Orwell Observations from Life on the Margins: Down and Out in Paris and London

Life at the bottom is no piece of cake. This is one fact you notice from reading George Orwell's memoir Down and Out in Paris and London. The book details what a life of menial labor and poverty consists of. 

The book is divided into two parts, the first being Orwell's experiences in Paris and the lessons he learned, such as how the starving manage to subsist, as he was one of them. In the latter part of his Paris life, Orwell works as a dishwasher in a hotel restaurant kitchen and lives in a slum. He also writes about the conditions at a charity hospital in Paris. 

Much of the book features stories about the array of characters he meets along the way along with details of the squalor and indignities people endure to survive. Occasionally, however, he steps back to interpret what he's seen, sharing conclusions he's drawn from his experiences. What's fascinating, disturbing or discouraging (depending on yout point of view) is how relevant these matters remain,

In chapter 22 he questions how there has come to be such a disparty between rich and and poor. More importantly, why do the middle classes side with the rich and separate themselves from the "vermin" who slave away all their waking hours doing work that is demeaning and sometimes useless?

Orwell concludes: I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think. 

A little further on he elaborates.

They (middle class) side with the rich because they imagine that any liberty conceded to the poor is a threat to their own liberty. Foreseeing some dismal Marxian Utopia as the alternative, the educated man prefers to keep things as they are. Possibly he does not like his fellow-rich very much, but he supposes that even the vulgarest of them are less inimical to his pleasures, more his kind of people, than the poor, and that he had better stand by them. It is this fear of a supposedly dangerous mob that makes nearly all intelligent people conservative in their opinions. 

Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like negroes and white men. But in reality there is no such difference. The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? 

Everyone who has mixed on equal terms with the poor knows this quite well. But the trouble is that intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might be expected to have liberal opinions, never do mix with the poor. For what do the majority of educated people know about poverty? In my copy of Villon's poems the editor has actually thought it necessary to explain the line "Ne pain ne voyent qu'aux fenestres" by a footnote; so remote is even hunger from the educated man's experience. From this ignorance a superstitious fear of the mob results quite naturally. The educated man pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day's liberty to loot his house, burn his books, and set him to work minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory. "Anything," he thinks, "any injustice, sooner than let that mob loose."

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What. are your thoughts about Orwell's observations? How are things different? And how are they the same? One thing that appears to have changed over the past century: we seem to have a lot more bread and circuses.

I'm interested in your thoughts. Comments welcome.

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Related Links
Orwell-related blog posts

George Orwell's "How the Poor Die": Exploring Themes of Inequality, Neglect and Other Grim Realities

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2024/09/george-orwells-how-poor-die-exploring.html

George Orwell on Wells, Hitler and "Patriotism vs. the World State"

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2021/07/george-orwell-on-wells-hitler-and.html

Orwell on Media Mischief

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2021/11/orwell-on-media-mischief.html

Orwell's Homage to Catalonia Is Instructive on Many Levels, Plus a Good Read

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2021/08/orwells-homage-to-catalonia-is.html

Public Introspection: George Orwell's Why I Write

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2016/08/public-introspection-george-orwells-why.html

Shooting an Elephant
https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2011/05/shooting-elephant.html

A Few Minutes with Roy

Having mentioned yesterday that some of Arundhati Roy’s ideas resonated with me, I should like to briefly comment on a few of the points she makes.

Ms. Roy’s book Public Power in the Age of Empire begins by noting that those who run our country claim to be on our side but in reality do not act in our best interests. Nor does our government care about what we think as long as we remain placid and keep re-electing those in power.

“Ordinary people in the United States have been manipulated into imagining they are a people under siege whose sole refuge and protector is their government. If it isn't the Communists, it's Al Qaeda. If it isn't Cuba, it's Nicaragua. As a result, this, the most powerful nation in the world - with its unmatchable arsenal of weapons, its history of having waged and sponsored endless wars, and the only nation in history to have actually used nuclear bombs - is peopled by a terrified citizenry, jumping at shadows. A people bonded to the state not by social services, or public health care, or employment guarantees, but by fear.

“This synthetically manufactured fear is used to gain public sanction for further acts of aggression. And so it goes, building into a spiral of self-fulfilling hysteria, now formally calibrated by the U.S. government's Amazing Technicolored Terror Alerts: fuchsia, turquoise, salmon pink.”

This stance of keeping the people manipulated into obeisance while the rich get richer is not uniquely American. I remember when oil was discovered off the coast of Mexico and it appeared that our neighbors south of the border were going to be rich, rich, rich. But while living there for a year in 1981 it was impossible not to notice the squalor the poor experienced in the big cities, the sprawling slums blanketing hillsides. Simultaneously, the presidents of the ruling PRI and their cronies suckled the golden teats of this oil flow so as to leave absolutely nothing changed except the size of their Swiss bank accounts. All democratically elected hoodlums.

When we were raising our children, my wife once read a book on parenting that noted that parents need to approach their children with an attitude that says, “I’m on your side.” The upshot of this is that the kids feel affirmed and listened to. The children are not always right, but there is a relationship that is healthy and which has ontological value.

Arundhati Roy’s premise is that government’s do not have this attitude when it comes to their poor. She cites dam projects which caused massive destruction and forced evacuations of the poor in India and elsewhere, of the massive destruction of homes in beautification projects for Olympic-sized entertainment complexes, and a whole catalogue of other indignities. And who is speaking on behalf of these people who have no voice in the modern world? These are part of our human family.

Even worse is the death and destruction wrought by war. The Bomb did not get dropped on troops. It leveled a city which was just like any city anywhere made up of people who went to work like you and I go to work, with schools, children, mothers, grandmothers… The destruction of the World Trade Center was not a military attack on a military target. The lobbing of bombs into Israel by Hamas and the incursion into Gaza, what happened there? Political powers made decisions, innocent people with no say in those decisions are killed, wounded, maimed.

But wars aren’t the only form of violence against the world’s poor. The World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and other financial institutions are writing economic policies and legislation that has no concern for the consequences wrought. According to Roy, “With a deadly combination of arrogance and ruthlessness, they take their sledgehammers to fragile, interdependent, historically complex societies, and devastate them.”

Because the situations are complex, Americans don’t understand what is really going on in the world. When people like Roy begin to raise their voices and get shrill enough to be heard, it frightens us... not the content of what these people say, but the megaphones they use to say it. As Roy says, the government uses this fear strengthen its power, like a mother hen drawing her little chicks up under her wing. “Yes, it is scary out there, little chickies," our leaders say, "so get up close to me here. I will protect you from the big bad wolves.”

This woman from India has done her homework. I am not sure what her prescriptions are for solution or if I line up with them entirely but I do believe she is speaking for a large contingent of humanity who at this point in time have no power, and no voice.

If interested in getting a taste of these challenging ideas, read Public Power in the Age of Empire here