Historian, professor & author Laura Beers joins the show as we celebrate her important new book, ORWELL'S GHOSTS: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-First Century (Norton). We talk about her course on Orwell and the making of the early twentieth century, how the post-Jan. 6 misuse of "Orwellian" inspired her to write this book, and her own path into Orwell. We get into Orwell's balancing act between freedom of speech and obligation to truth, what he meant when he wrote that he was "for democratic socialism, as I understand it," his family's history with Empire and his hatred of inequality, why my favorite of his essays, Inside The Whale, may be the most misunderstood Orwell piece of all (!), and why The Road To Wigan Pier might have the most influence on her. We also discuss the ways to reckon with Orwell's prejudices and especially his misogyny, why students are still coming into college with Animal Farm under their belt, Laura's trip to Barcelona to follow Orwell's steps in the Spanish Civil War, how her chapter on gender involved some deep, critical reading and writing, how we should look at the "blacklist" Orwell provided to the Information Research Dept., how Laura's next book on the politics of infertility sort of dovetails with Orwell's Ghosts, and more! Follow Laura on Twitter and BlueSky and listen to her on Progressive Britain • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal and via our e-newsletter
The Virtual Memories Show
Episode 595 - Laura Beers
(upbeat music) - Welcome to The Virtual Memories Show. I'm your host, Gil Roth, and we're here to preserve and promote culture one weekly conversation at a time. You can subscribe to The Virtual Memories Show through iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, Google Play, and a whole bunch of other venues. Just visit our sites, chimeraobscura.com/vm or vmspod.com to find more information, along with our RSS feed. And follow the show on Twitter and Instagram @VMSPod. Well, I am back from a getaway in Toronto. Amy and I bugged out of America after July 4th. My first Toronto trip since 2019. It was good to get away. I got to see friends, have some nice dinners, record a couple of these shows. And we got a walking tour of some of the islands in Lake Ontario, courtesy of one of my weekend podcasts. And that was a really, really lovely experience. Something I'd never, never thought about in all the years, I'd been going to Toronto. So it was pretty neat to visit Maurice and to walk around and see this community of people living right across the, from the mainland. And, well, anyway, it was also pretty neat just to be there without it being Toronto Comic Arts Festival weekend, which is the usual excuse we had to go to Toronto in the before time. Not being there for teacaf meant we could stay wherever we felt like. We didn't have to tie our schedule, my schedule, our schedule. To any of the panels and guests who were there, we didn't have to walk a couple of floors of the Toronto Reference Library to visit all the cartoonists. We did go back up to that area on Sunday, which was a little weird being there without teacaf going on. And also the last time I was there was with my great pal, the late Tom Spurgeon. We also, while we were walking from there, we came across the pilot bar, which is near the Reference Library. And that is the site where I was the emergency fill-in to interview the cartoonist Roger Langridge back in 2010. And that was like two years before I launched the podcast. Tom was supposed to interview Roger. He had a family emergency, couldn't make it. I had about two days notice, but I also had all this crazy work travel. I was in the middle of, but that was weirdly sort of the, the proof of concept moment that started me on making the podcast. When I was standing there looking at the pilot, I realized that was the first time I kind of, did the interview thing, worked with a crowd, worked with a guest, did all this research in the last day leading up to the show, as I tend to do with some of these. Anyway, I kind of wish we'd recorded that one 14 years ago, but it was kind of interesting, just kind of, well, seeing that it was still there and having those little resonances. Anyway, I am back. Our kitchen renovation is almost done. I am three weeks ahead on the podcast, and I'm headed off to ReaderCon in Massachusetts this weekend and hope to come back from that even farther ahead on the show. I've got two guests lined up. There's a third that may come together. None of them at ReaderCon itself. I'll be running all over Massachusetts to do this, but a fall is going to be busy. So the more I can backlog now, the better. This week, you get Laura Beers, who has a wonderful new book out now, Orwell's Ghosts, Wisdom and Warnings for the 21st century. It's from Norton, came out about a month ago, which would be June 2024, a few time travelers out there, and it is this amazingly enlightening book about George Orwell's writing and worldview and how they can provide us with a framework for understanding/ dealing with political realities today. And she writes beautifully, like Orwell talks about the window pane writing where there's no, well, where it's all there for the reader. She brings a ton of knowledge of Orwell's work, and she's great at framing contemporary politics and sometimes drawing analogs and sometimes showing where things have progressed from the interwar era of Orwell. As with most everybody's Orwell education, she brings us in via 1984, an animal farm, but explores the essays, the journalistic books, some of the other novels. And in the process really uncovers Orwell as thinker to see how his understanding of empire shaped him and led to his, led to a sense of rebellion, we'll say. And again, also provides us with ways of seeing and maybe changing the world that we live in. And the chapters cover different topics, like censorship and populism and tyranny and inequality and patriarchy and the potential for revolution and what Orwell calls democratic socialism as I understand it. And along the way, Laura brings Orwell's writing and life experience into conversation with his times and with ours and helps us see how change can happen. Now, we recorded this just on the cusp of the labor ass walloping of the Tories in the British parliamentary elections. We'll see what that ultimately leads to, but well, there are moments of change. And taking us from interwar to the cusp of the Cold War, like she does in this book, Laura explores those historical pivot points and the role that a writer like Orwell and an activist like Orwell can play. Anyway, I enjoy the heck out of Orwell's ghosts. It is not just for Orwell, aficionados. Those of you who've listened to the show for a while know that I'm an Orwell mark. This book is not intended for me. I enjoy the hell out of it, but it's a general audience book. I think those of you who do not have Orwell's essays under your belt are gonna love this too. So go give Orwell's ghosts a read. Now, there's only one real caveat that is, it's not even a caveat, it's me explaining something. The reader for the book on tape of Orwell's essays that comes up, it's David Case, not Richard Case. If you get the chance, download or buy the audio of David Case reading Inside the Whale and Other Essays by Orwell, it's phenomenal. I am kind of bummed we had to record this one remotely because I feel like in person we'd have gone on another hour or so, not just an Orwell literature, but also Laura's background in British history, her podcast and a lot of other topics. So I am hoping we get together for a follow up sometime. And here's Laura's bio. Laura Beers is a professor of British History at American University and the author of Orwell's Ghosts, Your Britain and Red Ellen, which received the Stansky