Why Orwell matters

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0:01:06 – If I asked you to name a famous writer
0:01:09 who manages to be both incredibly well known
0:01:13 and universally misunderstood, who comes to mind?
0:01:19 Marks and Nietzsche are obvious candidates,
0:01:23 but any list like this has to include George Orwell,
0:01:28 the English journalist and essayist and the author
0:01:30 of two of the most famous political novels
0:01:34 of the 20th century, 1984 An Animal Farm.
0:01:38 Whether you’ve read any of Orwell’s work or not,
0:01:41 you know his name and you’ve no doubt heard the term
0:01:44 Orwellian used to describe people and events
0:01:47 that are very likely contradictory,
0:01:50 which of course is part of the problem with Orwell.
0:01:53 He’s been stretched so much
0:01:55 that his name is now a floating signifier
0:01:59 that conveys just enough information to the audience
0:02:01 to suggest something vaguely meaningful,
0:02:04 but not enough information to truly clarify anything.
0:02:08 But none of this is Orwell’s fault.
0:02:10 And the irony is that Orwell’s greatest virtue
0:02:13 as a writer was his clarity.
0:02:16 He wrote so as not to be misunderstood,
0:02:19 and yet he is now perpetually misunderstood.
0:02:21 How did that happen?
0:02:24 And how should we understand him?
0:02:26 Who was George Orwell?
0:02:28 And why does he matter so much today?
0:02:33 I’m Sean Elling and this is The Great Area.
0:02:48 Today’s guest is Laura Beers.
0:02:50 She’s a historian at American University
0:02:54 and the author of a new book called Orwell’s Ghosts,
0:02:56 Wisdom and Warnings for the 21st Century.
0:02:59 This is an intellectual biography,
0:03:02 but it is not, to its credit, a hagiography.
0:03:06 Beers takes an honest look at Orwell’s life,
0:03:08 the best and the worst of it,
0:03:10 and presents a three-dimensional picture of who he was
0:03:12 and what he fought for.
0:03:15 That’s what I wanted to explore with Beers
0:03:17 and whether that’s still how we think of him today.
0:03:22 Laura Beers, welcome to the show.
0:03:24 Thanks for having me on.
0:03:25 I’m very glad you’re here
0:03:30 and I’m glad you wrote a book about George Orwell,
0:03:32 one of my heroes.
0:03:37 So why Orwell, who was this guy
0:03:41 and why are we still talking about him today?
0:03:45 So those of us who have heard the word Orwellian
0:03:48 bantered around probably remember Orwell vaguely
0:03:51 if at all, from middle school or high school
0:03:55 and reading Animal Farmer 1984.
0:03:57 And it’s those two works that George Orwell,
0:04:02 who was born in 1903 in India and the British Raj,
0:04:04 and educated very well back in England,
0:04:06 at first a prep school and then at Eaton,
0:04:11 before returning to Burma as an Imperial police officer.
0:04:15 He’s written several books, including Amidst Catalonia,
0:04:17 which is a testament of his experience
0:04:20 fighting against fascism in the Spanish Civil War.
0:04:25 He’s written a critique of inequality and unemployment,
0:04:26 The Road to Wigan Pier,
0:04:28 and another book about the urban poor
0:04:31 down and out in Paris and London.
0:04:34 He’s written about his experiences working in the empire
0:04:37 in both his fiction and non-fiction writing.
0:04:39 So there’s so much about Orwell
0:04:42 and so much that he has to offer as a journalist
0:04:44 and as a social investigator.
0:04:47 But I think the reason that people think about Orwell now
0:04:50 or the principal reason is because the word Orwellian
0:04:53 has come back with a vengeance
0:04:55 since the beginning of the first,
0:04:58 well, hopefully the first and last, Trump administration.
0:05:02 And the sense that Orwellian is in reference
0:05:04 really to his writing in his final two books,
0:05:09 Animal Farmer 1984 on disinformation
0:05:14 and the manipulation of truth by those with political power.
0:05:17 And now the term Orwellian,
0:05:20 maybe Franz Kafka and the term Kafkaesque
0:05:22 is something that has similar valence,
0:05:24 but there aren’t that many people,
0:05:26 Churchillian I guess would be another,
0:05:28 whose names have become adjectives, right?
0:05:30 And who people have a ready association
0:05:33 with what it means to call something Orwellian.
0:05:37 But Orwell himself as a journalist and as a novelist
0:05:40 had a comparatively short career
0:05:42 spanning basically about 15 years.
0:05:45 He dies young in January, 1950,
0:05:47 only a few months after the publication
0:05:50 of his final novel, 1984.
0:05:53 And he’s really active as a writer for the 1930s
0:05:55 and the early 1940s.
0:06:00 But during that time, he puts out an amazing corpus of work
0:06:04 that emphasizes the importance of integrity,
0:06:06 both in writing and in politics,
0:06:09 the importance of speaking up and defending truth
0:06:11 as you perceive it,
0:06:15 of combating inequality, exploitation,
0:06:17 and abuses of power,
0:06:20 and of really sort of championing the liberty
0:06:23 of the individual against the tyranny of the state.
0:06:27 – You mentioned 1984 and Animal Farm,
0:06:32 those are I think unquestionably his most famous books.
