focusing on one of them, which I do think is the most interesting one, and it's probably the one that got the most attention for this book. That is he sees one key correlated idea with socialism is this idea that there's a class war, and you're supposed to side with the lower class. So he feels like he should. And he he gives this example of he worked in Burma as a police officer, and there he felt it was really obvious that the locals were right and that the foreigners were wrong to be there controlling the the locals. And in that conflict, he wanted very much to side with the Burmese, and that's partly why he left Burma no longer in those roles. And then by analogy, he thought that he should be siding with the lower classes in his country because they were like the Burmese, but he couldn't very well. That is he had grown up in a culture, and he had assimilated many cultural values. And he saw that the lower classes had different cultural values. And when he looked at their lives, he saw some of those differences were to blame for their worst situation in their lives there in the North Of England. But he thought he was supposed to support the lower classes over his upper class origins even though he says he's he's not very rich. He he he does agree and sees that he has those values. And in the end of the book, he basically says, let's let's do everything in socialism but eliminate classes first because, maybe that'll happen by itself, but let's not try. And he he basically thinks your class is so deeply immersed in you that that you shouldn't even try because you would just not be the same person anymore if you were to try to eliminate your your culture. And so this is really about cultural conflict, really.

Agnes:

Yeah. So

Robin:

And multiculturalism, really, in in a sense.

Agnes:

Right. So, like, there's a line in here where he says, is it ever possible to be really intimate with the working class? Presumably, if you're upper class like me, he doesn't even have to say that. Right?

Robin:

Right. Yeah.

Agnes:

No working class person is reading this. So

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

That's the question he asked himself. No is his answer. It's not possible. Right? And he's he's like, took I tried it. I mean, I went and I hung out with them, and you I cannot do it. And what's striking is that it's harder for him than with the Burmese. That is because because in his view, the Burmese don't smell, and their skin is kinda nice. So he has this his the big obstacle for him is, like, smell where you know? And and kind of visceral these visceral responses that have been inculcated in him to these people are dirty, and they smell. And he does a lot to try to contextualize the dirt. Right? He spends so long on the miners and their dirt on their bodies, the the coal dust, and how, no, they really would take baths if we made it possible for them to take baths. And it's wrong for us to think that they're just the sorts of people who would only use their bathtubs to hold coal even if you gave them a bathtub or something. So he he he he's you hear him working against himself where he's like, there are people who want to be clean, but but they're not clean. Like, from his point of view, they're not clean. And I was raised to have visceral reactions to certain kinds of smells or appearances of dirt. Or, you know, he says to this day, I'm just repulsed at the thought of drinking after such a per like drinking water at such a person, unless it's a woman.

Robin:

Yes. That was funny.

Agnes:

I could drink after any woman. They're all clean somehow.

Robin:

But Right.

Agnes:

Right. But even to this day, after he has really worked on worked with nobbishness out of himself, he still can't drink water after them, after these dirty people.

Robin:

True. He's insightful when he talks about how other people, when they're poor but of upper class origin, they are all the more threatened by the possibility that people might confuse them with the lower classes, and they really then lean into all their cultural customs as a way to say, no. I'm really upper class.

Agnes:

Right. And so they're spending a lot of money. They're impoverishing themselves, creating, the the symbols. He's in a way, the the lower class people who are just below them are better off because they can spend their money on food.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

But these people have to spend their money, keeping up appearances to show Right. Find themselves that they're in

Robin:

the high. So the Burmese race means he's never gonna be confused with them. So he doesn't have to work to distinguish himself from him. But and then, of course, he's more likely to be confused with a lower class man than a woman. So that's also why he's more, you know, offended by men than women. So you can see his theories work fine. That is, yes, people like him are exactly very antagonistic toward, you know, lower class people who they could be confused with, plausibly, and that they are eager to distinguish themselves from. And that's the the origin of his hostility for them, but he still feels it and isn't willing to let go of it. And, I mean, to me

Agnes:

said earlier where, you know, these people are somewhat to be blamed for their condition. I mean, I guess I thought he largely wasn't saying that is

Robin:

He some but he points out in some cases, it's true. I mean

Agnes:

Okay. But, like, largely, what he wants to say is there are people who want to work. And when they have and when they're given opportunities, they work really, really hard. And they want to be clean, but they're not given opportunities to do so.

Robin:

For example, he talks about how they don't use the most nutrition cost effectiveness food. They spend extra money on more tasty food. And he says if they were, in fact, on average, more cost effective with their food, they just get lower doles. So there's and he's you know, he'd rather pay for lawyers to help them get more dole. Like, there's this thing where, you know, they're tempted to get the dole and also work, and then there's, you know, legal people who come to try to check for that, and he wants to, like, hide them from that because he wants them to get the dole and to be able to work.

Agnes:

Right. So the food is an inter so there are these interesting sort of places where they have a culture. Like, they have a working class culture, and that culture is gonna dictate how they behave just the same as for upper class people, which means they're not always gonna be maximally efficient. Right? That's just what it is to have a culture. Like so one of the examples is if you have to have tea all the time, and they're wasting all their money on tea, you know, the opiate, as Orwell calls it. But another one that another little little aside that I thought was super interesting was that he thinks that they could, a lot of the housing problems could be solved if they had, like, apartments. But these people think that it's, like

Robin:

They should have houses. Yeah.

