On Honesty As An Attitude - Orwell, Camus and truth

These two men went through so much struggle to show reality to "uninterested" humans. 

I am not going to use the word "hero"; Camus and Orwell are few men who helped me to keep my fire alive and keep breathing. I owe them this much. 

Think of it this way - without them, there is a very good possibility Max and I couldn't have ever met. And if they hadn't fought the ideological battle during their times, I cannot even think about helping animals since there would have been so much human suffering including mine. 

The fire they light is making us help animals and god knows what else that we are not even aware of yet?

Camus and Orwell never met in person nor communicated but yet they were best friends.  

My admiration for both of these eminent writers developed in isolation of one another — but I have always unconsciously identified them as the same sort of writer, and indeed, the same sort of person. There are various superficial similarities: the TB diagnosis that prevented both of them from joining the armed forces, the foreign birth, the rampant womanising, the shared hatred of fascism and suspicion of communism. Much more importantly, they seemed to share the same outlook. Both of these writers took the view that truthfulness was more important than ideological allegiance and metaphysics, that the facts should be derived from the real world, rather than the world of ideas. They were similar stylistically too: both wrote candidly, clearly and prolifically. 

Camus seemed to have shared my view. He said as much in a letter to his mistress, Maria Casarès, on the day of Orwell’s death in 1950.

Some bad news: George Orwell is dead. You don’t know him. A very talented English writer, with exactly the same experience as me (although ten years older) and exactly the same ideas. He fought tuberculosis for years. He was one of the very few men with whom I shared something.

For Camus to say that another writer had “exactly the same ideas”, and was “one of the very few men with whom I shared something” was no small thing. 

No correspondence between the two authors seems to exist. In fact, when I searched for personal links between them there was little to go on. But although my hunt for biographical evidence of a relationship was fruitless, the time I have since spent reading and comparing their work yields some rather more intriguing connections. 

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Both Camus and Orwell are rightly credited with being “antitotalitarian” writers. And yet their reasons for being so are not wholly political. They were antitotalitarian not just because they opposed totalitarian regimes, but because they both understood that the totalitarian mindset requires you accept that truth comes from ideology. If the ideas say something is true, it becomes true, and is true. For Fascists and Communists, ideology is not merely a set of values or beliefs, but a cohesive explanation of the past, present and future of mankind. This is what Camus referred to in The Rebel as the desire “to make the earth a kingdom where man is God”. Orwell and Camus both understood the dangers of such thinking, and sought to repudiate it in their work.

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Orwell – ever the protestant humanist – placed a great deal of faith in the idea of the sceptical conscience. In the world of the novel, “staying sane” meant remaining critical, even if only in secret. It isn’t Winston’s ability to say two and two make four that allows him to rebel: it’s because despite the universally believed falsehoods purveyed by the state, Winston continues to think diligently and honestly. 

For both of these writers, the truth was less a metaphysical question than an attitude. Their novels revolve around the quotidian, everyday experience of the world, in things rather than in ideas. They were both much more concerned with the facts that could be taken from experience than those that could be thought up through ideology. This was the attitude that sustained them throughout their intellectual lives, and united them as figures. And it’s for this reason that I like to think of them as friends, although their paths never crossed.