Award. Her writing has appeared in the New Republic and Washington Post among other publications and on CNN.com. She is also a co-host on the Progressive Britain podcast. She lives in Washington, D.C. And now the virtual memories conversation with Laura Beers. (upbeat music) So where did Orwell's ghosts begin for you? As a book, and then we can talk about your Orwell, which I really want to get into too. - Well, in many ways, the book wouldn't exist if it weren't for the fact that I have been teaching for the last several years. This course on understanding the early 20th century through the writing of George Orwell. I first taught it in the UK in 2018, and then first taught it as a summer course online during COVID at American University in D.C. And it's a course in which students explore the period from about 1900 to 1950s. So from the age of empires through the early Cold War, exclusively through the writing of George Orwell. So they read some of his novels and a lot of his short-form journalism. And teaching that course really made me focus on Orwell in a new way, and particularly on the contemporary residences of a lot of his writing. Because my students and their, you know, American University in particular is very policy-oriented school. But they would constantly join comparisons between the early 20th century and Orwell's writing about the early 20th century and their present moment. But then I think the actual impetus for writing the book came after January 6th when you had Donald Trump Jr. and Josh Hawley coming out and claiming that attempts to deplatform them because of their involvement in January 6th were a Orwellian censorship. And I thought, you know, this really reflects a complete misunderstanding of Orwell's politics. I'm a part of these two political figures who are about my age and who probably came to Orwell initially the same way I did in the late days of the Cold War. But I thought, you know, there's scope to have an actual conversation about the relevance of Orwell's writing in our current political moment. - Do you think those misreadings were deliberate or dumb? - If those are my two binary options, I'd have to go with dumb. I don't think that either Hawley or Trump were sitting there saying, you know, I'm going to twist Orwell from, you know, a reading that I know is not Orwellian, truly to support my aims. Nor do I think that Elon Musk who puts himself forward as a real Orwell fan and, you know, owns a t-shirt that says what would Orwell think? And, you know, that he really believes that what Orwell would think was that, you know, Musk is a danger to democracy. But I think that there is a reading particularly in the United States even more than in Europe or other parts of the world of Orwell that really foregrounds both his idea of freedom of speech without his accompanying sense of the obligation to truth that I think he believed came with it, but also his status as a Cold Warrior. And then there's a transmutation then from, you know, Orwell was anti-Stalin to Orwell was anti-socialist, which is very much not true, that makes him a figure that many on the right kind of grown towards without really unpacking the nuances of his writing. - Sure, I mean, and you cite it because it's the most obvious line about this, but I mean, in why I write, he literally says, you know, democratic socialism as I understand it, you know, that's his vibe. You can argue that maybe he changed over time, but I don't think, and you reflect very well that that mentality does not change in Orwell. - Even right before his death, he responds to a member of the United Auto Workers in the US, writes to him about 1984 and the politics of 1984, and he responds, this is, you know, he dies in January 1950, so shortly before his death, and he says, you know, this is not an anti-socialist book. I support the socialist government in Britain. This is Clement Attlee's labor government that's elected in 1945. You know, I am a democratic socialist as I understand it. This book is the warning of the way that power can corrupt, you know, basically all systems have taken to its absolute form, and it's not a critique of socialism by any means. So he's pretty explicit right until the last months of his life about the fact that he is a democratic socialist, and while he's very much an anti-stalinist, he's not an opponent of the left, but sees himself as of the left. - Right, I get you. In that respect, you know, you've had a few years teaching him. I was born in 1971, so for me, Orwell coincides with my teenage years, late Cold War. How have students, how do students approach Orwell? Do they still read 1984 and Animal Farm in high school? Are they coming in with some framework, or are they sort of discovering him through the process of your course, generally? - So I always quiz my students for the beginning of semester about how much Orwell they've read. And really, it's rare that anyone has read more than 1984 and Animal Farm. But I am always surprised about the continuation of particularly Animal Farm assigned in schools, given that Animal Farm more than 1984 is very much explicit allegory for Stalinism and for communist Russia. And we are in a moment when, you know, that is ancient history for all of my undergraduates are born post-9/11, you know, I mean, none of them have any lived memory of the Cold War. But Animal Farm is still seemingly widely assigned. And interestingly, my own son is 12 years old and is in sixth grade. And his sixth grade English teacher, who also teaches eighth grade English, had a bunch of copies of Animal Farm sitting around in her room. And so he asked whether they were going to read it. And she said, "Well, the local county curriculum is taken it off the curriculum, but we still assign it because we think it's a really important book." And I suspect that it's used more in schools now. Last was an explicit allegory, you know, I mean, probably when you read it in school for the first time too, you know, there was a real focus on figuring out who was who and, you know, a snowball of Klatsky and Napoleon as Stalin and the, you know, reading it as a direct allegory. But I think now it's more used to discuss the dynamics of power and the corrupting influence of absolute power. And you can see that translating in our current political moment to a whole bunch of regimes that are not Stalinist Russia. And 1984 is even more so, it's kind of universal, right? And the lessons that it spells out are not just about being anti-Stalinist or being a Cold Warrior, but are more about being cautious of the corrupting influence of power and society. - Any sense that they may be using it also as a, this is how you do satire, more as a teaching instrument than as the political message behind it? I just wonder, it only occurred to me in the moment. - I do think it's interesting because I don't want to talk too much about this course, but it is of course as part of the core curriculum, you know, where students have to take a certain number of what we call socio-historical inquiry classes before they graduate. And so a lot of students come to it from other disciplines. You know, you'll have people who are doing economics or more government, but I always got several communications majors signing up for this course as their elected social historical inquiry. And I think that's because Orwell is still relevant in that space as a model for lucid writing, right? You know, and it is a, it's a model for how to write satire, but his writing I think more broadly, and it's something I try to really bring out in Orwell's ghost, but it's just a model for lucid, persuasive journalistic and fiction writing, right? It's clear, it's intentionally on the plus category, and it is meant to persuade. It is in its own sense a type of propaganda, ironically given