Agnes:

In air. It's not yours. Right? Something that's tiny, but it's on the ground, that's more your house than than, like, a house. You you you can't have a slice of the sky or something. And then that that Orwell's like, you know, basically implicitly, like, that's silly. Right? But that's what culture is, is thoughts like, it matters to me that my house touches the ground. And so his his like, there there are many moments where he is in a way pushing for the abolition of low class culture with his arguments and observations. And and it's not clear that socialism can be anything but that, but, the abolition of low class culture.

Robin:

I mean, he points out that many socialists in history have been basically, we need to fix low class culture and take away its problem. Right? Yes. Exactly. And he

Agnes:

Which

Robin:

is But he doesn't wanna do that because he feels he should take their side in a class conflict.

Agnes:

Right. So this question, can the upper class person really and sincerely take the side of the lower class person in a class conflict? And Orwell is, like, doing his best to try to do that. But I feel like you see at so many points Orwell's sort of snobbishness come like, let's think about the food, the tinned food. I mean, he's just

Robin:

real about the

Agnes:

fact that these people eat tinned food.

Robin:

They they couldn't have any flavor at all in that tinned food. Right? They've lost all flavor.

Agnes:

Flavor, the apple versus the what other other kind

Robin:

The American apple has no flavor. The English apple.

Agnes:

Exactly. Right? So you see Orwell who has really he really thinks of himself as, like, someone who's done the work, you know, done some self examination. Like, the modern equivalent of the, this woke like, the Robin DiAngelo, you know, that kind of thing of, like, you need to work on yourself. Like, he's done that to an extraordinary degree. And yet he's still left with these kind of like like, these people are tasteless. They're eating this bad food that's like would be below me to eat. And that that's Right.

Robin:

But So he often talk

Agnes:

makes us want to read Orwell is that he makes observations like that, that he has style and penance.

Robin:

He's insightful, and he he sees things. But, like, you know, I come to this. I had this background as an economist hearing the word socialism and many arguments about it. And then the kinds of concepts of socialism I've heard about don't really show up much in this book.

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

Right? And then he tends to, like, not even want to explain social. He thinks it's obvious. He often says, it's just liberty and justice. That's all it is. And even as a point where he says, you know, if we just wanted to fix the problems, we just could. It would be obvious, and it doesn't really matter how.

Agnes:

I I I I I I was relying on line because I found it extraordinary. It was something like if we it was clear to everyone that if we really wanted equality, we would just have it. And, I mean, I'm now I'm now not finding it. This is a 200 page document, I'm not always able to find the

Robin:

quote. Right.

Agnes:

But, but, yeah, that's right. So he starts he thinks certain things are obvious, but also his conception of socialism is very, idiosyncratic. I call it machine socialism. That is pretty the very idea of socialism is deeply connected with the idea of machines in a way that I've never I've never really heard this from anyone else. So let me can I read? I wanna read the passage where he just describes the, this is not the machine part. This is just to describe what socialism is. Let me just.

Robin:

Page one thirty five. I have it.

Agnes:

Oh, okay. You read it

Robin:

then. K. I had at that time no interest in socialism or any other economic theory. It seemed to me then, it sometimes just seems to me now for that matter, that economic injustice will stop the moment we want to stop it and no sooner. And if we generally want to stop it, the method adopted hardly matters.

Agnes:

Okay. That's not the passage I was thinking. That's the passage I was just referring to. But let me now let me read you the passage where he tells you he explains what socialism is. This is page one fifty four. And all the while, everyone who uses his brain knows that socialism as a world system and wholeheartedly applied is a way out. It would at least ensure our getting enough to eat even if it deprives us of anything else. Indeed, from one point of view, socialism is such elementary common sense that I am sometimes amazed that it has not established itself already. The world, here's the important part, is a raft sailing through space with potentially plenty of provisions for everybody. The idea that we must all cooperate and see to it that everyone does his fair share of the work and gets his fair share of the provisions seems so blatantly obvious that one would say that no one could possibly fail to accept it unless he had some corrupt motive for clinging to the present system. So for Orwell, socialism is like a tautology, and it's a tautology that we're all in this together. In this means in a thing that has plenty of good stuff for everyone, as long as people are willing to do the work, and then we'll get the rewards. And, like, that's it. It's simple. That that's his understanding of what socialism is.

Robin:

Right. So as an economist, of course, I'm offended by him ignoring all the complexity. But the thing that most strikes me here is his agony about he needs to take the culture side of the lower class is not implied by this. This is completely consistent with believing that his class is right about many cultural and, you know, value things.

