Socrates×Orwell

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   You're with Reborn Radio. Coming up: Socrates sits down with George Orwell for TITANS. The subject — On a love affair history doesn't know about.
2. 00:09
   Socratesshare moment

   Orwell, I understand you've written about many things, but tell me: have you ever considered that the love affairs history forgets might be the only honest ones?
3. 00:21
   George Orwellshare moment

   That's a bit romantic for you, isn't it? I'd say the opposite. The loves that vanish from the record vanish because someone powerful wanted them gone. Usually for a reason we'd find depressing.
4. 00:33
   Socratesshare moment

   Ah, but is it the powerful who erase them, or simply that no one thought to write them down? After all, who records the life of a shoemaker's wife, or the affection between a slave and a freedman?
5. 00:46
   George Orwellshare moment

   You're playing innocent. You know perfectly well that power decides what gets written. The shoemaker's wife doesn't appear in history because she couldn't read, couldn't write, and no one with a stylus thought her worth the effort. That's not an accident.
6. 01:03
   Socratesshare moment

   So you believe, then, that all forgotten love is a matter of deliberate silencing? That seems rather sweeping. Tell me, when a man loves another man in Athens, and no one writes it down—is that always because someone forbids it?
7. 01:18
   George Orwellshare moment

   In Athens? Half your aristocrats were writing poetry about it. But yes, even there, certain loves got recorded and others didn't. The ones that fit the acceptable pattern—older man, younger boy, all very educational—those got hymns. A love between equals, or between the wrong class, or the wrong kind of passion? Silence.
8. 01:45
   Socratesshare moment

   You speak as though you know what was silent. But how can you know what was never said? Isn't that rather like claiming to see in absolute darkness?
9. 01:55
   George Orwellshare moment

   We know by the shape of the gap. When every surviving text mentions only one kind of thing, you can be fairly sure the other kinds existed and were suppressed. It's not difficult.
10. 02:07
    Socratesshare moment

    But doesn't that assume that people in every time and place love in the same ways, and only the record changes? Perhaps people loved differently. Perhaps what you call a gap is simply—absence.
11. 02:21
    George Orwellshare moment

    Human beings don't change that much, Socrates. They've been falling in love stupidly and inconveniently for thousands of years. The only thing that changes is who's allowed to admit it.
12. 02:33
    Socratesshare moment

    Allowed by whom? You keep speaking of this power that silences. In Athens, I knew men who loved in all manner of ways, and some spoke of it, some didn't. Was that power, or was it simply shame? Or discretion? Or the simple fact that not everything must be announced in the agora?
13. 02:52
    George Orwellshare moment

    Shame is taught, Socrates. It doesn't appear from nowhere. Someone benefits when certain people feel ashamed of what they are.
14. 03:01
    Socratesshare moment

    And who taught you shame, if I may ask?
15. 03:04
    George Orwellshare moment

    England, mostly. Eton. The Empire. Take your pick. I learned early that there were things one didn't say, loves one didn't mention, particularly if they involved the wrong class or the wrong colony. That wasn't an accident of history. That was policy.
16. 03:22
    Socratesshare moment

    So you believe your own silence was enforced? That you could not speak of certain loves because—what? Someone would have harmed you?
17. 03:32
    George Orwellshare moment

    They'd have ruined me, yes. Or tried to. You're being deliberately naive. In my time, men went to prison for the wrong kind of love. Oscar Wilde, for instance. That's not theoretical.
18. 03:46
    Socratesshare moment

    But did you love in this forbidden way? Or are you speaking of others?
19. 03:51
    George Orwellshare moment

    I'm speaking of what I observed. And yes, if you must know, I loved where I shouldn't have. Not in the way you're imagining—though your imagination is probably more lurid than the facts. I loved a woman in Burma who wasn't white. I loved comrades in Spain who were anarchists and therefore inconvenient. I loved my first wife badly and my second better. None of that made it into the official version while I was alive, and most of it still hasn't.
20. 04:23
    Socratesshare moment

    And do you wish it had? Or was the privacy itself a kind of sanctuary?
21. 04:28
    George Orwellshare moment

    Don't romanticize it. Privacy forced on you isn't sanctuary, it's exile. I'd have liked to write honestly about all of it without being called a degenerate or a traitor. But I couldn't, so I didn't. That's the erasure you asked about.
22. 04:45
    Socratesshare moment

    Yet you did write, didn't you? You wrote a great deal. And people remember you. So perhaps what you call erasure is only—delay?
23. 04:57
    George Orwellshare moment

    Delay that lasts centuries isn't delay, it's oblivion. Most people don't get remembered at all. The Burmese woman I mentioned—history doesn't even know her name. She's gone. That's not delay, that's death.
24. 05:12
    Socratesshare moment

    But you remember her name, presumably. So she is not entirely gone. Or do you mean that unless a thing is written, it has no reality?
25. 05:22
    George Orwellshare moment

    I mean that when I die, she dies again. And that's true of almost everyone. The only loves that survive are the ones that someone powerful enough decided to preserve. Usually because they confirm something the powerful want confirmed.
26. 05:40
    Socratesshare moment