Orwell's opposition to propaganda, but it's, it is a model I think for writing that still is useful in that respect as well. - So you mentioned teaching this in the UK as well as the US. How do the students' knowledge of Orwell differ? Did you notice anything that the UK students were coming in with a different framework or understanding? - I think students in Britain are more likely to have been exposed to some of the rest of Orwell's Uphra, and particularly his writing on empire. - Sure. - When Orwell starts out his career, he's a child of empire, not just his father, who was an imperial administrator in India, but his family back in the day made their money out of slavery in the Caribbean initially. And empires very much in his blood. His mother as well comes from Burma. Her father had been in the tea business and the shipping industry. And so when he leaves Eaton, he volunteers for the imperial police service and serves in Burma for five years. And his early awakening actually to the corrupting influence of arbitrary power comes not from his experience in the Spanish Civil War, which we can talk about, but from his experience in empire. And so his essays, Shooting and Elephant and the Hanging, which are real indictments of imperialism, those I think are more widely read in Britain, at least from my anecdotal experience still, and are way of reflecting about Britain's own imperial history. And I think homage to Catalonia, which deals with his experience in the Spanish Civil War is also more widely read in the UK still, which is more a reflection of just how little your average American knows about or is exposed to the history of the Iberian peninsula these days. - You took a Barcelona trip as part of this. I mean, I took a Barcelona trip last year for a pharmaceutical conference, but you took one specifically around homage to Catalonia, right? - Yes. - As part of research. Before we get to what Orwell does, and doesn't have to teach us for the 21st century, tell me about that, tell me what you learned in the Barcelona visit. - He stayed in the hotel arm of Ramblis, where Orwell and his wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy Blair, stayed while he was volunteering to report on the Spanish Civil War and ultimately volunteering and fighting for the Republic. With the Poom, which was a Marxist splinter party in the left Republican coalition. And so, I mean, it was an interesting experience to be in the space where Eileen had been based the whole time they were in Barcelona. She was volunteering at the Poom offices and their headquarters was just down the street from the hotel on the Ramblis. And it was also an opportunity to kind of have this embodied experience 'cause you could see where Orwell, who when he comes back for fighting on the front on behalf of the Poom and sees himself fighting Franco's forces and fighting the Republic in solidarity with all of these other soldiers on different fronts, he comes back to actually discover that there's a war within a war taking place. And actually the main socialist forces who are supported financially and practically by Stalin's Russia are both waging war on Franco but also waging an internal war on these much splinter groups like the Poom and the Anarchists who they see as deviating from the focus on just winning the war with Franco by trying to also really radicalize society and have an internal revolution within Spain. So he comes back to Barcelona and discovers what his wife has realized as she's been there working on the ground that it's no longer safe to be affiliated with these left factions because the Republican government is devoting almost as much energy to suppressing them. Very violently, he gets involved in street fighting in Barcelona. So I was able to see those spaces and you can still see the bullet holes on the walls of various buildings and you can still see the theater where Orwell served as a watchman for several nights on the roof for the Poom, keeping an eye out for government police who were looking to arrest and suppress them. And actually one of his and Eileen's close friends and comrades is arrested and serves a significant spell in prison because of his involvement with the Poom which is recast as a crime. And it's this experience for Orwell, this experience of being hunted and persecuted by his own side for deviation that really inspires I think animal farm and the way in which the figure of snowball is cast as a trigger and all of these crimes are attributed to him which as you read the story it's not possible he's actually committed or is responsible for and his understanding of the way that Stalinism operates grows out of that experience. - So it was wonderful to get to be there on the ground. I mean, it was also just if you know having been there for a pharmaceutical conference it's just a lovely place to go, right? And I took my two young sons and my husband and my sons and I went and so they got to learn a bit about Orwell but they also got to learn that southern European countries are much more hospitable to two rowdy boys than most of the United States. - So they have some affinity towards football, they're football not ours. - Yes, we actually we led to a Barca game which was another highlight and they beat Spurs who they were playing so that was. - I had to turn down an invite from one of my clients while I was there 'cause they only had one ticket and I would have been leaving my wife alone for an evening in Barcelona which I didn't necessarily wanna do and had the, you know, I really should have gone to a game just so I could say I've been to a game. - Well, if it was last summer the one thing you can consider yourself is you didn't miss a game at Camp New because they were renovating Camp New and they were playing in the Old Olympic Stadium which was an unusual experience but it's not quite the iconic Camp New experience. - Yeah, it was October last year and I remember passing it and they said they were renovating that one and playing and the other one that I was staying in this absolutely bizarre last minute hotel because my lodgings fell through right before the conference and was up on the mountain, basically overlooking the entire city and I'm thinking maybe I should not plan my hotel more going into these sorts of shows because I've ended up in the most wonderful place in the world except there are no cabs there so it took a while to get to the show but yeah, it was a marvelous experience. - Or well recuperated after, so he ultimately is shot, he takes a bullet to the throat which while it damages his vocal cords, he's really lucky it doesn't kill him but he ends up recovering in a sanatorium of those hills around the city before he ultimately flees pain because he's being hunted by the government who are looking for anyone involved with the prune. - You see, my big Orwell thing, we'll talk about your intro to Orwell also where it began for you, my big Orwell touchstone and maybe my big literary touchstone throughout is Inside the Whale which I know you cite several times here and there in that book, then basically for those of us, any listeners who do not know all these stories I've told about Inside the Whale over time, survey of ostensibly a critique of Henry Miller that's really a survey of English letters from 1900 to 1940 and to me there's the sense of Orwell and Miller actually meeting in Paris when Orwell's on his way to report and then fight in the Spanish Civil War where Miller just can't even conceive of that where it's just why would you do this? That's not our job, we're writers, this isn't what we're supposed to do and bringing very, very different ideas of what a writer is, who a writer is into that freighted conversation. I did my senior thesis as a novella about the two of them but-- - Oh really? I wouldn't