0:06:34 If anyone knows anything about Orwell,
0:06:36 what’s probably those two books,
0:06:40 you argue that they don’t do a great job
0:06:45 of capturing the full breadth of Orwell’s thought,
0:06:48 but they are a good culmination of it.
0:06:51 When you think about the totality of Orwell’s thought,
0:06:54 what springs to mind first?
0:06:58 Who was he really, what did he stand for?
0:07:00 – I think first and foremost,
0:07:04 he is a writer who stands for a defensive truth
0:07:07 in political writing and political speech,
0:07:11 and also just a sense of being true to your own convictions,
0:07:14 both in your politics, but in the way you live your life.
0:07:17 And you can see that in the critique
0:07:20 of the pig society in Animal Farm,
0:07:25 or the society created by Ingsock and Big Brother in 1984.
0:07:29 These are societies that don’t place a value on truth,
0:07:32 where truth is manipulated in the interest of those in power.
0:07:36 But in terms of a kind of a more positive defensive truth,
0:07:38 I think you see that in other places
0:07:40 in Orwell’s writing more clearly,
0:07:42 most particularly in his wartime essay,
0:07:44 “The Lion in the Unicorn,”
0:07:47 but also in a lot of his short form journalism.
0:07:52 And I think one of the things that we tend to miss out on
0:07:54 when we throw around the term Orwellian
0:07:58 in the 21st century moment is we use Orwellian principally
0:08:02 to talk about censorship and the shutting down of speech.
0:08:05 It was used most famously in recent years
0:08:07 by Josh Hawley and Donald Trump Jr.
0:08:11 in the aftermath of the January 6th uprising,
0:08:15 when they claimed that the views of Trump and his supporters
0:08:18 were being canceled by a woke left
0:08:21 who was misrepresenting what had happened on January 6th,
0:08:26 and that this was Orwellian cancellation of right wing voices.
0:08:29 But Orwell was not just an advocate for free speech,
0:08:31 even though he was that,
0:08:32 but he was an advocate for truth and speech.
0:08:34 You know, he’s someone who argues
0:08:37 that you should be able to say that two plus two equals four.
0:08:39 And he argues that against those
0:08:41 who would say that two plus two equals five.
0:08:44 So it’s not about the right to say whatever you want,
0:08:46 but about the right to speak truthfully.
0:08:52 – He said that one of his great strengths was,
0:08:57 and now I’m quoting his power of facing unpleasant facts.
0:09:00 That’s such an interesting phrase.
0:09:03 The use of the word power, especially,
0:09:07 as opposed to just saying the ability to face unpleasant facts.
0:09:09 What do you think he meant by that?
0:09:16 – Well, Orwell is writing in the context of the late 1930s,
0:09:19 when the left in Britain and across the West,
0:09:22 you know, feels this need to defend the Soviet Union,
0:09:26 because the Soviet Union is the one socialist society
0:09:28 in the West in that period.
0:09:31 And Orwell was in the awkward position
0:09:33 of someone who identified throughout his career
0:09:36 as a socialist and on the political left.
0:09:38 But he was very clear eyed
0:09:42 about the abuses of Stalinist totalitarianism
0:09:47 and was unwilling to kind of tow the general party line
0:09:49 in Western Europe by socialist
0:09:52 who were very defensive of Stalinist Russia.
0:09:54 And so for him, you know,
0:09:56 this power of facing unpleasant facts
0:09:59 is partially a willingness to stand up
0:10:00 to most of his colleagues
0:10:03 within the political left in Western Europe
0:10:06 and call them out for their support of the Soviet Union
0:10:08 and say that we can’t be afraid
0:10:11 that it will undermine the cause of socialism
0:10:13 to talk about the abuses of power
0:10:17 of this ostensibly socialist society in Russia.
0:10:21 And that if we are going to attain a better tomorrow
0:10:24 that we have to be honest about the mistakes
0:10:26 and missteps on our own side
0:10:29 as well as critiquing capitalism and critiquing fascism.
0:10:31 And he was a vocal critic of both.
0:10:34 And I think that’s where the power comes in
0:10:37 because you have to have a lot of political courage.
0:10:38 And, you know, I mean, we can see the absence
0:10:40 of that political courage today
0:10:41 on both sides of the spectrum, right?
0:10:45 To actually stand up against your party and say,
0:10:47 you know, well, I broadly agree
0:10:50 with the position of these people
0:10:52 on this side of the political spectrum.
0:10:56 I am going to call out the errors within my own party
0:10:58 in addition to critiquing my opponents.
0:11:02 – Yeah, I just, I agree with so much of that.
0:11:04 You know, for me on some level,
0:11:08 just the whole power facing thing
0:11:12 is really just the willingness to notice
0:11:14 when there’s a conflict between
0:11:17 what you want to be true and what’s actually true,
0:11:18 which is a very simple thing.
0:11:22 I know, but the vast majority of us do not do this.
0:11:26 Intellectuals rarely do this, but he did.
0:11:29 And I think that is one of the many attributes
0:11:32 about him that make him stand out.
0:11:35 – Yeah, and he actually, in 1984,
0:11:40 he creates this whole idea of double speak and double think,
0:11:42 which is really the ability to hold
0:11:44 two mutually contradictory ideas
0:11:46 in your head at the same time
0:11:50 and to speak a language that encompasses that contradiction.
