Animal Farm

Animal Farm
Being born in India as an Englishman was important in the life of George Orwell. The author interrogated himself and challenged the concept of colonialism. By the political situation of his time, maybe he entertained sympathy for communism. He went to Spain to fight for the communists on the civil war. There he found out what communism really is about and he saw that this ideology is not the solution.

In the next paragraphs I will try to find out why communism can’t be a solution by an examination of its philosophical background.

Marx believed that everything consists of matter and that matter has always been there. He believed that the universe, the world and even life arose by coincidences and evolved with conflicts (dialectic materialism.) According to this background, he wrote a theory about the evolution of the human history, where he saw concepts like possession and class conflict as a motor for this evolution. He also made some predictions and said that the goal of human history is a social structure, called communism.

Materialism is a philosophy, intervened by ancient Greek philosophers, who believed that only matter exists. This means that also living things and human consciousness are reducible to matter. In the 18th century these thoughts were adopted by fanatical French atheists like Denis Diderot and Baron d'Holbach and imposed on the people. In the next century, materialism became more widespread and took root in many European countries among which, Germany, the country of Marx.

This antic dogma, which rejects the idea that human beings have spirits, is today contrary with some scientific realities, because sciences like biology and quantum physics show us that all material existence that forms us and our environment is a totality of conception. The concept of what we call "matter" is like a dream, conceivable only as an image in our mind, with which we can have never have any connection. For example when we look, we can't see the external world, we see the images in our brains. Photons reflecting from the exterior world reach the retina at the back of the eye, which transforms them through a series of processes into electric signals. These signals are transferred along nerves to the center of vision at the rear of the brain. So, the bright, colorful, 3D world is perceived within this center of only a few cubic centimeters. In fact, we can never know if there's an external world, because for seeing there is no matter needed and this is the case for all our senses. This is for example proven every night when we dream. Another important question is who does the seeing? Who is it that sees the electric signals in the darkness of the brain without the need for eyes? The answer to that question is the being who we call "I" and which does not exist of matter.

This fact does not only invalidate materialism, but also its sequence for natural science: the theory of evolution. The claim of this theory is that life accidentally arose out of non-living matter and after a lot of time and a lot of coincidences, all living species, where under mankind arose by themselves. Some arguments why this theory is invalid can be shortly summarized with 3 general questions:

1. How did life begin?
A living cell exists of millions of proteins, with each a specific function and structure, grouped in organelles. The chance that 1 single protein of average size arises with coincidences, is 10^-950. (Calculated by the English mathematician and astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle.) Practically this means “0.”

2. How can a specie evolve into another? The mechanism of natural selection can't create new properties or organs. It just means that individuals with properties, who are more appropriate to their environment, have a higher chance to survive and to reproduce. It can't cause changes in genetic information. The only changes in genetic information are caused by mutations and they are in most of the cases dangerous or even deadly for the organism. Sometimes they are neutral. They can never add information for new organs to the DNA, because they’re just accidental writing errors.

3. The theory of evolution is a claim about natural history, so is it supported by the fossil record? When we take a look at the fossil record, we see that species appear suddenly and don't change for millions of years (stasis) and then eventually die out. There are 0 transitional forms. (Beasts with abnormal, incomplete organs, which show the gradually change of one specie to another. For example a fish whose fins started to become feet and it's not yet complete and useful should be a transitional form.)

So Orwell is right by saying communism in not a solution. But his error starts at the reason he gives for this. The image that he gives why communism, can’t be right, can be summarized with the words "Those who get the power, only think of themselves. The aim of to govern, is power." So Orwell thinks that a society where everyone is equal, isn’t realistic, because human are greedy, because of their nature.

But I don’t think this is true. The reason why Orwell made this mistake is maybe because just like all communists, he also believed in dialectic materialism and Darwinism. People, who believe that they’re evolved of other lesser animals, who don’t believe that they’ll give an account to God, who think everybody has no further existence than matter, indeed don’t have limitations on greediness by religious morality. In fact greediness is for them a way to hide their aimlessness. Properties like greediness, selfishness, etc are not a sequence of human nature, they’re disorders as result of believing human nature has to be that.