agree that. - No, you wouldn't trust me. It was a 21 year old's absurdist take on this stuff. - I was just gonna say, but I think that's fascinating because we talk about misunderstanding Orwell but not that many people have read Inside the Whale but I think Inside the Whale is perhaps the most misunderstood or well of them all, right? Because effectively you get people coming out and saying well, he's valorizing Miller for his political writing and the fact that he is existing inside the whale and he does very much admire Miller and as you say, he seeks him out and he needs him in Paris but he is going to fight in the Spanish Civil War, right? I mean, he is not living inside the whale and it's not so much a critique of Miller as a critique of the hypocrisy of other people on the left who talk the talk but then get sucked into this kind of sectarian camps and aren't really living out their politics and saying, well, better to live inside the whale together and be Henry Miller and to be these kind of fraudsters and hypocrites for the people who live inside the whale. - It blew my mind when you brought that up because 30 years of reading that, I'd never come away from it with Orwell endorsing quietism and pacifism. I can see not even admiring it but like you say, putting it above lying for the sake of Stalin as a more appropriate way to operate but not the best way to live or to make art, I guess. - Yeah. - And it's one that I'm sure I'll refer to throughout this conversation but tell me about your Orwell. Where did he begin for you and when did he begin to open up? - I mean, he began to open up when I was in college and I was assigned homage to Catalonia in a 20th century European history course and I was introduced to Orwell, I am a bit younger than you but still born in the 70s and so I read him in middle school when there was in the waning days of the Soviet Union and he, I read Animal Farm and it was very much taught as a kind of allegory for Soviet Russia in a very direct way. I mean, we spent a lot of time on who was who and this is a critique of Soviet Russia and then we watched the cartoon which is produced with CIA funding which is even more of a blunt instrument for really making this argument that this is Stalinism in allegory. And then I, in high school, I read 1984 in the context of an English class and again, the kind of idea that this was a critique particularly of a Russian totalitarianism came through but it was a more nuanced reading but I kind of thought of him when I left school as this guy who basically wrote stories to warn us off of Soviet totalitarianism and then I got to college and I read Amish Catalonian it just completely opened up a whole other Orwell for me. I mean, someone whose politics were kind of more nuanced but also who was more self-reflective who was not just thought it was an amazing book and from there, I read Orwell a lot on my own but interestingly, I then in graduate school and of course on political economy was introduced in that capacity to road to Wigan Pier. And the idea, I mean, this was of course taught by political economists who was really, you know, very much on the econometric mathematical side of the field but he assigned this book of reportage and kind of reflection on social inequality in the context of this class and he said, you know, this is one of the best things you can really read to think about, you know, the practical workings of economic policy on human beings and that is the, if I had to say which Orwell has influenced me most, it would, I think, be road to Wigan Pier. - How often do you revisit it? - Well, I revisit it on the regular now because I was trying to execute this course, right. And one of the things that I think is very interesting that I've started doing is listening to them all as audiobuts because so many students these days consume their assigned reading. - That's my Inside the Whale experience, by the way. My brother found books on tape back in the early 90s of Orwell's essays and that was my intro to Inside the Whale and I still hear it in the reader's voice but sorry, sorry. - Should I, would you recommend your reader? I'll have to find out if you-- - Oh my God, it's so good. Yeah, I'll email you afterwards. I wanna say Richard, Richard Case or something. Anyway, I've got it sitting on a shelf nearby. I will email you the name after this. - There's quite a good guy. He does a new rendering of 1984 that I listened to over the summer. Well, I was jogging. I'd sort of run around long to these stories of Big Brother. So I come back to them quite often and I mean, each time I do, I find something else to really alight on which is one of the treasures about reading Orwell. So tell me in relation to the book then, what do we have to learn and what do we not take from Orwell in this almost a quarter of the way into the 21st century? - I think there are two main positive takeaways I hope will come out of the book. And one is to think about the idea of free speech and of course of censorship as something that doesn't exist in a political vacuum but that is, you know, accompanied by a sense of obligation an obligation to integrity and honesty in your political speech. Then, and I use the example of the book but I think it's a pertinent one that I think it's crucial that Orwell says that freedom is the right to, the freedom to say that two plus two equals four. He doesn't say freedom is the right to say two plus two equals five, right? Which is, you know, what O'Brien is trying to get him to confess to, you know, freedom is the freedom to speak the truth. And there's obligation that goes with that. And I think that was the piece that, you know, you had Holly and Trump Jr. really missing, right? That free speech is not just the freedom to make stuff up and put it out into the ether. And I don't think Orwell would be actively hunting people down and wanting to lock them up for fake news but he certainly, you know, his definition of freedom was one that was about speaking the truth. So that's one. And the other, I think, is revisiting the question inequality because I do think that the road to O'Brien Pier is one of the most trenchant indictments of social inequality out there in the English language and he really doubles down on that in the line in the unicorn which is written during the early days of the Second World War when he's pointing to government intervention in terms of taxation and rationing and which are creating during wartime it's temporary more equitable society and saying that we need to build upon this and we need to kind of build a new socialist future. You know, using the tools of government that can improve the lives of people. But we've seen in the last quarter, the first quarter of the 21st century, really the corrosive impact of focusing on growing the economy without thinking about economic distribution and about the problem of inequality within societies. And I think Orwell was very much attuned to that throughout his writing and it's an important reminder. I think there are some things, you know, that I wouldn't take from Orwell. I would not read my gender politics from him and I make that point very clearly in the book that he is an instinctive misogynist and he's not, he's by no means perfect but I think there is a lot of value in his writing. - Before I get to my pet theory about Orwell's sexuality, you know, it's a phrase you used in terms of growing the economy that puts me in mind of the uses of language in politics 'cause I remember when I think Clinton, Bill Clinton was the first grow the economy guy and that very phrase struck me as wrong because it treated the economy as a living thing that grows. As opposed to make the economy grow or build on the economy. And I wonder, you know, in weird ways that language kind of subverts