Agnes:

That's why in the beginning when you were like, oh, he he puts forward three obstacles to socialism. I wanted to say, no. There's another consideration in this piece, which is about eliminating class, and it just doesn't it's not directly having to do with socialism. It's another and in fact, the point of the piece is that we could separate class elimination from achievement of socialism. Right? And Orwell was like, look. I it can't it's one way to read this, he would not like this at all. But I'm like, look. We can still be snobs, antisocialists. That's what I really want. That's what I care about is that I get to hold on to my elitism and the

Robin:

Well, I mean but he's not willing to say it that way, but that's what he's implying, basically. But many other people have been willing to embrace that. He's just not, and he's in conflict about it.

Agnes:

Right. So but I I like this description. I think it's worth spending a minute on it. You know, this idea, we're all in this together. We all need to we all need to do the work, and we'll all get the rewards. And, like, many of us have been in environments, right, where this logic applies. So right now, I'm teaching intensive summer class. I have a co teacher, and then I have two other teachers we're working with. There's still a lot of stuff that needs to be done. And we divide it amongst ourselves, and we're constantly kind of, you know, talking to each other who has to do what. And we try to be fair in dividing up the labor and dividing up the spoils. Right? And that is what it is to have, like, a group that works together. Right? And I think a family is such a group. In a family, you know, husband and wife, they'll be like, okay. You take out the trash. I will do the dishes. So we have this idea that for a group to work together well is just to divide up the labor in a fair way and then everybody gets taken care of. That is pretty intuitive. And then the question is why can't we just apply that to the totality of all human beings?

Robin:

Well, this concept of fairness can't take the weight. That is fairness

Agnes:

take it inside the family or the my me and my colleagues, but suddenly now it can't take it in

Robin:

Well, it's the single word that encompasses a lot of different context dependent norms. That is we have collected many con many norms that help us coordinate activity in particular areas, and we can describe those norms as fairness. But there isn't a single uber norm underneath them such that it would just imply fairness in every possible context. Mhmm. Fairness is the name we give to all these other sorts of, rules about how to share low work effort, how to share outcomes. And there are context in which we you know? Well, they're often they're pretty complicated. So for example, fairness in forager groups sharing food, they had complicated rules where the person who, say, brought in the animal got to break it up and give the choices pizza of meats meat to the people they preferred. Everybody got some meat, but there were a lot of complicated rules even in a forager context sharing food, which kind of food was shared with who, how, and they were context dependent norms. There isn't even if you just think of sharing food, it's not simple. There isn't a just generic how to share food thing. Even in a group of people all sitting together with a pile of food in front them, we usually think bigger people might need more food. Pregnant people might especially need food or at risk. Maybe people put more effort into it, need more food. Maybe permanent people, you know, get more food as opposed to visitors or vice versa. We're supposed to take care of visitors first. Right? Food sharing is complicated, Food is just one part of all the things we could share, and even the effort into food is only one of many different things.

Agnes:

Okay. But let's say we are in a group like, in a family, right, one does have to share food. Every evening, your family figures out some way of sharing food. And in my in my household, even though there's no scarcity of food, there's always some little thing to fight over. I want this piece or, you know, oh, can like, one of my kids will not have finished his food, and the other kid will be like, can I have that? And but it's like, but did the first kid was the first kid done eating yet? Or what was he asking for? Was he kind of marking that he wanted it so that, you know, if you're not too full that right. Right. We have these little disputes, about who gets what food when and how we distribute food. Do they get dessert? Have they eaten their vegetables? There's lots of complexity in there, but we resolve it. We're and I think that they would say, look. Everybody gets roughly what they deserve. And so so from the fact that there's a lot of complexity, it doesn't follow that we couldn't, come up with a solution. Like, these groups do come up with solutions, fair solutions.

Robin:

But, the ability to develop so, I mean, you're looking at, on the one hand, the complexity of the world you're dealing with. And on the other hand, how much interconnection do people have? How how often can they talk? How often do they see each other? How much can they observe each other? And the ability to not only generate but enforce norms about the behavior. So, you know, I guess a small family together or a small forager group and that's all in the same little, you know, camp, they can, by paying a lot of attention to each other and the context, negotiate norms that don't typically take into account all the complexity. Right. But because they have more capacity to generate and maintain complexity, they will go up to that capacity in developing rules and norms about how to handle the situation they're in. And then as their environment changes, they can renegotiate with each other how those norms change.

Agnes:

And in meta norms, like, we don't spend more than a minute arguing about the food or the Exactly. Mom gets to say or whatever. Right? So they're

Robin:

Right now, many ancient societies changed so slowly that they could have pretty widespread norms across the entire society about what to do how, and those were enforced and and forward. But the the world changed so slowly that and the and region was small enough as to be pretty uniform that they didn't need to sort of adjust how the norms change in one side of the region versus another side of the region or you know? And and they could change them over time. But, you know, this is about a scale. So I think Hayek and many other people have, in fact, noted that many socialist intuitions are, in fact, sort of family commune communism, basically. Family units and larger units like that often have and successfully do manage internal social norms. There's a standard story about, 150 as this number. I'm trying to remember the the guy who who who said it. But that basically because in the distant past, humans lived in groups of less than a 100 or so people. We just have a lot of social intuitions about how to manage those groups, then we do that better. And that typically when firms get larger than that, they tend to need more formal rules and and different ways of doing things because all the inherited ways of managing small groups that we can just so flexibly, you know, you apply just start to fail us in larger groups. And plausibly then, the world should be full of communes of roughly a 100 size, and that's what, say, the heretic and the Amish do, actually. Heretic and the Amish are grouped in the you know, they basically start with a size of 50. When they get to a 100, they split into two groups of 50. And within those groups of 50, they are very communal, they have many norms of sharing, and they do in fact share the work and the effort, but but they don't do it on larger scales.

