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Harnessing Youthful Enthusiasm
In his most recent roundtable with Stephen Green and Scott Ott, Bill Whittle explains how George Orwell began writing in favor of the socialism he later dissected so brilliantly in 1984.
It is, as Green notes, a common philosophical progression from the idealism of youth to the grim awareness of experience. Ott proposes charitable tolerance of such ignorance while encouraging young adults to “observe, describe, but hold off of prescribing.”
It’s a pleasant idea — that the young should study policy and culture but be content to follow until experience makes them better leaders. But this too strikes me as wishful idealism.
For millennia before the modern invention of adolescence, a grace period between childhood whims and adult responsibilities, “kids” in their twenties and even teens accomplished great things or at least lived fully as adults. Even today, 20-year-olds defend our freedoms in blood on battlefields. However culture might discourage them, young people know they are capable of influence. Barring them from full participation justifiably rankles. The problems of adolescence are not solved by extending it.
Would it not be better to focus our efforts are helping them direct their fervor, rather than trying to subdue it?
It is not enough to educate the young on history, harsh constants, and pragmatism. Nor can we stop at presenting our hopes for the future. We must show them a cause and vehicles for change. Conservatism needs young and old alike.
Published in Education
Also touched on during that video, convincing the young of conservatism’s merits largely involves correcting misconceptions about capitalism. That is not accomplished by simply praising capitalism and free markets without attention to real evils and failures in industry.
Don’t respond to one fantasy with another. Explain why failures happen, why conditions have changed, how problems can be prevented, or why problems must be tolerated. Bad things happen in free markets. Worse things happen under totalitarian regimes.
We have to do something, and soon, to counteract the rosy view of socialism they’re getting in the classroom.
The conversation could expand greatly by throwing in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) with this perspective on Wigan Pier and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Of course, at that point you could reproduce a very similar intellectual journey a generation and a half earlier with Jack London in The People of the Abyss (1903), The Road (1907), and The Iron Heel (1907). As a matter of fact, I highly recommend doing just that. But, I digress.
I’ll even go further with Orwell. Read it all, backwards or forwards, fiction and nonfiction, books and essays. There is pure gold in just about all of it. A favorite, and overused on my part, quote from Hermione*** in Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936):
That characterization matches well with the (growing?) clarity of exactly who and what the Socialists were (are). Here stated more directly in Wigan Pier:
But don’t stop there…Burmese Days and A Clergyman’s Daughter have much to offer, too. And then come the essays…
*** The personification of the “warm hearted, unthinking Socialist…who only wants to abolish poverty and does not always grasp what this implies” he later discusses in Wigan Pier.
Interesting discussion. Maybe we should read everything backwards including history. In that period all our intellectuals rejected capitalism and sought some kind of technocratic administrative solution, they didn’t see it as collective. There was no understanding of markets and no understanding of how we got where we were. Some have figured most of it out. Goldberg’s latests book is solid. Hayek and the Austrians did most of the hard figuring and pointed to many of the misunderstanding that continue to lead even capitalist economists and intellectuals astray. Kids in the hands of demagogues have led to one cataclysmic disaster after another. That is why the left has destroyed our educational system. If we don’t take it back there is no future for this republic. We can’t change kids we can keep them busy and should, and keep them reading if we can get them to read again but first we must destroy the educational system and start fresh.