0:11:54 And in some ways, this is a criticism of his colleagues
0:11:58 within the left who are on the one hand,
0:12:02 espousing a rhetoric of equality and liberty.
0:12:04 And on the other hand, in the same breath supporting
0:12:07 the Soviet Union, which he sees as a brutal tyranny.
0:12:11 And those two things are mutually contradictory.
0:12:16 And yet many of the members of the left in his time
0:12:18 are holding both ideas simultaneously, right?
0:12:22 And this becomes for him the model of double think.
0:12:24 – It’s pretty striking too.
0:12:29 And I guess revealing that Orwell was on the right side
0:12:36 of every major ideological struggle of his century,
0:12:41 imperialism, colonialism, fascism, communism,
0:12:46 he was always opposed to unjust power,
0:12:48 regardless of who was wielding it
0:12:52 and who was victimized by it.
0:12:54 And that to me says so much about him.
0:12:56 And I guess if you had to attribute that to anything,
0:13:00 it’s that really unusual commitment
0:13:03 to intellectual honesty that we’re talking about here.
0:13:05 I just think that of all his virtues,
0:13:06 that may be the greatest.
0:13:09 – Well, I might throw in one caveat there, Sean.
0:13:10 – Yeah, go for it.
0:13:15 – And I do think that women in his time,
0:13:17 and certainly women in our time,
0:13:20 would insert in asterisks there and say that he wasn’t
0:13:23 on the right side when it came to the feminist struggle
0:13:26 during his lifetime, that the movement of women
0:13:29 for principally for equal access to the professions,
0:13:33 equal pay, equal political rights,
0:13:36 and an equal place within society more broadly,
0:13:37 and particularly also campaigns
0:13:40 for women’s bodily autonomy,
0:13:42 which begin, there’s a political movement
0:13:45 for abortion rights and birth control.
0:13:48 There’s an organized abortion law reform association
0:13:50 in the 1930s in Britain,
0:13:52 and similar movements across Europe
0:13:55 that feminists are behind as a political movement.
0:13:57 And they see reproductive rights
0:14:00 as tied to women’s rights to bodily autonomy,
0:14:02 but also women’s equal rights
0:14:05 within the workplace and society more broadly.
0:14:09 And that is a campaign with which Orwell is not allied.
0:14:13 And it is something that he has been called out on,
0:14:15 partially by me in the book,
0:14:17 but by others in recent years.
0:14:20 You have Anna Funder’s recent book, “Wifdom,”
0:14:23 which is a real critique of his gender politics
0:14:25 within his marriage,
0:14:29 done through the lens of a kind of hypothetical reimagining
0:14:33 of his wife’s side of the story in their marriage,
0:14:35 his wife, Alina Shaughnessy Blair,
0:14:38 who dies during the Second World War.
0:14:40 Or you have Sandra Newman’s “Julia,”
0:14:42 which is a novel that was recently published,
0:14:44 which is a reimagining of 1984
0:14:48 told through the perspective of Winston Smith’s “Lover Julia,”
0:14:51 which really puts her center stage
0:14:54 and shows in doing so how unfully realized
0:14:58 she is as a character in Orwell’s first novel.
0:15:00 And so I think he’s on the right side
0:15:03 of almost every fight in the early 20th century,
0:15:05 but I’m not sure that could be said
0:15:09 in terms of the feminist movement and gender politics.
0:15:11 – What’s worth knowing about him on this front,
0:15:13 because I didn’t know anything about this.
0:15:17 And I suspect a lot of other people don’t as well.
0:15:19 – One of my good friends, when I was in graduate school,
0:15:22 used to have this expression when we were gossiping
0:15:23 about our love lives, our feelings.
0:15:25 And she’d go, “Calling Dr. Freud.”
0:15:28 But you could certainly say, “Calling Dr. Freud,”
0:15:30 about Orwell and do a deep dive
0:15:32 into where he gets his gender politics,
0:15:38 because he’s largely raised by a mother who is a feminist
0:15:41 and who has friends and family members
0:15:43 who are involved in the suffrage movement,
0:15:47 the movement for the women’s vote in the early 20th century.
0:15:49 And he is raised in a largely female environment.
0:15:52 His father, until he eventually retires,
0:15:55 is away in India while Orwell and his two sisters
0:15:58 are being raised by his mother at home in England.
0:15:59 And then he goes off to boarding school
0:16:00 and all of a sudden it’s in a much more
0:16:03 homosocial male environment from that point on.
0:16:06 But his childhood is feminized.
0:16:10 But he does have this view that the natural order
0:16:14 is one in which the male is the dominant figure,
0:16:15 in which the kind of household is set up
0:16:17 around the male authority.
0:16:21 And you see that then reflected not only
0:16:23 in his fiction writing and the way that women tend
0:16:26 to be subservient to men within the context of his fiction,
0:16:29 but even in animal form, where all the characters are animals.
0:16:32 The female animals are less intellectually serious,
0:16:36 more frivolous, more likely to sort of sell out ideas
0:16:38 for their own personal gratification,
0:16:41 in the case of Molly the show pony.
0:16:44 And so there is this sense that appears
0:16:47 throughout his writing that patriarchal society
0:16:50 is the natural order, which seems to come into conflict
0:16:53 when you look at the actual history of his early childhood.
