When it comes to politics, I worry about free will. To what degree are your politics the product of the environment in which you were raised? I would like to believe that I am a liberal because liberal social and economic policies are more moral or correct than conservative policies in some objective way. Certainly these seem more rational and "true" to me. But what if I'm a liberal just because I grew up in Park Slope, that most liberal milieu? What if the facts are only facts because I've been wired to receive them that way? After all, my graphs depicting economic inequality don't seem to convince any of my Republican friends that they are wrong.

Let's apply this discussion to someone else besides me. Take George Orwell— more than anyone I've read, his politics seem to match my own. But we obviously grew up in very different environments. He was a child of pre-WWI upper-middle class England (or was it the lower upper class England? to an American, the English class system is an impenetrable mystery.) He was certainly raised with a different set of values than I was: patriotism, obedience to your social betters, courage in war, etc. Since these kinds of ideas are foreign to Park Slope, I was puzzled at how we arrived at much the same place politically: a desire for a more equitable society, less driven by materialism and class-differences. But then I read "Such, Such Were the Joys", Orwell's essay about his youth in British prep schools:

I understood to perfection what it meant to be Lucifer, defeated and justly defeated, with no possibility of revenge. The schoolmasters with their canes, the millionaires with their Scottish castles, the athletes with their curly hair- these were the armies of the unalterable law. It was not easy, at that date, to realize that in fact it was alterable. And according to the law I was damned. I had no money, I was weak, I was ugly, I was unpopular, I had a chronic cough, I was cowardly, I smelt... at the time I could not see beyond the moral dilemma that is presented to the weak in a world governed by the strong: Break the rules, or perish."

And I realized the key to Orwell's politics isn't the exact circumstances of his childhood; his beliefs are the beliefs of anyone who has ever felt acutely weak in the presence of the strong, or acutely poor in the presence of the rich, or acutely ugly in the presence of the beautiful. And those feelings I understood. From the time I was young I always found myself breaking the rules, for much the same reason as Orwell did, and by the time I was adult, I began to feel, as he did, that there's something unreasonable and exploitive about our current political and social system. But the thrust of my politics, like his, was opposition: opposition to the powerful, opposition to wealth, opposition to the exploitation of the weak by the strong. You could call it liberal humanism or democratic-socialism or whatever you like, but the truth was that these values don't attach so easily to a regimented system of belief. Rather, a person with these values will find himself, from time to time, opposed to any system under which he lives, because no system will be perfectly fair.

I think Orwell understood this. In his essay about Dickens, he writes "A joke worth laughing at always has an idea behind it, and usually a subversive idea. Dickens is able to go on being funny because he is in revolt against authority, and authority is always there to be laughed at." Orwell loves non-conformists and people he recognizes as free-thinkers. But time and again, he criticizes them for simply criticizing the given order, rather than advancing a specific new order that would be more fair or more just. In this "Collection of Essays" He levels this charge repeatedly at Dickens, at Henry Miller, even at Gandhi. I think it bothers him so much because he knows it also applies to him: Orwell knows very well what he is opposed to (Colonialism, Totalitarianism, etc), but can only dimly describe the kind of society he'd rather live in.

In so many essays in this collection, like "England, Your England" or "The Art of Donald McGill", or "Boys Weeklies", Orwell lovingly paints a picture of his own country. Despite its dysfunction, and the extent to which it is run by rich, inbred idiots, you get the sense that Orwell sees England as a kind of paradise. A dirty paradise, perhaps, but one that he prefers to anywhere else in the world. I get the sense that in his heart of hearts, he'd simply like the world to be like England, perhaps more democratic, and run less by the rich, but still English in most of its values- love for sport, good grammar, smart dress, sarcasm. This leads Orwell into certain difficult spots:

"When you see how the people live, and still more how easily they die, it is always difficult to believe that you are walking among human beings. All colonial empires are in reality founded upon that fact. The people have brown faces- besides there are so many of them! Are they really the same flesh as yourself? Do they even have names?"

"In mid-19th century America men felt themselves free and equal, were free and equal, so far as that is possible outside a society of pure communism. There was poverty and there were even class distinctions, but except for the Negroes there was no permanently submerged class."

Which is to say, despite his best intentions and opposition to colonialism and the British class system, he still retains some of the biases he learned growing up inside of that system: a slight racism, a slight colonialism, a slight inability to truly feel at one with the common man he consciously admires.

But let's return again to the original question: how much choice does Orwell, or anyone, have in their politics, or in their biases? Most men of Orwell's generation and social setting did not become democratic socialists and sign up to fight in the Spanish Civil War. I'd even wager that most tubercular, ugly, prep-school poor kids didn't go that way. Free will must play some role. The question is how much. And the answer, for me, is that even if his free will played a very small role, I'm glad that a man of Orwell's keen intellect came out on the liberal side: it gives me a little more hope that liberal politics might actually be right. But Orwell understood this feeling too- writing about Henry Miller, he said:

"But read him for five pages, ten pages, and you feel the peculiar relief that comes not so much from understanding as from being understood. 'He knows all about me,' you feel, 'he wrote this specially for me.'

And that's how I feel about him.