Sometimes an aging English major will trip and fall down a rabbit hole, sometimes with Alice and sometimes on one’s own. I’ve been groping around for about a week now in one that was not of Lewis Carroll but rather George Orwell.
Orwell is one of the few writers whose name has been adapted into an adjective. Just as we can describe something as Dickensian, Shakespearean, or Byronic as the case may be, the term Orwellian has been applied quite a bit lately to our current situation for reasons so obvious that an explanation is superfluous.
The hole I’ve been in is about the shadings around the meaning of one of the revised commandments in Orwell’s Animal Farm. I’m going to pull it straight out without context and trust that most everyone remembers the basic story from their schooldays. “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
Now I’m not questioning Orwell’s considered purpose for that line in his fable. That’s not my rabbit hole. It’s just that with so much talk about the Declaration of Independence lately, particularly that bit about “all men are created equal,” I just tacked on the Orwellian second clause and was down the rabbit hole immediately.
The original version of that commandment was simply “All animals are equal.” Like Jefferson’s line, it’s declarative and uncompromised. What you need to unite animals or people against their common enemy at the beginning of a successful revolution is some nice, succinct political dogma. The pig leaders in the book knew it and so did Thomas Jefferson.
But once the battle is won, some revisions may be in order. Some animals are more equal than others, as it turns out, just as some men are more equal than others, as the Constitution clearly defined. While some men may have had some question whether or not they were more or less equal than some of the other men, they could at least agree that they were more equal than all the women and all the people of color. Four or five words become a compound sentence, and before you can shout “Hallelujah!” that dogma has turned into the pliant message that gives rise to highly effective propaganda. I know that Animal Farm was intended as a satire on the Russian revolution as acknowledged by Orwell, but BUT there are more layers to a complex work than just the obvious.
If all people are created equal, are some people more equal than others? Many of us have heard folks assert things like “I’m as good as anybody else.” Or “Nobody’s any better than I am.” Personally, I like “We all put our pants on one leg at a time.” These statements almost sound like all people are equal, but that belief is not in those words. There’s a strong possibility that whoever said it will reveal within the next five minutes who he or she finds to be less equal than themselves.
Lawyerly types have long pointed out that we’re all equal under the law, and that justice is and should be blind. How blind as an adjective came to describe the ideal that the application of the law should be objective and unbiased has always mystified me. Miss Merriam Webster offers not a single definition of that word that is even adjacent to objective and unbiased. Aside from sightlessness, she offers definitions that include “unable or unwilling to discern or judge,” “unquestioning,” “having no regard to rational discrimination,” “lacking a directing or controlling consciousness.” Think “blind to their child’s faults,” “blind loyalty,” “blind choice,” “blind chance.” Yes, justice is blind, and often deaf and mute to boot. As a result, some folks are more equal than others.
It almost goes without saying that some of the folks who think they are more equal than others are exactly those folks that a preponderance of their peers would categorically identify as folks that are less equal than themselves. Some of those folks who think of themselves as more equal are often tediously annoying to those who actually are more equal. Unless I miss my guess, practically everyone reading this can populate these equal, more than equal, and less than equal categories with folks they actually know. I can, with plenty of folks left over.
Then I’m left with a question. Are the times we live in Orwellian or more Kafkaesque in nature? If anyone wants to go there, just let me know. I’ll have to brush up on my Kafka, but otherwise I’ll let that go and give my inner math nerd a chance to overthink quadratic reciprocity.
I promise not to write about that.
