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If I asked you to name a historical figure who is both widely known and widely misunderstood, who would you think of?
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 you’ve read Orwell or not, you’ve certainly heard the word “Orwellian” used to describe people and things that are likely to contradict themselves, which is certainly one of Orwell’s problems. He has been so overhyped that his name is now a floating symbol that conveys just enough information to suggest some vague meaning but not enough to really clarify anything.
The great irony is that Orwell’s greatest strength as a writer was his directness and clarity. He wrote so that he would not be misunderstood, but now he is perpetually misunderstood. How did this happen? And how should we understand Orwell?
Laura Beals is a historian at American University and the author of the new book, Orwell’s Ghost: Wisdom and Warning for the 21st CenturyThis is an intellectual biography but, to its credit, it is not hagiography. Bierce takes an honest look at Orwell’s life – the best and the worst – and presents a three-dimensional picture.
So I invited Beers Gray Area Talking about who Orwell was, his complicated legacy, and how he speaks to this political moment. As always, there’s more in the full podcast, so listen in and follow Gray Area exist Apple Podcasts, Spotify, PandoraOr wherever you find podcasts. New episodes are released every Monday.
This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Orwell said that one of his greatest strengths was his “ability to face unpleasant facts.” This is an interesting statement, especially the use of the word “ability.” What did he mean?
Orwell was writing in the late 1930s, when the left in Britain and across the West felt compelled to defend the Soviet Union. Orwell was in an awkward position; he had considered himself a socialist throughout his career, but he was well aware of the drawbacks of Stalinist totalitarianism and was unwilling to listen to the defense of Stalinist Russia offered by Western European socialists.
For him, this ability to confront unpleasant truths was partly a matter of his willingness to stand up to most of his colleagues on the Western European political left, calling on them to support the Soviet Union and saying that we could not worry about undermining the socialist cause by talking about abuses of power in Russia, an ostensibly socialist society. If we were to achieve a better tomorrow, we had to be honest about our own mistakes and errors, and criticize both capitalism and fascism, of which he was an outspoken critic.
What do you think is the main value of reading Orwell today?
What Orwell was really concerned about was the growth of state power and media power, and you can see that in his last two novels, so that you have a controlling narrative and there is little room for different voices in the political conversation.
Also, the role of surveillance and the way people are constantly being watched and judged. The importance of false information and manipulation of the truth as a tool for those who want to seize power and those who hold power illegally. All of these things are very evident in our 21st century era in different ways.
The difference between 2024 and 1984 is that we are constantly being watched, but with the exception of TikTok or mainland China, it is not the state that is watching us, it is large private companies. In that sense, we are being watched, and that is the giant Orwellian eye that you often see on posters, book covers, or T-shirts. But we also live in a time when there is a lack of space for dialogue, and for many people there is indeed a dominant, controlling voice.
For some, like in Russia under Putin or China under Xi Jinping, it’s through active state censorship. But for others in the democratic West, it’s about the way people get information and these information vacuums where you can live in an ostensibly free society but hear no real exchange of opinions, no dissenting voices. 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 free dialogue and the exchange of ideas.
Orwell had always been fascinated by the use and abuse of language. That’s why he was so sensitive to the role of euphemisms in our political language. What would he have thought of it?
“The problem with euphemisms, in his view, is that they sidestep the truth and obscure ugly realities. For example, when you say ‘illegal immigrants’ as a blanket phrase, it sidesteps the actual lived experiences of many of the people who risk their lives crossing the border, how many of them are victimized, how many of them are threatened, and it creates a sense of threat to an entire group through a term that is meant to blur and clarify.”
So he was very aware of the power of language and the narrowness of acceptable political language. He knew that if you couldn’t talk about ideas, they would lose political power because they couldn’t be expressed. 1984Orwell has a striking appendix, which his early American editors wanted to omit, and which he insisted the book could not be published without. It is a concise history of Newspeak, the language of Ingsoc. 1984.You can see how it reduces the language and therefore the acceptable range of political ideas that can be thought and expressed.
