Animal Farm by George Orwell: Review and Reaction

I finished reading Animal Farm today, a short-ish story (just over a hundred pages) about a farm owned by an incompetent human who neglects the animals, leading them to revolt and throw all humans off the property. As they work to prove that "two legs bad, four legs good" by running the farm on their own and making everything common, it doesn't take long for a new authoritarian regime to rise, under the leadership of Napoleon the pig.

It's a quick read and a fun story, with the personification of the animals done so well you forget you're reading a political satire on Stalinism.

From what I'd heard about the novel I went in thinking that it was going to be anti-socialist, or anti-communist. During the "revolution" against Farmer Jones, however, the reader sees that the animals are completely justified in finally fighting back against their drunken and abusive master, and their ideals are noble and selfless in establishing a new form of government with the goal of making all animals equal and no animal the servant of another. The animals actions are portrayed as heroic.

The Animal Farm runs in to trouble not from bad ideals, but from ignorance and blind trust in how the government is run. The more intelligent animals (pigs and their trained canine henchmen) use propaganda of patriotism and fear to put themselves in positions of authority and continually distance their lives and responsibilities from the other animals. This distancing allows the pigs over time to adopt practices of authoritarianism such as carrying whips, and to differentiate themselves from other animals by wearing clothes and sleeping in beds. The animals' ignorance and inability to remember the past make them easily swayed by the occasional display of rhetorical eloquence from the pigs.

My main takeaway from the book is a sense of gratitude to live in such a unique country, with a government framed so that power is divided up and not concentrated in the hands of a few.

However, as George Bernard Shaw once said (and I would add "Republic" to this quote as well), "Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve." While a satire on what Stalinism was, many themes of this book are enduring and should be a warning to make sure we deserve the government we want. Our system of checks and balances might make it difficult, but it is not impossible for ourselves to fall under the shadow of authoritarianism; when it happens, it is our own fault and through our own ignorance. The clearest example of this to me comes around every four years.

In the months leading up to a presidential election I hear blame and praise for almost everything the entire government is responsible for - and isn't responsible for - placed on a single man or woman: the President, or the opposing party's nominee. We seem to forget or ignore for our own convenience that the President is head of just one of three branches of the federal government, which is just one layer of government we support. This growing mentality that one person is the key to affecting real change has allowed presidents backed by either party to exercise power and authority that goes beyond what our Constitution intended and created a bureaucracy of nearly three million people, not including military, whose living comes only from tax dollars.

In Orwell's story, there are many issues "of the highest importance for the welfare of the farm… But still, neither pigs nor dogs produced any food by their own labour; and there were very many of them, and their appetites were always good." The greatest question in my mind after reading the book is this: are we handing off our most important issues and our earned money to those living in the "house" far away, when solving our problems out in the "field" of local, city, county or state governments would allow us to personally get involved and have an actual voice?

This analogy has its limits, but watch even a local news station and see to whom we give our power by where we put our attention.

Reading the Gospels with Jesus the Christ by Talmage

If you're looking for a way to make your study of the Gospels more meaningful, you might like this.

Twice in the last few years I've read and studied the Gospels of the New Testament. Last time, in January of this year, I decided to study them in harmony - not just to get a better chronological sense of events in the life of the Lord, but also so that I could study it in conjunction with James E. Talmage's Gospel Commentary, "Jesus the Christ."

This wasn't my first attempt at reading "Jesus the Christ." It's an incredible work, but pretty heavy, and I never felt like I got much out of it. This changed when instead of trying to plow through it, I would look at the scripture references for a given chapter and read those first; Talmage's comments became more significant and interesting when I compared them to my own impressions and thoughts from studying the source just prior.

For the most part the idea was great, and I developed a deeper understanding for the mortal life and sacrifice of my Savior. However, it wasn't as easy as I thought it would be. While Talmage uses extensive references to the Gospels, he doesn't reference everything; so in order to read the Gospels completely while studying his commentary I had to find out which verses weren't being covered, and assign them to an applicable chapter. To do this, I started building a simple spreadsheet.

The end product is a table of the chapters from "Jesus the Christ" by James E. Talmage with their associated references to the four Gospels of the King James version of the New Testament. If the reader goes through all of the referenced verses for each chapter of Talmage according to the table, he or she will have read the Gospels in their entirety.

I hope this table will be as useful for you in your study of the life of of our Savior Jesus Christ as it was for me. Click the link below to download the .pdf and let me know if you have any questions or corrections.

Download JCHarmony.pdf