the way we think, how much of that plays into this super corrosive, you know, hyper speed economy of the 21st century where we're, you know, number go up, you know, all we have is keep increasing the big dollars and don't worry about anybody on the ground. Not to say that, you know, Bill Clinton, well, in a sense, the globalization that began taking place under Clinton did help accelerate a lot of these trends but I don't know how you escape and avoid that stuff. Anyway, that's me in my little language, Picadillo, but. - Well, or while as the author of politics in the English language, I'll give you, you know, it was very attuned to the way that, you know, linguistic terms of phrase could obfuscate and, you know, hide the true meaning of what people were trying to say in politics, you know, grow the economy perhaps falls into that category 'cause it doesn't, you know, there's a lot that you could unpack from that phrase but it also obscures fairly easily, you know, the undertones of what is implied by growing the economy. - Yeah, yeah, it's again, just me and the little things that pick out at me when phrases start to become, sort of fall into common usage. My pet theory about Orwell is that he was actually gay, maybe unconscimated and that's part of why he was so monstrously abusive towards women in his life but there's nothing to corroborate this whatsoever except for the fact that he was an English guy who went to public school. Thank you, you know, it's a standard joke but you get where I'm coming from. - Oh, he is a significant homophobia, you know, that you can tease out in his writing as well and it's certainly something that has been brought up, right? And something that Christopher Hitchens and his why Orwell matters kind of tackles head on and, you know, is very at first to that reading of Orwell but he is definitely, his sexuality is, there's a lot of repression and a lot of anger, I think, that going to his interactions with the opposite sex and read into it what you will. I mean, I do give the caveat at the beginning that, you know, I'm not seeking to cycle analyze or well and I'm interested more less in his personal sexual life than in how that manifest in the way that he writes about women and writes about gender which I do think is deeply problematic and it's problematic even within the context of his own time, let alone, you know, a 21st century post Me Too moment. But at the same time, you know, I mean, we've had so many conversations with the last few years about canceling individuals from the past because of, you know, things that are, you know, not what we in the current moment would approve of and I think there's too much to be lost by doing that to Orwell or frankly to anyone, I'm not a big fan of a chance on people. But I do read him with a grain of salt and a recognition that he is by no means perfect. - Yeah, how much, you bring up that the students tend to catch that, I guess, you know, how much does it play into their reading and how much, you know, do you have to go through a sort of corrective? Yeah, this was the time and he was bad in certain respects for the time. He was also, you know, a grand anti-imperialist. So, you know, bouncing all that, I guess. How sensitive are students about this and how much does it, you know, how much work do you have to do to get them not to shut them off, I guess? - I do think they are very sensitive to it. To their credit, I think, you know, whether it makes them like him or not at the end of the day is very student by student, but there is, I mean, these critiques of the wokarati and of, you know, American academia are not fair to young people or to those who educate them. You know, I mean, my students are not saying, we shouldn't read Orwell and we shouldn't listen to what he has to say about censorship or about power or about, you know, social life and inequality because his sort of sexual politics are gross, they're saying, we can see his sexual politics are gross and that is something that we should think about when we talk about him, but there's also other things about you, right? I mean, I think students are not the caricature that's often painted of them in nor universities, you know, such. - That was good to hear. I, you know, I wondered in relation to the book and you do a masterful job of not modernizing Orwell, like not trying to pull the, here's what he would say about X, Y, and Z, but, you know, conveying what we can learn and, you know, the way we can sort of apply that as a filter. Was it a challenge for you in that way to not fall into the Orwell would have felt this or that in the course of the book? - I think it is, you know, it was a challenge, right? Because it would be, it would have been easier in a sense to write this as a kind of prescriptive, you know, Orwell would say this or what would say that. But as I say in the beginning of the book, it really isn't, it's an effort not to say what would Orwell do, but to say how can reading Orwell now in the 21st century help us think about our 21st century problems in a different way. You know, what about his analysis of his own time? Can we proactively take to think about the problems in our time? So there is a lot of contemporary politics in the book and actually one of mine, I did a book event in DC and it was an in conversation and the person I was in conversation with sort of joked that this book is partially a book about George Orwell's politics and partially a book about the politics of Laura Bier's. (laughs) I don't think I could accept the fairness of that. I don't know if he did mean it as a criticism but of that analysis, but what it tries not to be is to say, well, the politics of Laura Bier's are the politics of George Orwell, right? He's the writer I admire. We didn't see eye to eye on everything, but it's how, you know, how I think it's profitable as someone with my own politics to read Orwell and think about what he had to say about his time to help me understand my own. - Do you think he missed out by not visiting America? - I mean, I think it's hard not to say as an American, right, I think this country has so much to offer. Yes, he did, but he's also someone who didn't visit Russia, right, and yet his writing had this huge impact on both Russia and the US in the Cold War. I think he had huge preconceptions about the United States, which it's nice to think maybe if he'd come here, he would have seen a more nuanced or an open picture, though it is also quite possible he would have seen what he wanted to see, but he definitely, you know, I mean, he saw the US as kind of materialistic as taking, you know, as not class written in the way that Britain was, and he was very critical of the class written structure of British society, but as, you know, money obsessed and deeply unequal and, you know, comparatively lacking in social conscience. And, you know, it would be nice to think that having come to the US with temper some of those views given a lot of his prejudices that he held throughout life, I'm not entirely sure I believe it would, but it is, you're right, as you point out, interesting that, you know, he had this huge influence on these two regions, neither of which he had spent in the actual time and. You know, part of it, I think, is just dying when he did, you know, him going into the '50s, into the '60s, as America is changing drastically, much less the way the UK was, you know, it becomes a, well, he becomes a different person, obviously, had he lived longer, and, you know, the perspective and the subject that he's, you know, looking at changing drastically in front of him. Well, again, by the time he's close to death, he's predicting nuclear war wiping out the world within a couple of years, 'cause he's just entering a phase that nobody had ever experienced before, which