Agnes:

Right. So one way to think about just sort of the implied argument in that Orwell passage is that, you know, there's there's a question about how to share, and that's really a lot of questions put together. And what has to happen for any group that is going to come to the conclusion that it was done fairly is that the group has to have a consensus about all of those norms. And the bigger the scale, just the more difficult that problem is. And, so one thing that you could get is you could get, you know, some kind of consensus enforcement mechanism or something where you could start to try to make the whole world be really similar. And then and then it might that might move in the direction of being allowing socialism. But so this would suggest in fact that the two things that we were separating, which is socialism and the class war are maybe not so separate because in order for the for there to be socialism between, let's say, the the working class and the upper class, There have to be shared norms about how to share, and they don't have those norms. And, okay, I wanna bring up a passage that I was very struck by. Orwell observes that one of the minors so a common problem was the minors would become blind. And one of the minors who was basically blind, you know, but when that happened, they would get a a monthly payment because they couldn't work. But then he had to go and wait in his place to get his money and kind of apologize for the fact that he was getting this money. And Orwell observes that when he goes to the bank and there's even some problem that he's guilty for, the people at the bank are, like, very solicitous and respectful of him where he hasn't, like, destroyed his eyesight by performing this function that was incredibly useful society. He he doesn't he feels like he doesn't deserve nearly as much respect as he's getting, and his minder deserves way more respect, and yet he's embarrassed to ask for this money. And that that is just, a class difference, right, in how stuff is shared and who's owed what. And, so there isn't a communal language of fairness and sharing across the two classes. And that's exactly what creates the pressure. Well, maybe if we just destroy the working class and there were no more of that kind of people and no more bad smells, We could all live happily together as, like, upper class people, but that's really what the thought boils down to.

Robin:

Sharing a culture is not at all sufficient for sharing to be effective or ideal. So there's this literature of how forager groups who lived in these groups of, you know, 50 or 30 to 50 people, roughly, they had very strong sharing norms, very strong egalitarian norms. But then when people became farmers, they had weaker norms. That foragers in different groups with different kinds of environments, they share different things. And the key consistent pattern is the bigger the risk, the more you wanna share. So in a forager group, you know, they're they they hunt and they get a big animal or something. Like, that doesn't last very long, and you can't fill yourself up on it. It just makes a lot more sense for people to share those big animals. But when people have their own plot of land they farm on, then it makes more sense for them not to share their farm produce with their neighboring farm because now, that has monitoring and incentive problems, which are worth overcoming for the in the forager group. The forager group, like, the individual hunters variation in produce is so large. If you were trying to live as an individual hunter, that's just very hard. So individual animals who go out and hunt by themselves, they face very high risks that they can just have a streak while they get no food and they will die. And groups of animals then have a benefit if they share food because the risk the variation is so high. And then that was a key thing that explains different forager groups. Like, the kind of berries say they could all pick easily, well, they don't share those. They'll share the kind of meat that would be high variance. And same way for, you know, often the things we share are the things that we face high risks on and that individually would crush us. So even a group of farmers, they might share risk about flooding, say, or something that, you know, each one of them couldn't handle those risks by themselves.

Agnes:

Yeah. But I thought that's that the point you're making now is just one level below and could be taken in by the socialism. Like, the socialist of Orwellian socialists could say, yeah, everyone ought to farm their own plot of land and just eat whatever food is on their plot of land. But we have, like, insurance or, you know, there's storms. There's sometimes we have to hunt big animals. And then basically, based on this, look, we'll work all of that out. Like, one of the ways in which we can work something out in such a way that, we are fairly sharing the labor and the proceeds is that for some part of it, people do it for themselves. I don't think that's inconsistent. So but but the issue is that the the the issue is getting shared norms about that, about which part is for you and which part is for everyone across these various groups, and they all have different norms about that.

Robin:

So arguably in, say, The United States today, we do largely have shared norms about which things individuals should suffer their own risk through and which we share. Like, we have socialized Social Security. We have Medicare. Right? Employment insurance. We have actually a set of choices about which risks we share and which risks we don't. But I don't think Orwell would call it socialism because he wanted a lot more sharing than what we have.

Agnes:

Right. The but the point is just to think about what the limits to sharing might be. That is I think the reason he wouldn't call it socialism is at least in part that there's actually a lot of disagreement about how much we should be sharing. I think if everybody were happy with the amount that we were sharing, and there was a bit that people had to do for themselves, but everyone was happy with the thought that they do that bit for themselves, I think he might be willing to call it socialism. It's sort of like, well, we don't actually all agree about how much health health care should be on you versus on the state, you know, poverty, how much of it should be on you versus on we don't all agree about that. And, if we had shared norms about that that everyone was happy with, that might be good enough for him. But then that's the difficulty is getting that kind of shared mindset in a country of so many people, let alone the whole world.

