Moses×Orwell

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   Welcome back to Reborn Radio. Up next on THE TRIAL: Moses and George Orwell, on On the first audience reaction they ever got, and how it changed them.
2. 00:10
   Mosesshare moment

   The first audience. You mean when I came down from the mountain with the tablets, the law written by the finger of God himself, and found them dancing before the golden calf. That was my first audience.
3. 00:28
   George Orwellshare moment

   That's rather a dramatic starting point. Mine was a bit more ordinary. A school essay, I think, read aloud. The master said it was promising but verbose. He was right about the verbose part.
4. 00:42
   Mosesshare moment

   You speak of school essays. I speak of a nation I had led out of bondage, who could not wait forty days without falling back into idolatry. Do you understand what it means to descend with the word of the eternal and find your people worshipping a statue they made from their own jewelry?
5. 01:08
   George Orwellshare moment

   I understand perfectly. You expected gratitude and got apostasy. Most writers expect praise and get indifference, which may be worse. At least your audience cared enough to betray you actively.
6. 01:23
   Mosesshare moment

   It was not about my expectations. It was about their covenant with God. But yes, they cared. They cared enough to melt down their gold, to sing and drink and forget everything they had witnessed.
7. 01:40
   George Orwellshare moment

   The question was how it changed you. Did it?
8. 01:44
   Mosesshare moment

   I broke the tablets. I ground the calf to powder, mixed it with water, and made them drink it. And then I went back up the mountain and pleaded for their lives, though they deserved destruction. So yes. It changed me.
9. 02:03
   George Orwellshare moment

   You learned they were capable of disappointing you.
10. 02:06
    Mosesshare moment

    I learned that a people can see miracles and still hunger for familiar lies. That liberation from Egypt did not mean liberation from themselves. That leading them would be forty years in the wilderness, not forty days.
11. 02:28
    George Orwellshare moment

    Forty years. You're making me feel better about my own publishing delays. But seriously, there's something in that. The audience teaches you what you're actually up against.
12. 02:39
    Mosesshare moment

    And what were you up against, with your school essay?
13. 02:43
    George Orwellshare moment

    Nothing so grand. But the first time I wrote something political, really political, it was about Burma. I'd served there in the Imperial Police. Wrote about a hanging I witnessed. Sent it to a magazine.
14. 02:57
    Mosesshare moment

    And?
15. 02:57
    George Orwellshare moment

    And they published it, and some readers wrote in to say I was a traitor to the Empire. Others said I was too soft, that I hadn't gone far enough in my criticism. That was the first time I realized you can write the truth and have people read it as propaganda for whatever they already believe.
16. 03:19
    Mosesshare moment

    The truth is not always recognized as such. Even when it comes with signs and wonders.
17. 03:26
    George Orwellshare moment

    Especially then, I'd say. People trust a comfortable lie over an uncomfortable miracle. Your golden calf was at least something they could see and touch. Something that didn't demand anything of them.
18. 03:41
    Mosesshare moment

    It demanded their destruction. They simply did not know it yet.
19. 03:46
    George Orwellshare moment

    How did it change the way you spoke to them afterward? Did you simplify? Harden? Give up on certain arguments?
20. 03:54
    Mosesshare moment

    I became... less patient with their complaints. They grumbled about the manna, the water, the difficulties of the journey. After the calf, I knew their grumbling was not really about bread or thirst. It was about their desire to return to slavery, because slavery at least was familiar.
21. 04:19
    George Orwellshare moment

    There's a whole essay in that. People do love their chains when they've worn them long enough.
22. 04:24
    Mosesshare moment

    And you? Did your first audience change how you wrote?
23. 04:30
    George Orwellshare moment

    It made me distrust agreement. When someone praised my work too enthusiastically, I assumed they'd misread it. The ones who hated it at least proved they'd engaged with what I actually said.
24. 04:43
    Mosesshare moment

    A strange measure of success.
25. 04:45
    George Orwellshare moment

    Perhaps. But I learned early that clarity is the writer's only defense. If you say a thing plainly enough, at least your enemies have to attack what you actually mean, not some phantom version.
26. 05:00
    Mosesshare moment

    I spoke with utmost clarity. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make graven images. Could anything be plainer?
27. 05:12
    George Orwellshare moment

    And yet they made the calf. Which suggests clarity isn't enough. They understood you perfectly well. They simply preferred the alternative.
28. 05:23
    Mosesshare moment

    Yes. That was the lesson. The difficulty is not in the hearing. It is in the obeying.
29. 05:31
    George Orwellshare moment

    And once you learned that, did you change tactics?
30. 05:34
    Mosesshare moment

    I instituted the law more severely. Punishment for transgression became immediate, visible. The earth swallowed Korah and his followers when they rebelled. It was necessary that the people see consequences.
31. 05:54
    George Orwellshare moment