was, you know, the push of a button can end the planet. What does that mean in terms of human psychology and who actually presses the button? This is me rambling as opposed to asking a question. It's more the, what would a world become in the '50s and '60s? - Well, I think about this. I mean, we're recording this interview. I don't know what it will come out, but in the aftermath of the first, I mean, frankly, probably there won't be another one, but Trump Biden debate, right? And one of the things that Orwell does for C, you know, he writes this essay, you know, you and the atom bomb, where he actually is noted as having coined the term the Cold War early on, but he foresees a world in which more nuclear weapons are actually going to be used against populations. In 1984, there's this moment, 1984 is a system which is stabilized after a period of massive nuclear destruction, which destroys, you know, a series of major capitals around the globe, and then things stabilize, and then you get into, you know, the kind of mutually certain destruction world that we lived in throughout the Cold War, and the Stasis and both sides having huge nuclear stockpiles, but being unwilling to use them. But we have been very lucky, right, that after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there hasn't been the use of nuclear weapons in active warfare. And I think one of the things that is somewhat frightening to a lot of people about a possibility of a second-shot presidency is he seems less concerned than some, you know, I mean, his view of what's the point of having nuclear weapons, you're not going to use them, is that extremely frightening worldview, right, but yes, Orwell, and it's reflective of the thoughts of a lot of people at that time, right, you know, I mean, he just assumed that the jobbing of the first two bombs would not be the end of the story, and that pessimism really inflex 1984, which is written in the immediate aftermath of World War II. - Right, and there's no game theory at that point. - Yeah, again, no mutually assured destruction theory that's really developed by then. So, you know, you're looking at the, well, obviously, people would do this because this is what we've done historically, but tell me, you know, it's one of the interesting aspects of the book for me, how you pair patriotism from nationalism in terms of, well, in terms of Orwell, in terms of, you know, what's good and bad about, you know, having national identity, but not a nationalistic identity. - Can you speak a little on the Orwell's patriotism and how it differs from the, you know, the nationalism we get from, say, Donald Trump? - I mean, I think this is a question that Orwell really grapples with, right, because he is an English patriot, which is something that he owns quite openly, and his essays, including "My Country Writer Left," when he talks about his left-wing socialist policies, not precluding, you know, patriotic response in the Second World War. But he also has this essay on nationalisms, and interestingly, he defines nationalism not just, you know, as a support for the nation, but also as an adherence to any kind of group-based ideology that sees its furthering its own interest at the expense of others as its aim. And I think, for him, that's the crucial distinction, that nationalism is an us-be-them ideology, right? And it's one where furthering the interest of the nation means it's, you know, a zero-sum game, right, taking a bigger piece of the pie, whereas he sees patriotism, more as the love of country, which he does very much feel, and actually the line in the unicorn, socialism in the English genius, which he writes early in the war, is a love letter to England in many respects. But it's sort of, you know, an affection and love for your country and for the people within it. But it's not necessarily exclusionary and it's not at the expense of. And I think for him, that was how he parsed the distinction between nationalism and patriotism, and it was an important distinction for him. And the idea that I think it's sort of a mega-politics version of nationalism, really that some people have to be advanced by other people being pushed back. That was something he very much explicitly rejects in his notes on nationalism when he's writing about the kind of evils of nationalism's broadly defined. - Students pretty good at grogging the patriotism, not necessarily that they are patriots, but that they see that distinction? - They are, honestly. I mean, I think I have a lot of time and I give a lot of credit to young people today. But I also hope that the book will kind of parse out those distinctions for people across generations who are really different. 'Cause I think there's a lot of value in using that Orwellian lens to think not just in a knee-jerk way, censorship bad, free speech good, totalitarianism bad, democracy good, but to actually look at Orwell's writing and the more nuanced things that it does say about national identity and the place of national identity and patriotism within modern life and within societies, about the role of class, about the role of kind of group affinities. There's just a lot more to his writing than the knee-jerk caricatures that most people automatically go to when they hear the word Orwellian. The aim of the book is to open that conversation. - And Spaniards are invariably cruel to animals. I'm just kidding. It's a line from England during England. (laughs) Yeah, I know. - Yeah, and he's very affectionate towards Spaniards. So condescending. - I know, I know. When he brings up the cultural stereotypes, it's meant to undercut all of them I felt, but I can understand how people could latch on. You mentioned, you know, you talked about the impetus for the book, what did you learn in the process of writing it? - Oh, what did I learn? I mean, this is an interesting, you know, it took me back as I wrote it into the text and which I've read multiple times, but more deeply into the text. And I think the place where I really learn the most is, was in the chapter on gender because I, it forced me to, as academics would say, kind of read him against the grain, right? To read him looking for critiques of him and kind of embedded as opposed to foregrounded within his text. And that was at times difficult, right? Because you're taking someone who you greatly admire and you're thinking, you're trying to think critically about what their shortcomings might be. But I think also in the chapter on race and imperialism, just working through, I mean, one of the things I really admire about Orwell's writing at Empire is there's a real honesty about it. He's really trying to confront a system in which he knows himself to be complicit. But there's also a real sense of conflict about what you do, having really kind of messed things up, how you move forward. And I think thinking through his writing and thinking about our own current politics were arguably, particularly but not exclusively in the United States, right? There's the kind of mess of the aftermath of years of first slavery and then institutionalized racism. But where do you go from here? And so watching or reading Orwell try to work through that and the conflicts that he has, where do you go from here in the aftermath of centuries of British Empire and think about where do you go from here in terms of our contemporary racial politics was really profitable for me. So I think those two chapters were the ones where I felt I learned the most. I definitely had kind of developed ideas about Orwell's writing on speech and democracy that had sat with me for a lot longer. But as I was putting the book together, I was challenged in those other areas. - And how's the response been so far? The book's been out for a couple of weeks, but I'm sure you also had the review copies