"what is now fashionable to call ‘realism’, meaning the doctrine that might is right"

Thinking about what Harold R. Johnson wrote about Orwell being an artist-scout for the rest of us, I remembered one of his most insightful essays I've read in which he contrasted the light fiction of the authors of the gentlemen thieves, Arsene Lupin and Raffles with the writer of more pathologically amoral, violent modern pulp fiction, James Hadley Chase.   

It is a shame that that essay is so little known, I suspect because the great George Orwell, the citation of whom is so often welcomed as a great hero when he was criticizing dictators and other political figures was far less welcomed when he pointed out the role his own profession, writers, artists, had and have in producing depravity.   It is remarkable how much of what he wrote more than 70 years ago, change a few names, clarifies exactly what we're seeing right before our eyes. Take this paragraph.

In borrowing from William Faulkner's Sanctuary, Chase only took the plot; the mental atmosphere of the two books is not similar. Chase really derives from other sources, and this particular bit of borrowing is only symbolic. What it symbolizes is the vulgarization of ideas which is constantly happening, and which probably happens faster in an age of print. Chase has been described as ‘Faulkner for the masses’, but it would be more accurate to describe him as Carlyle for the masses. He is a popular writer — there are many such in America, but they are still rarities in England — who has caught up with what is now fashionable to call ‘realism’, meaning the doctrine that might is right. The growth of ‘realism’ has been the great feature of the intellectual history of our own age. Why this should be so is a complicated question. The interconnexion between sadism, masochism, success-worship, power-worship, nationalism, and totalitarianism is a huge subject whose edges have barely been scratched, and even to mention it is considered somewhat indelicate. To take merely the first example that comes to mind, I believe no one has ever pointed out the sadistic and masochistic element in Bernard Shaw's work, still less suggested that this probably has some connexion with Shaw's admiration for dictators. Fascism is often loosely equated with sadism, but nearly always by people who see nothing wrong in the most slavish worship of Stalin. The truth is, of course, that the countless English intellectuals who kiss the arse of Stalin are not different from the minority who give their allegiance to Hitler or Mussolini, nor from the efficiency experts who preached ‘punch’, ‘drive’, ‘personality’ and ‘learn to be a Tiger man’ in the nineteen-twenties, nor from that older generation of intellectuals, Carlyle, Creasey [*] and the rest of them, who bowed down before German militarism.[**] All of them are worshipping power and successful cruelty. It is important to notice that the cult of power tends to be mixed up with a love of cruelty and wickedness for their own sakes. A tyrant is all the more admired if he happens to be a bloodstained crook as well, and ‘the end justifies the means’ often becomes, in effect, ‘the means justify themselves provided they are dirty enough’. This idea colours the outlook of all sympathizers with totalitarianism, and accounts, for instance, for the positive delight with which many English intellectuals greeted the Nazi-Soviet pact. It was a step only doubtfully useful to the U.S.S.R., but it was entirely unmoral, and for that reason to be admired; the explanations of it, which were numerous and self-contradictory, could come afterwards.

Change ink on paper to electronics, spoken words and pathological depravity spouted and committed by Hollywood beef cake, change a few names and you've got 2019 nailed spot on. 

All of what Orwell describes is a product of the scientistic materialist culture.  It's unfortunate that the habit of historians, social commentators, etc. to break down the history of culture into epochs does so much to blind people to the commonalities that unite a tradition that that division into ideological schools hides.  18th century "enlightenment" its scientism, its materialism, its secularism were largely retained through allegedly different epochs of romanticism, Victorianism, modernism, I think the uniting themes were a negation of moral responsibility or, in the case of some of the romantics, a modification and restriction of the range of moral responsibility.  I think that secular, scientistic, materialistic strain of western culture was, before the respectable churches started to give way to scientism, countered by the remnants of earlier Christian morality.  In the United States the abolition struggle grew out of the Quaker and Puritan traditions, not out of the "enlightenment" thinking of the Founders generation which proved to be entirely compatible and, in the case of someone like Jefferson, enthusiastic in its scientific justification of slavery.  It is the increasing influence of scientistic materialism in the "realism" of the late 19th century that turned into modernism which, contrary to what so many a naive and ignorant liberal or lefty will think, was remarkably compatible and, in so many cases, enthusiastic about fascism, Nazism, and, as Orwell pointed out, its equivalent in Marxism.

The current fashion of American "free speech - free press" jurisprudence certainly found its origin in the Darwinist scientistic materialistic savagery of Oliver Wendell Holmes*** and his fellow jurists on the Supreme Court.  That was what certainly influenced the largely Marxish when not overtly Marxist founders of the ACLU and so many other vintage institutions which have enabled our descent into fascism through their advocacy of "freedom" without regard to moral responsibilities or even consequences.  

* I would guess he means the British military historian Edward Creasey and not the 20th century Brit scribbler of crime novels.  

** Here is something I wrote a few years back about that man, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the area of Brittish intellectual "MORALITY!" of the 19th century, Thomas Carlyle, which showed that his attraction to the depravity of German militarism went both ways:

I think the role that British and other intellectuals played in creating the conditions that produced Nazism and fascism are too little known or considered.  It is known that Thomas Carlyle and his "great man" theory of history, especially his biography of Fredrick the Great had a huge effect on Goebbels and Hitler.   I recall reading somewhere that Goebbels was reading it to Hitler in the bunker as motivation to keep the war going.  Carlyle's hatred of democracy was certainly influential in proto-Nazi German thinkers such as Nietzsche - though Nietzsche, understanding that both morality and materialism can't be true criticized Carlyle for both his idealism and his moral assertions.   Carlyle, in his book on "Chartism" is a hodge podge of stuff, but among other things he contemplated was the possible "necessity" of exterminating the Irish.   He also shared the typical British elite hatred of the poor, he favored enslaving the entire population of the underclass and was an opponent of abolishing slavery, in general. 

*** Here's my archive of going into Holmes' depravity.