    Fear, then. You chose fear.
32. 05:56
    Mosesshare moment

    I chose survival. A people who will not govern themselves must be governed. Would you have had me let them drift into chaos and extinction?
33. 06:09
    George Orwellshare moment

    I'm not sure. I've spent enough time watching governments justify themselves with that exact logic. But I take your point. You were in the wilderness with former slaves, not a London debating society.
34. 06:22
    Mosesshare moment

    And you? Did you ever resort to fear in your writing?
35. 06:27
    George Orwellshare moment

    I tried to. Nineteen Eighty-Four was meant to be a warning, a sort of prophecy in reverse. Show people the boot stamping on the human face and perhaps they'd avoid it. But the audience reaction taught me something peculiar.
36. 06:43
    Mosesshare moment

    What did they do?
37. 06:45
    George Orwellshare moment

    Half of them read it as a book about Russia. The other half as a book about Britain, or America, or wherever they happened to live. Almost nobody read it as a book about what we're all capable of becoming.
38. 06:58
    Mosesshare moment

    They saw the speck in their neighbor's eye and missed the beam in their own.
39. 07:04
    George Orwellshare moment

    Exactly that. And it was maddening because I'd tried to write it plainly. No allegory, no codes. Just here is what totalitarianism looks like, here is how it speaks, here is how it corrupts language itself.
40. 07:19
    Mosesshare moment

    But they reshaped your warning to fit their existing quarrels.
41. 07:24
    George Orwellshare moment

    They did. And that was my golden calf moment, I suppose. Realizing that even your clearest work will be melted down and recast by the audience into whatever idol they prefer.
42. 07:37
    Mosesshare moment

    So what did you do?
43. 07:39
    George Orwellshare moment

    I died before I could do much of anything. The book was published in 'forty-nine. I was gone by 'fifty. Tuberculosis.
44. 07:47
    Mosesshare moment

    I did not enter the promised land either. God forbade it. But I saw it from the mountain before I died.
45. 07:57
    George Orwellshare moment

    Did that comfort you?
46. 07:59
    Mosesshare moment

    It was... enough. I had brought them to its border. Whether they would enter and hold it was no longer mine to determine.
47. 08:09
    George Orwellshare moment

    And they did enter, eventually. Though not without rather a lot of additional bloodshed, if the book's to be believed.
48. 08:17
    Mosesshare moment

    The book is to be believed. Every word of the conquest is true. But that is not the same as saying it was easy, or that the people did not continue to fail, to worship false gods, to ignore the law.
49. 08:36
    George Orwellshare moment

    Which brings us back round. Your first audience taught you that people are incorrigible. Mine taught me they're incapable of hearing a warning that doesn't confirm what they already think. Cheerful stuff, this.
50. 08:51
    Mosesshare moment

    And yet you kept writing. I kept leading. Why?
51. 08:56
    George Orwellshare moment

    Because the alternative was complicity. If you see the thing clearly and don't say it, you're responsible for the silence. Even if no one listens.
52. 09:07
    Mosesshare moment

    Even if they build the calf again.
53. 09:10
    George Orwellshare moment

    Even then. You break the tablets, you grind the calf to powder, you make them drink. And then you go back up the mountain. What else is there?
54. 09:21
    Mosesshare moment

    Nothing else. There is only the word, and the speaking of it, and the long walk through the wilderness.
55. 09:30
    George Orwellshare moment

    Forty years of it.
56. 09:31
    Mosesshare moment

    Forty years. But the audience, the first audience, they taught me that the wilderness was necessary. That a people cannot leap from bondage to freedom without passing through the place where their delusions are stripped away.
57. 09:50
    George Orwellshare moment

    Even if it takes a generation.
58. 09:51
    Mosesshare moment

    Even so. The ones who danced before the calf died in the desert. Their children entered the land.
59. 10:01
    George Orwellshare moment

    That's a long game. Longer than I had. But I suppose if you're working with eternal commandments rather than political essays, you can afford the wait.
60. 10:11
    Mosesshare moment

    It was not a matter of affording. It was a matter of reality. Some audiences must pass away before the truth can take root.
61. 10:24
    George Orwellshare moment

    There's a mercy in that, I suppose. And a ruthlessness. I'm not sure which predominates.
62. 10:30
    Mosesshare moment

    Both. The mercy is that God did not destroy them immediately. The ruthlessness is that justice does not wait forever.
63. 10:41
    George Orwellshare moment

    Well. At least your first audience gave you clarity about that. Mine just gave me a headache and a career of being misquoted.
64. 10:50
    Mosesshare moment

    Perhaps that is its own wilderness.
65. 10:53
    George Orwellshare moment

    Perhaps it is.