0:16:56 But is nonetheless an unavoidable kind
0:16:58 of current of his writing.
0:17:00 One of the things I appreciate about the book
0:17:02 is that it’s not pure hagiography.
0:17:05 I mean, he was always this kind of weird amalgam
0:17:10 of a socially conservative, very English person,
0:17:13 and also kind of radical democratic socialists.
0:17:16 And those things did kind of sit uneasy in him
0:17:18 and in many different ways.
0:17:23 And I guess I will say this, he does, in his defense,
0:17:29 seem to have educated himself out of a lot of prejudices.
0:17:33 He does change his beliefs when experience contradicts him.
0:17:35 There’s an integrity there.
0:17:40 I mean, I think he was one of the first true post-colonialists,
0:17:41 for example.
0:17:43 He clearly has his flaws in blind spots.
0:17:46 He just pointed to a big one.
0:17:48 But I still think it’s fair to say
0:17:52 he was uncommonly virtuous in these ways,
0:17:53 in terms of his intellectual honesty,
0:17:55 and his ability to evolve and change
0:17:58 when the evidence suggested it.
0:18:01 Yes, that is one of the things that I highlight in the book,
0:18:04 that he has a kind of protean intellect.
0:18:07 He’s not rigid in his ideas.
0:18:09 And if they do need a course correction,
0:18:11 he’s willing to make that course correction.
0:18:13 I’m not sure that I would go so far
0:18:16 as to call him the kind of first post-colonial figure.
0:18:22 But he’s an early advocate for decolonization,
0:18:27 and an early and vocal critic of Britain’s role in its empire.
0:18:31 Though I think what is notable is that when he looks at him,
0:18:33 when he critiques the British empire, which I think he does
0:18:37 most poignantly in his short essay, “Shooting an Elephant,”
0:18:42 which is an ostensibly autobiographical recollection
0:18:45 of his experience as a young police officer in Burma,
0:18:47 feeling compelled to shoot an elephant
0:18:51 so that he doesn’t lose face in front of the native population,
0:18:54 even though he knows in his mind and his heart
0:18:56 that it’s the wrong thing to do,
0:18:58 that the elephant doesn’t pose a danger to the community
0:19:01 and that killing it will cause a significant economic loss
0:19:05 to its owner and a sort of social harm to the community.
0:19:08 And this essay is a real critique of the ways
0:19:11 that empire corrupts those who govern
0:19:13 as much as those who are governed.
0:19:15 But throughout the story and throughout much of Orwell’s
0:19:20 writing on empire, the focus is really on those who govern
0:19:22 as opposed to on those who are governed.
0:19:24 They’re the fully realized characters
0:19:27 who are really damaged by their participation in empire.
0:19:29 And the argument he’s making is really
0:19:32 that the British need to get out of empire
0:19:35 because their participation in it is corrupting them
0:19:38 and making them worse people and kind of impinging
0:19:41 upon their identity as freeborn Englishmen
0:19:44 by making them kind of complicit in this culture
0:19:49 of tyranny and censorship and just general badness.
0:19:55 – All these blind spots notwithstanding,
0:19:58 what did he actually want to see in the world?
0:20:00 I mean, everybody knows for the most part
0:20:04 that he was anti-totalitarianism,
0:20:07 but he was a committed democratic socialist.
0:20:10 Did he ever really explain what he meant by socialism?
0:20:14 What was his actual political project?
0:20:15 – Well, I talk about this in the end of the book
0:20:19 in a chapter on his kind of blueprint for revolution.
0:20:23 So this is written early in the war in 1941
0:20:28 during the Blitz when London and other industrial
0:20:32 and port cities around Britain are being continuously bombed.
0:20:33 And there is a real sense that Britain
0:20:34 might not be able to hold out
0:20:37 and might not be able to win the war.
0:20:39 And Orwell is effectively making the argument
0:20:41 that British society needs to change,
0:20:43 needs to revolutionize itself
0:20:46 in order to be able to successfully defeat Hitler.
0:20:48 And the ways in which he argues
0:20:51 that Britain needs to revolutionize itself
0:20:55 are effectively to achieve a greater equality
0:20:57 that’s both economic and social.
0:21:01 So he argues for a limitation of income
0:21:02 so that you don’t have wealth disparities
0:21:05 that are greater than 10 to one.
0:21:07 And so he’s arguing for doing away
0:21:09 with the vast income inequalities
0:21:11 that characterize not only Britain,
0:21:13 but the United States and much of the West
0:21:15 in the early 20th century,
0:21:17 but also to break down
0:21:20 those sort of more insidious social inequalities
0:21:23 that really tore apart as he saw British society.
0:21:27 So class snobberies was sense that somehow
0:21:30 certain people were just people you could never identify with
0:21:33 and never have a solid heuristic kind of joint feeling with
0:21:36 because of their different accents,
0:21:37 their different way of dress,
0:21:40 their different smell, Orwell is obsessed with smell.
0:21:45 And he has one quote that he got a lot of plaque for
0:21:47 at the time and sense in the road to Wigan Pier
0:21:51 where he says that upper class children like himself
0:21:53 or as he defines himself,
0:21:55 lower upper middle class children
0:21:57 are taught from the early childhood
0:22:00 that the work in classes smell.
