If I asked you to name a historical figure who manages to be both incredibly well-known and universally misunderstood, who would come to mind?
Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche are obvious candidates. But any such list must include George Orwell, the English essayist and author of two of the most famous political novels of the 20th century: 1984 And animal farm.
Whether or not you’ve read any of Orwell’s work, you’ve undoubtedly heard the term “Orwellian” used to describe people and events that are quite possibly contradictory, which is certainly part of Orwell’s problem. He has been expanded so much that his name is now a floating clue that provides enough information to suggest something vaguely meaningful but not enough information to truly clarify anything.
The great irony here is that Orwell’s greatest virtue as a writer was his directness and clarity. He wrote so as not to be misunderstood, and yet he is now forever misunderstood. How did that happen? And how should Do we understand Orwell?
Laura Beers A historian at American University and author of a new book called Orwell’s Ghosts: Wisdom and Caution for the 21st Century. It is an intellectual biography but it is, to its credit, not a hagiography. Bierce takes an honest look at Orwell’s life — at its best and at its worst — and presents a three-dimensional picture.
So I invited Beer gray area To talk about who Orwell was, his complex legacy and how he speaks to this political moment. As always, there’s more in the full podcast, so take a listen and follow along gray area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, pandoraOr wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Sean Ealing
Orwell said that one of his great strengths was his “power to face unpleasant events”. This is an interesting phrase, especially the use of the word “power”. What did he mean by that?
Laura Beers
Well, Orwell is writing in the context of the late 1930s, when the left in Britain and across the West felt the need to defend the Soviet Union. And Orwell was in the awkward position of someone who identified as a socialist throughout his career, but who was very clear-eyed about the abuses of Stalinist totalitarianism and unwilling to toe the general party line in Western Europe by socialists who were too defensive. Stalinist Russia.
For him, this strength in the face of unpleasant events was partly due to standing with most of his colleagues on the political left in Western Europe and calling them to support the Soviet Union and saying that we cannot be afraid. To talk about Russia’s abuse of power in this ostensibly socialist society would undermine the cause of socialism. And that is, if we’re going to achieve a better tomorrow, we have to criticize capitalism and fascism along with our own mistakes and missteps, and he was a vocal critic of both.
Sean Ealing
What would you say is the main value of reading Orwell today?
Laura Beers
The things that really worried Orwell, and you see them in his last two novels, are the growth of state power and the growth of media power so that you have little room for voices of dissent within a controlling narrative and political discourse.
Also, the role of surveillance and the way people are constantly being monitored and judged. and the importance of disinformation and manipulation of truth as a vehicle for those who seek to seize power and hold power illegally. All of these things are very evident in our 21st century moment in many ways.
One thing that separates 2024 from 1984 is that we are constantly being monitored, but outside of TikTok or mainland China, it is not primarily a state that is monitoring us as much as a large private corporation. In that sense, we are being watched, and this is the giant-eyed Orwell you often see on posters or book covers or t-shirts. But we also live in an age where you lack space for dialogue and you have a dominant, controlling voice for many people.
For some, such as in Putin’s Russia or Xi’s China, it is through active state censorship. But for other people in the democratic West, it’s about the way people receive information and this information vacuum, where you can live in an outwardly free society but never hear a real exchange of ideas and never hear a dissenting voice. And Orwell was a real critic of that way of life. He believed in the importance of truth, but he also believed in the importance of a free dialogue and exchange of ideas.
Sean Ealing
An abiding obsession of Orwell’s was the use and misuse of language. This is why he was so sensitive to the role of accent in our political language. What did he have to say about that?
Laura Beers
As he sees it, the problem with euphemisms is that they avoid the truth, they paper over ugly reality. So, for example, when you talk about “illegal immigrants” as a catch-phrase, it ignores the real-life experiences of the many people who risked their lives to cross the border and the way many of them have been victims. , many of them are under threat, and gives a sense of danger to an entire group through the term, which tends to obscure as much as it categorizes or clarifies.
He is therefore very aware of the power of language and the narrowness of acceptable political language. He knows that if you can’t talk about ideas, they lose their political power because they can’t be expressed clearly. at the end 1984Orwell had this amazing appendix that his first US editors wanted to cut, and he insisted that the book could not be published without it. This is a brief history of Newspeak, the language of IngSoc 1984. You can see how this works to reduce language and therefore reduce the acceptable range of political ideas that can be thought and expressed.
He’s always really clear about the way language hides as much as it reveals, and I think one of the great strengths of his writing is the way he emphasizes clarity in written and spoken English. He doesn’t like to use passive tense, he doesn’t use many adjectives. This is very clear, journalistic writing.
