Graceful Monuments to the Obvious

[pyat]

I found this essay on my hard drive. It's not quite finished, and not well-polished, but I might as well post it, finally. I wrote this sometime last year.

Of late I’ve been reading a selection of George Orwell’s essays. His critiques of Rudyard Kipling and Charles Dickens fired some larger thoughts, which I’ve been trying to take a moment to write down.

So, here we go.

Rudyard Kipling was intensely popular in the late 19th century as an Imperialist poet. It was he who coined the term “White Man’s Burden,” and his poetry was the backdrop of the Victorian Empire. By Orwell’s time – indeed by the end of WWI - Kipling was seldom quoted by anyone with pretensions of culture, except in a purely ironic sense. He was too hawkish and mawkish, all at once. However, he remained hugely popular with the British working class, the very class that had paid the most in blood and toil to realize the dreams of Empire, and perhaps benefited least from it.

Orwell suggested various reasons for this. He noted that Kipling’s poems often expressed fairly common sense moral principles of decency and fairplay and honour. He refers to them as “Graceful Monuments to the Obvious.”

You see these monuments almost everywhere, some of them less graceful than others. A Graceful Monument to the Obvious is a self-evident truth or commonplace moral that everyone can get behind. Orwell expressed as similar sentiment when writing about Dickens. One of the stock characters in Dickens is the kindly old rich man who hands out shillings and 100 guinea annuities and enviable positions as an office boy to all the poor characters. This is clearly a good thing to do. Almost everyone can agree with that. I’ve met people whose entire morality depends on “Monuments to the Obvious” in one form or other. Chances are, you have too.

This happens a fair bit in fandoms, with intelligent people eschewing a traditional set of morals or spiritual tradition in favour of a more recent construct. The moral code of Superman, for example, or Captain Mal Reynolds.

The Third Doctor and Captain Kirk and Mr. Pickwick all present fine, upstanding moral codes that no one can question within the context of the media. This last bit is very important, however, because they don’t exist outside of the limited and shallow context of their own fictional reality. They fight only chosen evils. Sure, Andy of Mayberry is a swell guy. But what does he think of abortion? Or homosexuals? Or capital punishment? It never comes up. The writers of the media control the situation in a way that can never happen in the real world.

And, one must surely wonder how someone as warm-hearted and generous as Mr. Pickwick (for example) ever got to the point where he had any money to give away in the first place. In the real world, while it is good for rich people to be generous, one must also realize that, in order to get rich, it’s usually necessary to eschew fair play, if not honesty outright, at some point in the game. You don’t get rich by handing out shillings to plucky urchins all day.

In that sense, Dickens’ morality was similar to those golden platitudes offered in something like Chicken Soup for the Soul, or in the scriptures of a hundred minor gurus. It is perfectly possible to read through the entirety of Chicken Soup for the Soul and find no objectionable lesson, no hard fact, and no contentious advice. The whole book may glow with the light of gentle truth. It also offers very little useful practical advice.

To put it another way, we’re all against torturing puppies. We’re all against children starving. We’re all against evil totalitarian governments showing up and taking out freedoms away. However, the real world rarely presents us with such clear-cut moral choices, in part because the world is made up of individuals who mostly share exactly the same set of basic morals. That doesn’t stop us from attempting to fit complex situations into easy moral boxes. This seldom works very well in reality.

Comments

[heron61.livejournal.com]

*nods* This is an attitude that puzzles me. I am far more likely to personally trust someone who admits to being strongly self-interested, because I tend to assume people who don't are either lying, self-destructive, or so caught up in some ideology that they care more about being ideologically correct than their own well-being or the well-being of others. I do my best to avoid all three types of people, especially the third type.

It's also true that empathic engagement is a significant part of all moral calculations I make. I avoid many actions because performing them would obviously hurt other people and seeing people I interact with regularly being in distress makes me unhappy.

[madmanofprague.livejournal.com]

Well, I tend to (cynically?) assume that because empathic engagement usually results in someone being hurt, most people are inadvertently taught not to do it and rely on pat, well-worn ethical boundaries to avoid a constant barrage of universal misery. Thus, by wearing an ideological hat, they're telling me up-front where they stand. The Bene Gesserit perspective, I guess.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

I can see that. My objection to people who strongly follow ideologies is that I've all too often seen the result being people who focus more on ideological correctness instead of any attempt to maximize the immediate happiness or even to minimize the immediate suffering in their lives and the lives of others. From my PoV, that single tendency is the cause of much, and perhaps most deliberately caused suffering in human history. Thus, I distrust all strong ideological motivations. If nothing else, it's possible to reason or bargain with someone whose motivations are relatively self-interested. Reasoning or bargaining with ideologues is far more difficult.

[madmanofprague.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I explained what I meant. I don't... believe in ideological correctness, I guess, or that people who espouse belief in its importance are either sincere in that belief internally or honestly pursuing it in their social actions.

I think it's a myth, or at least if it is somehow achieved it's because the ideology is constructed rom negotiation between normative habits of the social environment and whatever personality traits the individual prefers in themselves. Especially in politically secularized societies like ourselves (well, mine–I'm Canadian :P), religious placards–ideology, philosophy, political orientation or what we classically recognize as religion–are more about taste and brand loyalty than anything else.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

religious placards–ideology, philosophy, political orientation or what we classically recognize as religion–are more about taste and brand loyalty than anything else.

In general, that's true of civilized first world societies (which is why I'm very much in favor of such a society). Sadly, the US is not yet such a society, although things are looking somewhat hopeful on that front. The US has no shortage of fantatics, and unfortunately some of them get into positions of power.

[madmanofprague.livejournal.com]

I just doubt that fanatics are fanatical about anything but power : )

[heron61.livejournal.com]

That's clearly true about the leaders, but from various interviews and articles, that seems far less true about most people who follow such ideologies, and w/o them the leaders have little to distinguish them from cranks shouting on street corners.