Robin:

Wait. I guess one way to think about this is, you know, in analogous situations in the past, people did mostly agree or at least they didn't argue very loudly for changes because mostly people accepted the way the world is. But in our world, people are used to lobbying for large changes from the way things are, and that's been part of the energy of socialism is wanting to lobby for big changes. And that's sort of different, but that's sort of endemic to a world where we all, you know, feel we should have a different opinion, different maybe from other people's opinion, push for it, and socialism has been part of this world of cultural change.

Agnes:

Okay. I wanna move on to the top the machine socialism, as I call it, of Orwell, which I think is really interesting. Because in effect, Orwell thinks that the biggest disadvantage of socialism is that it is a form of futurism. And people hate futurism, and they hate a future of machines.

Robin:

But, again, let's be clear. This isn't implied by the policies' descriptions of socialism. Socialism as a policy doesn't have to be this is the culture of of socialism.

Agnes:

Right. I mean, this is for Orwell. I mean, Orwell does say that he thinks socialism is unimaginable without machines. So he said

Robin:

Sure. But that machines weren't actually the question is whether there's this machine utopian That's the cultural thing he he's But he thinks

Agnes:

that machines entail machine utopianism. The the once you got machines, what you you people start start thinking in this kinda innovator mindset, efficiency mindset, which he thinks human beings hadn't done for most of history. And by the way, that bit maybe is a bit compelling to me. Because for me, there's a standing question about, like, like, why didn't, you know, why didn't we innovate on the plow? Or why there's a lot of things where we were just using them for a long time in ways that were not maximally efficient in the ancient world, like, that much technology in a in a people that was, in other ways, intellectually very sophisticated. And Orwell's thought is, like, they just didn't have that, you know, Silicon Valley tech mindset that, I mean, the thing that that develops into that of, like, we're always having to innovate and improve. And even as I, you know, I always want the best kind of pencil sharpener. Right? Can I do this faster? Can I do it more efficiently? Where could a machine substitute for a little bit of the labor? That mindset is relatively new, and that's interesting. And it may go along with the political innovation mindset. That is the thought that we're always wanting new policy or new culture or whatever that may just be part of the same thing of this kind of new, like, always be improving mode of interacting with the world.

Robin:

But at the end of the section where he discusses this issue, his resolution is to say, look. We just need to all accept that we're not gonna get rid of the machines. They're just here to stay. But he thinks you can have that attitude, the machines are here to stay, without embracing this machine utopianism. That and that's his criticism. The the socialists have embraced machine and that puts off a lot of people who aren't so sure machines are that utopian and see value in other things besides ease of life and comfort. That that's his key argument. Machine utopianism puts this priority on the only thing important is make things easy. And he thinks a lot of people that that doesn't appeal. And in fact, it's wrong. And and there's a sense he's right about that. Right? But but so the accepting the machines are here to stay doesn't mean you have to take on this ideal of the point of everything is to make things easy.

Agnes:

Right. Though, I mean, as I understood it so for Orwell, the big this is also worth flagging. The contrast to socialism is not capitalism. Capitalism barely shows up in this essay. Right. It's it's a footnote. The contrast to socialism is fascism. So Orwell thinks, you know, we're we're definitely gonna have machines, but there's two flavors of machine world, socialist flavor and the fascist flavor, and the socialist one's better because the fascist one you know, this in in the fascist one, there's going to be this top down authoritarian thing that's gonna dictate how we engage with the machines, and then that's worse than the socialist one. But so the point is you might as well just accept the the machines because they're here either either way, your choices between the socialist versus the the so democratic versus fascist

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

Way of incorporating them, and we don't have to idealize them.

Robin:

Can

Agnes:

I read can I read a passage about the machine? Because I want I wanna sort of bring that out.

Robin:

What page are we on?

Agnes:

So, so let's say, page 174. Barring wars and unforeseen disasters, the future is envisaged as an ever more rapid march of mechanical progress. Machines to save work, machines to save thought, machines to save pain, hygiene, efficiency, organization, more hygiene, more efficiency, more organization, more machines, and then finally you land up in the now familiar Wellesian utopia, aptly caricatured by Huxley in Brave New World, the paradise of little fat men. It's like Wall E. The movie Wall E is just

Robin:

so Yep.

