So easily forgotten…’twas I that suggested the topic. Oh well, I guess people will remember me when I get my own podcast someday.
To add to your incredulity at his prodigious output (that wording likely sent him spinning in his grave), he did not actually begin writing seriously until he was about 27, if memory serves. Blows your mind, I know. He also was a man of notable physical courage, not just as a policeman in Burma, but also evident in his voluntary participation in the Spanish civil war, where he was badly injured.
I also wanted to comment on the discussion regarding his alleged snobbery. It is definitely there to a degree, especially when you read essays like “The Lion and the Unicorn,” where he simultaneously describes the average Englishman as something of a dolt, yet recognizes the immense strength that resides within the simple, traditional, Victorian class society that he grew up in. Yet his willingness to get down in the dirt with the average man, whether in Spain or in trudging through the slums of London, reveals someone who was definitely not a purely aristocratic snob. It is also worth noting, he was a notable critic of British imperial colonialism, knowing it quite well from the inside. His essay on “Shooting an Elephant” is a great little exercise in cultural differences. All in all, I think he fits the mold you all gave in your episode on intellectuals; he is a perpetual outsider, one who fits molds uncomfortably, is often full of contradiction, but is generally fearless in “calling it as he sees it.”
Michal, in a recent discussion I had regarding CCM, I brought Orwellian language from this essay to bear to make my point that the lyrics found therein were, for the most part, irritatingly meaningless. I’m glad you made that connection too, and you beat that drum all you want!
Great episode guys, you gave me a lot to think about regarding this essay. I will bring this rather long comment to an end with an appropriately Orwellian quote:
“Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child’s Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship. To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox.”

JeffVeitch If that name happens, you’ve GOT to let us know as soon as you can.  This is the kind of literary-nerd scoop that our Internet circles need to hear about!

Great episode. Other Christian terms that have become meaningless: “Community.” “Missional.” Even “Christ-centered” is getting pretty close.

Speaking of academic jargon, have you guys seen thehttp://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/? It randomly creates gems like this:

If
one examines constructivism, one is faced with a choice: either reject
capitalist narrative or conclude that sexual identity, somewhat
surprisingly, has objective value. Humphrey[1] holds that we have to
choose between Sontagist camp and subtextual desituationism. However,
the primary theme of Finnis’s[2] model of the modern paradigm of
discourse is the role of the participant as writer.
“Sexuality is
elitist,” says Derrida; however, according to Long[3] , it is not so
much sexuality that is elitist, but rather the meaninglessness, and
therefore the fatal flaw, of sexuality. The premise of capitalist
narrative suggests that the State is capable of significance, but only
if art is distinct from sexuality; if that is not the case, we can
assume that the raison d’etre of the reader is deconstruction. In a
sense, Debord uses the term ‘Sontagist camp’ to denote a mythopoetical
totality.

ChenBuLei Let me make the historical distinction first.  In the first half of the twentieth century, as Leninist/Stalinist Communism grows as a force in Russia and China and eastern Europe, it meets resistance not just from Capitalism but also from Socialism in Europe.  Socialists like George Orwell thought that Stalinism especially was an inhumane way to live as a nation and insisted that the best way for a nation to exist was neither as the thralls of corporations (which tend to regard human lives as “labor” commodities to be discarded when a better price is available) nor as the victims of a violent Communist avant-garde (which tends to break more than it fixes) but as a social democracy, where strong legal protections provided for the basic health, safety, and opportunity for all involved.  So as late as the 1960’s there was a strong intellectual distinction, recognized fairly broadly, between socialism and Communism.  Now I’ll grant that Capitalists liked neither, but even they tended to see that socialism, relative to its alternative, was a better partner.

With regards to our stances towards capitalism, I won’t speak for the others, but I’ll say that asking whether one must be either capitalist or socialist is somewhat akin to asking whether one must be Muslim or atheist.  In my mind, such a question, framed in such a way, ignores other possibilities that might be better than the two alternatives posed in the question.

To get a bit more concrete, I’ll appeal to two figures, G.K. Chesterton and Richard Weaver, who are heroes to modern conservatives but had little patience for Communism or Capitalism. 

Chesterton famously quipped that “One would think, to hear people talk, that the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers were on the side of property. But obviously they are the enemies of property because they are enemies of their own limitations. They do not want their own land; but other people’s. . . . It is the negation of property that the Duke of Sutherland should have all the farms in one estate; just as it would be the negation of marriage if he had all our wives in one harem.”

Similarly, in Richard Weaver’s book Ideas Have Consequences, Weaver simultaneously insists on private property as indispensable natural law and sharply criticizes the modern international banking system (this was in the throes of the Cold War, mind you) for separating the labor of human beings from the accumulation of wealth.

And of course, those are just twentieth-century figures.  I’d argue that medieval notions of labor are abandoned treasures for folks trying to think a bit more broadly about possible ways for human beings and our wealth to co-exist.

So yes, like Richard Weaver, and like G.K. Chesterton, I’m suspicious of multinational corporate consumer capitalism.  But that no more makes me a Communist than does my rejection of the tenets of Islam make me an atheist.