Indifference

I'm reading 1984 with my seniors this quarter. This is my first time teaching the book, so I find myself encountering new ideas as I teach (of course, I hope that I find myself doing the same thing years down the road!). Orwell describes the proles--or proletariats--as being the only hope for the nation. The problem is that the proles don't get it. They are so tied up in their day-to-day that they are unable to see beyond it. Orwell says:

In reality very little was known about the proles. It was not necessary to know much. So long as they continued to work and breed, their other activites were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern. They were born, they grew up in the gutters, they went to work at twelve, they passed through a brief blossoming period of beauty and sexual desire, they married at twenty, they were middle-aged at thirty, they died, for the most part at sixty. Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling filled up the horizons of their minds.

It's funny (and not ha-ha funny) to me how much this resembles most Americans. We get caught up in living our day-to-day lives and become blind to the princibles behind our lifestyles. Orwell continues:

No attempts was made to indoctrinate [the proles] with the ideology of the Party. It was not desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils inevitably escaped their notice.

Orwell is talking about a group of people who are so consumed with the petty happenings of their lives that they cannot see beyond them, in the political sense. I encouraged my students today to strive to see beyond their daily duties to what lies behind those actions. This is political--absolutely. We should be making our opinions known to the decision makers; we should be drawing attention to important issues. But it is even bigger than politics, I think. It we stay focused on the political arena, we are still guilty of the same shortcoming as Orwell's pride. We need to look beyond the specific and, while not neglecting the specific, make sure we understand the big picture. Do I have a philosophy of life? Do I have an opinion (even a loosely held opinion!) on how God and the government should work together? Do I have sentiments toward God that are more than a general belief in a higher being whom I can call on in the midst of personal or national crises? My hope today is that I'm able to do well in my day-to-day because I am focused on the Big Picture.