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.These are the processes that erode the revo-lutionary ideals, but then, on the elitist view, so much the worse forrevolutionary ideals.Orwell, of course, favored these ideals and wanted tosee them survive the after-revolution.The predicament posed by the story,a predicament that matters to anyone who favors the revolutionary idealsof animalism, is to determine how one can have one s revolutionary idealsand effective and stable social order at the same time.This is the dilemmaof revolutionary hope, a dilemma Orwell poses with admirable sophisti-cation in the novel.But of course the animals are unable to understand any of this.Ifthey are not sufficiently astute to grasp the challenges posed by the after-revolution, the  lower animals are at least reflective enough to notice whenthe pigs are tinkering with their revolutionary ideals.And this creates atension between rulers and ruled.How can the rulers make the necessaryadjustments in political ideals to satisfy the requirements of political neces-sity without generating a second revolution? This, of course, introducesthe problem of control that Orwell has Mr.Pilkington recognize at the endof the story.Control of the population now becomes a problem for post-revolutionary elites that must be resolved if social well-being is to berealized.If elites cannot manage the control problem, Animal Farm likelywill have another revolution in its future, and the sorry cycle will begin allover again.This parodies Burnham s cyclical theory of political change thatOrwell reproduces, straight-faced I think, in Goldstein s book in NineteenEighty-Four.The elitist reading thus suggests the logic that inclines the pigs to chiselaway at the revolutionary ideals of animalism, and this is the logic Orwellfound troubling.Needless to say, the  lower animals are worse off underthe pigs than they were under farmer Jones.They work harder, get less inreturn, and are badly exploited in order to allow the pigs to flourish.Thisis hardly a condition that realizes the well-being of the community as awhole.Instead, we are back to a familiar problem many are exploited sothat a few can enjoy a good life.But the economic impoverishment andexploitation of the  lower animals is only the most superficial of the con-cerns that seem to animate Orwell.The inequality that bothered him, afterall, was only tangentially related to the maldistribution of social goods.Orwell was hardly a strict economic egalitarian.He supposed it important72 ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWERfor everyone to have enough stuff to live decently.He never says muchabout the level of economic well-being required for a decent life, but fromhis few comments on the subject, we can suppose he did not set the eco-nomic bar terribly high.His most developed comments in this regard seemto come from  Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War, where he says:All that the working man demands is what these others would con-sider the indispensable minimum without which human life cannotbe lived at all.Enough to eat, freedom from the haunting terrorof unemployment, the knowledge that your children will get a fairchance, a bath once a day, clean linen reasonably often, a roof thatdoesn t leak, and short enough working hours to leave you with a littleenergy when the day is done.(Orwell, 1946a: 207 8)Satisfying these needs hardly demands much in the way of economicresources, and it seems reasonable to think this condition could be satisfiedwithin the context of elite rule.It even seems reasonable for elite rulersto make sure the workers live such economically decent lives, since if itbrings them a measure of happiness and security, they are likely to be moreaccepting of elite rule (or more likely, simply to not notice elite rule).But Orwell would still object, on egalitarian grounds, to the socialcondition created by the pigs even if this modest condition of economicdecency was realized.It was, after all, social inequality rather than strictlyeconomic inequality that mattered most to him.The class/caste divisionthat so bothered him was significantly indecent because of the presumedsuperiority of the upper caste.And the pigs quickly become an upper caste,as Orwell illustrates by having them turn into human-like creatures, leav-ing the animal world behind and adopting a new and presumably improvedspecies status.Given the resultant inequality of social status, Orwell, alongwith all other genuine egalitarians, would have grounds to complain evenif the lower castes were allowed to live reasonably decent lives in terms ofeconomic well-being.The indecency associated with economic inequalitymattered to Orwell chiefly because it was little more than a manifestationof the indecency linked to social inequality.What troubles about AnimalFarm, and what constitutes the heart of the indecency that flows throughthe story, is the transformation of the pigs into social elites, or into animalsmore equal (i.e., worthier) than the others.So, it is necessary to dwell a bit longer on the way elite rule generates thecaste system so abhorrent to Orwell.Why should ruling elites understoodin the sense of rule by those most able to rule wisely and effectively (thinkof Plato s philosophical rulers here) transform themselves, in their ownRevolting Pigs 73minds, into superior persons/animals elites in the social sense? The ques-tion invites a comparison with Plato s analysis of political decay near theend of the Republic.Timocracy (rule by able elites), Plato argued, will decayinto oligarchy because the elite class will attempt to solidify its politicalcontrol and perpetuate itself, and it will do so because it will come to wantto institutionalize its position of privilege.In the process the ruling elitesconfuse its class well-being with the well-being of the polity as a whole(Plato, 1961: 780 5).The problem, as Plato saw it, is a product of the lackof moral knowledge in the ruling elite, because they are not philosophersthey do not know the good, and therefore cannot act upon it.Was Orwell making a similar point? The traditional reading wouldseem to invite this conclusion.If Orwell was just parodying the Russianrevolution, he might be understood to be warning against allowing therevolutionary agenda to fall into the hands of morally flawed characterslike Stalin.Tyranny, on this reading, requires a tyrant, and a tyrant is under-stood as a flawed moral character.Accordingly, we might conclude thattroubles emerged on Animal Farm because Napoleon and Squealer weremorally flawed pigs [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]