Horizon

Great article, isn't it. Maybe people who've never been unfairly hurt themselves have trouble believing that injustice or bad luck aren't the victims' fault?

Hard to believe, but seemingly true, that "if thou be poure, thy brother hateth thee..." (name that quote, and the fictional citer thereof).

I think we're really on to something here, Martha. The Hegemony of the Happy. Has a nice ring. And the beauty of it is that when the normal people of the world get around to overthrowing their smirking oppressors all they'll have to do is make them sit through 24 hrs of CNN.

You absolutely must be right. What makes the whole thing even more dismal is that the memory of suffering wears off remarkably quickly once a person's situation changes. We're treading here into what Nietzsche called the morality of ressentiment, aren't we? Well, I know I am.

So you wanna explain this ressentiment stuff?

If I'm not mistaken, ressentiment is just French for resentment, and it means pretty much what it sounds like. Nietzsche had the idea that the west had developed two opposed moral systems (this is from The Genealogy of Morals), one the fruit of basically the pagan aristocratic classes which IIRC he considered to be the invention of the Greeks, and one, which he called the morality of ressentiment, which essentially sprang from underclass resentment and was taken up and codified by Christianity.

The central difference between the two moral systems, IIRC, is that the aristocratic morality has no conception of evil. In this system the distinction is between good and bad. Someone may behave badly, but they are not therefore considered evil (or, on the other hand, saintly).

Nietzsche thought that the other sort of "prole" morality introduced the concept of evil to westerners.

Now it's been a long time since I've read this so I may be wrong in some details. But I think that's it in a nutshell.

There's a fairly brief description of the book here.

The central difference between the two moral systems, IIRC, is that the aristocratic morality has no conception of evil. In this system the distinction is between good and bad. Someone may behave badly, but they are not therefore considered evil (or, on the other hand, saintly).

"Good" and "bad" corresponding roughly to "noble" and "villainous", the feudal etymology of those terms a very conscious part of the system.

Orwell's own moral progress then really having been from the classical imperial morality he was taught to the suffering-oriented morality he adopted, with sufficient personal consequences to feel the "ressentiment" on his own behalf -- ?

That's an interesting proposition. I think there is a lot of evidence that he never really did adopt the "slave" morality as Nietzsche construed it. One thing which always struck me about Orwell was the rather cool way he dealt with evil or badness or villany. Consider the essay he wrote about following the Jewish man around Germany just after the war ended. His tone was almost one, as I recall, of bemusement as he observed the poor fellow getting his own back on the German prisoners. You could say that this is an illustration of the difference between "master" and "slave" morality.

Orwell would not have been the first person to attempt such a transition. I think it's just these people he had in mind in criticizing the tendency of middle class socialists to romanticize the lower classes. His conclusion (I don't have time to look up which article this was, sorry), was in essence that upper class socialists needed to resist the urge to adopt a morality of ressentiment precisely because it is impossible; that the best they could achieve would be a sham, an inauthentic attempt to ape the lower classes.

It may well be that Orwell never relinquished the upper class morality he grew up with, and that it is exactly this which made him such an unusual socialist and such a persistent thorn in the side of socialists and progressives to this day. Clearly he was as disconcerted as any middle class progressive at his own social position, his own sense of privilege. But he rejected the adoption of "prole" morality as doomed to failure. Very perceptive on his part, I think.