In Defence of Doubt
LIONEL TRILLING’S 1949 REVIEW of Orwell's then brand new novel 1984 popped up this morning in my inbox—this week's New Yorker classic. Fascinating to read now how a leading and influential literary critic received the book, and with what freedom from theory's grip he wrote. Trilling notes how Orwell, though he had transcended his class (in life and in mind and in identity), anchors his thinking in the certainties (about decency and justice, for example) taught by the upper-class education he had. I'm not sure that I'd see those values as certainties only an upper-class education can give. Some people acquire such faith by reading and thinking for themselves. But Trilling is not "cancelling" Orwell, one should note, for such a shortcoming, if that's what it is. There was a time when criticism played the ball and not the woman or the man. Indeed, Trilling comes across as fairly sure of his conclusions, aristocratic in his utterance, too.
Trilling shares with Orwell and with Dostoyevsky—and I confess I share with them—a suspicion of all orthodoxies, in particular of all theory that speaks a prickly and polysyllabic discourse, adamant and unforgiving. (One of my traditions, proudly and definitively non-conforming, is the social democracy within Methodism; like Keats, I am a Dissenter.) When theory has become dogma, when it presumes its rectitude (when it leaves no room for doubt or nuance), when it has forgotten the irreducible and organic nature of the human spirit, it has become dangerous, no matter what wrong it claims to right.
As Trilling notes in this review, our spiritual freedom, our humanity, is at just as much at risk from the left as from the right. Since the left, unlike the right, is by definition committed to tolerance and diversity, that might seem an excessive claim, but there is, these days, a ferocious piety one encounters among the arbiters of “right thinking” on the left that feels as life-denying, as monopolistic, almost, as anything one hears from the apologists of capital.
Beware all oligarchies of thought. It is not faith, Calvinist theology wisely taught, if it includes no doubt; if there is no forgiveness in it, no give, it’s probably a sect, a cover for good old-fashioned power-getting and power-keeping, another kind of cancelling. The colder it sounds, the more abstract it its utterance, the less likely it is to be true.
On the other hand: views of the world are probably worthy of some regard that have retained their capacity, through thousands of years, say, to sustain the earth and deepen an experience of what it means to be alive, and to help others live well, too—such a worldview as plays in the mystic traditions in many cultures, in Indigenous cosmologies, in Chinese poetics, in Sufism, in lyric poetry, for instance. And none of those will be without their contradictions and shortcomings, either.
But here’s an article of my faith, for what it is worth, and uttered with a fair measure of doubt: Literature—which, if it is any good, is captive to no ideology; which catches us (including the author) in our contradictions—is the discourse of freedom. So keep reading. Start here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1949/06/18/orwell-on-the-future?
