Stalin and Hitler did not suffer from lack of clarity.
Having read dozens autobiographies, memoirs, and other primary sources (including translations, I don’t read German, Russian, etc.), as well as many more secondary sources about the Second World War (and the Spanish Civil War, and the Winter War, etc.), I can only wonder as to what you might mean by “clarity”, “logic”, and the other terms you use and/or how you came to your conclusions, and what sources were the input you interpreted.
Orwell’s hands were not clean; he fought with the Communists in Spain
I think Lessdazed meant that even if rationality doesn’t stop people with bad intentions from doing bad things, it can stop people with good intentions from doing bad things. And there are probably more bad things done by irrational, well-intentioned people than by evil people.
Thus gigantic evil deeds are invariably accomplished by teams of people full of clever rationalizations for evil constructed by clever intellectuals.
They don’t need to rationalize when they just don’t have sam0345′s concept of ‘evil’ anywhere in their brain in the first place. It get the impression, for example, that Genghis Khan just did what he wanted to do—no excuses, no need to rationalize. Hearing this ‘evil’ concept of Sam from the future wouldn’t have just been something he rejected it would be completely dumbfounding.
Yes, there’s clearly something dubious about assuming that not only Genghis Khan, but his entire army, consisted of weird mutants who somehow lack moral intuitions. Much more likely is that they had normal human moral intuitions, but failed to apply them generally to all people, rather than (say) people in their own cultural group.
Stalin actually was a psychopath (probably diagnosable, as he fits all the standard criteria: flat affect, deceives people easily and without remorse, indifferent to suffering, superficially charming). Genghis Khan may have been (we know far less about him). But the average Soviet soldier? The average Mongol warrior? Clearly not—there are simply too many of them for that to be plausible.
...human evil and muddled thinking intertwine like conjugate strands of DNA...To make our stupidity obvious, even to ourselves—this is the heart of Overcoming Bias...Evil sneaks, hidden, through the unlit shadows of the mind. We look back with the clarity of history, and weep to remember the planned famines of Stalin and Mao, which killed tens of millions..For perpetrators of evil to avoid its natural opposition, the revulsion must remain latent. Clarity must be avoided at any cost...Does Tyler seriously think that scope insensitivity to the value of human life is on the same level with trying to create plans that will really save as many lives as possible?
B.H. replies:
Stalin and Hitler did not suffer from lack of clarity...Intellectuals who supported, and support, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Osama, Saddam, and so forth, knew what they doing...Helping people to open their eyes and see human suffering, raising children to be compassionate, will do far more to get rid of the Hitlers and Castros than logic and writing classes.
B.H. seems to think that intellectuals of the past century suffered from a lack of compassion and desire to do good, and were good at thinking clearly. I think that they were compassionate and had good intentions, yet had muddled thinking. It is this contrast that I was trying to bring out, and this is not anon sequitur.
You had a valid point to make (or at least an interesting point that would appeal to the lesswrong philosophy). It did not apply to the quote you set it up as a refutation of. Refuting a somewhat different position that what you are quoting is the foundation of debating but I consider it bad form. Particularly because it works so well against human minds.
If you just made your point without the vaguely relevant quote then I would not have commented.
For my part I don’t particularly agree with either of you. I wouldn’t focus on ‘teaching compassion’ or ‘teaching clear thinking’. I would focus on setting up institutions and power structures in which corruption and things-I-call-evil just aren’t the most efficient way to gain power.
I think that they were compassionate and had good intentions, yet had muddled thinking.
I don’t particularly agree with either of you.
I think you read into what I said some things that weren’t there.
I wouldn’t focus on ‘teaching compassion’ or ‘teaching clear thinking’. I would focus on setting up institutions and power structures in which corruption and things-I-call-evil just aren’t the most efficient way to gain power.
I agree with the value of that approach to group and societal problems, but the smaller the scale, the less relevant that approach is and the more relevant overcoming bias is, so which I think better to focus on for a situation depends on specifics. B.H. was discounting clear thought in favor of good intentions, I addressed that, without intending to malign auxiliary approaches. I do not believe that many people are the villains of their personal narrative, and so think that “teaching compassion” is not too important, and that teaching clear thinking is. Teaching clear thinking isn’t always the right approach.