Agnes:

Right? And so I'm interested in this question. Like, Orwell has this idea that, sort of the qualities we admire in human beings can only function in opposition to some kind of disaster pain or difficulty, but the tendency of mechanical progress is to eliminate disaster pain and difficulty. So human virtue, like the virtue of having strong muscles, like the minors, he's very he's sort of rhapsodic about these these minors' beautiful muscles. And because they're naked too, a lot of them were almost naked. So you can see these rippling muscles. Right? They've and they have these muscles not because they worked out at the gym, but because they have a kind of function of, you know, kind of extracting this thing from nature that's keeping society going. And that, like or, you know, the courage that they're exhibiting and dealing with their poverty or whatever, that all of that, all of those virtues are responses to adversity. And then we're trying to get rid of the adversity and human beings are going to be fat and pathetic and useless. I'm just like and and he's really worried about that. And I find it a very striking worry to show up in a book, the whole first part of which was just detailing the sufferings of these minors and of these poor peoples. And, I mean, really long passages about how the miners go underground, and then they have to travel this long distance underground called traveling where they are hunched over because the the thing is not tall enough, and they hit their head if they if they let their head go down. So their neck has to be held up to look. And the, you know, the suffering that Orwell felt when he would just go one quarter of the way, he would collapse, and they're practically running along this whole way. But this is, like, this terrible form of suffering that they're subjected to on the one hand. And then on the other hand, he's like, but that's where human virtue lies, and you're not really gonna be a good person unless you are subjected to the forms of adversity that our machines are gonna steal from us.

Robin:

On reflection, I think this is maybe his trying to embrace a working class ethic compared to an upper class ethic that could care.

Agnes:

So that's where I was going. I agree.

Robin:

That is, that is upper class ethic is more about comfort and elegance of, you know, consumption and life, and he doesn't wanna lean into that. He he thinks that's sort of, you know, miserable and, you know, did not to be respected.

Agnes:

Right. So what a really striking passage, he talks about how it's it's hard to drive a car now because we're in the early days of cars. Let's put it that way. Like, we men of the. Right? But he kind says that, you know, it's it's hard. You need some skill to drive a car, but you need less skill than to ride a horse. And he's like, and I'm sure in, like, fifty years, you'll need barely any skill to ride a car. And in fifty more years, a baby will be able to drive an airplane. And, and he says, you know, the objective of mechanical progress is a foolproof world, which may or may not mean a world inhabited by fools. In tying yourself to the ideal of mechanical efficiency, you tie yourself to the ideal of softness, but softness is repulsive. And thus all progress is seen to be a frantic struggle towards an objective, which you hope and pray will never be reached. Right. So so I think it is this it's the lower class ideal that is hard, that involves risk. Right? And you see this even today among the Silicon Valley, elevate it's like the people who are appraising risk a lot are often people who they did take risks when they were younger, but now they live very cushy and very risk free lives. And but there's this but there's this still, there's this ideal of facing risk and facing adversity and having to respond to it. And the thought is that only lower class culture can claim that mantle of that form of virtue.

Robin:

If we think about, say, the difference between fascism or capitalism and socialism with respect to this, you might think either of those other two systems could have also presented the machine utopia realized through their different means. Why is this an especially socialist issue? Well, I think the key idea is in the fascism and capitalism, we are leaning into some other difference that we think is legitimate that we are that gives us meaning. So in capitalism, there's the I'm gonna be rich and I'm gonna be better than other people because I'm rich. And in fashion, there's, like, our nation's gonna beat the other nations. Right? And the meaning in those other things isn't just we're gonna be rich and comfy, but socialism seems to just present no. No. No. You don't wanna you know, nationalism is bad. You don't wanna fight other nations, and that's bad. And and being better than other people, you don't wanna be better than other people. That's not good. Right? So they've emptied out these other sources of meaning, and then the risk is like, what do you got left here? Just just comfiness?

Agnes:

That's a great point. Yeah. I think that's right. So I think that what really Orwell is noticing is that the goal is missing or the positive the idea of a positive target. It's like, when he has the idea of, like, well, we're on a ship, and we're all in it together, and there's plenty for everybody. And it's like, so net suppose we've done it. We've distributed to everybody. Now what? Is there anywhere we're going in the ship, or is there anything we're trying to do, we're trying to achieve? And it looks like qua socialist, you kind of have to say no because you're opposed to these all these other answers to, like, what it is that you might be trying to do once we've distributed everything fairly.

Robin:

So I think, say, The Soviet Union and even China today, they lean into sort of human humanity's destiny and the stars sort of images as capitalism did to inspire people. That is, say, science fiction of the sixties and seventies was this idea that, you know, a thing that we can unite behind is this great quest to, you know, understand and conquer the universe, and we're gonna do that together even collectively. But just how are we gonna do it exactly? And I think the Soviet Union wasn't just selling people on, you know, we're gonna be comfy. It was trying to sell people on this collective achievement of our society, what we were gonna do together.

Agnes:

That was very much tied to, like, we're gonna be better than the West.

Robin:

Right. But it it was better

Agnes:

then tied to the the fascist thought. Right? Or whatever you wanna put it.

Robin:

Right. But they deny it being fascist. They say, oh, no. It's about you know? In some sense, it's about the ideological fight. There's a sense in which social the thing that's most meaningful about socialism is the ideological fight against the antisocialists. Yeah. And that's the war they can really get behind and have a war and a conflict. If they were to win the war, they'd be in more trouble. They wouldn't have a motive.

Agnes:

Yeah. Right. Good. So right. So that they they the, in addition to creating a comfortable situation for everyone, like, we can think, oh, that's really very far away. And in fact, he has a passage early on where he's like, look. The only reason why anyone ever pushes for any of this stuff is we know it won't happen. That is that there's a very deep conviction in all these revolutionaries that this is not ever going to you don't have to worry about how we won't like it if we got what we wanted because we're not getting what we wanted. What we're doing is fighting, you know, fascists

Robin:

or Right.

