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George Orwell, Cosmopolitanism, and Global Justice

BRUCE ROBBINS

In the middle of his book The Road to Wigan Pier (1936), which described the effects of the Great Depression in the mining towns of northern England, George Orwell suddenly looked away from the poverty and squalor in front of him and spoke instead about inequality and deprivation on a global scale. “Under the capitalist system,” he declared memorably, “in order that England may live in comparative comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation—an evil state of affairs, but you acquiesce in it every time you step into a taxi or eat a plate of strawberries and cream. The alternative is to throw the Empire overboard and reduce England to a cold and unimportant little island where we should all have to work very hard and live mainly on herrings and potatoes.”1

I want to reflect on this proposition, which is both compelling and also (for a champion of plain speech like Orwell) devious and even emotionally contorted. It is not a truth that the capitalist system universally acknowledges about itself. Perhaps it is not a “truth” in the strongest sense at all. Nevertheless, it now has a place within progressive and liberal common sense. Consider some famous words by George F. Kennan from Policy Planning Study 23, a confidential document circulated within the U.S. State Department in 1948 and published to the world at large only in the 1970s: “We have about 50% of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3% of its population.… In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity.” It is a remarkable fact that Kennan’s statement had to be kept secret and, when it was ultimately leaked, was considered scandalous. Why should it be scandalous? After all, Kennan does not admit to theft; he does not say, as Orwell does, that our wealth depends on their deprivation. Yet his words were and are embarrassing, and the embarrassment deserves to be thought of as an intriguing historical phenomenon in its own right. It implies the existence of a cosmopolitan norm which, without necessarily going as far as Orwell, nonetheless agrees with him that access to the world’s resources ought to be better aligned with population—ought to be subject to something like global democracy perhaps, or at any rate ought not to be simply a matter of each nation trying to seize as much for itself as it can.

If such a cosmopolitan norm exists and has entered into our common sense, one would like to know where it came from and what can be done to encourage it.

In the humanities, these questions are not often raised about cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism as it is currently conceived has to do with “a receptive and open attitude towards the other,” to quote one of many recent books on the subject; it does not have to do with economic redistribution between rich and poor.2 Further evidence to this effect can be found in Kwame Anthony Appiah’s eloquent and insightful book Cosmopolitanism, which is probably the single most quoted source on the subject. Appiah spends a great deal of time on respect for differences, and very little time on obligations to distant others, in particular material obligations. Indeed, one of the most visible impulses of the book is to fend off appeals like Peter Singer’s for the citizens of the rich countries to ensure that citizens of poor countries get what Appiah himself calls “their fair share.”3 If some people these days tend to feel a certain sinking of the heart when the word cosmopolitanism is pronounced, or at least a diminishment of intellectual expectation and excitement, I think it is only partly because the word is now being overused. As another recent book says, “At the present cosmopolitan moment in anthropology there is a temptation to label almost anyone—African labour migrants, urbanites, Pentecostals, traders, diasporics—‘cosmopolitan.’ ”4 The deeper reason is that cosmopolitanism is not sufficiently demanding. As one reviewer of Appiah’s book objected, “[M]ost of us [are] already the ‘partial cosmopolitans’ Appiah wants us to be.”5 This means that invocations of the concept tend to be a bit complacent, and certainly not strenuous in the way the Kennan quote would urge us to be.

One might well object that, rather than being too satisfied with things as they are, today’s cosmopolitanism is asking for a great deal more than it can expect to get: namely, an end to war making. For Kant and for a majority of its champions since, peace has been cosmopolitanism’s primary aim and measure. The best incentive to take the concept seriously has been the fact that wars and the rumor of further wars are still everywhere you look. As U.S. hegemony declines, this logic will probably get even more pertinent. If our “city on a hill” days are over, if America is already a fatally wounded giant, as some pundits have proposed, liable to flail militarily in all directions as its economic and political power ebbs, then it may be that cosmopolitan humanists should start training themselves for a different, a more defensive role: not seeking a better distribution of global resources, but merely tempering the destruction the giant is likely to cause to those around it as it thrashes and totters and perhaps falls, especially destruction outside its borders. That role would certainly be taxing enough. At any rate, this idea seems worth adding to conversations about the value of the humanities.

