What I've Been Reading: Churchill and Orwell
Written as a dual biography, Churchill and Orwell by Thomas E. Ricks links these two fascinating British men by their shared belligerency toward totalitarianism. The prevailing mindset of enlightened thought prior to World War Two revolved around appeasement, if not outright embrace of totalitarian thought. Hindsight clearly reveals the inglorious failure of this strategy, but at the time these men were in a definite minority: “Many people around them expected evil to triumph and sought to make their peace with it. These two did not” (265).
Churchill and Orwell were two champions for freedom, albeit in their own ways. Ricks' thesis is that:
“Churchill and Orwell recognized that the key question of their century ultimately was not who controlled the means of production, as Marx thought, or how the human psyche functioned, as Freud taught, but rather how to persevere the liberty of the individual during an age when the state was becoming powerfully intrusive into private life (3).”
Although from different social classes, Churchill and Orwell had remarkably similar experiences in their formative years. Both men had relatively uninvolved fathers. Both men experienced years as war correspondents, Churchill in the Boer War and Orwell during the Spanish Civil War. As Ricks intersperses the life experiences of Churchill and Orwell with their writings (and Churchill’s speeches), he provides a compelling apologetic for freedom.
Even with failed totalitarian nation-states littering the ash-heap of recent history, modern culture often expresses a positive view of expansive government power. Sometimes this is expressed as approval of communism or sometimes as support for socialism (there is a distinction between social programs and socialism as a system of government). Regardless, both systems of government lead in a similar direction--to totalitarianism. Against that way of thinking, Churchill and Orwell provides a stark warning. Orwell, more of a leftist himself, cautioned:
“So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot” (127).
As Christians, we understand that part of being created in the image of God (Gen. 1:26) is our accountability to God for the stewardship of our lives. Therein lies our first loyalty. Beyond this, the first institution God created was the family. This is another layer of accountability and loyalty that God has placed in our lives. Before any other obligations, we relate to one another as husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, and brothers and sisters. After this, government exists, as a minister of God (Rom. 13:1) to restrain and punish evil and promote justice. Any philosophy of government that does not begin with this biblical framework inevitably replaces God with the state, resulting in the oppression of people.