0:22:04 And he says that if there ever is to be true social inequality
0:22:06 that those ideas have to be unlearned
0:22:09 and that they have to no longer be taught.
0:22:12 And part of the way that he hopes that will be achieved
0:22:14 is through equality and education,
0:22:16 which he puts a real emphasis on.
0:22:18 He himself is privately educated.
0:22:19 And in fact, he went to Eaton,
0:22:23 which is the poshest of the private schools in England,
0:22:25 but he believes that private schools should be abolished
0:22:28 because he thinks that social equality
0:22:31 is best achieved through universal state education.
0:22:35 – What would you say is the prime value
0:22:37 of reading Orwell today?
0:22:40 What makes this moment Orwellian
0:22:44 and how are people misusing that term?
0:22:46 Because one of the things you say very early on in the book
0:22:50 is that, yeah, we’re living in an Orwellian moment,
0:22:54 but not in the sense most people think we are.
0:22:56 So maybe we can get a proper definition of Orwellian
0:23:00 and then say a bit about what makes this moment Orwellian
0:23:02 and how people are getting it wrong
0:23:03 or right as the case may be.
0:23:08 So I think the things that really concerned Orwell
0:23:11 and that for me characterize Orwellian
0:23:13 in terms of his writing and his final two novels
0:23:16 are the accretion of state power
0:23:18 and the accretion of media power
0:23:21 so that you have one controlling narrative
0:23:23 and little space for dissenting voices
0:23:26 within a political conversation,
0:23:27 the role of surveillance
0:23:31 and the way in which people are constantly being watched
0:23:32 and judged.
0:23:37 And also the importance of the way that he emphasizes
0:23:41 disinformation and the manipulation of truth
0:23:46 as a vehicle of those who want to seize power
0:23:48 and hold power illegitimately.
0:23:51 And I think all of those things in different ways
0:23:54 are very apparent in our 21st century moment.
0:23:58 I think one of the things that makes 2024 different
0:24:02 than 1984 is that we are being constantly surveilled
0:24:06 but outside of TikTok or mainland China,
0:24:09 it’s principally not a state that is surveilling us
0:24:12 so much as large private corporations
0:24:15 and the ends to which they might be putting that data
0:24:19 that they’re collecting are a broader conversation.
0:24:21 So I think in that sense we’re being watched
0:24:24 and this is the Orwell of the giant eye
0:24:27 that you often see on posters or book covers or t-shirts
0:24:32 but we’re also living in an age where you do have
0:24:34 a lack of space for dialogue
0:24:38 and you do have kind of one dominating controlling voice
0:24:39 for a lot of people.
0:24:43 And for some, like in Putin’s Russia or in Xi’s China
0:24:46 that’s through active state censorship.
0:24:49 But for other people in the Democratic West
0:24:51 it’s through the kind of funneling
0:24:54 of the way that people consume information
0:24:56 and these kind of information vacuums
0:24:59 where you can live in an ostensibly free society
0:25:02 but never hear a genuine exchange of opinion
0:25:05 and never hear dissenting voices.
0:25:09 And Orwell was a real critic of that way of living, right?
0:25:11 He believed in the importance of truth
0:25:14 but he also believed in the importance of a free dialogue
0:25:16 in exchange of ideas.
0:25:19 And I think in rereading Orwell now
0:25:21 that’s what really stands out to me
0:25:23 is that we are living in a moment I think
0:25:28 where the importance of a free political dialogue
0:25:32 and of reaching truth through a free exchange of ideas
0:25:33 is in peril.
0:25:36 (upbeat music)
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0:29:20 (dramatic music)
0:29:27 – One of Orwell’s enduring obsessions
0:29:31 was the uses and abuses of language.
0:29:36 Why was he so intensely concerned about that?
0:29:38 – I think part of it is he’s,
0:29:41 you know, he was a little boy who wanted to be a writer.
0:29:43 I mean, I’ve been in his archives
0:29:46 at the British Library and the University College London
0:29:48 and the UCL archive has his kind of notebooks
0:29:50 from when he’s a young boy
0:29:52 in his first attempts at story writing, right?
0:29:56 So he understood reality through the medium
0:29:58 of the spoken and particularly the written word.
0:30:00 He also wrote poetry.
0:30:04 But I think the other reason that language seems so integral
0:30:06 for his understanding of the world
0:30:09 was his time spent in Burma when he was a young man.
0:30:13 So he doesn’t go on to college, to university, after school.
0:30:16 He leaves school at 18 and he immediately signs up
0:30:17 to serve in the Indian police service.
0:30:21 So he’s a very young man when he goes to Burma in the IPS.
0:30:24 And there he feels constantly stifled.
0:30:26 Like you can never speak your mind
0:30:28 that though for white men and women,
0:30:31 the censorship is entirely informal
0:30:34 that effectively he is more strictly censored
0:30:36 than Winston Smith in 1984
0:30:40 because he has to be what the British would call a paka sahib
0:30:43 like a sort of, you know, upstanding gentleman.
0:30:46 And that means to adhere to a whole bunch
0:30:49 of, you know, to effectively to group think.
0:30:52 And much of that group think is to him,
0:30:56 abhorrent is in defiance of the actual reality
0:30:58 as he experiences it around him.
0:31:01 But there’s no real scope for speaking his mind.