At the risk of stating the obvious, however, I will add that economic inequalities are one of the main causes of war. It follows that cosmopolitanism cannot do even its traditional job without paying serious attention to those inequalities. This it has largely failed to do. Here I am as guilty as anyone. I was first inspired to use the term by the historian of anthropology James Clifford.6 Around 1990, I noticed that Clifford, whose work I have always found instructive, had done an interesting about-face. In 1980, in an influential review of Edward Said’s Orientalism, Clifford had used the term cosmopolitan to describe the “humanist” side of Said, of which he strongly disapproved. This was the side that claimed “the privilege of standing above cultural particularism, of aspiring to the universalist power that speaks for humanity,” a privilege “invented by a totalizing Western liberalism.”7 Ten years later, in Clifford’s essay “Traveling Cultures,” the term cosmopolitan had migrated from Western anthropologists and travelers to “the host of servants, helpers, companions, guides, bearers, etc. [who had] been discursively excluded from the role of proper travelers because of their race and class.”8 These too, Clifford now said, had “their specific cosmopolitan viewpoints,”9 viewpoints that were very much worth retrieving.

This positing of a “cosmopolitanism from below” was an inspiration to me and to many others. In the cultural disciplines in particular, it opened up what turned out to be a very fruitful program of work, some of it empirical research into the transnational subjectivity of the new, less privileged cast of cosmopolitan characters, and some of it reflection on the moral and pedagogical goals of the humanities. This is the “new” rather than the “old” cosmopolitanism, where the “new” is also described as “full” rather than “empty” (as David Hollinger puts it) and as empirical rather than normative.10 If Appiah is the poster boy for the new, full, empirical cosmopolitanism, Martha Nussbaum seems the most widely cited representative of the old, empty, normative version. The question that gradually came to trouble me was crystallized by the opposition between empirical and normative. Thinking back to Clifford, it was suddenly unclear to me exactly how much of a change in course his two statements marked. In 1990, was he assigning to different characters the same normative, Nussbaumian task—implying, in other words, that the nonelite cosmopolitans were also, like Said, speaking for humanity? Or was he assuming that Said’s task of speaking for humanity, which Clifford had criticized in 1980, would be repudiated by the new, nonelite cosmopolitans in favor of particular experiences of border crossing that could not or should not be generalized? If this was all about particular experiences, then interrogating “guides, assistants, translators, carriers, etc.” (107) might not have anything at all to do with Said’s themes of imperialism and global justice.11 The same was true about the rest of us who enthusiastically joined Clifford in building up a new, nonelite cast of characters to fill in the category of “cosmopolitanism from below,” modifying cosmopolitan’s universalism with adjectives like “vernacular” or “rooted” or “actually existing.” The cause of planetary justice could not be satisfied merely by including more voices. Adding the poor and disadvantaged to cosmopolitanism certainly did not in itself mean that we were pushing directly for a more equitable distribution of the world’s material resources. It was even possible to make these additions while resisting a redistribution of resources. That’s arguably what happens in Appiah’s book.

The question that follows is this: is it possible to see the new cosmopolitanism as also a redistributive cosmopolitanism?

If so—and that is what I will be suggesting here—it will be thanks in part to one valuable thing that Appiah accomplished: subverting the antithesis between cosmopolitanism and the nation-state. The gesture was not unprecedented, but for thinkers of the past two decades, it has been decisive. Most recent champions of cosmopolitanism have assumed, I think rightly, that the nation-state as such is not their perpetual or foreordained enemy. Cosmopolitanism has even reappeared as an updated form of American patriotism. The formula is now both/and: multiple and overlapping loyalties. This both/and cannot be taken as some sort of guarantee that one will be spared a choice between loyalty to one’s country and loyalty to humanity in general—that a moment of either/or can never arise. Again, that seems to me what Appiah proposes. The quotation from Kennan was intended to suggest that this is simply not good enough, at least not for residents of the wealthy global North. But it prods us to scan for certain possibilities that might not otherwise have been visible.

Why is it so significant that nationalism and cosmopolitanism need not always contradict each other? Because historically the nation-state has been a somewhat successful agent of economic redistribution. When it works, to the extent that it works, that agency is what we mean by the welfare state. When the welfare state is allowed to fail, as it largely has been in the period of neoliberalism that began roughly with Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, under Democrats as well as Republicans, what is missing is arguably a sufficient quantity of national solidarity. That remains in itself a political goal worth fighting for. Recent theorists of cosmopolitanism, myself included, have suggested that national solidarity and international solidarity are not different in kind. At least in theory, then, it is possible to imagine building international solidarity out of national solidarity, extending the ideas and institutions of the welfare state so as also to include noncitizens in need. Here I could offer the example of the transnational struggle against the big pharmaceutical companies to secure the right to produce low-cost, generic antiretroviral drugs for HIV/AIDS. This struggle, though led by nongovernmental organizations, also required the help of states like Brazil and India, which afforded the technical competence and political will to produce generic versions of brand-name drugs. It also required the good offices of European governments. And it was a success, though a limited and provisional one.12

In this sense, celebrations of the demise of the nation-state would not necessarily be good news for the project of a redistributive cosmopolitanism. Which brings me back to George Orwell and the role the British state played in permitting him to link cosmopolitanism to global economic justice.