Sean Ealing
On this point about his clarity, it’s part of what makes his shapeless legacy so mysterious. He writes so clearly and so simply and yet he is so effortlessly appropriated by left and right. Why do you think he became such a two-dimensional caricature?
Laura Beers
I think, in some ways, it’s the risk of dying young, right? He was born in 1903 and died in 1950. He died before the Cold War really heated up, although he may have been the first to use the term “Cold War” in an essay called “You and the Atomic Bomb.” He wrote shortly before his death. But he died before many of the political changes that define the modern moment.
Sean Ealing
What do you think was Orwell’s biggest mistake?
Laura Beers
There are things he realized he did wrong before he died. One of these is the idea that, in order for Britain to win the war against Nazism, it must reform itself internally, and this does not actually happen. A Labor government is elected with a majority [for] [1945broughtsignificantsocialchangeforthefirsttimebutnorealeffectiverevolutionandthewarwaswonwithoutNerwasaboutthepossibility[1945সালেপ্রথমবারএবংএরসাথেউল্লেখযোগ্যসামাজিকপরিবর্তনগুলিআসেকিন্তুবাস্তবেকোনকার্যকরবিপ্লবনেইএবংতাছাড়াইযুদ্ধজয়ীহয়।এবংতিনিতারনিজেরত্রুটিস্বীকারকরেছেনএবংআমিমনেকরিতারপরবর্তীবছরগুলিতেতারকিছুরাজনৈতিকহতাশাবাদসেইআশাবাদেরঅনুভূতিকেব্যর্থকরারফলাফলযাতিনিযুদ্ধেরপ্রথমদিকেরবছরগুলিতেসামাজিকপরিবর্তনেরসম্ভাবনাসম্পর্কেছিলেন।
But I think more fundamentally, from our 21st century perspective, it’s about what we were talking about earlier. He fails to appreciate the evolution of surveillance and state power. If you live in Russia or Communist China right now, this is a very serious problem. But if you live in the West, your surveillance isn’t coming from the States for the most part; It is coming from private corporations. And I think he didn’t foresee the role that big corporations would play in controlling access to our information and controlling information about us in the 21st century. And I think that’s partly because he was a real technophobe, and that comes through in a lot of his writing. He really sees technology as the enemy of culture and is someone who thinks people should be working the land and reading books as opposed to playing with mechanical blocks.
Sean Ealing
I would never describe Orwell as a “technophobe,” but that helps explain what I’ve always considered his biggest blind spot. Although he diagnosed the 20th century so well, he simply did not anticipate the 21st century. If you are looking for predictions, a book like Aldous Huxley’s brave new world The one you want, no 1984. Neil Postman sums it up better than anyone else in his book Playing with deathAnd it’s worth reading the paragraph in its entirety:
What did George Orwell fear who would ban books? What Aldous Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book because no one wanted to read it. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information, Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would fall into passivity and egoism. As Orwell feared that truth would be hidden from us, Huxley feared that truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture, Huxley feared we would become a parochial culture.
Neil Postman, Playing with death
Laura Beers
If you compare Huxley and Orwell, what stands out to me is Huxley’s idea that the pleasure principle can actually be somewhat harmful. That we can become complacent and as a result we lose the will to rebel. Huxley has a much more sophisticated bread-and-circus view of how to dominate and control people.
For Orwell, the way people are dominated and controlled is not through pleasure, but through pain. 1984In many ways, a very graphic story of someone’s torture and eventual breakdown. So Orwell has a brutal rigor to the violent system of control. I think this is partly a reflection of the poverty he wrote as a social investigator, Down and out in Paris and London And Wigan Pier Road, and the poverty he saw at the end of the empire. He holds that control is not by pacifying people so that they have no desire to rebel, but by violently suppressing them so that they have no power to rebel.
So maybe it’s true that complacency is even more of a threat in the 21st century as rising standards of living rob people of their political edge. But there are still too many people being brutally and violently repressed to conform to our age, so I guess there’s room for both dystopias in 2024.
Sean Ealing
What would you say is Orwell’s most relevant lesson for the 21st century?
Laura Beers
I think the lesson we can best observe in the West is the idea that people need to protect the right to say two plus two equals four, but to do so is as much a duty as it is a right. Granting your right to tell the truth is also an obligation to tell the truth. It is not the right to say that two plus two equals five, it is the right to express truth in place of falsehood and delusion and to speak out against falsehood and delusion. And it was something Orwell was committed to in his own career, in his journalistic writings, and in his personal politics. If he has a legacy for the 21st century, it is this power to confront unpleasant facts and stand up for truth in times of confusion and doublethink. This is his most important legacy.
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