On a subject related to yesterday’s obituary for affirmative action, I want to think about this quote from Wendell Berry, who in turn is quoting and commenting on George Orwell:

In his essay on Kipling, George Orwell wrote: “All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are ‘enlightened’ all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our ‘enlightenment,’ demands that the robbery shall continue.”

This statement of Orwell’s is clearly applicable to our situation now: all we need to do it change a few nouns. The religion and environmentalism of the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something they do not really wish to destroy. We all live by robbing nature, but our standard of living demands that the robbery shall continue.

Wendell Berry, “Word and Flesh” in What Are People For?

This relates as well to my post a couple of weeks ago about how the left needs to get serious about politics, and I guess is becoming a bit of a running theme for me. There are real serious issues for the left to tackle – around inequality, wealth, economic justice, corporations, capitalism, and more – that would have fantastic downstream effects on marginalized communities. But, tackling them would mean back-benching identity issues and the easy clicks and fundraising pitches they generate, not too mention the dopamine hits that a good Twitter rant conjures up. Orwell saw it nearly a century ago, Berry saw it fifty years ago, and here we are today. The left hasn’t really changed; most liberals seem to enjoy the fight more than they do results, and the people who are hurt by that decision are the ones we claim to care the most about. We’ve got to get serious. We’ve got to.