George Orwell and the Rule of Law: the power of illusions

George Orwell never wrote about legal technicalities, but he did something much more important: he described the attitudes once prevalent among English people that made it possible for them to be ruled by laws and not by men. For some reason, they chose to depend on laws –even bad laws– and not on the benevolence of clerks, the inspiration of judges, and the whims of party leaders. Orwell described the mental atmosphere that made that choice possible and made it work. If he helps us to understand it, his remarks might prove to be more valuable than a whole library of law books.

I was born and have lived all my life in Argentina, a country where law is feeble, where people seem to find it better to be swept from place to place by powerful men (or women) than to be ruled by fixed laws. We have good laws, or at least they are not worse than those of other countries. Our Constitution was largely copied from that of the US, as our founding fathers proudly admitted. But one cannot just copy rules, one must then abide to them, and that has proven to be the difficult part.

Many countries –perhaps most countries in the world– suffer the same problem. Nevertheless, apart from some self-ashamed mumbling about national traits, we know and say very little about the attitudes that make the difference. And we must not delude ourselves thinking that this is merely a matter of removing a corrupt upper class because the new one would be the same, or worse: the roots go down to ordinary people. We need to understand why law is respected in a few countries and neglected in most others. That might be more valuable for people’s happiness than the discovery of a new gold mine, even better than a hundred new oil wells.

Orwell had a gift and a passion for describing the habits of his own people: the English people. Unfortunately, Orwell is remembered mainly as the author of Animal Farm and 1984. Of course, these are fascinating books, but one is a fable and the other a novel about a possible future that never came true –at least not in England. This may lead people to forget that Orwell wrote much and well about his own time and about real events. Sprinkled here and there in his many essays and articles, we have Orwell's invaluable remarks about the attitudes that made England what it was in his time, and probably most of what it still is today. As Orwell himself, I have written ‘English attitudes’ and not ‘British attitudes’, but this is not essential to our issue.

English attitudes towards law

The rule of law has crept in many places, but it first bloomed in England. Even foreigners acknowledged it, among others Montesquieu and Voltaire –that was long before French intellectuals had been taught to sneer at bourgeois liberties. In his essay England your England, Orwell said that an all-important English trait was the respect for constitutionalism and legality, the belief in ‘the law’ as something above the State and above the individual, ‘something which is cruel and stupid, of course, but at any rate incorruptible’. In England, wrote Orwell, such concepts as justice, liberty, and objective truth are still believed in.

To this, many people –among them many English people– would object that those beliefs are silly and misguided, that English law is full of incongruities, and that those high words about liberty and justice are just a cover for prejudices. Some would add: at the end of the day English notions of justice are no better than those of the Nazis and terrorists. The only difference between Churchill and Hitler –so goes a common view– is that Churchill hid his power-grabbing strategy behind a mist of morality, while Hitler preferred ruthless sincerity. But Orwell answers: justice, and liberty, and objective truth ‘may be illusions, but they are very powerful illusions. The belief in them influences conduct, national life is different because of them’. Against those who remain sneering, Orwell did not try academic arguments; he said simply: ‘In proof of which, look about you. Where are the rubber truncheons, where is the castor oil?’ Justice was tougher in Orwell's time, but we can understand his argument: 'the hanging judge, that evil old man in scarlet robe and horsehair wig, whom nothing short of dynamite will ever teach what century he is living in, but who will at any rate interpret the law according to the books and will in no circumstances take a money bribe, is one of the symbolic figures of England'.

Now we come to a crucial remark: Orwell writes, ‘It is not that the English people imagine the law to be just. Everyone knows that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. But no one accepts the implications of this…’. Most people in most countries will immediately follow the implications that the English refuse to accept: if we feel that law is unfair, if a rich man is acquitted when we feel that he should have been punished, then we do not owe obedience to law, and we may well disregard it. Those who reason in this way –a large number in my country and probably in most countries in the world– do not reject the possibility that some day in the future they might respect a new political arrangement, one that is flawless, one that makes mistakes impossible. But till that day comes, one is entitled to evade taxes, pay and take bribes, and bully those who look easy targets. If law is imperfect, it is no law at all.

The ratchet system

Half a loaf is no bread: this is a way of reasoning that Orwell never accepted, and with him, most English people. They accepted improvements and reforms that were far from perfect, and then tried to build something better on top of them, and then something even better, and so on. I would call it, the ratchet system: you advance but always keeping all that you already have of what is right and good. Edmund Burke compared it with an account that grows with new interest but always keeping the capital already gained. 
Comparing rights with an account and progress with capital, how shocking! That is why Hitler called the English “shopkeepers” as opposed to his German heros, always ready to kill and die for the good of the community. Even Orwell thought that Hitler had a point: he said that a planned economy on the lines of Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia was necessary in order to win the war (his article: Shopkeepers at war). However the shopkeepers were able, not only to build the Spitfire, but to defeat the Arian heroes.

Many people –perhaps most people– still reject the ratchet system. I once heard an Argentine man who refused to go and tell the truth in court, not out of fear, but because –as he explained– he thought that trials may end up being unfair anyway. He was afraid that by telling the truth he would look self-righteous –or worse, naïve. Unless a leader takes charge and roots out all the underlying causes of injustice, there is no point in doing right: it is mere illusion –or worse, hypocrisy. You might tell the truth in court (or a lie) as a special favour to a friend or a relative, maybe returning a similar favour you received or expect to receive, but not because of the simplistic notion that one must tell the truth. It is simplistic as well to criticise those who block wheelchair ramps with their cars –a familiar sight where I live. One must take into account that there must be scores of worse faults –even cases of corruption– that will never be exposed. It is simplistic, indeed hypocritical, to argue against a whole array of things: from petty corruption to politically motivated court rulings. This is the way in which people in hundreds of countries manage to accommodate a haughty moral posture together with absolute passivity towards injustice –sometimes mingled with obvious relish in it.

English people, at least in Orwell's time, lacked that gusto for convoluted justifications. They would not think that you have to pass judgement on the whole judicial system first, and then decide whether you will bother to tell the truth in court. English people, wrote Orwell, ‘have a horror of abstract thought, they feel no need for any philosophy or systematic “world-view”’. Instead, they are very capable of acting ‘upon a species of instinct, really a code of conduct which is understood by almost everyone, though never formulated’. Of course, we are bound to meet the old Marxist retort: this is a worldview just as any other. No it is not, and the difference is that law and moral codes are limited. Moral codes set limits; worldviews are boundless. We owe justice to our enemies –maybe stern justice–, but no rule commands us to be unfair. Incidentally, this does not mean that you must love the enemies of your country: this would be reverse-nationalism, as Orwell called it.

Nor are you required to pretend that a lie told by your party is better than a truth told by the opposite party. The historian Lord Macaulay was a Whig, but he must have felt that he was right in dedicating a poem to all that was noble –though misguided– in the Jacobites. World-views scorn all this as hypocritical; ruthless sincerity is better. Instead of the gentleman, the ruthless-man must be admired. The word ‘ruthless’ appears again and again in Hitler’s speeches and in his book Mein Kampf  –it must have been part of what people found attractive in him. In Argentina, General Perón’s motto ‘to the enemy, not even justice’ underpins all our recent history. More than that, I think it sums up all that was wrong in many countries in the past century. Today the names and the places have changed, but that dreadful notion remains as powerful as it was then.

Note: this is the first of a series of articles on George Orwell’s remarks concerning English attitudes and the rule of law. All of them will be published soon in this blog.