Orwell - Post Great War Awakening

The Silent Generation, the Baby Boomer Generation, Generation-X, the Millennial Generation (or Generation-Y) and the Pivotal Generation (Generation Z)
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ridgel
Posts: 75
Joined: Fri Feb 20, 2009 1:33 am

Orwell - Post Great War Awakening

Post by ridgel »

Hi John and all,

I found a passage in "The Road to Wigan Pier" which I couldn't let slip by with respect to generational dynamics. This is from the third paragraph of chapter IX:

But those years, during and just after the war [ WWI ], were a queer time to be at school, for England was nearer revolution than she has been since or had been for a century earlier. Throughout almost the whole nation there was running a wave of revolutionary feeling which has since been reversed and forgotten, but which has left various deposits of sediment behind it. Essentially, though of course one could not then see it in perspective, it was a revolt of youth against age, resulting directly from the war. In the war the young had been sacrificed and the old had behaved in a way which, even at this distance of time, is horrible to contemplate; they had been sternly patriotic in safe places while their sons went down like swathes of hay before the German machine guns. Moreover, the war had been conducted mainly by old men and had been conducted with supreme incompetence. By 1918 every one under forty was in a bad temper with his elders and the mood of anti-militarism which followed naturally upon the fighting was extended into a general revolt against orthodoxy and authority. At that time there was among the young, a curious cult of hatred of "old men." The dominance of "old men" was held to be responsible for every evil known to humanity, and every accepted institution from Scott's novels to the House of Lords was derided merely because "old men" were in favour of it. For several years it was all the fashion to be a "Bolshie," as people then called it. England was full of half-baked antinomian opinions. Pacificism, internationalism, humanitarianism of all kinds, feminism, free love, divorce reform, atheism, birth-control--things like these were getting a better hearing than they would get in normal times. And of course the revolutionary mood extended to those who had been too young to fight, even to schoolboys. (emphasis mine)

The events described sound very much like a crisis pre-war and then a 1960's style awakening shortly after. Orwell was born in 1903. If he was an American he would be in the hero generation. Is Britain still out of sync with the U.S. generation-wise? If not, when did it sync up, and are there patterns to that sort of thing?

Anyways, food for thought. Cheers.

-Ridgel

John
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Joined: Sat Sep 20, 2008 12:10 pm
Location: Cambridge, MA USA
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Re: Orwell - Post Great War Awakening

Post by John »

Ridgel wrote: > I found a passage in "The Road to Wigan Pier" which I couldn't let
> slip by with respect to generational dynamics. This is from the
> third paragraph of chapter IX: ...

> The events described sound very much like a crisis pre-war and
> then a 1960's style awakening shortly after. Orwell was born in
> 1903. If he was an American he would be in the hero generation. Is
> Britain still out of sync with the U.S. generation-wise? If not,
> when did it sync up, and are there patterns to that sort of
> thing?
That's a very interesting quote. It illuminates the attitudes and
behaviors of the Lost Generation, which is of the same generational
type as today's Generation-X.

As for the question of Britain "syncing up" with the U.S. (i.e.,
having roughly the same generational timeline), Britain and the US
were several decades apart throughout the 1600s, 1700s and 1800s,
until the time of the American Civil War.

We had a discussion about this in the old fourth turning forum. David
Krein pointed out: "The Wars of National Unification from the 1850s to
the 1870s were really global in scope, from Mexico, the United States,
Paraguay, Uruguay, Brazil, and Argentina, Japan, China, India, to
Poland, Italy and Germany (and Romania snuck in there without a war
while Hungary got a separate identity from Austria after the 1866 loss
to Prussia)."

These wars of national unification could be considered a kind of
precursor to WW I, since they involved so much of the world,
including the US and Britain. It was at this time that the world's
generational timelines coalesced around two of them, which we now
call the World War I timeline (Russia, Eastern Europe, the Mideast
and others) and the World War II timeline (North America, Western
Europe, India, China, Japan, Australia, and others).

In 2006, I did some research on Britain's involvement in the American
Civil War.

I went to books.google.com , and searched for free books on "history
of england." I ended up reviewing three of them, although the first
had the most comprehensive coverage of the American Civil War, and the
other two basically confirmed the first, although in briefer
form. Here are the main points that I learned from these three books:
  • Just prior to the American Civil War, there was almost a war with
    France caused by panic.
  • England's upper classes favored the South, who were most similar
    to England's upper classes.
  • England's lower classes favored the North, who were most similar
    to England's lower classes.
  • The British government remained officially neutral, though they
    favored the South.
  • The northern blockade of Southern ports, preventing the export of
    cotton, inflicted great hardship on Lancashire's cotton mills, which
    depended on the cotton for work
  • The British government was tempted to break the blockade, but
    decided to stay neutral.

    This was the opposite situation from the Napoleonic wars, where
    England had blockaded Europe's ports, and America began the War or
    1812 to break the blockade.
  • Even Britain's neutrality was resented by Northerners, who felt
    it indirectly supported the South.
  • The South didn't like it much either, since they wanted real help
    from the English.
  • Late in 1861, Northern Captain Wilkes boarded an British ship and
    removed two Confederate envoys. This incident caused Britain to
    start preparing for war against the North. It was averted only
    because the North backed down, freed the envoys, and apologized.
  • The Confederacy purchased a ship, the CSS Alabama, from Britain
    through France as an intermediary, to the embarassment of Britain
    when the ship was launched. Later, an international tribunal awarded
    America damages from Britain for violating neutrality.
This is one of those rare situations when a country prepares for a
crisis war and is all geared up for war, but the triggering event
never occurs, or is aborted. For example, this is what happened with
Switzerland in WW II, which was able to maintain neutrality, although
it was preparing for war with Germany.

