Everyone who has read 1984 knows, in an abstract way, what it is like to live in North Korea.
Big Brother. Doublethink. Thought crime. From these concepts, one can outline North Korea’s relationship to its citizen-slaves — its paranoia, propaganda, torture rooms and, perhaps most importantly, its attitude towards history.
So how is it, then, that George Orwell, an English novelist, could be so right about a country that he himself would never visit?
I ask this to combat — or “problematize,” as the strange new lingo has it — the notion that one’s ability to approach truth rests solely on one’s experiences, much less one’s national identity. Orwell did not need to be a North Korean to understand the intricacies of how dictators become emperors and emperors become gods.
It is true: identity has power. Books would not be worth reading if they didn’t stem from where the author came from or what they had gone through. One of the reasons that it’s worth being interested in other people is that you might learn something new about yourself.
But the truth — like 1984’s vision — is a general human truth, and it has implications for every culture. How many regimes in how many different places have created a Big Brother? Have destroyed the past in order to create it? The 20th century showed us that any society is capable of becoming one of Orwell’s horror-nations.
This one author never directly experienced that kind of horror, but was able to triangulate its existence by never compromising his mental faculties.
I write this, in part, because I am terrified that left-leaning college students have forgotten what Orwell teaches us. The tone I get from serious people is that the U.S. spent all it’s cultural currency in the Iraq war, and no longer has the right to discuss what goes on outside of its borders.
These people believe that female genital mutilation is an “African problem,” as if borders and culture somehow lessen that horror. In an attempt to exonerate faith, they say that ISIS is primarily a political organization, not a religious one as if they were mutually exclusive ideas. They scoff at those who have spoken seriously against modern totalitarianism, even those who have experienced it first-hand. People like Ayyan Hirsi Ali, Azar Nafisi and Salman Rushdie, none of whom originate from the U.S., are told that while their opinions are perhaps correct, they are creating a narrative that will only serve to oppress an injured minority, and therefore should keep quiet.
There is something masochistic about this tendency — it is an attempt to seem urbane and multicultural by refusing to entertain certain ideas or truths if they concern a sufficiently foreign culture.
But there’s also a secret narcissism to it as well. By labeling all events outside of one’s culture as “out-of-bounds” one can restrict the conversation to one’s own culture. One can then feel justified in wasting valuable time debating "manspreading" when unthinkable forms of human suffering goes on just a few hours away by plane.
I am not saying that criticisms of the minutiae of U.S. culture are a total waste of one’s time. There are discussions to be had here. But they’re a lot like the spurts of violence and vandalism after Freddie Grey — sad, certainly, but absolutely nothing in comparison to institutionalized racism and murder. Female genital mutilation is worse than “manspreading,” and deserves to be treated as such. Priorities still have their place.
Cultural relativism turns away from the world instead of facing it. It is narcissism disguised as acceptance. It is totalitarian in its desire to restrict debate, and publicly shame (on Twitter, usually) anyone who talks about the world as group of interconnected human beings, instead of a homogenous place of isolated cultures who, under no circumstances, should be able to discuss each the other's faults.
It doesn’t particularly matter that many of those who openly accept cultural relativism are feminists and other social activists, and therefore they are the kind of people I tend to agree with on principle. Even people with the right opinions can come to those opinions easily and disingenuously (and, therefore, cannot defend them properly when attacked).
The old saying stands: it is not what one thinks, but how one thinks that really matters.
Orwell himself had dealt with, and sincerely hated, the English pro-Stalin incarnations of this type: “They take their cookery from Paris and opinions from Moscow . . . It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during ‘God save the King’ than of stealing from a poor box."
In this, Orwell gives us another truth: in every culture significantly advanced, there will always be those who resent the place in which they live. They are, unconsciously, the tools of dictators who, at the very least, have strength in their own convictions.