“Orwell may or may not have felt guilty about the source of his family’s income—an image that recurs in his famous portrait of England itself as a family with a conspiracy of silence about its finances—but he undoubtedly came to see the exploitation of the colonies as the dirty secret of the whole enlightened British establishment.”13 Christopher Hitchens is referring here to the origins of the Blair family fortune (long gone by the time Eric Blair/George Orwell was born) in Jamaican sugar, hence in slavery, as well as his father’s role as a minor functionary in the opium trade. Hitchens is one of many critics who have both raised the theme of guilt in Orwell and explicitly used self-blame to account for Orwell’s unusual attention to injustice at a cosmopolitan scale. It’s as if there were a peculiar mystery about the emphasis Orwell gives to the economic well-being of distant foreigners, especially but not exclusively the subjects of the British Empire, in contrast to a more natural concern for the domestic working class, and something personal had to be said to account for it.

The psychologizing of Orwell’s political commitments tends of course to cast doubt on their usefulness and validity. So, for example, Louis Menand writes: “The guilt [his term] that he felt about his position as a member of the white imperialist bourgeoisie preceded his interest in politics as such.”14 If you start from guilt, nothing good can follow. Orwell says

that if what he calls political speech—by which he appears to mean political clichés—were translated into plain, everyday speech, confusion and insincerity would begin to evaporate. It is a worthy, if unrealistic, hope. But he does not stop there. All politics, he writes, “is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.” And by the end of the essay he has damned the whole discourse: “Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.”

Drawing his political commitments from self-blame, Menand suggests, Orwell can only finish by repudiating politics as such.

Orwell in fact remained a socialist to the end of his life, even through the dark years when the Cold War was beginning to dictate the terms in which his writing would henceforth be interpreted. This does not mean that Menand is mistaken. But what we tend to recognize as politics is politics at the scale of the nation. Hence cosmopolitanism or internationalism or any pretense of politics beyond the scale of the nation will always look not like socialism but like mere personal psychology or like a repudiation of politics, whether we are talking about Orwell or about anyone else.

And there are plausible reasons for this. Sustaining political commitment beyond the scale of the nation does seem to be a challenge. Certainly it was for Orwell. Consider the extraordinary sentences with which I began:

Under the capitalist system, in order that England may live in comparative comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation—an evil state of affairs, but you acquiesce in it every time you step into a taxi or eat a plate of strawberries and cream. The alternative is to throw the Empire overboard and reduce England to a cold and unimportant little island where we should all have to work very hard and live mainly on herrings and potatoes.

Did Orwell include himself among the “left-wingers” of the final sentence, who do not wish England to become a cold and unimportant little island? It’s not clear. It’s equally unclear that he himself was committed to ending the injustice he so forcefully laid out. It seems likely that he was speaking as one of the taxi-takers and strawberry-and-cream eaters, though there is room for doubt: for better or worse, Orwell’s class politics were fueled in part by a vigorous personal asceticism. To assume that Orwell spoke not as a renunciate but as a fellow beneficiary, which would help explain why the passage is so at odds with itself, would not clarify other issues. If Orwell did not want England to give up its empire and go back to eating herrings and potatoes, then what did he want? If he too “acquiesces” in this “evil state of affairs” while continuing to insist on how evil it is, then where does he place himself, where does he belong? Assuming that he were to be successful in persuading a certain number of readers that this state of affairs is indeed evil, as he seems to be attempting to do, to what category would those readers who agree with him then belong? What kind of membership is available to a European or Northerner who would take up the cause of ending inequality between global North and global South, a cause that is not in his or her self-interest but that also does not require face-to-face communication or collaboration with actual global Southerners, let alone the autonomous activity of those Southerners? If action creates membership just as membership creates action, what hypothetical action and what hypothetical membership does an indictment like Orwell’s aim at? What might be done, and who might do it, about the global injustice that Orwell describes?