going out and I'm sure the Orwell scholars were early recipients. Have you gotten any feedback from the Orwell world? - I have, and it's been quite positive. I've done some collaboration with the Orwell Foundation and if you have your copy of the book sitting on a DJ Taylor who wrote the-- - That's exactly who I was thinking of, yeah. (laughing) - But I was happy that David Taylor could write Orwell's "A New Life" was quite pleased with how it came out as was Peter Stansky who did another recent book on Orwell. So I've, you know, I've been engaged in that broader Orwell community for a while and it is a book that is in conversation with existing scholarship as well as in conversation with Orwell's work. The one, you know, grumpy feedback that I got from an Amazon reader, you know, so-- - Yeah, but come on. - Three scholars and said, she equates Donald Trump with Vladimir Putin on page 127 or whatever it was. And I thought, well, yeah. (laughing) So I think if you're coming to it from the perspective that there's no legitimate way to think about Donald Trump as being a quite a hole with Vladimir Putin, then you maybe will not enjoy what we get from Orwell's. - Hello, to be frank, the idea that they got that far in the book is pretty incredible, unless they were doing a search, but I'm pretty impressed they weren't that far. They just looked at index for Trump. But no, it has been, and I think that is a great flash in of how seriously I took, you know, the Orwell community and the scholarship on Orwell. I mean, it engages critically. There's not a cherry-picking, you know, you know, people's quotes out of context or an attempt to take scholars not at face value in terms of the arguments that they're making about his work. But I think a fairly genuine effort and engagement, both with Orwell's writing, but also with the body of Orwell's scholarship out there. At least I quote, so... - You know, I think you do a great job of it. And it's one of those, what I was interested to see was the revised Orwell, both as Taylor revises him in a new life and how you approach the blacklist, you know, information research department list to put of, should we say, Stalinists or untrustworthy? Well, how did you reconcile the black list? We'll put it that way. - I mean, that was another quote I enjoyed writing and thinking about writing. So just for those of you listening who don't know Orwell's list, this is a list he puts together for the information research department, which is a bureau of the foreign office that produces propaganda and counter propaganda in the early days of the Cold War. And he is asked by a previous girlfriend who works for the I.R.D. if he will put together a list of intellectuals within British literary society who he thinks might be deemed untrustworthy and that the government should avoid working with. And he maybe too readily agrees, right? And he believes, I think at the time, all he's doing is ensuring that these people are blacklisted from working for the government. And luckily, you know, that is effectively where it ends. Though as we see, right, if we think about the McCarthy hearings in the US, you know, I mean, things could have gotten a lot messier than they did, but he puts together this list, which includes, you know, several writers and editors who, during the Spanish Civil War, had refused to look in the eye whether Republican government supported by the Stalinist was doing to the anarchist in the Prum and kind of left-wing groups. But also those who, in the early days of the Second World War under an instruction from the Communist Party before Nazi Germany and Bates Russia, you know, supported a pacifist line. But people who he thinks are dishonest and unpatriotic. And it's something that the left for years has given or will a lot of flack for and, you know, said effectively that he had betrayed the left because most of the people, everyone he reports basically is up the political left by doing this. But I think in Orwell's mind, this speaks to what for him is this, you know, weighing up of the importance of free speech versus the importance of true speech, right? And he thinks that these writers and editors have abused their platform and their, you know, access to media outlets and publicity to spread what we would now refer to as fake news, right, disinformation. And that that in his might disqualifies them, at least from access to a government platform for their views. - When it happened, or when it came out, I guess, in the early 2000s, I felt, no, that's of a piece. I don't see this as some grand betrayal of what he'd written previously, who he was, et cetera. But I can understand from the, again, deliberate misreading or dumb misreading of him how one can draw a quick conclusion. - Clearly, Gil, it's your, a huge gem inside the whale, right? I mean-- - Yeah, that's exactly it. - Well, you know, about the camp, the kind of critic, Lassa Doetchel, and-- - The necessary murder group, yeah. - And he is vilifying inside the whale, the people he's happily reporting on to the IRDs. So it is, as you say, of a piece. - So I know we don't want to talk about modernizing Orwell and what he would say nowadays, but any interest in jumping on Israel and Gaza with this one, or are we gonna let that slide? Just kidding, I-- - I mean, I think what, the one without getting deep into the politics of Israel and Gaza, the most valuable or well-ian takeaway is Orwell writes a lot about how truth is, in some sense, is malleable, that there is an objective truth, but that objective truth is not what usually gets told, and that, you know, history is written by the winners, and it's a thing he reprises in both his journalistic writing, but then again, in 1984, when he has a Brian effectively just make that point explicitly, to Winston, when he's interrogating him in prison. But I do think that, I mean, you have mutually contradictory versions of what is happening in Gaza, coming out of Hamas on the one hand, and the Israeli government on the other, and how that issue is written is going to become very much on how that conflict plays out in the months and years to come, which Orwell would clearly have recognized, watching them fold. - Do you feel he, where do you feel he falls on the British anti-Semitism scale in general, given that it's sort of a background thing in England, especially in that era? - I think someone who grew up an environment where casual anti-Semitism was just embedded in culture, and was himself casually anti-Semitic for a long time, but I think during this like a world war, and after he's awakened in a way that many people are, to the problem with being casually engaged. And he's, there's an attempt on his own part to be conscious of his own biases, and to make himself better, right? And it's not like he's the world's most enlightened, anti-antismatic by the time that he dies, but he is someone who's become conscious of his own casual prejudices and tried to look them in the eye and try to eradicate them, from his writing and his practice. And I think that's partially from working with Jewish exiles, intellectuals, during the Second World War, when he did a lot of writing for left socials publications and collaborated with many exiles, Jews in Britain, during the war. It's amazing to me how much he improved as a human being in all those aspects, except with women. It's still just, again, coming out of imperial life, recognizing everything that's terrible, recognizing how to get over the poor smell, that classic vibe. And it's one big hole that he had is, "Well, you can't be perfect. You can't fix everything." But the big question I always ask, which I forgot to warn you was coming, what are you reading? What am I reading right now? I am trying to read Tom Lake from my book group and born senseless by