Orwell for Christians

Several weeks ago, Rick asked the question, "Is Christian Jurisprudence possible?"  One surprising source of insight might be the work of George Orwell, at least in terms of his skepticism toward modern humanity's devotion to overarching normative theories of society.  In an article entitled "Orwell for Christians" in the current First Things, Paul Griffiths explains:

[Orwell] was, from a Christian point of view, a self-tortured pagan whose moral vision was unusually clear.  From a reading or rereading of him at the beginning of the third millenium Christians can learn how easy it is to justify atrocity by misplaced theory, whether in politics or ethics.  Many Christians in Europe in the 1930s and '40s (Catholics in Spain and Italy; Protestants and Catholics alike in Germany) permitted themselves to connive at or endorse atrocity because of the seductions of theory.  Orwell reminds us of the first thing to do when you're faced with actions or recommendations to actions that are malum in se: don't theorize; actively resist and speak out.  He reminds us, too, that most of us have an uneasy grasp of theoretical argument, much more uneasy than our grasp upon our moral responses to what we are faced with. . . .

Arguing with people whose consciences and perceptions are deeply malformed can do no good, for the difficulty isn't at the conceptual level.  Argument about such matters as whether torture is always wrong, whether genocide is an acceptable instrument of foreign policy, whether state-authorized killing has justifications beyond the protection of the innocent, whether killing babies in utero is defensible and so on, is not only useless, however.  It is also dangerous because it will typically seem to take seriously a corrupt standpoint.  The virtue we can learn from Orwell is to see the power of language to depict and of thought to grasp the meaning of what is depicted, and to strive to use language in such a way that it more fully realizes that power.

This virtue is not much in evidence in American political or literary life today, and the passionate divisions among those on the left and right trying to expropriate Orwell for their own use almost all show precisely the kind of slavery to their own smelly little political orthodoxies that Orwell encouraged us to see through.  If we can see through them with a clear eye, we will see what he saw, which is that the field of human history and human political effort is a potter's field, a field of blood.  Every step we take is on ground saturated with the blood of the slaughtered.  That has not changed since Orwell's time, and we can benefit from paying close attention to his lesson, which is that a sure way to increase the flow of that blood is to think ourselves in possession of a sure and complete means to stanch it.  To act on such a conviction is to sacrifice the present to an imaginary future, and it is among Orwell's principal virtues that he presses that truth upon us.  It should not be a hard lesson for Christians to learn, for it is written into the text of our tradition, too.

I don't read this as suggesting that the development of Christian legal theory is impossible or imprudent, but that it is necessarily different.  Much of this difference, in my view, will flow from the humility with which Christian theorists approach their work.

Rob