0:31:05 And so I think his critique of censorship really emerges
0:31:08 and this comes through in his first novel about his time
0:31:13 in Burma, Burmese days of that experience of empire.
0:31:16 – I think one thing that always stood out to me
0:31:21 is how much he understood that words are not just words.
0:31:27 Words both reflect and structure thought.
0:31:30 The words we use actively shape our understanding
0:31:34 of the world and words can either illuminate or obscure.
0:31:37 And you can always tell which end is being pursued
0:31:39 by the nature of the language itself.
0:31:42 I mean, this is why he was so sensitive
0:31:46 to the role of euphemisms in our political language.
0:31:50 What was his warning about euphemisms?
0:31:52 – I think the difficulty with euphemism as he sees it
0:31:56 is that it elides truth that allows you
0:31:59 to kind of paper over ugly realities, right?
0:32:03 So if, for example, you just,
0:32:06 when you talk about illegal immigrants
0:32:08 as a catch all phrase, right?
0:32:10 That kind of allies the actual lived experience
0:32:12 of a lot of the people who risked their lives
0:32:13 to cross the border, right?
0:32:16 And the ways in which many of them are victims,
0:32:18 many of them are under threat
0:32:22 and kind of gives the sense of menace to an entire group
0:32:25 through this term that is meant to obscure
0:32:29 as much as that categorizes or clarifies.
0:32:32 And I think, you know, other ways in which
0:32:33 in addition to euphemism,
0:32:37 he’s very conscious of the power of language
0:32:42 is the narrowing of acceptable political language.
0:32:44 You know, the don’t say gay law
0:32:47 that Governor DeSantis puts in place in Florida
0:32:50 or sort of saying that we can’t talk about systemic racism
0:32:52 within certain school curriculum.
0:32:54 That if you can’t talk about ideas,
0:32:56 they lose their political power
0:32:58 if they’re unable to be articulated.
0:33:02 And in the end of 1984 Orwell actually has this,
0:33:03 this amazing appendix,
0:33:07 which actually his early US editors wanted to excise.
0:33:09 And he said, the book can’t be published without it.
0:33:11 You know, this is to my mind integral,
0:33:14 but it’s kind of a short history of new speak,
0:33:18 which is the language of Ingsock in 1984
0:33:22 and how it works to reduce language
0:33:26 and by reducing language to reduce the acceptable range
0:33:28 of political ideas that can be articulated.
0:33:31 And therefore political ideas that can be held
0:33:34 because he recognizes that without the ability
0:33:37 to articulate the ideas lose their power.
0:33:39 – That’s right.
0:33:40 And really, if you think about it,
0:33:42 what are euphemisms in politics?
0:33:46 They’re just pretty words for ugly things.
0:33:49 Enhanced interrogation, collateral damage.
0:33:53 I mean, to get torture called enhanced interrogation
0:33:57 is to have already done most of the work to justify it.
0:34:00 To get people to think of it as not torture, you know,
0:34:03 to get the murder of innocent people called collateral damage
0:34:07 is to have already done most of the work to excuse it.
0:34:09 I mean, these are the sorts of affronts
0:34:13 that he is trying to call our attention to, right?
0:34:17 – Yeah, he has several examples
0:34:19 in his writing from his own time, right?
0:34:20 And many of them are similar,
0:34:23 particularly to this idea of collateral damage,
0:34:26 but he talks about what it means to pacify
0:34:28 an unruly population, right?
0:34:32 I mean, which is effectively to use massive aerial bombardment
0:34:34 and other techniques to silence people
0:34:36 but blowing them to bits, right?
0:34:38 But using the term pacifying
0:34:40 gives an entirely different spin
0:34:45 to the actions of colonial or other totalitarian regimes.
0:34:47 – Goes down smoother than murder and torture.
0:34:48 – Yeah.
0:34:50 (laughs)
0:34:53 And, you know, so he’s, he cottons onto that pretty early on
0:34:57 and is, you know, is really clear about the way
0:35:00 that language can hide as much as it can reveal.
0:35:02 And I think one of the great strengths of his writing
0:35:06 is the way that he insists on clarity
0:35:08 in written and spoken English.
0:35:10 And so his writing is actually, I mean,
0:35:12 in some ways it’s, it’s blissfully easy to read
0:35:13 because it’s, you know.
0:35:14 – Yes, yeah.
0:35:16 – He doesn’t like to use passive tense.
0:35:18 He doesn’t use too many adjectives, right?
0:35:20 It’s, it’s very clear journalistic writing.
0:35:22 – No, that’s such a, that’s such a great point, right?
0:35:27 I mean, like Orwell, he wasn’t really a great writer
0:35:28 by historical standards.
0:35:29 I don’t think anyone places him
0:35:33 in the first year of prose stylist, you know,
0:35:34 but he was still so monumentally.
0:35:35 – He’s no priest.
0:35:36 – Yeah, right?
0:35:39 But he was so influential, maybe more influential
0:35:40 than someone like that.
0:35:42 And I think I got this from your book.
0:35:44 It was a quote from Lionel Trilling,
0:35:46 who once said of Orwell,
0:35:49 if we ask what he stands for, what he was a figure of,
0:35:53 it’s the virtue of not being a genius.
0:35:54 And that says so much.