It is indeed misleading to describe Orwell’s Catalonian comrades-in-arms as capital-C “Communists,” since this would imply that they were controlled from Moscow, which they weren’t. (They were a mix of local independent communists and anarchists.) However, in Homage to Catalonia, there are several passages where Orwell presents clear evidence of their terror, murder, vandalism, and forcible suppression of all opposition, which he however excuses and rationalizes away, never toning down his utterly idealistic appraisal of them. His general comments about the war are also clearly remote from reality and biased in the pro-communist (small-c) direction, and on occasions he obviously relays the communist propaganda as a complete dupe. On the whole, as a propagandist for his favored side, he commits pretty much all the sins for which he would later bitterly excoriate the orthodox Stalinists, if perhaps in a less blatant manner.
So on the whole, I wouldn’t say that his hands are that clean. He certainly didn’t deserve the place in intellectual history he was eventually awarded, in the sense of being remembered as the unwavering fighter for truth, clear thinking, intellectual honesty, and opposition to political lies and gangsterism. Certainly some of his contemporaries were far more deserving of such description, and yet hardly anyone remembers them today.
I would say that he’s remembered as the writer of two of the most influential books opposing tyranny, rather than as an unwavering fighter against truth, clear thinking, intellectual honesty, and opposition to political lies and gangsterism.
Homage to Catalonia came out in 1938. 1984 came out in 1949. Is it possible that his experiences (perhaps including realizing what he’d been excusing) had something to do with 1984?
I would say that he’s remembered as the writer of two of the most influential books opposing tyranny, rather than as an unwavering fighter against truth, clear thinking, intellectual honesty, and opposition to political lies and gangsterism.
Well, the article that started this discussion describes him in these terms. It is true that most people who have heard of him know him only as the writer of these two books. But among people who know more about him, as far as I’ve seen, he typically has this illustrious image.
Homage to Catalonia came out in 1938. 1984 came out in 1949. Is it possible that his experiences (perhaps including realizing what he’d been excusing) had something to do with 1984?
As far as I can tell, he never ceased admiring the “revolutionary” regime that ruled over Catalonia before the Communists took over. However, even regardless of that particular issue, his views have definitely never been particularly free of ideological bias—and here I’m not comparing him with some unreachable ideal, but with other people who lived and wrote at the same time. Yes, he was certainly much better than the typical Stalinist intellectual of the time, but that’s an awfully low bar to clear, and some other people managed to clear much higher ones.
Orwell was still something of a totalitarian to the day he died, but that is what made him great. He understood totalitarianism from the inside, and so condemned it in an accurate and insightful way that no outsider could condemn it.
In “Nineteen eighty four” Orwell whitewashes Trotsky’s disagreement with Stalin as merely a matter of technical details, represented by the windmill, but in actual fact, it was over terror, torture, and mass murder. Trotsky complained that Stalin was not tough enough on the peasants, and objected to torture and murder being slowed down and obstructed by bureaucracy and red tape. But we do not look to the book for an accurate history of Russia. We read the book to understand how totalitarians think.
No one who had not been well and truly totalitarian could have written such a book.
Fair enough. I didn’t check back to the article, and only went with my impression of his reputation—the latter is a mistake I should watch out for, since I seem to be less inclined to think of famous people as comprehensively wonderful than most.
The Republicans in general and anarchists in particular should not be conflated with the communists; communists gradually and somewhat steadily took over the leftist side from being a tiny minority at the outset of the war to being in control of a lost cause.
Orwell’s unit was almost all anarchists. The communists were just one group against the fascists, his propaganda is pro-Republican generally and pro-anarchist in particular, so pro-communist is not the best description.
...on occasions he obviously relays the communist propaganda as a complete dupe. On the whole, as a propagandist for his favored side...
Fighting among anarchist allies of communists and doing as the anarchists do, until the communists turn on them and kill them, does not make him associated with communism in a very important way and especially not with Communism.