John

ridgel
Posts: 75
Joined: Fri Feb 20, 2009 1:33 am

Re: Orwell - Post Great War Awakening

Post by ridgel »

Thanks for the analysis. I still don't understand why WWII came so close on the heels of WWI with respect to generational dynamics. WWI seems like a crisis war, by almost any understanding - it started with almost no apparent provocation, and was entered into with excitement across Europe. And afterwards, even the nominal winners were crushed, Britain especially having lost a generation of its best on the battlefield. So why wasn't there a recovery and then an awakening 20 years hence like the one following WWII? Obviously Britain was dragged relucantly into WWII by the actions of Hitler, but they did eventually fight another existential battle. Does it matter to GD whether a war is won or lost to determine the timing of an awakening?

-Ridgel

John
Posts: 11478
Joined: Sat Sep 20, 2008 12:10 pm
Location: Cambridge, MA USA
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Re: Orwell - Post Great War Awakening

Post by John »

Ridgel wrote: > Thanks for the analysis. I still don't understand why WWII came so
> close on the heels of WWI with respect to generational dynamics.
> WWI seems like a crisis war, by almost any understanding - it
> started with almost no apparent provocation, and was entered into
> with excitement across Europe. And afterwards, even the nominal
> winners were crushed, Britain especially having lost a generation
> of its best on the battlefield. So why wasn't there a recovery and
> then an awakening 20 years hence like the one following WWII?
> Obviously Britain was dragged relucantly into WWII by the actions
> of Hitler, but they did eventually fight another existential
> battle. Does it matter to GD whether a war is won or lost to
> determine the timing of an awakening?
WW I was a crisis war, but not for America, not for Britain, and not
even for Germany. WW I was a crisis war for Russia (the Bolshevik
revolution) and the Mideast (collapse of the Ottoman empire).

The easiest way to think of WW I for America is that it's like the
Vietnam war, not like WW II. The Vietnam war turned out to be very
unpopular for Americans, and so did WW I. America remained neutral
for many years, despite repeated German terrorist attacks on
Americans, there was a powerful pacifist (antiwar) movement that
included high government officials, and it resulted in no important
transformations in America.

Even for Germany it was a non-crisis war. They got involved
reluctantly, only because of a treaty with Austria, they mishandled
the war from the beginning, and they capitulated long before they had
to, because of strong anti-war sentiment in Germany.

The following are places where I've discussed these issues in the
past. The first one gives the great American anti-war poem "In
Flanders Fields," and the third one discusses the great British
anti-war poem "Anthem for a Doomed Youth," as well as the German
anti-war book "Im Westen Nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western
Front)."

** In Flanders Fields
** http://www.generationaldynamics.com/cgi ... 11#e061111


** Tomorrow is the 90th Anniversary of the 1914 Christmas Truce
** http://www.generationaldynamics.com/cgi ... 23#e041223


** Politicians commemorate Battle of the Somme, July 1, 1916
** http://www.generationaldynamics.com/cgi ... 02#e060702


** Chapter 4 -- The Principle of Localization II
** http://www.generationaldynamics.com/cgi ... alization2


** Chapter 2 -- American History
** http://www.generationaldynamics.com/cgi ... canhistory


John

ridgel
Posts: 75
Joined: Fri Feb 20, 2009 1:33 am

Re: Orwell - Post Great War Awakening

Post by ridgel »

Good links - the "Transformation of the defeated nation" is one of the things that I was looking for in particular, namely how defeat affects the generational timeline vs. victory.

Reading Orwell's writings on the working class during the British version of the Great Depression, which seems if anything longer and grittier than the American version, made me think of John Maynard Keynes and his principle of government deficit spending to get out of a recession. Orwell describes in great detail the horrible housing conditions of the working or unemployed coal miners - leaky roofs, families of 10 living in a single bedroom, etc. At the same time that the miners were living in these conditions, many coal mines were shuttered due to lack of demand. So there was plenty of latent demand for housing, and plenty of surplus labor and material to build it. But there was no money to set it in motion. The "dividend collecting classes" that Orwell mentioned so often were satisfied with the status quo, however bad it might be for the bulk of the population. They had the money, and without enough demand there was no way to get it to the workers in the form of greater-than-subsistence wages. The Socialists at the time wanted to tax the rich (or worse) to help workers. Keynes' genius was in his roundabout approach to that redistribution. If he had proposed to tax the rich to support government programs he would have been just another Socialist economist. But instead he constructed an elaborate rationale of aggregate supply and demand, etc to justify government borrowing. Of course, the net effect of that borrowing on the rich was the same as taxation. The poor got government programs. And in the short term the rich got interest payments on the debt which kept most of them happy. In the longer term of course they had their money debased through the increased money supply, but few of them took a long enough view to protest that.

So from that perspective, it's kind of a polite lie of our society that we are "capitalist" but that the whole system depends on transfer payments in the form of borrowed money to periodically keep the rich from getting too rich and the rest of the economy from shutting down. The rich can avoid rebellion or collapse without admitting they're getting taxed and the politicians can hand out the goodies and get re-elected and the poor and middle classes can stay employed. Of course the exponential mathematics of interest payments mean the amount of borrowing will eventually become ridiculous and endanger the very fiat money system that makes the borrowing possible. But that's in the long term, and in the long term we're all dead.

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