0:35:56 I mean, what you see often with intellectuals
0:35:58 is a lot of rhetorical gymnastics
0:36:03 and a near herculean capacity to twist and distort reality
0:36:06 so that it fits your ideological priors,
0:36:08 but that’s not Orwell at all.
0:36:10 That’s what he sort of stood against.
0:36:12 And there was that commitment
0:36:15 to seeing the world clearly and describing it simply,
0:36:18 which again, sounds easy, but it is rare.
0:36:20 – Yeah, and it’s, I mean, one of his great
0:36:23 and least read essays inside the whale,
0:36:26 which includes an essay and tribute to Henry Miller,
0:36:28 who he very much admired as a novelist,
0:36:30 but part of the reason that he admired him
0:36:33 is he thought he was a clear plain descriptor
0:36:36 of the world as he lived in and experienced it.
0:36:38 And that was what Orwell really aimed to be.
0:36:42 It not someone who engaged in verbal gymnastics,
0:36:44 as you say, not the Simone Biles of writing,
0:36:46 but instead the Henry Miller, right now.
0:36:49 – Look at you, look at that.
0:36:51 All right, end points for you for speaking
0:36:53 in an Olympics reference.
0:36:56 – Well, I mean, to that point about clarity,
0:37:01 it’s that fact which makes the reality of his legacy
0:37:04 being so weirdly shapeless and malleable,
0:37:07 so mystifying, right?
0:37:10 I mean, he did write so clearly and so simply,
0:37:14 and yet he has been so effortlessly appropriated
0:37:15 by the left and the right.
0:37:16 I mean, why do you think he became
0:37:20 such a two-dimensional caricature in that way?
0:37:24 – I think in some ways that’s the risk of dying young, right?
0:37:27 So he’s born in 1903, he dies in 1950.
0:37:29 He’s 46 years old.
0:37:31 I say this as someone who’s 45
0:37:34 and thinks that 46 is extremely young.
0:37:37 When he passes away, he dies, you know,
0:37:40 really before the Cold War heats up,
0:37:43 though he is, he might have been the first person
0:37:46 to use the term the Cold War in writing.
0:37:49 Actually, in an essay, us and the atom bomb
0:37:52 that he writes shortly before his death,
0:37:57 but he passes away before a lot of the political changes
0:37:59 that have defined the modern moment.
0:38:01 – It is sort of the irony of ironies
0:38:04 that so many people using the term Orwellian
0:38:07 are themselves thoroughly Orwellian,
0:38:10 which is the most Orwellian thing ever, I guess,
0:38:11 but here we are.
0:38:15 – Layers and layers of Orwellianness.
0:38:16 – Layers, so many layers.
0:38:19 You know, one thing that’s always interested me
0:38:24 is how well he seemed to understand totalitarian societies
0:38:28 without having lived in one himself.
0:38:31 That is pretty rare, almost unheard of.
0:38:33 How do you think he was able to do that,
0:38:34 to have that kind of insight
0:38:37 into the totalitarian world and psyche?
0:38:38 Because you hear this from a lot of people
0:38:40 who were, say, behind the Iron Curtain
0:38:43 who read his books and really felt like
0:38:46 he understood their world better than anyone else
0:38:47 they had read.
0:38:50 – Yes, and his experience of living
0:38:53 in a totalitarian society is not non-existent.
0:38:55 It’s just extremely brief.
0:38:59 And he had the luxury of a comparatively easy means
0:39:03 of escape in that Orwell volunteered to fight
0:39:06 against Franco’s forces in the Spanish Civil War
0:39:09 in early 1937.
0:39:11 And he goes over to fight in Spain
0:39:13 without really understanding much about the conflict.
0:39:17 For him, what he’s doing is fighting fascism.
0:39:21 And he ends up enlisting with this small splinter group
0:39:25 called the PUM, which was a Marxist party
0:39:28 allied with the Independent Labor Party in Britain.
0:39:30 And it’s really through connections from a friend
0:39:33 that he ends up fighting alongside them.
0:39:36 But he becomes close with his comrades in the PUM
0:39:40 and they risk their lives fighting against Franco’s forces
0:39:45 only then for the socialist-led Republican government
0:39:48 which is increasingly beholden to Stalin’s Russia
0:39:51 because no one else is willing to sell arms
0:39:55 or to help fund them or to give them any kind of support
0:40:00 material or diplomatic in this conflict in 1937.
0:40:03 So Soviet Russia comes in to fill that vacuum
0:40:07 and gains a lot of power over the Republican government
0:40:09 as a consequence.
0:40:13 And they use that not only to prosecute the war against Franco
0:40:15 but also to start an internal battle
0:40:18 against their political enemies within Spain.
0:40:21 And those include the independent Marxist socialist
0:40:23 with whom Orwell is affiliated.
0:40:27 So Orwell all of a sudden discovers firsthand
0:40:30 what it’s like to have your words turned against you,
0:40:33 to be falsely accused of being an enemy of the very people
0:40:37 who you’re fighting alongside, to see his friends in prison,
0:40:41 in some cases executed, and to have to flee for your life.
0:40:43 And ultimately he and his wife Eileen
0:40:47 who is with him in Barcelona end up escaping
0:40:50 through the Pyrenees by the skin of their teeth
0:40:54 before they’re arrested by the Republican government
0:40:56 on orders from Russia.