it. Sorry, I'm passionate if you are listening. I just finished reading this British novel, "The Ministry of Time," which is in some ways as the title suggests, but there's an Orwellian inspiration, I think, that underlies it, but is this novel kind of about time travel, but also about the state and also about this question of how and if we can change history and whether we should, which was a wonderful read, and I've very much enjoyed. And I'm also reading Catherine Hall's "Lucky Valley," which I'm thinking about adding onto a course syllabus, which is about the kind of mechanics, the economic mechanics of slavery as in 18th and 19th century British Empire and the relationship between Jamaica and the Jamaican economy and then the domestic British economy, which comes out of work that she and a group at UCL University College London have done tracking the economic impact of slavery and then the emancipation of slavery on the British economy. That actually sounds pretty interesting. I'm going to ask you to email me that afterwards so I can look that up. The other question just occurs to me. Do you, I think you mentioned one of the novel, well, one of the pieces of fiction about Orwell or Eileen, do you read Orwell fiction, basically? Have you taken it in 13 o'clock and looks like that? I read Julia, which is a retelling of 1984 by Sandra Neiman from the perspective of Julia, as opposed to from Winston, which I did very much enjoy. And the question of whether it's fiction but wifedom, which came out last year, was this kind of life of semi-fictionalized and life of Eileen Blair or Orwell's First Wife, which is a combination of archival research, but then also imaginative reconstruction by Ella Funder. And there's also then another novel, which I just listened to as a book on tape and speaking of kind of great, this is an excellent audiobook, but Verma Sahib by Paul Thoreau, which is a kind of reconstruction of Eric Blair as he was then. That's his birth name, Orwell's his kind name of Blair's life, while serving in Verma as a police officer. And it combines them throughs, he's a travel writer initially, and he spent time in Verma and his kind of writing on Verma, but also his enduring interest in Orwell and that I very much enjoyed as well. So yes, I've gone down that rabbit hole, I'll read this. So I'm not going to subject you to my novella from 1992, so consider yourself lucky coming out of this one. Actually, real last question, next book. I've got a couple of questions in hand. I'm thinking about the next project is likely to be on the politics of infertility. We're coming up on 50 years since the birth of the first IVF baby in 1978, and it's obviously very much a live question now, or kind of the future of artificial reproductive technologies in the aftermath of the overturning of Roe, but looking at how IVF and surrogacy and egg freezing and all of those new technologies have kind of reshaped our society in the last 50 years and also kind of evoked important debates within religious movements, feminist movements, politics about how families should be structured, what the role of the state should be in regulating and supporting these types of technologies. So it's a question. In some ways, I came to Orwell interested in him as a political historian and how he can help us understand our modern politics, and this is coming to reproductive science, but again, wearing the hat of a political historian who is very interested in how they shaped both the body and the body politic over the last half century, so that's what I began at the moment. It does come up and it comes up in Orwell's ghosts in the patriarchy chapter, so I'm glad you're following a thread through all this, but Lord, thanks for Orwell's ghosts and thanks for coming on and thanks for humoring me around inside the whale, because I still feel like it's a touchstone for understanding art, politics, and truth. Well, at least as we know it. No, I very much enjoyed it, so thank you for having me on top. And that was Laura Beers. Her new book, Orwell's Ghosts is wonderful. It'll help you not just re-appreciate Orwell's writing and the example of his life, but you'll learn to see our own era more clearly, and maybe come up with some tools to instigate change. We'll put it that way. Orwell's Ghosts, out now from Norton, go get it. Laura does not appear to have a website, but she is on Twitter as fiery, underscore, particle, both spelled the way they sound, and on blue sky is fiery, particle, all one word, no underscore. Not a ton of posts on blue sky, but she is active on Twitter, so go check that out. And as I mentioned in her bio, she's also the co-host on the Progressive Britain Podcast, and I'll have a link to all of that in the show and episode notes for this one. Now, you can support the virtual memories show by telling other people about it. Let them know there's as podcast comes out every week with really interesting conversations with fascinating people. You can also help out the show by telling me what you like and don't like about it, or who you'd like to hear me record with, or what movie or TV show or book or piece of music or theater, art exhibition, dance performance, whatever. You think I should check out and turn listeners on too. You can do that by sending me email, DM, if we're connected on Instagram or blue sky, postcard, letter, I put my mailing address at the bottom of the newsletter. I send out twice a week, so you can look for it there. Or using my Google voice number, which is 973-869-9659. That goes directly to voicemails. You don't have to worry about getting stuck in an awkward conversation with me. Messages can be up to three minutes long. Go longer than that. It's going to cut you off, so call back and leave a second message. Let me know if it'd be okay to include your message in an upcoming episode of the show. 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With institutions, I give to my local food bank, give to World Central Kitchen every month, occasional election contributions, which I actually had to file this week for my lobbying thing. I'm a registered lobbyist, so I have to list all my political donations every six months. Anyway, you can make political donations and you don't have to register them with the senate.gov website. You can also give to Planned Parenthood Women's Choice Freedom Funds. There are all sorts of other funds out there and institutions in need, and maybe you can build a better world, so I hope you will. Our music for this episode is "Fella" by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. You should visit my archives to check out my episode with Hal from the summer of 2018 and learn more about his art and painting, and you can listen to his music at SoundCloud.com/Mayforth, and that's M-A-Y, the number four, T-H. And that's it for this week's episode of The Virtual Memories Show. Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back next week with another great conversation. You can subscribe to The Virtual Memories Show and download past episodes at the iTunes Store. You can also find all our episodes and get on our email list at either of our websites, vmspah.com, or chimeraobscura.com/vm. You can also follow The Virtual Memories Show on Twitter and Instagram at VMSPod, at virtualmemoriespodcast.tumbler.com, and on YouTube, Spotify and TuneIn.com by searching for Virtual Memories Show. And if you like this podcast, please tell your pals, talk it up on social media, and go to iTunes, look up The Virtual Memories Show, and leave a rating and maybe a review for us. It all goes to helping us build a bigger audience. You've been listening to The Virtual Memories Show. I'm your host, Gil Roth. Keep reading, keep making art, and keep the conversation going. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]