From: word_chemist@hotmail.com   
      
   'Experience, confirmed by what happened in the second world war, where all   
   values and loyalties became confused, also taught him that, in the event,   
   human beings mattered more than abstract ideas; it was something he had   
   always felt in his bones. Orwell never wholly abandoned his belief that a   
   better society could be created by the force of ideas, and in this sense he   
   remained an intellectual. But the axis of his attack shifted from existing,   
   traditional capitalist society to the fraudulent utopias with which Lenin   
   had sought to replace it. His two greatest books, _Animal Farm_ and   
   _Nineteen Eighty-Four_ were essentially critiques of realised abstractions,   
   of the totalitarian control over mind and body which an embodied utopia   
   demanded, and (as he put it) 'of the perversions to which a centralized   
   economy is liable'.   
   Such a shift in emphasis necessarily led Orwell to take a highly critical   
   veiw of intellectuals as such. This accorded well with his temperament,   
   which might be described as regimental rather than bohemian....Intellectuals   
   who feel most solidarity with their class have long recognised him as an   
   enemy. Thus, in her essay on Orwell, Mary McCarthy, sometimes confused in   
   her political ideas but nothing if not caste-conscious, was severe: Orwell   
   was 'conservative by temperament, as opposed as a retired colonel or working   
   man to extremes of conduct, dress or thought'. He was 'an incipient   
   philistine.' His socialism was 'an unexamined idea off the top of his head,   
   sheer rant'. His pursuit of Stalinists was occasionally a 'a mere product of   
   personal dislike'. His 'political failure... was one of thought'. Had he   
   lived he must surely have moved to the right, so 'it was a blessing for him   
   probably that he died.' (This last thought - better dead than anti-red - is   
   a striking example of the priorities of archetype intellectuals.)   
     One reason why professional intellectuals moved away from Orwell was his   
   growing conviction that, while it was right to continue to look for   
   political solutions, 'just as a doctor must try to save the life of a   
   patient who is probably going to die', we had to start 'by recognizing that   
   political behaviour is largely non-rational', and therefore not as a rule   
   susceptible to the kind of solutions intellectuals habitually sought to   
   impose.'   
      
      
      
   ROBBIE   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)