The clause “you acquiesce in it” seems very provocative, very tough on the (presumably English) reader. But does it have an impact that could be properly described as political? Does it lead anywhere? It would not appear to be designed to. Unlike tea or opium, the taxi, strawberries, and cream are (or were at that time) recognizably domestic products. This leaves the non-Indian reader a little farther from seeing, in the desired sudden flash of insight, what exactly India might have to do with his or her little luxuries. The choice of domestic over exotic goods can perhaps be read as symptomatic. Perhaps the strawberries and cream are there so that tea and especially opium (which made the tea trade possible) can be absent. In any case, their absence makes it easier to hide the mediations, the visible causal steps that would lead from comfort here to starvation there. Enumerating these steps would allow them to be retraced, thus indicating what we might be able to do about this situation—consumer boycotts, or whatever. By omitting them, Orwell gives us nothing to do, no possible deliverance from the universal culpability.

That’s precisely the point of his next sentence: neither he nor the British left can see any eligible option. “The alternative is to throw the Empire overboard and reduce England to a cold and unimportant little island where we should all have to work very hard and live mainly on herrings and potatoes. That is the very last thing that any left-winger wants.”15 By making the alternative so ineligible, Orwell makes the clash of interests between Indians and Englishmen seem total and inescapable. Extreme self-blame begets an equally extreme sense of necessity. There is no possible overlap of interests, no room for negotiation. Simply because we are who we are and they are who they are, our guilt too becomes total and inescapable. The logic, both paradoxical and utterly familiar, combines provocation and backlash in one sentence. And the result is that the guilt disappears. If this exploitation is really as inevitable as you say it is, I reason, then I will refuse to feel guilty about it. After all, I have to get on with my life; that is, I have to try to change what can be changed. If this can’t be changed, if there is really no alternative, then it’s not my business any more. Poof—my guilt is gone. And cosmopolitanism disappears along with it.

The standard reading of Orwell’s career suggests that he followed something like this trajectory himself. In the run-up to World War II, he was radically cosmopolitan enough to question the value of fighting on the side of the British Empire even against an enemy like the Nazis. But he reversed himself, becoming a patriot and, as if to leave no doubt about it, berating other intellectuals for their supposed lack of patriotism. After the war, this patriotic and anti-cosmopolitan turn became part of the larger, depressing story of the Cold War binary and its chilling effect on intellectual life. In some ways, to put it this way is to understate the case. Even as a cosmopolitan, Orwell had been a bit of a cultural conservative. One of his favorite terms was “decency.” He relied on decency to make his case against imperialism: “no modern man, in his heart of hearts, believes that it is right to invade a foreign country and hold the population down by force.” On the other hand, the decent heart of hearts tended to be oblivious to economic injustice:

Foreign oppression is a much more obvious, understandable evil than economic oppression. Thus in England we tamely admit to being robbed in order to keep half a million worthless idlers in luxury, but we would fight to the last man sooner than be ruled by Chinamen; similarly, people who live on unearned dividends without a single qualm of conscience, see clearly enough that it is wrong to go and lord it in a foreign country where you are not wanted.16

Here national identity is destiny. And if so—given what had not yet come to be called the international division of labor—then economic identity is also destiny. Schemes for economic justice, whether at the domestic level or, even more so, beyond it, founder on the unchangeability of human nature.

In the “you acquiesce in it” passage, however, Orwell’s eventual point, arrived at only after a lengthy detour about attitudes toward class, is that, like the abolition of class distinctions, the abolition of the Empire (and the abolition of unearned income from overseas investments, which Orwell characteristically and prophetically adds) will mean, for the average middle-class person, “abolishing a part of yourself.”17 In some moods, he says this means “they are asking us to commit suicide.”18 In other moods, it merely suggests a need for “uncomfortable changes” in one’s habits.19 Surprisingly, Orwell does not seem sure after all that this is too much to ask.

Just as surprisingly, these uncomfortable changes are what he has on his mind in the midst of World War II. After the 1941 publication of The Lion and the Unicorn, with its attack on cosmopolitan intellectuals, Orwell found himself working for the BBC Eastern Service, writing and supervising pro-Allied broadcasts to India. Critical discussions of this episode have tended to focus on whether, by making himself an instrument of propaganda—something he never denied—he was contradicting his trademark ideal of absolute truth telling. But the episode raises a more interesting point. In his unpromising effort to talk his Indian listeners into taking the side of their colonizers, Orwell obviously could not content himself with reciting the litany of Axis atrocities, though he does devote airtime to them. In India, the atrocities committed by the British Empire were all too well known. Atrocities alone could not push Indians into taking one side against the other. So what could? Orwell hoped that Britain would promise India its independence, but he also knew that he could not be persuasive unless he could address the economic factors working against this alliance. In “Not Counting Niggers,” he refused what he called the “first duty of a ‘good anti-Fascist,’ ” which was “to lie about” the disparity in income between England and India, a disparity so great that, Orwell asserts, an Indian’s leg is commonly thinner than an Englishman’s arm.20 “One mightn’t think it when one looks round the back streets of Sheffield, but the average British income is to the Indian as twelve to one. How can one get anti-Fascist and anti-capitalist solidarity in such circumstances? … Indians refuse to believe that any class-struggle exists in Europe. In their eyes the underpaid, downtrodden English worker is himself an exploiter.”21 If he was going to make his case, Orwell would have to find a way of speaking to the point he had raised in The Road to Wigan Pier five years earlier: the dependence of the ordinary Englishman on Indian poverty—not just the taxi-taking, strawberry-and-cream eating member of the middle class, but also those well below them on the social ladder. This would mean producing evidence that the British as a nation were prepared to live on less on a less important island.

