The Question Of Decency

“Either we all live in a decent world, or nobody does,” wrote George Orwell. It’s from his essay, “The Lion and the Unicorn,” which was a prose-poem in some ways to the quiet virtues of his native England. It so affected me that I actually remember the moment I was reading it. I was a 13 year old on the top deck of a double-decker bus, the windows opaque with condensation, the air thick with cigarette smoke, the skies dark outside, rain falling steadily, making my way home from school.

Decency. This was Orwell’s deep theme — not exactly a moral virtue as Aristotle might conceive of it, but more of a cultural and ethical baseline. Orwell saw it primarily in ordinary people, especially the English, and rarer among intellectuals: “It is not easy to crash your way into the literary intelligentsia if you happen to be a decent human being.” He rebuked Jonathan Swift because he “couldn’t see what the simplest person sees, that life is worth living and human beings, even if they’re dirty and ridiculous, are mostly decent.”

Decency was something Orwell found among the men and women he fought alongside in the Spanish Civil War, among the homeless and poor in Wigan, and amid the flower-loving, stamp-collecting Englishmen in their home-castles: a recognition of our shared brokenness, which begets a very basic human compassion.

I love this passage, from his review of Gandhi’s autobiography:

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.

Sanctity is inhuman if it denies this (Hitchens’ point); ditto ideology. Decency is different and simple. It is loving your girlfriend, recoiling at a bully, defending a friend, telling a simple truth, respecting another’s dignity, doing an honest day’s work, speaking in plain English. You can see it depicted across Orwell’s sprawling oeuvre. Think of Boxer — the loyal, ingenuous cart-horse in Animal Farm, who trusts his superiors and works hard for the common good. Or Winston Smith’s simple, human, decent love for Julia: