ORWELL RECONSIDERED
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some existing form of culture when most likely a new form will ar–
rive of its own accord which may well be preferable to anything
we can envisage? The proper field for "reformism" is material
conditions, for here the consequences of any move we make are
more or less ascertainable and their desirability or otherwise a suit–
able matter for the informed moral judgment.
To Orwell such an attitude was repugnant. "To take a ration–
al political decision," he was to write
in
his essay on Koestler, "one
must have a picture of the future." Of course to some extent one
must: but not, I maintain, a picture possessed of that degree of
detail which Orwell thought necessary. And I think that he pitched
his demands so high for two reasons neither of which is valid. In
the first place, as we have seen, he believed that the only
practical
political alternative to socialism was fascism, and fascism had a pic–
ture of the future, and therefore if one wanted to beat fascism one
must have a bigger and brighter picture. In other words, Orwell
anticipated an argument of which,
mutatis mutandis,
we have
heard enough and more than enough during the Cold War. The
other reason why Orwell thought that socialism required a com–
plete vision of the end towards which it was directed is, I suspect,
that fundamentally he believed in conformity. To some the appeal
of socialism resides in the fact that it holds out the prospect of a
society, to be realized at some not too distant date in the future, in
which men, all of them, will be free to lead the life they choose.
Without in any way rejecting this ideal of autonomy Orwell makes
it
fairly clear that for him the attractions of socialism are not deri–
vative from it. What he looked for in socialism was the inaugura–
tion of a certain determinate way of life: a "decent" way of life–
to use a favorite expression of his. It is true that Orwell gives as
one of the "essential
aims"
of socialism
liberty-the
other one being
justice-but
to Orwell (who here as elsewhere has so much in com–
mon with Rousseau) liberty meant not the ability to lead whatever
kind of life one might choose, but rather a particular quality, or
characteristic, pertaining to the kind of life he expected everyone to
choose. Li·berty in Orwell's scheme of things finds its natural con–
trast in servility rather than in constraint. It would be no great Dar-