Amazingly, that is the inconvenient prospect he brings up, beginning on his first day on the job. His first weekly news broadcast for the BBC, on January 20, 1942, notifies his Indian audience that consumption in Britain has been restricted.

Once war has started, every nation must choose between guns and butter … since England is an island and shipping is very precious, they [the working population] must make do with amusements that do not waste imported materials … the luxuries which have to be discarded are the more elaborate kinds of food and drink, fashionable clothes, cosmetics and scents—all of which either demand a great deal of labor or use up rare imported materials.… If you have two hours to spare, and if you spend it in walking, swimming, skating, or playing football, according to the time of year, you have not used up any material or made any call on the nation’s labor power. On the other hand, if you use those two hours in sitting in front of the fire and eating chocolates, you are using up coal which has to be dug out of the ground and carried to you by road, and sugar and cocoa beans which have to be transported half across the world.22

The next sentence makes it clear that, though bananas have disappeared and even sugar is “none too plentiful,” Orwell genuinely approves of rationing: “In the case of a good many unnecessary luxuries, the government diverts expenditure in the right direction by simply cutting off supplies.”23 In his second broadcast, on January 22, he announces: “There is a great deal of evidence that food rationing has not so far done any harm to public health in Britain—rather the contrary, if anything. English people before the war usually ate too much sugar and drank too much tea.”24 It’s not exactly a call for England to go on a herring-and-potato diet, but his enthusiasm does seem to exceed what is strictly necessary in order to maintain wartime morale. Three weeks later, his approval of wartime rationing has become even more intense: “The ordinary people who have to put up with these restrictions do not grumble, and are even heard to say that they would welcome greater sacrifices, if these would set free more shipping for the war effort, since they have a clear understanding of the issue, and set much more store by their liberty than by the comforts they have been accustomed to in peacetime.”25 W. J. West, the editor of the BBC broadcasts, finds this evocation of an uncomplaining multitude almost unbearable. He comments in a note: “The resemblance between Orwell’s writing here and the voice screeching about rationing over the telescreens in Nineteen Eighty-Four is striking. ‘The ordinary people’ who ‘would welcome greater sacrifices’ are very clearly the basis for Orwell’s creation in that book, the ‘Proles.’ ”26

The leap to Nineteen Eighty-Four may be inevitable, but it is also misleading. Orwell no doubt came to feel revulsion for much of what he did for the Ministry of Information, but he could not help but know that in working there he had also served purposes he had believed in before the war, continued to believe in after it, and freely announced when he did not have the government looking over his shoulder. In talking up austerity, Orwell was not simply talking up the war effort or saying what his bosses wanted him to say. On the contrary, his broadcasts on rationing were among those most severely censored by the government. The following passage (from March 14, 1942) is one of many that were cut by the censors: “The British people are disciplining themselves yet harder for the demands of total war. The penalties against those who operate the Black Market in food have been stiffened up, so that offenders can now get as much as fourteen years imprisonment. White flour is to be withdrawn from the market shortly, and only wheatmeal flour allowed. This alone will save half a million tons of shipping space every year. It is probable also that the use of petrol for mere pleasure or convenience will shortly be prohibited. No one complains of these restrictions—on the contrary, the general public are demanding that they be made even stricter, so that the selfish minority who behave as though Britain were not at war can be dealt with once and for all.”27