The analysis at the first link is pretty decent factually, and not a flat caricature either. I don’t completely agree, but the objective picture feels correct. Indeed, when reading Homage to Catalonia, it felt obvious to me that Orwell was mostly charmed by the contrast between his comrades in arms’ heartfelt quasi-religious attitude and the emotionally stunted life of Western middle class. He was conscious that they were in essense a barbarian tribe crossed with a Puritan sect—seeing all out-groups as not quite human unless proven otherwise—but chose not to apply all the boring ethical standards to them. Even later in his life he showed a certain insensitivity to slaughter of “innocents”, coldly pointing out that there shouldn’t be an ethical difference between soldiers & civillians. Indeed, he was a little bit of a fascist, although closer to Nazism than to Stalinism in his darker moments.
However, calling the Spanish Anarchist rule “totalitarian” is pointless abuse of the term, of which I prefer Arendt’s strict and horrifying definition. (See her work Origins of Totalitarianism.) It was, in essense, the rebirth of some scavenger values, painted red mostly for political utility and planting a few Marxist ideas into rich soil. And they certainly were the heroes of their own stories—it’s moral myopia and not everyday heartlessness that appears to be their cardinal sin.
I’m not especially a fan of anarcho-syndicalism, as you can see. Even in theory it can threaten to throw out civilization’s baby along with the bathwater. And even disregarding the out-group interactions (which are psychologically imperilled whenever in-group consciousness strengthens), it depends too much on morale, high spirits and good leadership.
Which is also my answer to Eugine_Nier’s criticism of Alinsky’s work—his approach to everything was heavily Syndicalist (not Socialist), he was proud and stiff-necked and it could’ve rubbed off on the black communities he sought to unite; without guidance, their new-found voice and political power might’ve served to plaster over long-standing internal problems and reduce the relative attractiveness of self-improvement in blacks’ eyes (the material incentive for “breaking out of the hood” shrank as life got better, but it’s a tall order to cultivate ideological and cultural incentives during a short window of a community’s eagerness to change). Yet I feel certain that doing nothing for those benighted, long-suffering people was morally unacceptable. And I haven’t heard any better counter-factual proposals from anywhere right of center—it’s just “Segregation was not so bad, leftists are whining over good old ways, equality of outcome is horrible anyway” from what I’ve seen of their criticisms.
(I’m not going to read the second link, as I’ve had enough of Comrade Sam for the next few centuries.)
Edit: oh, the author is an Anarchist himself, and looks fairly broad-minded too. I was afraid he’s got an orthodox libertarian bottom line, given who linked to him.
I include the anarchists (CNT) and the Catalonian independent Marxists (POUM) among the “small-c communists.” We can quibble about this designation, but I think it’s fair, especially since I have emphasized that they were not Moscow-controlled. I’m also sure that members of POUM would not have had any problem with this label, being self-proclaimed orthodox Leninists.
Also, Orwell served in POUM’s militia, not with the anarchists.
In any case, however you choose to call them, it is indisputable that the parties for which Orwell fought were guilty of political terror and murder, that they were violently intolerant of any opposition, and that Orwell clearly excused, rationalized, and even praised these acts and attitudes, which he witnessed first-hand. Sure, they eventually ended up as loser underdogs who got crushed by even bigger and meaner political gangsters, but this is no valid reason to excuse and romanticize them the way Orwell did.
Also, Orwell served in POUM’s militia, not with the anarchists.
The unit’s members, not its flag, hence “almost all”, which would make no sense describing the unit’s affiliation.
It is necessary to explain that when one speaks of the P.S.U.C. ‘line’ one really means the Communist Party ‘line’. The P.S.U.C. (Partido Socialista Unificado de Cataluña) was the Socialist Party of Catalonia; it had been formed at the beginning of the war by the fusion of various Marxist parties, including the Catalan Communist Party, but it was now entirely under Communist control and was affiliated to the Third International...Roughly speaking, the P.S.U.C. was the political organ of the U.G.T. (Union General de Trabajadores), the Socialist trade unions.
...
In any case the loose term ‘Anarchists’ is used to cover a multitude of people of very varying opinions. The huge block of unions making up the C.N.T. (Confederacion Nacional de Trabajadores), with round about two million members in all, had for its political organ the F.A.I. (Federacion Anarquista Iberica), an actual Anarchist organization.
...
The P.O.U.M. militiamen were mostly C.N.T. members, but the actual party-members generally belonged to the U.G.T.