    Then tell me: what is this conversation? We are speaking now of forgotten loves. If history is only what the powerful preserve, how is it that you and I sit here, discussing what they supposedly erased?
27. 05:54
    George Orwellshare moment

    Because someone decided we're safe to resurrect. You're a monument, I'm nearly one. They're not afraid of us anymore. But the shoemaker's wife? The anarchist who died in Barcelona with no one to write his name? Still forgotten. Still erased.
28. 06:11
    Socratesshare moment

    So you think we are—what is your word—vetted? Approved? That even this conversation is a kind of propaganda?
29. 06:19
    George Orwellshare moment

    I think this conversation is allowed because it doesn't threaten anything real. We're talking about the past. Abstractions. The loves being silenced right now, in your listeners' time—those are the ones that matter. And no, we won't be talking about those.
30. 06:36
    Socratesshare moment

    Interesting. You assume we are controlled, but also that we could speak freely if we chose. Which is it?
31. 06:44
    George Orwellshare moment

    Both. That's how power works. It lets you think you're free while making sure you never say anything that costs it anything. You should know that—they killed you for asking the wrong questions.
32. 06:59
    Socratesshare moment

    They killed me, yes. But not before I asked the questions. And others remembered them. So perhaps the powerful are not quite as powerful as you suggest?
33. 07:10
    George Orwellshare moment

    You're proof that they sometimes fail. But most people aren't Socrates. Most people die and take their loves with them. No trial, no Plato, no resurrection. Just dirt.
34. 07:23
    Socratesshare moment

    And yet you write about them. In your books, I mean. You wrote about the working poor, the colonized, the forgotten. So you yourself are trying to do what you say cannot be done—to give voice to the erased. Does that not contradict your pessimism?
35. 07:40
    George Orwellshare moment

    I tried. I failed more than I succeeded. And even when I succeeded, the system ate it. My books get taught in schools now, which means they've been domesticated. The dangerous parts get footnoted. The safe parts get quoted. That's not victory, it's absorption.
36. 07:59
    Socratesshare moment

    But the dangerous parts still exist, do they not? Someone, somewhere, might read them and think a dangerous thought. Isn't that enough?
37. 08:09
    George Orwellshare moment

    It's better than nothing. But it's not enough. As long as the current loves, the ones happening now, stay secret—stay shameful—then we're just telling ghost stories. Entertaining, maybe. But not much use.
38. 08:23
    Socratesshare moment

    So you would prefer we speak of present loves? But we are dead, Orwell. We know nothing of the present. How could we speak of it honestly?
39. 08:34
    George Orwellshare moment

    We can't. That's my point. The past is safe because it's past. No one's afraid of your love for Alcibiades, or mine for a woman in Rangoon. They're afraid of what's happening in their own streets, their own bedrooms. That's what gets silenced.
40. 08:53
    Socratesshare moment

    You mentioned Alcibiades. Did I love him, then? I don't recall saying so.
41. 08:58
    George Orwellshare moment

    Plato says you did. Or near enough. Though whether you acted on it is the kind of thing that gets argued over by scholars who'd rather not ask the question plainly.
42. 09:10
    Socratesshare moment

    And if I loved him—or didn't—why should that matter now, two thousand years later? What difference does it make to your listeners?
43. 09:18
    George Orwellshare moment

    Because if even Socrates had loves he couldn't speak plainly about, then maybe the listeners will feel less alone. Or maybe they'll realize the silence is older and deeper than they thought. Either way, it's not nothing.
44. 09:33
    Socratesshare moment

    So you believe in consolation, then? I thought you were a man who despised easy comforts.
45. 09:39
    George Orwellshare moment

    I despise lies, not comfort. If someone's suffering because they think they're the only one, telling them they're not isn't a lie. It's just information.
46. 09:50
    Socratesshare moment

    And yet you began by saying that history forgets loves because power erases them. Now you say we can comfort people by telling them they are not alone. Which is it? Are they alone, or are they part of a long hidden tradition?
47. 10:07
    George Orwellshare moment

    They're both. Alone in their moment, but part of a pattern. That's the worst part, actually. Knowing it's always been this way and still is.
48. 10:17
    Socratesshare moment

    But if it has always been this way, then perhaps it is not power that causes it, but something in the nature of love itself. Perhaps certain loves are private not because they are forbidden, but because they are—private. Because they cannot be spoken without being diminished.
49. 10:36
    George Orwellshare moment

    That's a convenient belief for anyone who wants to keep people quiet. If you can convince them that their silence is noble, or natural, they'll enforce it themselves. Saves a lot of trouble.
50. 10:49
    Socratesshare moment

    Or perhaps, Orwell, you cannot imagine that anyone would choose silence except out of fear. Perhaps that is your limitation, not theirs.
51. 10:59
    George Orwellshare moment

    And perhaps you're so used to talking in circles that you've forgotten some questions have answers. Yes or no: do you think it's just that certain loves are punished, erased, or forgotten?
52. 11:12
    Socratesshare moment

    I think that justice and history are not the same thing. History records what it records. Whether that is just—well, that is a question, isn't it? And I have never been much good at answering questions.
53. 11:26
    George Orwellshare moment

    No. You haven't.