Though the government was not fully enthusiastic about what Orwell was saying, it had already performed one absolutely crucial service for him: it had demonstrated and was continuing to demonstrate the existence of an alternative to the apparently iron laws of the market. Rationing showed that demand was not omnipotent. It could be successfully interfered with, and with the assent of the consumers. In interfering with it, the state too was acting under pressure, of course; it was the war that made regulation of the market both militarily necessary and politically possible. Yet the collision of necessities resulted in a freedom that, however provisional, taught Orwell a very useful lesson. For motives of his own, Orwell needed evidence of a will to curb British consumption. The war provided it in the form of a dramatic interruption in world capitalism and world interconnectedness, a prolonged moment in which the channels of world trade were largely closed down and tropical commodities like tea, coffee, sugar, tobacco, and oil were suddenly in short supply. The effect was not to send Britain back to a nearly self-sufficient precapitalist state, but it was proof of sorts—and proof was exactly what Orwell needed—that the British could after all be something other than what they were. National identity was not fate, even in such visceral matters as habits of eating and drinking. Abolishing a part of yourself had become state policy—policy that was unpleasant and yet also, miraculously, popular.

The logic is never spelled out, but it is clear enough, and nothing else makes sense of Orwell’s compulsive attention to a theme that was not obviously interesting to his Indian listeners while it also got him in trouble with the higher-ups at the BBC. If self-abolition had been British policy, the logic goes, then it could become policy again. It could not be legitimately assumed after all that British and Indian consumption were stuck forever at a ratio of 12 to 1. One day, collective asceticism might win another place on the political agenda, this time motivated by something other than the Nazi threat—by the desire for ecological survival, for a slower rate of immigration, and perhaps also (who knows?) for global justice. The wartime state prefigured the totalitarianism of Nineteen Eighty-Four, but it was also a genuine effort toward collective self-fashioning that prefigured other as yet unrealized possibilities, even if Orwell, who was already dying, never found the time or the occasion to look beyond the newborn Cold War and think them through.

This is not to suggest that British rationing ever did India any material good. During the period of Orwell’s broadcasts, there was in fact a famine in India. But there was no rationing. As Lizzie Collingham notes in her book on food during World War II, “a considerable portion of the population was already living at a bare subsistence level. Rationing would have entitled the worst hit to at least a minimum of food.”28

If Britain were to meet India’s request [for food], shipping and supplies would have to be withdrawn from either British soldiers fighting the Germans or British civilians making do on corned beef.… Churchill was not inclined to be generous with India at Britain’s expense. He is said to have claimed that Indians had brought these problems on themselves by breeding like rabbits and must pay the price of their own improvidence.29

Nor is there any guarantee that collective asceticism, should it again become a real historical force, would further a cosmopolitan agenda. Some of the evidence seems to run in the opposite direction—toward a chauvinist agenda. I refer to the slew of books that have recently appeared, before as well as during the 2008 financial crisis, which mix ecological virtue—how to have less of an impact on the planet—with more or less undisguised xenophobia or anti-Chinese racism and a straightforward desire to be sure the United States gets the largest possible slice of the world economic pie. Examples include Sara Bongiorni’s A Year Without “Made in China” (2007) and Roger Simmermaker’s How Americans Can Buy American: The Power of Consumer Patriotism (2008), now in its third edition, and even Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (2007), which set about “to wring most of the petroleum out of our food chain, even if that meant giving up some things.”30

Giving things up in order to eat local would obviously not raise the standard of living in places like China and as these titles suggest, it’s not always meant to. The immediate result might well be the reverse. It seems impractical, therefore, to connect the ascetic impulse embodied in the locavore fashion with the utopian goal of a more equitable distribution of the world’s resources. Perhaps the best way to take this episode is as a window briefly opening on certain still distant possibilities for a politics of global justice. It may be that a leveling in the world’s resources will happen by means of violence. It may be that it will result from market forces, though neither the United States nor the Chinese government has ever allowed market forces to work unhindered. It may be that this leveling will not happen at all. None of these possible outcomes seems to me as desirable as a leveling that would happen by means of democratic decision making at a planetary scale—by a planetary equivalent to the once-equally-unimaginable process by which the United States decided democratically, against strong opposition, that it would have a graduated income tax. If we would like to equalize at least somewhat the life chances of the residents of planet earth, and if we would prefer to see that happen in a peaceful and democratic way, then we should surely value whatever evidence we can find, however skimpy and unsatisfying, that people who have more than their fair share are willing to imagine living on less, even when the evidence is as politically ambiguous as the American impulse to asceticism and self-sacrifice. As with rationing in World War II, proof that one can do without exotic commodities that had come to seem necessities is also proof that one can do without, full stop—proof that one can consume less, perhaps mainly herrings and potatoes, and be happy enough in doing so. This is precisely what would have to be demonstrated in order to make the case that global redistribution is more than a mere fantasy or an abstract ideal.