...
In Barcelona there had been a series of more or less unofficial brawls in the working-class suburbs. C.N.T. and U.G.T. members had been murdering one another for some time past; on several occasions the murders were followed by huge, provocative funerals which were quite deliberately intended to stir up political hatred.
Those are from Homage to Catalonia.
I include the anarchists (CNT) and the Catalonian independent Marxists (POUM) among the “small-c communists.” We can quibble about this designation, but I think it’s fair...I’m also sure that members of POUM would not have had any problem with this label, being self-proclaimed orthodox Leninists.
The minority U.G.T. Leninists wouldn’t, but the Catalan draftees who were members of anarchist unions (which were strongest in Catalonia) would.
it is indisputable that the parties for which Orwell fought were...violently intolerant of any opposition
If they were so violent, they wouldn’t have let the Communist minority grow in power until they killed them. They were really violently intolerant of some opposition, which is not the same quality of thing, for many are violently intolerant of some opposition, the extreme stances being violent intolerance to no opposition or all opposition.
The minority self-proclaimed Leninists wouldn’t, but the Catalan draftees who were members of anarchist unions (strongest in Catalonia) would [object to being called communists].
This isn’t really relevant for the main point of the discussion, but the official ideological self-designation of the CNT was “libertarian communism” (comunismo libertario). See for example this declaration from the 1936 CNT congress: http://www2.uah.es/jmc/comunismolibertario.pdf
Having read dozens autobiographies, memoirs, and other primary sources (including translations, I don’t read German, Russian, etc.), as well as many more secondary sources about the Second World War (and the Spanish Civil War, and the Winter War, etc.), I can only wonder as to what you might mean by “clarity”, “logic”, and the other terms you use and/or how you came to your conclusions, and what sources were the input you interpreted.
This is misleading. Wikipedia.
Good intentions do not stop people from acting evilly.
Non sequitur.
I think Lessdazed meant that even if rationality doesn’t stop people with bad intentions from doing bad things, it can stop people with good intentions from doing bad things. And there are probably more bad things done by irrational, well-intentioned people than by evil people.
In order to accomplish gigantic evil deeds, it is necessary for people to work together in teams. Consciously evil people are not team players.
Thus gigantic evil deeds are invariably accomplished by teams of people full of clever rationalizations for evil constructed by clever intellectuals.
They don’t need to rationalize when they just don’t have sam0345′s concept of ‘evil’ anywhere in their brain in the first place. It get the impression, for example, that Genghis Khan just did what he wanted to do—no excuses, no need to rationalize. Hearing this ‘evil’ concept of Sam from the future wouldn’t have just been something he rejected it would be completely dumbfounding.
Seems like he would have a label like “evil” for stabbing an ally in the back or the like. It just mightn’t apply to outgroups whatsoever.
Yes, there’s clearly something dubious about assuming that not only Genghis Khan, but his entire army, consisted of weird mutants who somehow lack moral intuitions. Much more likely is that they had normal human moral intuitions, but failed to apply them generally to all people, rather than (say) people in their own cultural group.
Stalin actually was a psychopath (probably diagnosable, as he fits all the standard criteria: flat affect, deceives people easily and without remorse, indifferent to suffering, superficially charming). Genghis Khan may have been (we know far less about him). But the average Soviet soldier? The average Mongol warrior? Clearly not—there are simply too many of them for that to be plausible.
Can you explain?
The article says things such as:
B.H. replies:
B.H. seems to think that intellectuals of the past century suffered from a lack of compassion and desire to do good, and were good at thinking clearly. I think that they were compassionate and had good intentions, yet had muddled thinking. It is this contrast that I was trying to bring out, and this is not anon sequitur.
You had a valid point to make (or at least an interesting point that would appeal to the lesswrong philosophy). It did not apply to the quote you set it up as a refutation of. Refuting a somewhat different position that what you are quoting is the foundation of debating but I consider it bad form. Particularly because it works so well against human minds.
If you just made your point without the vaguely relevant quote then I would not have commented.
For my part I don’t particularly agree with either of you. I wouldn’t focus on ‘teaching compassion’ or ‘teaching clear thinking’. I would focus on setting up institutions and power structures in which corruption and things-I-call-evil just aren’t the most efficient way to gain power.