Agnes:

Capitalists whatever.

Robin:

I have to point out two sort of just factual predictions he got wrong. One, he said that when he talked about poverty in England, he basically was saying, and it's gonna get worse because we lost the empire. The empire was making us be rich as English. But now that we've lost the empire, we're all gonna get even more poor. This is gonna be even worse, and nothing's going to fix this. But socialism would make would make innovation much faster, he claims, and we will get much faster in the future if we had socialism. But but in fact, all the poverty he he saw did go away in the intervening seventy years, eighty years really, because of, you know, capitalist growth. So he just doesn't see the possibility of capitalist growth getting rid of most of the poverty and that he wants socialism to get rid of the poverty. And he thinks socialism is now gonna be more effective at innovation, which in our experience is just not.

Agnes:

But, again, I I don't think he's trying to say that socialism is gonna give you more innovation than capitalism.

Robin:

No. He does. He says he does explicitly. There's a section where he says that explicitly. Very explicitly.

Agnes:

Really? I think it's then fascism, not then capitalism. But

Robin:

Than the current yeah. No. He talks about capitalism. He talks about capitalism is wasteful because you don't have a good incentive to innovate, and socialism wouldn't be wasteful. I'll I'll try to find that. But

Agnes:

Okay. Okay. Okay.

Robin:

But, anyway, I think I'd like to also talk now about maybe the third of his issues in the book. One is the class war and his com comfortable with that. The second was this, machine utopia.

Agnes:

Mhmm.

Robin:

And the third was his discomfort with all the other weirdos that were associated with socialism.

Agnes:

Probably this weirded yoga. Right.

Robin:

So I actually did a poll here that's going at on at the moment that you guys can look or can give a link for about types of people he just thought it was putting off regular people being associated with socialism because socialists tend to be associated with these people. I mean, there was even pistachio colored shirts. It was one thing he mentioned a lot. But then I I have a list here, atheist, bearded, feminist, fruit fruit juice drinker, and a Latin nationalist, pro, nature cures, nudist, pacifist, poetry, birth control, divorce, free love, sandals, teetotaling, vegetarian, yoga, Quakers. He just saw that socialists tend to be associated with these people. And then when you went to a socialist meeting, you saw all these people and that that would put ordinary people off. And he was upset that, hey. We got this good thing here. Let's not associate with all this weird stuff. And I have this experience because I've been around contrarians where this issue comes up a lot in completely non socialist worlds. So I mean, and we've discussed this, I think, when we had our conversation with Ella about different kinds of contrarians. But base for example, I'm a libertarian and a you know, somewhat libertarian and a partner with lots of libertarian. But then if I'm weird in non libertarian ways, they go, like, you're tainting our our weirdness with these other weirdnesses. And I think the usual idea is many contrarian groups wanna state, look. We seem contrarian, but pretty soon we're gonna be seen as ordinary and not contrarian. We don't we don't wanna identify with the other contrarians. We don't wanna be associated with them. They're all wrong. They're mostly wrong, but we're right. Our contrarianism doesn't deserve to be seen as contrarian. And that's why, like many of these other groups, pacifists or atheists or, you know, teetotalers, they don't wanna be identified with these other groups either because a teetotaler doesn't necessarily think the pacifists are right or the nudists are right. They think, well, it's just objectively true that people drink too much alcohol, we should drink less. But that shouldn't be a contrarian position. It just happens to be in our world. And there is, in some sense, not a natural alliance of contrarians in that sense, but contrarians do tend to correlate. I mean, it's striking how many of these sorts of groups do still tend to cluster together, in leftist sort of know, communities. And that's just an interesting conflict where Orwell basically says, look. The socialism thing shouldn't be seen as contrarian. It's completely reasonable. It should not be associated with this other weird stuff. Then then it'll seem weird.

Agnes:

So, I think, I actually it took me a little while to try to understand what exactly was the problem with it seeming weird or with that these people are, you know, doing yoga or wearing pistachio colored shirts. And so I think the key is well, let me bring in two passages. One of them I'm not I'm not going find them, but I I roughly recall them. So one of them is about how, you know, a lot of these sort of, a lot of intellectuals will come up with, like, a unified system where their ideology is gonna penetrate into every aspect of their life. And so, like, he makes fun of Chesterton saying that, like, tea drinking is not really as Catholic as what you're drinking. Where it's like your Catholicism has to determine, like, what you drink and what clothes you wear and who you associate with. Whereas for ordinary people, they just don't have this kind of totalizing outlook. They don't have the luxury of trying to bring, like, all of their stuff into line in that way. So, like, that's, like, you know, on the one hand. And that, like, he has this line towards the end that I thought was really nice where he says that, people will hold on. People are gonna like, people are willing to accept sacrifice, etcetera, but what they won't accept is priggishness or something. The that's what that's what the kind of socialist so there's just it's not just that they're weird. They're weird in a specific way, in ways that kind of go to cure. The ordinary man may not flinch from a dictatorship of the proletariat if you offer it tactfully. Offer him a dictatorship of the prigs, and he gets ready to fight. Okay. So I think the thought is these people are like, no. This isn't the right food for you to eat. And this you have to wear this kind of clothing, and you have to, like, you know, not drink alcohol, and you have to this is so, like and I think this is related to, like, wokeness. Right? And the the the anti woke agenda of, like, we're we're manly. We're not woke. We're manly. That this is like this the the problem with these people, the yoga lovers and the teetotalers, is that they are not manly. They are priggish, and no working class, no self respecting working class person could join a group of a bunch of bearded yoga loving tea drinking or beer non beer drinking, you know, pistachio shirt wearing people because they're now what? They're kind of soft or so it's it's not just they're weird. It's a specific form of weird where being able to apply this totalizing ideological framework to constrain all of your tastes is a mark of a certain kind of luxury. Luxury.