He was always very aware of how much language can hide, but also how much it can reveal. I think one of the great strengths of his work is his insistence on clarity in both written and spoken English. He doesn’t like to use passive tenses, and he doesn’t use too many adjectives. His writing is very clear, journalistic writing.
Something about his clarity is one of the reasons his shapeless legacy is so mysterious. He wrote so clearly, so simply, and yet he was so easily exploited by both the left and the right. Why do you think he became such a flat caricature?
I think in some ways that’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 was probably the first person to use the term “Cold War” in an essay called “You and the Atomic Bomb,” which he wrote shortly before he died. But he died before many of the political changes that would define modernity had taken place.
What do you think was Orwell’s biggest mistake?
Before he died, he realised that he had made some mistakes. One of them was that he thought that in order to win the war with the Nazis, Britain had to reform internally, but that didn’t really happen. In 1945, a Labour government was elected with a majority for the first time, and with it came major social change, but there was no real effective revolution and the war was not won. He recognised his mistakes, and I think his pessimism about politics in his later years was partly due to his frustrated optimism about the potential for social change in the early days of the war.
But I think the more fundamental point, from a 21st century perspective, is what we were talking about earlier. He failed to recognize 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, most of your surveillance comes not from the state, but from private companies. I think he just didn’t foresee the role that big corporations would play in controlling our access to information and controlling information about us in the 21st century. I think that’s partly because he was a real technophobe, and that comes through in a lot of his work. He really saw technology as the enemy of culture, and he thought people should be working the land and reading books, not playing with mechanical building blocks.
I’ve never heard anyone describe Orwell as a “technophobe,” but it helps explain what I’ve always considered his biggest blind spot. While his diagnosis of the 20th century was pretty accurate, he just didn’t foresee the 21st. If you’re looking for prophecy, then Aldous Huxley’s The Great Depression is the best. Brave New World It’s what you want, not 1984Neil Postman summed it up better than anyone else in his book Entertainment to Deathit is worth reading this full passage:
What George Orwell feared was those who banned books. What Aldous Huxley feared was that there was 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 become passive and selfish. Orwell feared that the truth would be hidden, Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared that we would become a captive culture, Huxley feared that we would become a culture of insignificance.
If I compare Huxley to Orwell, I am struck by Huxley’s view that the pleasure principle can actually be harmful. We can become desensitized and complacent, and lose the will to resist. Huxley had a more complex “bread and circuses” view of how people can be dominated and controlled.
For Orwell, the way people are dominated and controlled is not through pleasure but through pain. 1984In many ways, the book is a vivid description of the process of a man being tortured and ultimately broken. So there is a brutal harshness to Orwell’s violent control mechanisms. I think that in part it reflects the poverty he experienced as a social investigator, and he wrote Down and Out in Paris and London and Road to Wigan Pier, and the poverty he saw at the end of the empire. He believed that control was achieved not by pacifying the people so that they had no will to rebel, but by violent repression so that they had no ability to rebel.
So maybe complacency is more of a threat in the 21st century, because rising living standards take away people’s political advantages. But in our own time, there are still a lot of people being brutally and violently suppressed, so I guess there’s room for both dystopias in 2024.
What do you think is Orwell’s most relevant lesson for the 21st century?
I think the most important lesson for us in the West is that people need to defend the right to say that two plus two equals four, but that doing so is both a right and a responsibility. Being given the right to tell the truth is also an obligation to tell it. It is not a right to say that two plus two equals five, but a right to speak the truth in a space of lies and disinformation, to oppose lies and disinformation. And this is what Orwell was committed to throughout his career, in his journalism and in his personal politics. If he does leave a legacy for the 21st century, it is the power of confronting uncomfortable facts and defending the truth in an age of disinformation and doublethink. This is his most important legacy.
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