I think you read into what I said some things that weren’t there.
I agree with the value of that approach to group and societal problems, but the smaller the scale, the less relevant that approach is and the more relevant overcoming bias is, so which I think better to focus on for a situation depends on specifics. B.H. was discounting clear thought in favor of good intentions, I addressed that, without intending to malign auxiliary approaches. I do not believe that many people are the villains of their personal narrative, and so think that “teaching compassion” is not too important, and that teaching clear thinking is. Teaching clear thinking isn’t always the right approach.
It is indeed misleading to describe Orwell’s Catalonian comrades-in-arms as capital-C “Communists,” since this would imply that they were controlled from Moscow, which they weren’t. (They were a mix of local independent communists and anarchists.) However, in Homage to Catalonia, there are several passages where Orwell presents clear evidence of their terror, murder, vandalism, and forcible suppression of all opposition, which he however excuses and rationalizes away, never toning down his utterly idealistic appraisal of them. His general comments about the war are also clearly remote from reality and biased in the pro-communist (small-c) direction, and on occasions he obviously relays the communist propaganda as a complete dupe. On the whole, as a propagandist for his favored side, he commits pretty much all the sins for which he would later bitterly excoriate the orthodox Stalinists, if perhaps in a less blatant manner.
So on the whole, I wouldn’t say that his hands are that clean. He certainly didn’t deserve the place in intellectual history he was eventually awarded, in the sense of being remembered as the unwavering fighter for truth, clear thinking, intellectual honesty, and opposition to political lies and gangsterism. Certainly some of his contemporaries were far more deserving of such description, and yet hardly anyone remembers them today.
I would say that he’s remembered as the writer of two of the most influential books opposing tyranny, rather than as an unwavering fighter against truth, clear thinking, intellectual honesty, and opposition to political lies and gangsterism.
Homage to Catalonia came out in 1938. 1984 came out in 1949. Is it possible that his experiences (perhaps including realizing what he’d been excusing) had something to do with 1984?
Well, the article that started this discussion describes him in these terms. It is true that most people who have heard of him know him only as the writer of these two books. But among people who know more about him, as far as I’ve seen, he typically has this illustrious image.
As far as I can tell, he never ceased admiring the “revolutionary” regime that ruled over Catalonia before the Communists took over. However, even regardless of that particular issue, his views have definitely never been particularly free of ideological bias—and here I’m not comparing him with some unreachable ideal, but with other people who lived and wrote at the same time. Yes, he was certainly much better than the typical Stalinist intellectual of the time, but that’s an awfully low bar to clear, and some other people managed to clear much higher ones.
Orwell was still something of a totalitarian to the day he died, but that is what made him great. He understood totalitarianism from the inside, and so condemned it in an accurate and insightful way that no outsider could condemn it.
In “Nineteen eighty four” Orwell whitewashes Trotsky’s disagreement with Stalin as merely a matter of technical details, represented by the windmill, but in actual fact, it was over terror, torture, and mass murder. Trotsky complained that Stalin was not tough enough on the peasants, and objected to torture and murder being slowed down and obstructed by bureaucracy and red tape. But we do not look to the book for an accurate history of Russia. We read the book to understand how totalitarians think.
No one who had not been well and truly totalitarian could have written such a book.
Fair enough. I didn’t check back to the article, and only went with my impression of his reputation—the latter is a mistake I should watch out for, since I seem to be less inclined to think of famous people as comprehensively wonderful than most.
The Republicans in general and anarchists in particular should not be conflated with the communists; communists gradually and somewhat steadily took over the leftist side from being a tiny minority at the outset of the war to being in control of a lost cause.
Orwell’s unit was almost all anarchists. The communists were just one group against the fascists, his propaganda is pro-Republican generally and pro-anarchist in particular, so pro-communist is not the best description.
Fighting among anarchist allies of communists and doing as the anarchists do, until the communists turn on them and kill them, does not make him associated with communism in a very important way and especially not with Communism.
