The political acuity of Orwell and Hobsbawm should be treasured by both Right and Left
David Aaronovitch Sunday November 2, 2003 The Observer
There is, over the next fortnight, a coincidence of Erics, both - to an extent - Red. On Friday, historian Eric Hobsbawm, whose autobiography Interesting Times has just come out in paperback, will receive a huge cash prize from the Swiss-based International Balzan Foundation. (At least I think it's huge, though I'm not absolutely sure how much one million Swiss francs are worth. In any case, half of this sum will be allocated by Hobsbawm to projects involving young researchers. Apply to him, not me.) The foundation exists to promote achievements in the sciences and humanities, as well as humanitarian endeavours, and previous winners include Borges, Ernst Gombrich and Mother Teresa.
On Wednesday, The Observer will be marking the 100th anniversary of the birth of Eric Blair (George Orwell) with a two-month exhibition, celebrating his life and work, at the Newsroom - the Observer and Guardian archive and visitor centre. A book of Orwell's writings for this newspaper has been published entitled Orwell: The Observer Years, and a series of Tuesday-night seminars will be held at the Newsroom, beginning on 11 November.
We do well to honour our Erics. One has been a historian of cosmopolitan scope and elegance; the other was an expression, an example, of many of the best qualities of this country: integrity, humour, restraint and compassion. They were also (and here I hope that Eric H. will forgive me) born only 14 years apart, their early lives being lived during the colossal, superhuman struggles of the interwar period. At the end of Hobsbawm's 1994 history of the twentieth century, The Age of Extremes, there is a curiously pessimistic passage cautiously predicting that things may well get worse. This suggestion has always seemed curious to me, coming from someone who was born a year before the end of the First World War, witnessed the attempt by the Nazis to exterminate an entire people, and who dwelt under the shadow of atomic annihilation for another 40 odd years.
And both were, or are, men of the political Left. As a schoolboy, Orwell was sold to me as a one-man proof of the proposition that change is usually worse than leaving things well alone. It was only much later that I discovered how radical he could be, and how persistent was his view that society could and should be organised differently. Hobsbawm was a member of the Communist Party for many years, though a slightly Bohemian and (necessarily) semi-detached member. He, too, has always wanted a more equal, fairer world.
I mention this because it has become very hard to know what the Left now is or what it's for. Orwell's concrete proposals for a more egalitarian society - such as widespread nationalisation and pay limits - seemed to him to be common sense. Most intelligent people, he would often write, should be able to accept them almost without argument.
But today, such a statist manifesto is almost as incomprehensible as are our grandparents' ideas about race or gender. Reading Hobsbawm's unsentimental explanations of the sacrifices that communists were prepared to accept (or inflict) during the 1930s and 1940s, it takes a real imaginative effort to occupy their psyches and to understand their world.
This is a bad time for prophets and heroes, as it is for visible ideologies. One great advantage of political parties of the Left used to be that they would furnish the supporter with a bespoke opinion on subjects that were barely understood, with respected leaders whose words could be quoted, with answers to awkward questions. They would know how to get There from Here.
Such structures don't exist in that way now. In Britain, we currently seem - at best - to be arguing over the merest details of the new social democratic settlement, making fetishes out of whether NHS hospitals should be able to borrow money, while the Government goes about the steady, unexciting business of improving things a bit. Further Left, we have movements generally popular only in their culture of objection: anti-war, anti-globalisation, anti-extra-runway at Heathrow or Stansted.
I know the other thing when I see it: the inhuman certainties of, say, the American Right and its stupid tax cuts, the obscurantist divine nonsense of the extreme Islamicists, the insane complacency of the world's super-rich, the toleration of injustice and routine torture, suicidal environmental degradation.
But what is our thing? Partly, I suppose, the recognition of other possibilities. Is it conceivable that co-operation rather than profit might, in some places, as in the case of Ghanaian cocoa producers, be given a chance? Beyond that, the idea of a wholesale transformation in Britain or the West seems not only implausible, but undesirable. Things may need changing, but they don't require the replacement of the entire system. This is a disappointment to those who prefer their politics to have edge.
Yet the spirit that acted as the impulse for Orwell or the young Hobsbawm can still be invoked. The conditions that forced them to demand great reforms - Wigan or Vienna in the 1930s - exist for us now in other parts of the world. The Left must now be both internationalist and environmentalist in character and preoccupation. It must seek new dispensations in trade and aid, make its priorities the fighting of Aids and anarchy in Africa, argue for the reconstruction of the United Nations as a force both powerful and legitimate enough to intervene to prevent genocide and human-rights abuses, abandon outdated notions of the supremacy of borders and help develop and implement new forms of energy and green technology.
And what this Left could borrow from the Erics is not their history but the manner of their thinking. If you read through the Orwell Observer collection, you will see a common feature is Orwell's preparedness to discuss the costs of any course of action, and his impatience with those who pretend that their own solutions are some kind of magic - healing wounds without leaving a mark. Orwell always nailed intellectual dishonesty and vanity and if I had any regret last week, it was that he was not around to assess George Galloway's promise to set up a new progressive political force.
In Hobsbawm's writing too, there is a similar quality of facing the facts. His detractors on the Right have made much of an interview that he once gave to Michael Ignatieff, on whether the sufferings following the Russian Revolution could have been justified had real communism come about. Hobsbawm's answer was that, given the suffering that had already been going on, it might have been worth it. This was an honest answer.
The shining city on the hill of course, turned out to be an illusion. That doesn't mean that there aren't better places than this, and real ways of getting to them. Reading the Erics should help those who would like to make the journey.