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Good morning. Today is the 75th anniversary of the publication of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Published in 1945, the book famously satirises Stalin’s Russia. The animals of Manor farm, led by their pig compatriots, rise up against the neglectful Farmer Jones. The new seven commandments of the farm teach: ‘All animals are equal’. But the pig leaders betray this vision, and the commandments are amended: ‘All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.’ Thus, Orwell exposes all politics turned into self-serving narcissism. During lockdown I’ve returned to a group of mid-century writers, to which Orwell belongs. Copies of Albert Camus’ The Plague, also written in the mid 1940’s, have flown off the online shelves. Using the allegory of a virus to explore the experience of fascism, Camus shows how viruses come in many social forms. As Camus and Orwell were writing, WH Auden was composing The Age of Anxiety. Four characters sit in a New York bar, discussing the ‘frightened lands’ they inhabit. At the heart of this fiction is a common set of questions: how do we get as deeply into the world as possible, look at it without illusion, understand the suffering we create, but also finding the courage to resist and to hope? These writers trouble us with these questions. Orwell, Camus and Auden all wrestled with Christianity. They were as critical of religious institutions as of secular ones. But the politics of the 1930’s and 40’s brought Auden, at least, back to his Christianity. He believed that the command to love one’s neighbour was the teaching that could enable resistance to power gone awry. For Auden neighbour love meant seeing the unique value of every human being. Being able to see the infinite worth of an imperfect other is, for Auden, an insight that comes to us from outside ourselves, but is the kind of insight you have to choose to really own for yourself, again and again. For it means being willing to revolt in the face of every system that decides some human beings are worth more than others. The great miracle for Auden is the moment when you choose to “love your crooked neighbour with your crooked heart.” When we do we image God, who, Auden says, numbers each particle, knows each thing by its Proper Name. God is the very opposite of indifference. God is not like an algorithm. Great poetry and literature, Auden wrote, ‘makes nothing happen’. But it does extend our knowledge of both suffering and love, and by doing so, makes all the more urgent the choice that lies before us: to actively choose to inhabit a more genuinely human world.