Orwell’s “anarchists” set up a totalitarian terror state in Catalonia within hours of seizing power. See The Anarcho-Statists of Spain and What really happened in Catalonia
The analysis at the first link is pretty decent factually, and not a flat caricature either. I don’t completely agree, but the objective picture feels correct. Indeed, when reading Homage to Catalonia, it felt obvious to me that Orwell was mostly charmed by the contrast between his comrades in arms’ heartfelt quasi-religious attitude and the emotionally stunted life of Western middle class. He was conscious that they were in essense a barbarian tribe crossed with a Puritan sect—seeing all out-groups as not quite human unless proven otherwise—but chose not to apply all the boring ethical standards to them. Even later in his life he showed a certain insensitivity to slaughter of “innocents”, coldly pointing out that there shouldn’t be an ethical difference between soldiers & civillians. Indeed, he was a little bit of a fascist, although closer to Nazism than to Stalinism in his darker moments.
However, calling the Spanish Anarchist rule “totalitarian” is pointless abuse of the term, of which I prefer Arendt’s strict and horrifying definition. (See her work Origins of Totalitarianism.) It was, in essense, the rebirth of some scavenger values, painted red mostly for political utility and planting a few Marxist ideas into rich soil. And they certainly were the heroes of their own stories—it’s moral myopia and not everyday heartlessness that appears to be their cardinal sin.
I’m not especially a fan of anarcho-syndicalism, as you can see. Even in theory it can threaten to throw out civilization’s baby along with the bathwater. And even disregarding the out-group interactions (which are psychologically imperilled whenever in-group consciousness strengthens), it depends too much on morale, high spirits and good leadership.
Which is also my answer to Eugine_Nier’s criticism of Alinsky’s work—his approach to everything was heavily Syndicalist (not Socialist), he was proud and stiff-necked and it could’ve rubbed off on the black communities he sought to unite; without guidance, their new-found voice and political power might’ve served to plaster over long-standing internal problems and reduce the relative attractiveness of self-improvement in blacks’ eyes (the material incentive for “breaking out of the hood” shrank as life got better, but it’s a tall order to cultivate ideological and cultural incentives during a short window of a community’s eagerness to change).
Yet I feel certain that doing nothing for those benighted, long-suffering people was morally unacceptable. And I haven’t heard any better counter-factual proposals from anywhere right of center—it’s just “Segregation was not so bad, leftists are whining over good old ways, equality of outcome is horrible anyway” from what I’ve seen of their criticisms.
(I’m not going to read the second link, as I’ve had enough of Comrade Sam for the next few centuries.)
Edit: oh, the author is an Anarchist himself, and looks fairly broad-minded too. I was afraid he’s got an orthodox libertarian bottom line, given who linked to him.
I include the anarchists (CNT) and the Catalonian independent Marxists (POUM) among the “small-c communists.” We can quibble about this designation, but I think it’s fair, especially since I have emphasized that they were not Moscow-controlled. I’m also sure that members of POUM would not have had any problem with this label, being self-proclaimed orthodox Leninists.
Also, Orwell served in POUM’s militia, not with the anarchists.
In any case, however you choose to call them, it is indisputable that the parties for which Orwell fought were guilty of political terror and murder, that they were violently intolerant of any opposition, and that Orwell clearly excused, rationalized, and even praised these acts and attitudes, which he witnessed first-hand. Sure, they eventually ended up as loser underdogs who got crushed by even bigger and meaner political gangsters, but this is no valid reason to excuse and romanticize them the way Orwell did.
The unit’s members, not its flag, hence “almost all”, which would make no sense describing the unit’s affiliation.
...
...
...
Those are from Homage to Catalonia.
The minority U.G.T. Leninists wouldn’t, but the Catalan draftees who were members of anarchist unions (which were strongest in Catalonia) would.
If they were so violent, they wouldn’t have let the Communist minority grow in power until they killed them. They were really violently intolerant of some opposition, which is not the same quality of thing, for many are violently intolerant of some opposition, the extreme stances being violent intolerance to no opposition or all opposition.
This isn’t really relevant for the main point of the discussion, but the official ideological self-designation of the CNT was “libertarian communism” (comunismo libertario). See for example this declaration from the 1936 CNT congress:
http://www2.uah.es/jmc/comunismolibertario.pdf