I want to conclude by acknowledging two objections to the argument I’ve just made. Objection #1: Sacrifice in the defense of a nation at war could plausibly be described as self-interested. My argument began with the embarrassment caused by George Kennan’s statement of national self-interest, an embarrassment I take as evidence that self-interest is by no means an undisputed ideological norm. Still, my argument posits both an exceeding of self-interest and the emergence of a motive other than war. Is it possible to imagine a moral equivalent of war that could generate as much will to collective self-fashioning as the Nazi threat did while also extending its solidarity beyond the collectivity of wartime allies? I can’t pretend to know. The recent adventures of finance capital in the United States, including the loss of many homes, jobs, and retirement funds along with considerable new experience of ontological insecurity, may be a step in this direction, a means of augmenting the capacity of Americans to empathize with victims of globalization elsewhere without actually eliminating the objective differences between globalization’s victims and beneficiaries—that is, the degree to which others elsewhere suffer from the same forces and suffer more. If Americans as a nation are beneficiaries of global capitalism, as Orwell described his fellow Englishmen as beneficiaries of Empire, we are troubled and insecure beneficiaries. But for the moment the most obvious answer to the “moral equivalent of war” question is, of course, the threat of ecological catastrophe. That threat is the major nonracist impulse that the new ascetics are responding to. Whether you consider this self-interested or altruistic will depend on how far into the future you consider that your self extends. I would not like to think that it’s only those of us with offspring who recognize ourselves in future collectivities, even if we can’t know them, as well as in our present, delimited selves—which we don’t know all that well either. Do I see striking evidence of people stretching themselves in time to anticipate severe ecological harm the way they anticipate coming to belong to the top 1 percent? Not for the moment. But I don’t think the case is closed.

Objection #2: why the privileging of economic inequality? After all, inequality is not even the most peremptory of evils. I have not spoken here about absolute deprivation, only relative deprivation. Inequality can also seem too crudely utilitarian a target. Orwell’s “herring and potatoes” line finds a tonal and philosophical echo in the philosopher Derek Parfit’s argument against both egalitarianism and utilitarianism: “[E]ven if some change brings a great net benefit to those who are affected, it is a change for the worse if it involves the loss of one of the best things in life.” The best things in life, for Parfit, are aesthetic. He therefore imagines (paraphrased by Malcolm Bull) that at first, “Mozart’s music is lost, then Haydn’s; then Venice is destroyed, then Verona, until eventually all that is left is a life of muzak and potatoes.”31 Either Parfit or Bull may be remembering Orwell’s herring and potatoes, which would therefore count as an anticipation of what Parfit calls the “repugnant conclusion.”

Bull’s answer to Parfit concedes some of the repugnance but turns it around, making egalitarianism into something that is not merely utilitarian. What anti-utilitarians like Parfit mean by “leveling down,” Bull suggests, is often something closer to “leveling out,” that is, adding extra people from outside the given political community and treating them as if their standard of living mattered as much as that of those inside. Bull speaks of accommodating an “additional population of non-beneficiaries.”32 The threat of seemingly limitless additions, of a pressure to accommodate infinite and therefore seemingly impossible numbers of nonbeneficiaries, cannot be kept from infiltrating pious wishes for planetary democracy. In conceding this, Bull brings out an impulse in egalitarianism that is more philosophically interesting than a mere numbers game. He takes up a quote from Nietzsche in which Nietzsche seems to be attacking egalitarianism, in his most grandly antidemocratic manner, as “nihilistic.” Yes, Bull says, egalitarianism is indeed nihilistic. But this should not be taken as a critique of it. Egalitarianism undercuts existing judgments of “value,” like the superiority of Mozart to potatoes, by imagining

the potential disappearance of what at the start of the process is the good being distributed.… [T]he revolutionary tradition has actually been inspired by the idea of advancing to that point where the absence of limits negates the existence of those things the limit seeks to preserve and distribute—property, class, law, or the state—and which equality serves to maintain precisely because it presupposes them. There is indeed a sense in which, as Nietzsche said, this is “the secret path to nothingness.”33

Bull redefines equality, accordingly, as “a form of socially realized skepticism about value. Equality already functions like this in the case of positional goods, where sharing in, and diminishing the value of, are effected simultaneously.”34 This seems to me what Orwell means by abolishing a part of yourself, which is here presented not as therapy or self-flagellation but as a philosophical program worthy of and inviting us toward a collective cosmopolitics.

