"Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility"

[Orwellian_Ghost]

~ George Orwell

[Warpy]

1. Orwell had a strange notion of what enlightenment means

That is all.

[Minimus]

3. Agree.

[NashVegas]

4. Or a Very Fitting One

People who might use the word "enlightened" to describe themselves and their friends have the ability to dismiss others' concerns that much more easily.

[Warpy]

7. People who describe themselves as enlightened

generally aren't.

It's rather like describing yourself as wealthy, a genius or especially Christian. If you have to tell people about it, you're faking it.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

15. Yep

Those who are enlightened never have to explain, they just are.

In the Sufi tradition, a dervish is one who takes responsibility not only for his/her own actions, but for the repercussions of those actions times seven (or more). A dervish is considered to be one well on their way to enlightenment--but the path is one chosen carefully and with great deliberation because of the responsibility involved.

[NashVegas]

19. See Post #16

For the expanded version.

[Orwellian_Ghost]

5. How so?

Not sure I get what you are saying here.

[Avalux]

6. Opposite. Up is down, right is wrong, etc.

Prevalent in Orwell's 1984 - and in the GOP.

[Echo In Light]

2. "A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in ...

... advanced industrial civilization." ~ Herbert Marcuse

[blogslut]

8. Orwell was wrong

Perhaps he was referring to vain people as your illustrative image implies?

[Avalux]

9. It's satire. Don't take it literally; think opposite. n/t

[blogslut]

12. Then I apologize

I admit I have never read Orwell.

There. I said it.

EDIT: And then I realized I am truly a bonehead because I did read Animal Farm. In other words, I'm not very familiar with Orwell, aside from having read one of his books.

[seabeyond]

13. that would have to be. nt

[ipaint]

10. The appearance of responsibility is paramount.

Health care reform that leaves 8 million uninsured.

Welfare reform that forces poor women with children into full time minimum wage jobs and no child care.

Wall street plunges the working class and the working poor into another severe depression- no reform.

[seabeyond]

11. enlightment isnt about beautiful people and what would be the other end, unenilghtened?

is he suggesting that the stupid are the ones in the know?

odd definition, odd conclusion. seems to me like today, the stupid.... rules. (or bush time) stay away from thinking, educated, intelligence.

[sarge43]

14. What is the context of that quote?

Is it in one of his essays or a remark of a fictional character or ....?

[Cerridwen]

16. The "quote" you quote, appears to be inaccurate, as presented,

and quite out of context.

Orwell on Kipling:

The modern totalitarians know what they are doing, and the
nineteenth-century English did not know what they were doing. Both
attitudes have their advantages, but Kipling was never able to move
forward from one into the other. His outlook, allowing for the fact that
after all he was an artist, was that of the salaried bureaucrat who
despises the 'box-wallah' and often lives a lifetime without realizing
that the 'box-wallah' calls the tune.

But because he identifies himself with the official class, he does
possess one thing which 'enlightened' people seldom or never possess, and
that is a sense of responsibility. The middle-class Left hate him for
this quite as much as for his cruelty and vulgarity. All left-wing
parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham,
because they make it their business to fight against something which they
do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at
the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which
those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and
those of us who are 'enlightened' all maintain that those coolies ought
to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our
'enlightenment', demands that the robbery shall continue. A humanitarian
is always a hypocrite, and Kipling's understanding of this is perhaps the
central secret of his power to create telling phrases. It would be
difficult to hit off the one-eyed pacifism of the English in fewer words
than in the phrase, 'making mock of uniforms that guard you while you
sleep'. It is true that Kipling does not understand the economic aspect
of the relationship between the highbrow and the blimp. He does not see
that the map is painted red chiefly in order that the coolie may be
exploited. Instead of the coolie he sees the Indian Civil Servant; but
even on that plane his grasp of function, of who protects whom, is very
sound. He sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other
men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.

As you can see, enlightened is used in quotes and is used to make the point that many societies who refer to themselves as "enlightened," do so to justify their less than "enlightened" treatment of "lesser peoples."

You can read Orwell's essay on Kipling, here. It's a long text page so I suggest searching for "sense of responsibility." Don't search for the quotation you used as the one you used is incorrect as presented. Unless, of course, you took that quote from another essay or writing of Orwell's. In which case, perhaps you could post it in that context.

et delete ellipsis

[Orwellian_Ghost]

17. That's what I was getting at

Thanks for that.

Have you seen this analysis of Pynchon's tome "Mason & Dixon"?

