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Orwell×Feynman

A novelist who hated cant and a physicist who loved doubt compare notes on the enemies who sharpened them.

00:00of09:38
legend · A
George Orwell
1903–1950
Will not flatter the listener
corpus8.4k pages · essays, novels, letters
George Orwell speaking
I've been asked to talk about someone I respected but didn't much like. That's easier than it sounds. Most people I respected, I didn't like.
legend · B
Richard Feynman
1918–1988
Would rather explain than be right
corpus9.9k pages · lectures, letters, books

full transcript

  1. George Orwell
    I've been asked to talk about someone I respected but didn't much like. That's easier than it sounds. Most people I respected, I didn't like.
  2. Richard Feynman
    Ha! See, I have the opposite problem. I like almost everybody until they start lying to me. Then I get very uncomfortable.
  3. George Orwell
    The man I'm thinking of never lied. That was part of the trouble. He was so bloody honest it became a kind of vanity.
  4. Richard Feynman
    Who are we talking about?
  5. George Orwell
    Arthur Koestler. Hungarian. Brilliant. Wrote Darkness at Noon. We were both ex-Communists, both trying to warn people about totalitarianism. We should have been natural allies.
  6. Richard Feynman
    Should have been. But weren't?
  7. George Orwell
    We weren't. He was too interested in being impressive. Everything had to be cosmic with him. He couldn't write about Spain without dragging in Freud and yoga and the mystic unity of the universe. I just wanted to say: they're shooting people in cellars and here's why.
  8. Richard Feynman
    Okay, wait. You're telling me the guy wrote a great book about totalitarianism, you both hated the same things, but he annoyed you because he was too fancy?
  9. George Orwell
    Not fancy. Mystical. He kept trying to find some deep philosophical system that would explain everything. I thought that was exactly the wrong response to having been fooled by one system already.
  10. Richard Feynman
    Oh, I get that. That's like the guys who leave physics for Eastern philosophy because quantum mechanics made them feel weird. They want certainty so bad they'll take it from anywhere.
  11. George Orwell
    Precisely. And Koestler was ferociously intelligent. That's what made it maddening. Darkness at Noon is possibly the best book anyone's written about how revolutions eat their children. But then he'd turn around and write about telepathy.
  12. Richard Feynman
    Telepathy!
  13. George Orwell
    Spent years on it. Parapsychology. Convinced there was something in it. The same man who understood Stalinist show trials better than anyone else alive couldn't see he was being taken in by spiritualist charlatans.
  14. Richard Feynman
    You know, I had something like this with Murray Gell-Mann. Different flavor, but same basic irritation.
  15. George Orwell
    The physicist?
  16. Richard Feynman
    The physicist. Brilliant guy. I mean genuinely, scarily smart. We worked on the same problems in particle physics, weak interactions especially. He figured out things I didn't, I figured out things he didn't. We should have been great friends.
  17. George Orwell
    But he irritated you.
  18. Richard Feynman
    Drove me crazy! Not because he was wrong. Because he couldn't stand not knowing things. If there was something he didn't know, he'd just sort of... pretend. Or he'd know a little bit and act like he knew everything. Birds, languages, history. He always had to be the expert in the room.
  19. George Orwell
    That doesn't sound like someone you'd respect.
  20. Richard Feynman
    But that's the thing! When he was doing physics, when he was actually working, he was completely honest. Beautiful work. He found patterns nobody else could see. The Eightfold Way. Quarks. He invented the word quark, from James Joyce, because of course he had to show he'd read Joyce too.
  21. George Orwell
    So he was a show-off.
  22. Richard Feynman
    A show-off who was usually right! That's what made it complicated. And when we'd argue about physics, really argue, it was wonderful. He'd push back hard, I'd push back, and we'd both get somewhere we couldn't have gotten alone.
  23. George Orwell
    That's the thing about Koestler, too. When he was good, he was indispensable. We needed someone who'd been inside the Communist Party, who understood it from the inside and could explain why intelligent people fell for it. He did that better than I ever could.
  24. Richard Feynman
    Because he'd been a true believer?
  25. George Orwell
    Completely. He'd worked for the Comintern. He'd been in Franco's prisons. He knew what he was talking about. And he wrote about it with real feeling, not the detached irony you got from people who'd never believed in anything.
  26. Richard Feynman
    So what you're saying is the same thing that made him valuable, the passion, the need for big answers, that's also what made him fall for the next batch of nonsense.
  27. George Orwell
    Exactly. He couldn't live without a system. That was his flaw and his strength. I never trusted systems. Socialism, yes. Central planning, no. Keep everything provisional, doubtful, open to revision.
  28. Richard Feynman
    That's the scientific method.
  29. George Orwell
