Examine the fundamental assumptions that Mead makes about human nature. Choose one reading in the chapter "Human Nature and the Mind" as the basis for a comparison.
george orwell
Pacifism and the War
[1942]
"GEORGE ORWELL" is the pen name of Eric Blair (1903-1950), one of the most important and controversial English writers of the twentieth century. Though he published nine novels and several collections of essays and occasional pieces, his reputation as a major author rests almost entirely on two of his last works: Animal Farm (1945), a satirical allegory that presents the events of the Russian Revolution as an uprising of the animals on a farm, and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), a dystopian novel about a futuristic totalitarian society based on surveillance, punishment, and disinformation.
Though Orwell considered himself a socialist and a political liberal, he greatly disdained rigid ideologies—even liberal ones—which, he believed, caused people to be intolerant, irrational, and susceptible to manipulation by cynical, power-hungry politicians. Orwell constantly angered other liberals by attacking their sacred cows and their cherished notions about the world. He especially scorned Soviet Communism, the totalitarianism of which he recognized and attacked at a time when many left-leaning intellectuals in Europe and America were still defending that system, and Spanish, Italian, and German fascism, which he saw as the greatest threat to freedom in history.
Orwell's passionate antifascism during the early stages of World War II led him into a conflict with the liberal pacifist movement in England and America. Though he had once considered himself a pacifist, the aggression of Spain's Francisco Franco, Italy's Benito Mussolini, and, most of all, Germany's Adolf Hitler had convinced him that failure to fight enemies of this kind would eventually cause more suffering and misery than even the bloodiest war. In 1942, he began attacking pacifists in his monthly "London Letter" column in the American magazine Partisan Review. His attacks generated numerous responses from pacifists, including letters from the prominent British intellectuals D. S. Savage, George Woodcock, and Alex Comfort. Orwell wrote the following commentary for Partisan Review as a collective response to these three letters.
In this response, Orwell identifies one of the most difficult philosophical questions for any pacifist philosophy to answer: how can one respond nonviolently to genuinely evil people, such as Hitler, who will use violence to further their own agendas and who will never respond to nonviolent persuasion? For Orwell, pacifism in the face of unwarranted aggression was morally untenable.
Orwell begins his argument with a single, declarative thesis that he supports through a series of deductive arguments. In the process, he refers to and refutes arguments made earlier by the writers that he is responding to.
Pacifism. Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, "he that is not with me is against me." The idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle, while living on food which British sailors have to risk their lives to bring you, is a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security. Mr Savage remarks that "according to this type of reasoning, a German or Japanese pacifist would be 'objectively pro-British'." But of course he would be! That is why pacifist activities are not permitted in those countries (in both of them the penalty is, or can be, beheading) while both the Germans and the Japanese do all they can to encourage the spread of pacifism in British and American territories. The Germans even run a spurious "freedom" station which serves out pacifist propaganda indistinguishable from that of the PPU.[254] They would stimulate pacifism in Russia as well if they could, but in that case they have tougher babies to deal with. In so far as it takes effect at all, pacifist propaganda can only be effective against those countries where a certain amount of freedom of speech is still permitted; in other words it is helpful to totalitarianism.
I am not interested in pacifism as a "moral phenomenon." If Mr Savage and others imagine that one can somehow "overcome" the German army by lying on one's back, let them go on imagining it, but let them also wonder occasionally whether this is not an illusion due to security, too much money and a simple ignorance of the way in which things actually happen. As an ex-Indian civil servant, it always makes me shout with laughter to hear, for instance, Gandhi2 named as an example of the success of non-violence. As long as twenty years ago it was cynically admitted in Anglo-Indian circles that Gandhi was very useful to the British Government. So he will be to the Japanese if they get there. Despotic governments can stand "moral force" till the cows come home; what they fear is physical force. But though not much interested in the "theory" of pacifism, I am interested in the psychological processes by which pacifists who have started out with an alleged horror of violence end up with a marked tendency to be fascinated by the success and power of Nazism. Even pacifists who wouldn't own to any such fascination are beginning to claim that a Nazi victory is desirable in itself. In the letter you sent on to me, Mr Comfort considers that an artist in occupied territory ought to "protest against such evils as he sees," but considers that this is best done by "temporarily accepting the status quo" (like Deat or Bergery,3 for instance?). A few weeks back he was hoping for a Nazi victory because of the stimulating effect it would have upon the arts:
Gandhi: Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948), Indian political and spiritual leader who led nonviolent protests against the British rule of India.
Deat or Bergery: Marcel Deat and Gaston Bergery were French politicians who collaborated with the Nazi forces occupying France during World War II. Bergery appealed to pacifism in arguing to cooperate with Adolf Hitler.
As far as I can see, no therapy short of complete military defeat has any chance of re-establishing the common stability of literature and of the man in the street. One can imagine the greater the adversity the greater the sudden realisation of a stream of imaginative work, and the greater the sudden katharsis of poetry, from the isolated interpretation of war as calamity to the realisation of the imaginative and actual tragedy of Man. When we have access again to the literature of the war years in France, Poland and Czechoslovakia, I am confident that that is what we shall find. . . .
I pass over the money-sheltered ignorance capable of believing that literary life is still going on in, for instance, Poland, and remark merely that statements like this justify me in saying that our English pacifists are tending towards active pro-Fascism. But I don't particularly object to that. What I object to is the intellectual cowardice of people who are objectively and to some extent emotionally pro-Fascist, but who don't care to say so and take refuge behind the formula "I am just as anti-Fascist as anyone, but—." The result of this is that so-called peace propaganda is just as dishonest and intellectually disgusting as war propaganda. Like war propaganda, it concentrates on putting forward a "case," obscuring the opponent's point of view and avoiding awkward questions. The line normally followed is "Those who fight against Fascism go Fascist themselves." In order to evade the quite obvious objections that can be raised to this, the following propaganda-tricks are used:
The Fascising processes occurring in Britain as a result of war are systematically exaggerated.
The actual record of Fascism, especially its pre-war history, is ignored or pooh- 5 poohed as "propaganda." Discussion of what the world would actually be like