George Orwell did not write that “people sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” That was a summing up of Orwell’s view by Richard Grenier, a journalist and critic. The phrase that Orwell in fact used in a commentary on a poem by Rudyard Kipling was that “men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.”
The original version covers more territory—“guard” can mean both defend and restrain, and feeding is left to the peaceful sleepers in Grenier’s paraphrase—while the quotation that is popularly attributed to Orwell limits itself to acts of aggression that must be performed by some among us to keep the rest in relative safety. It is a line that could have been used in a review of A Few Good Men, were a critic to take the side of Colonel Jessep.
What either of these sayings express is a recognition that life has its dirty elements—its dirty jobs, to use the title of a once and current television show—that do not go away, no matter how tidy we make the remainder. And it speaks to a particular bloc of the left wing, those who insist that peace is always the answer.
A modern examination of this is to be found in the novel, Fever, by South African writer, Deon Meyer. The story centers on the efforts of father and son, Willem and Nico Storm, to survive after a global pandemic has wiped out ninety-five percent of the world’s population—it was published in 2017, nota bene—and eventually to rebuild civilization. Call it an antipodal version of Stephen King’s The Stand in which the struggles are entirely in the human realm, but are nevertheless parallel in essence and evolution.
Two of the characters in the novel exemplify the above quotations: Willem and Domingo. Willem is intellectual, a humanist who follows the philosophy of Spinoza. Domingo roars into the story on a motorcycle, having had military training that he does not discuss, and forms the security service of the new community that Willem has founded. Willem believes in democracy and reason; Domingo trains his recruits to know that their enemies want to kill them and to act accordingly. To Domingo, humanity is a rough beast, to use a phrasing familiar both to Yeats and Nietzsche, with a thin veneer of moral blather, while Willem sees us as beings of limitless potential.
And the novel’s argument is that both are right. The position that I am taking here is a plea to my fellow leftists to pay attention.
I see the pacifist strain of leftism frequently today in discussions over the war in Ukraine. Some will say that what matters most is an end to the killing, even if that means a surrender to the Russian invaders, and some tell me that the risk of global nuclear war is too great to justify the aid that many western democracies are sending to the Ukrainians. The claim is that negotiations are the only solution, the assumption being that if only the respective diplomats would talk, we could have peace in our times.
This strikes me as the same sort of argument that gun control advocates make by claiming that no property is worth a human life—i.e., let attackers take anything they can carry rather than fighting back. Perhaps the objects in my home are not something that I ought to protect with lethal force—the law on the subject varies by jurisdiction—but my own life is something I have a proprietary interest in, and someone who is willing to smash in my door is unlikely to see my existence as something to be protected.
But the implications of such an incident are often ignored by gun control advocates and are deeper in the conversation over pacifism than usually gets expressed in the first exchange of views. Civilization is a wonderful invention. It produces luxury and opportunity, longer and more varied life, and things worth taking and defending. The latter calls forth the antithesis of civilization, the barbarian who yearns to absorb the blessings of civilization without paying the cost in time and discipline.
The barbarian lives by smashing and grabbing. We on the left have to recognize two things here: Barbarians exist, and no amount of reasoning will influence them.
Orwell, a democratic socialist, understood this, and his memoir, Homage to Catalonia, is in part an indictment of countries such as Britain and France who at best dithered in responding to the rise of fascism in Spain. Had the free peoples of Europe and America protected republican government from Franco’s forces—and had France around the same time given a kinetic no to the remilitarization of the Rhineland—the full abominations of Hitler’s regime could have been aborted before reaching maturity.
Orwell’s actual remark is the one we need to keep in mind. We on the left have good methods of feeding everyone—read this in the broad sense of providing each member of society the multiple advantages that civilization generates. Some of that work will be unpleasant, and the left offers such ameliorations as unions, health and safety regulations, and living wages until automation saves us all from drudgery. But we on the left especially must remember the techniques of the uncivilized with a view to countering them when possible and using them when the conflict is existential in nature.
A leftist with a gun is able to negotiate meaningfully. A leftist unarmed is only able to beg.
I think it was in Shirer's "Rise and Fall" that I read the Wehrmacht's contingency plan had the French responded in force to the occupation of the Rhineland was to turn and run like hell. Would have been preferable to what actually happened.
In Homage, the other thing I came away with was that the Republicans spent as much time, or more, fighting each other than they did the Nationalists. Kinda like that Monty Python "People's Front of Judea" skit.
But yeah. The veneer of civilization is lightly draped over our baser instincts.