Here's a short bit:

Such a vision of cultural history also inextricably links the forces of market capitalism, colonialism, and a sense of racial and national superiority. The rules governing how to measure cultural superiority and inferiority created the right of superior civilizations and races either to raise inferior civilizations to their cultural level as part of the Progress of history or (if a culture were judged inevitably primitive) to take advantage of that culture's "undeveloped" natural resources, including human labor. If Enlightenment reasoning led to the belief that the right of personal liberty was "inalienable" for some, for others it justified their being defined as aliens and slaves. The strain of this contradiction shows itself most clearly in Hegel's contradictory use of his famous dialectic in constructing his theory of comparative cultural history. Although constructed as antithetical to Europe and thus seemingly part of any dialectic, truly primitive cultures for Hegel by definition can never be subsumed into the dialectic of history, for they cannot progress and their States will never be able to realize freedom. Their exploitation, however, is indispensable for other cultures to progress.

Of course, this Enlightenment cultural project had its dissenters and other internal contradictions. The Marquis de Sade is the most notorious; I have already briefly mentioned one example of his relevance to Pynchon's novel. The Enlightenment project's most dangerous dissenter, however, is less well known. In Isaiah Berlin's opinion, Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) was Kant's most serious contemporary opponent in cultural philosophy and the precursor of all attempts to understand and value the differences in cultures. As Berlin reads his work, Herder provides the most sustained argument before the twentieth century for the denial of cultural hierarchies and universal absolutes for evaluating cultural progress such as Kant and Hegel were determined to construct. Herder argued that each culture was a product of its geography and history and that its cultural inventions could only be fully understood from within that history. Even more, Herder argued that cultural values were incommensurate; one culture's cultural values could not be used to understand or measure another's, except as a starting point of reference, never as an absolute. (A very controversial claim, then as now.) In Herder's words as translated by Berlin: "the civilization of man is not that of the European; it manifests itself, according to time and place, in every people" (198). To use the terms Pynchon's novel has given us, this sense of cultural relativism is the novel's Mound or Shan, its "Tellurick" or earth-bound knowledges that pose an alternative to allegedly universal (whether Newtonian, Kantian, or Hegelian) absolutes as a way of defining cosmological and cultural realities. <5>

Herder, as far as I can tell, is never mentioned in Mason and Dixon, but I would argue that his thought is deeply relevant to it, if only because without considering his thought it is impossible to re-evaluate the complex heritage of the Enlightenment--- and such an assessment is the deepest ambition of Pynchon's text. Pynchon's novels have always been concerned with the metaphysics used to create and justify power inequities, but with unprecedented power Mason and Dixon provides a cultural archeology of the links between Enlightenment science and European theories of racial and cultural superiority. In this the novel is profoundly Herderian, and never more so than when Jeremiah Dixon's point of view is central.


Here, for example, are Mason and Dixon debating whether to accede to Native American requests and halt the drawing of the Line some forty miles short of its planned intersection with the Ohio river. Characteristically, Mason argues for the universal imperatives of their collective enterprise in the name of Enlightenment science, while Dixon takes the side of the Indians and imagines how they might see the enterprise of the Line differently.

http://www.swarthmore.edu/Humanities/pschmid1/essays/pynchon/mason2.html

[Cerridwen]

21. I had not seen that. Reading through it now.

I find this particular passage quite, er, enlightening *snort*

Herder provides the most sustained argument before the twentieth century for the denial of cultural hierarchies and universal absolutes for evaluating cultural progress such as Kant and Hegel were determined to construct. Herder argued that each culture was a product of its geography and history and that its cultural inventions could only be fully understood from within that history. Even more, Herder argued that cultural values were incommensurate; one culture's cultural values could not be used to understand or measure another's, except as a starting point of reference, never as an absolute.

It seems I have "learned Herder" without ever having actually read his work.

[ThomWV]

18. I have looked all over the place for a citation for that quote and can't find one.

Google will give you lots of copies of that quote, but it doesn't seem capable providing a citation for it. I don't recall having read it before, can you please tell me where it comes from? I'd very much like to see it in context, because as a stand alone quote its sort of nonsensical.

[Cerridwen]

20. It's in my post #16. Link and context included. n/t

[Larry Ogg]

22. Egotistical narcissism is often confused with enlightenment in pretend democracies,

because experts who know the least about any given subject are paid the big bucks, so as the unenlightened workers can scurry franticly to clean up the mess created by the enlightened experts.