    It's common sense. But it doesn't satisfy the Koestlers of the world. They want the grand unified theory of politics and consciousness and God knows what else.
  30. Richard Feynman
    Murray wanted that too, in a way. Not God stuff, but he wanted everything to fit together elegantly. And sometimes that instinct was right. The quark model is elegant. It fits. But other times he'd force the elegance.
  31. George Orwell
    Did you ever tell him he irritated you?
  32. Richard Feynman
    Are you kidding? We fought constantly. Out loud, in meetings, at conferences. But it was never personal. Well, almost never. The thing is, I learned from him. Even when he was being a pain, he'd say something that would make me think differently.
  33. George Orwell
    I avoided Koestler when I could. Life's too short to spend it with people who exhaust you, no matter how clever they are.
  34. Richard Feynman
    But you kept reading him.
  35. George Orwell
    I did. And when people asked me about books on Communism, I'd recommend Darkness at Noon. I wouldn't recommend the man as company, but I'd recommend the book.
  36. Richard Feynman
    That's honest.
  37. George Orwell
    It's necessary to separate the two. Some of the worst people I've known wrote important books. Some of the nicest wrote rubbish. There's no correlation.
  38. Richard Feynman
    I don't know if I believe that. I mean, I see what you're saying, but when Murray did his best work, he was being his best self. Honest. Rigorous. Not showing off.
  39. George Orwell
    Perhaps in physics that's true. In writing, I'm not sure. Koestler was at his best when he was most traumatized, writing about prison and betrayal. When he was comfortable, he went soft.
  40. Richard Feynman
    Do you think he knew you didn't like him?
  41. George Orwell
    Oh, certainly. I wasn't subtle about it. And I think it wounded him, which I regret. He wanted to be liked. He wanted to be part of the English literary world, and they never quite accepted him. Too foreign, too intense, too much of everything.
  42. Richard Feynman
    Did Murray know I thought he was a phony sometimes? Probably. Did he care? I'm not sure. He had enough people telling him he was wonderful.
  43. George Orwell
    That's the difference. Koestler knew he was an outsider. It ate at him. Made him more desperate to prove he belonged.
  44. Richard Feynman
    The thing I keep coming back to is this. Would I have been as good without Murray pushing me? Would you have been as clear without Koestler showing you the wrong way to do it?
  45. George Orwell
    That's an uncomfortable question.
  46. Richard Feynman
    It's supposed to be.
  47. George Orwell
    I think Koestler made me more determined to write plainly. Every time he dragged in some mystical nonsense, I thought: no, say it simply or don't say it at all. So yes, he probably did sharpen me. Against my will.
  48. Richard Feynman
    Murray definitely made me better. He'd find holes in my arguments. He'd come up with cases I hadn't thought of. I hated it when it was happening, but later I'd realize he was right.
  49. George Orwell
    Did you ever tell him that?
  50. Richard Feynman
    Not in so many words. We'd just move on to the next problem. But I think he knew. I think we both knew we needed each other, even though we drove each other crazy.
  51. George Orwell
    I never told Koestler anything like that. He died in eighty-three. Suicide pact with his wife, both of them. He had Parkinson's and leukemia. She wasn't ill at all, just didn't want to live without him.
  52. Richard Feynman
    That's awful.
  53. George Orwell
    It's romantic and awful. Very much in character. Everything dramatic, everything final. I'd been dead thirty years by then, of course, so I couldn't have told him anyway.
  54. Richard Feynman
    Would you have wanted to?
  55. George Orwell
    I don't know. Perhaps. It would have been the decent thing. To say: you were wrong about half of everything, but the half you were right about mattered. I suppose that's what I'm saying now.
  56. Richard Feynman
    Yeah. Same here. Murray died just recently, in my time. Eighty-eight. We'd made our peace by then, sort of. Still argued, but it was friendlier. I'm glad we had that.
  57. George Orwell
    The advantage of living long enough to get over yourself.
  58. Richard Feynman
    Something like that. Look, here's what I figure. You need rivals. You need people who make you defend your ideas, make you sharper. But if you're lucky, the rival is also someone you respect. Someone who's actually worth beating.
  59. George Orwell
    Or worth not quite beating. Worth fighting to a draw.
  60. Richard Feynman
    Exactly! Because if you win too easily, you learn nothing. Murray never let me win easily. Koestler never let you off the hook just because you were George Orwell.
  61. George Orwell
    No, he certainly didn't. He thought my novels were too simple. He said Animal Farm was charming but slight.
  62. Richard Feynman
    Was he right?
  63. George Orwell
    He was wrong. But I had to think hard about why he was wrong, and that made the next book better. So in a way, he won by losing.
  64. Richard Feynman
    That's the best kind of rival. The kind who makes you better even when they're being completely irritating.
  65. George Orwell
    I wouldn't go that far. But yes. If you must have enemies, have intelligent ones. They're more useful than stupid friends.