I have a book I never finish reading. (It’s not Finnegan’s Wake; I haven’t even started that one.) It’s George Orwell’s Essays and as it lands with the thud of 1,363 pages of political, cultural and literary criticism, I feel entitled to a bit of leeway. I don’t try to plow straight through, but keep it around for between-other-book reading. (Yes, incessant Orwell reading does explain my personality. Got a problem with that?)
This week, I read his 1945 “Notes on Nationalism.” George begins by expressing his dissatisfaction with the term nationalist as imprecise. The phenomenon in question isn’t always tied to a nation state, but “nationalist” was the closest word he could think of to describe “the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests.”
What may have been an exceptional observation 67 years ago is blatantly obvious today. In this country, the disease is particularly pernicious when it comes to those who put the interests of their group ahead of the interests of the nation. People afflicted, Mr. Orwell says, think, “solely, or mainly, in terms of competitive prestige.”
A tour of our political horizon demonstrates how far this notion has expanded its boundaries. Not enough that the media obsesses over trivialities of the never-ending national campaign, but a good deal of what passes for debate – at federal, state and local levels – lands at or below the standard of schoolyard taunting. This is true in Vermont as a whole and Burlington, two places which tend to have more enlightened debate (to my mind, at least) than many other parts of America and yet the puerile pap that flows from the mouths of politicians, even those I tend to support, makes me want to be done with the whole process. The strength of conviction required of a citizen today is considerable.
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The Persistence of Magic
In the midst of George Orwell’s essay, “Notes on Nationalism,” he makes a reference to sympathetic magic: “Nationalist thought often gives the impression of being tinged by belief in sympathetic magic – a belief which probably comes out in the widespread custom of burning political enemies in effigy, or using pictures of them as targets in shooting galleries.”
I’d never thought of it that way, but I don’t spend much time thinking about magic. I’m familiar with such pop-cultural references to things like voodoo dolls but never thought much about them, either (until zombies began popping up in Miami.)
Intrigued, I turned to that infallible source for occult knowledge, Wikipedia. According to this unimpeachable source (I have no reason to disbelieve this particular entry), the term “sympathetic magic” was coined about a century ago by anthropologist George James Frazer, who described two types – one that acts by similarity and one that acts by contact or “contagion.” Continue reading »