NOTES

  1  George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (London: Penguin, 1937/1962), 140; George Orwell, “Review of Letters on India by Mulk Raj Anand,” Tribune, March 19, 1943, in The Complete Works of George Orwell, edited by Peter Davison, Vol. 15, “Two Wasted Years” (London: Secker and Warburg, 1998), 33. It was not simply courageous of Orwell to notice global inequality: in presenting all of Britain as dependent on a surplus drained from its colonies, he was perhaps also doing something to assuage the personal guilt of benefiting from class privileges within Britain.

  2  Gavin Kendall, Ian Woodward, and Zlatko Skrbis, The Sociology of Cosmopolitanism: Globalization, Identity, Culture and Government (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 1.

  3  Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 164.

  4  Pnina Werbner, ed., Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism: Rooted, Feminist, and Vernacular Perspectives (Oxford: Berg, 2008), 17.

  5  James Seaton, Weekly Standard, October 9, 2006.

  6  I discuss the recent development of the concept of cosmopolitanism in more detail in the introduction to my Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012).

  7  James Clifford, “On Orientalism,” In The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 255–276. The essay originally appeared in History and Theory 19 (1980), 204–223.

  8  James Clifford, “Traveling Cultures,” in Cultural Studies, edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 106.

  9  Ibid., 107.

10  David A. Hollinger, “Not Pluralists, Not Universalists, the New Cosmopolitans Find Their Own Way,” Constellations, June 2001, 236–248.

11  This was a question that Paul Rabinow had posed explicitly in 1986, in a book Clifford coedited, when he spoke of a “critical cosmopolitanism.” He described critical cosmopolitanism as “an oppositional position, one suspicious of sovereign powers, universal truths.” Yet universalism has clearly not been banished from it, for it is also described as “suspicious [both] of its own imperial tendencies” and of “the tendency to essentialize difference” (258) it seems intended to lie in between “local identities” and “universal ones.” In other words, the universal is not simply alien to it. Paul Rabinow, “Representations Are Social Facts: Modernity and Postmodernity in Anthropology,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 234–261.

12  See Gaëlle Krikorian, “A New Era of Access to Rights?” in Nongovernmental Politics, edited by Michel Feher with Gaëlle Krikorian and Yates McKee (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 247–259.

13  Christopher Hitchens, Why Orwell Matters (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 6.

14  Louis Menand, “Honest, Decent, Wrong: The Invention of George Orwell,” New Yorker, January 27, 2003 (online).

15  Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, 140.

16  Ibid., 126.

17  Ibid., 141.

18  Ibid., 148.

19  Ibid., 142.

20  George Orwell, “Not Counting Niggers,” in The Collected Essays: Journalism and Letters, edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, Vol. 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 434–438.

21  Orwell, “Review of Letters on India by Mulk Raj Anand,” 33.

22  Orwell: The War Broadcasts, edited by W. J. West (London: Duckworth/BBC, 1985), January 20, 1942, 72. West’s theory is that his time as Talks producer in the Indian Section of the BBC’s Eastern service was “the key to Orwell’s evolution from the slightly pedantic and unpolished author of pre-war days” (p. 13). West opposes his theory to “the received view … that these were lost years for Orwell” (p. 13). “There were constraints and frustrations certainly,” but he didn’t stop writing, he wrote some of the talks himself, and saw what he said as “essentially truthful” (p. 13).

23  Ibid.

24  Ibid., 74.

25  Ibid., February 14, 1942, 53.

26  In his “London Letter” in Partisan Review, August 29, 1942, Orwell talks about the effects of the war on consumption. “The most sensational drop [under rationing] has been in the consumption of sugar and tea.… Two ounces of tea is a miserable ration by English standards … the endlessly stewing teapot was one of the bases of English life in the era of the dole, and though I shall miss the tea myself I have no doubt we are better off without it” (p. 519). “War and consequent abandonment of imports tend to reduce use to the natural diet of these islands, that is, oatmeal, herrings, milk, potatoes, green vegetables and apples, which is healthy if rather dull.… After the war Britain must necessarily become more of an agricultural country, because, however the war ends, many markets will have disappeared owing to industrialization in India, Australia, etc. In that case we shall have to return to a diet resembling that of our ancestors, and perhaps these war years are not a bad preparation” (p. 519). In much the same spirit, it can be said that Orwell’s broadcasts are not a bad preparation today for a slow shift away from U.S. hegemony that is either in process now or a likely result of longer-term processes.

27  Orwell: The War Broadcasts, 64.

28  Lizzie Collingham, The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (New York: Penguin Books, 2013), 144.

29  Ibid., 145.

30  Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 10.

31  Malcolm Bull, “Help Yourself,” London Review of Books, February 21, 2013, 18.

32  Ibid., 15.

33  Ibid., 24.

34  Ibid.