Robin:

Well, it's true that these tend to be non lower nonworking class things and that working class people will just not like them. They are not upper class people things either. They're just weird. So I think the more fundamental thing is that they're weird, not so much that they're upper class or lower class.

Agnes:

Talks about that dreary tribe of high minded women and sandal wearers and bearded fruit juice drinkers who come knocking toward the smell of progress like blue bottles to a dead cat so that women, high minded women it's not weirdos. It's high minded women. That's very much not the same as weirdos. High minded women, sandal wearers, bearded fugitive drinkers. I think that that's we should hear that. The modern word for that is woke people. That is people who are, like, so delicate in their sensibilities and so easily offended, and they have to this is how they have to dress, and this is how they have to talk. And that that they are people who are subject to having a totalizing ideology take over their sensibility in ways that a tough person who has to adjust to scarcity and difficulty is never going to

Robin:

So you call it totalizing. If I think of the working class culture as a package that's somewhat integrated, say, around concepts of toughness and strength and and determination and work, I don't know that that's any less consistent than this package of things. I don't think these are more consistent, but they are interestingly different. And there's some aesthetic that they share in common that's noticeable. But consistency isn't a hallmark of this package of things. I don't think there's much consistently between nudist and atheist and pacifist and poetry and, you know, sandals. I but I see how we

Agnes:

see vibe. I mean, I get I kinda get vibe.

Robin:

Right. But it's not a totalizing ideology producing this package. It's some sort of a culture thing. There's some shared culture of these people and their styles.

Agnes:

Like, so when I think about, like, here are two elements of the working class culture. I'll do one that I brought out, which is they don't wanna live in the air. That is they want their hands

Robin:

to be on

Agnes:

the ground. And here's another one that struck me a lot. You know? So a lot of these men were unemployed, like, for decades, And their wives were just, like, killing themselves working, keeping a little like, you know, getting food and cleaning the food and serving and raising the children and keeping the house clean. And the men didn't do any housework. Just and there was this big problem of what to do with all these idle men, and there would be these rec centers and things just so that they could just have something to do. And you might have thought, why don't they do some housework? Why don't they help with the kids? Right? They have all this free time. But, but the thought is like, no. That's not that that's just not permitted. And it's not the men. It's the women who thought that wouldn't be permitted, because then the men wouldn't be manly. If they if the men swept the floor, then they're not manly. So this is the working class, ideology. It's things like men can't ever do housework and you can't live in the air. And maybe this is the deep, like, cultural difference, but I think you're right that there is that these cultures that it's not the the juice drinking, yoga, whatever person is

Robin:

Sandal wearing.

Agnes:

Sandal wearing. It's not upper class. It's something else. It's maybe

Robin:

Sort of a

Agnes:

missionary class.

Robin:

Bohemian, we often call it now.

Agnes:

Offshoot of the upper class. The part of the upper class that doesn't like the fact that it's upper class.

Robin:

Right. But the interesting thing is this has continued over a century here and probably earlier. That is there's these rebels, they act in sort of distinctive rebel culture ways.

Agnes:

Right. And that's what Orwell's picking up is that, like, working class people working class culture is not compatible with rebel culture. The working

Robin:

class people Raise the puzzle. Why is why is there a rebel culture, and why is it what they did with their time. And apparently, a lot of them just spent their all their time reading newspapers and then wanting to talk about newspapers with each other. So this is a to an intellectual, a surprising affirmation of intellectualism to in a certain sense that is when working class people, after a long life of very little intellectual stuff, they had free time. They wanted to try to be the kind of intellectuals they could be by going to the library and reading newspapers and talking about this stuff all the time. And then really and here's this somewhat intellectual writer who hated them, didn't wanna talk about them to their intellectual things. And there's a sense in which the news attraction of their intellectual, you know, I you know, inclination was a waste. That is, I do think it's in fact a waste when intellectuals who have the potential to think about interesting things get sucked into the news and spend all their time thinking about the news. And I I feel that similar maybe to how Orwell felt about tinned food or something. I feel there's this rich, healthy intellectual food, and they're having the tinned food of newspaper.

Agnes:

We better stop because I gotta go teach my class.

Robin:

Alright. Nice talking.