0:41:00 And so he does know though he never lives in Eastern Europe
0:41:04 and he never travels behind what becomes the Iron Curtain,
0:41:09 he does have this experience of what it’s like to fall victim
0:41:11 to a totalitarian persecution
0:41:15 and one that is manipulating truth
0:41:18 and using language against him.
0:41:23 He’s referred to as a Trotskyist enemy of the people
0:41:26 as are his friends and colleagues in the PUM.
0:41:28 And it’s really that experience in Spain
0:41:31 I think that informs his deep rooted anti-Stalinism
0:41:34 that remains with him for the rest of his life.
0:41:37 (upbeat music)
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0:44:24 – I am clearly an Orwell admirer,
0:44:26 have made no attempts to hide that.
0:44:32 So let me interrupt all of this praising here
0:44:33 to ask something a little different,
0:44:37 which is, what do you think he got most wrong?
0:44:40 What, of all his insights,
0:44:43 what doesn’t stand the test of time for you?
0:44:45 – I think there are the things
0:44:48 that he realized he got wrong before he passed away, right?
0:44:51 And one of those is this idea that in order for Britain
0:44:54 to win the war against Nazism,
0:44:57 that it would have to reform itself internally.
0:44:59 And that doesn’t really happen, right?
0:45:02 A labor government is elected with a majority
0:45:04 for the first time in 1945.
0:45:06 And there are significant social changes
0:45:09 that come along with that as there are across Western Europe
0:45:11 and even to a lesser degree in the United States.
0:45:14 But there is no real effective revolution
0:45:15 and the war is won without that.
0:45:17 And he recognized his own error.
0:45:19 And I think some of his political pessimism
0:45:22 in his later years is the result of the kind of thwarting
0:45:24 of that feeling of optimism that he had
0:45:26 about the potential for social change
0:45:29 in the early years of the war.
0:45:31 But I think more fundamentally,
0:45:33 from our 21st century perspective,
0:45:35 is the issue that I brought up earlier
0:45:39 about kind of surveillance and state power,
0:45:41 which if you are living in Russia
0:45:45 or in communist China right now or in other regimes,
0:45:46 is a very serious issue.
0:45:49 But if you’re living in the West,
0:45:51 your surveillance is not coming from the state
0:45:52 for the most part, right?
0:45:53 It’s coming from private corporations.
0:45:57 And I think he just didn’t foresee the role
0:46:00 that large mega corporations would play
0:46:03 in controlling our access to information
0:46:07 and controlling information about us in the 21st century.
0:46:10 And I think that’s partly because he was a real technophobe.
0:46:13 And it comes through in a lot of his writing.
0:46:19 He really sees technology as an enemy of culture
0:46:22 and is someone who thinks that people should work
0:46:25 for the landed read books as opposed to play with
0:46:27 mechanical blocks.
0:46:30 And so I think he just had a blind spot
0:46:34 to the potential role of private corporations
0:46:35 in kind of technological advances
0:46:38 and the impact that they could have on society.
0:46:41 And there’s this huge irony that in 1984,
0:46:46 Apple actually uses Horwell and a big brother advertisement.
0:46:49 – On January 24th,
0:46:53 Apple computer will introduce Macintosh.
0:46:58 And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984.
0:47:01 – There are so many reasons why this ad is problematic.
0:47:02 One, it’s there’s a feminine heroin.
0:47:03 And as I’ve talked about,
0:47:06 he doesn’t really see women as the ones who have agency
0:47:08 and power to revolutionize anything.
0:47:11 But he also just was sufficiently technophobic
0:47:14 that he would have wanted nothing to do with home computing.
0:47:16 I think we can say with some certainty.
0:47:18 – That is so helpful.
0:47:21 I have never heard him described as a technophobe,
0:47:25 but it actually really helps understand
0:47:28 why he missed what he missed.
0:47:29 I mean, my view has always been,
0:47:31 and this is not unique to me,
0:47:35 that Horwell really diagnosed the 20th century,
0:47:40 but he didn’t anticipate the 21st century very well.
0:47:43 If you want to understand the 21st century,
0:47:45 you don’t read 1984.
0:47:48 You read Algeos Huxley’s Brave New World.
0:47:49 Of course, Huxley was a very,
0:47:52 on also a very famous English writer and novelist
0:47:56 in the 20th century, wrote a lot of dystopian literature.
0:48:01 And there’s a famous passage from Neil Postman’s book,
0:48:03 “Amusing Ourselves to Death.”
0:48:04 I just want to read actually, if you don’t mind,
0:48:06 because it sums this up better than I ever could.
0:48:08 And I just want to get your thoughts.
0:48:11 He says, “What George Orwell feared
0:48:13 “were those who would ban books?
0:48:15 “What Algeos Huxley feared was that there would be
0:48:17 “no reason to ban a book,
0:48:19 “for there would be no one who wanted to read one.
0:48:23 “Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information.
0:48:26 “Huxley feared those who would give us so much
0:48:29 “that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.
0:48:32 “Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us.
0:48:34 “Huxley feared the truth would be drowned
0:48:36 “in a sea of irrelevance.
0:48:39 “Orwell feared we would become a captive culture.
0:48:43 “Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture.”
0:48:46 That’s a hell of a passage.
0:48:47 There’s a lot going on there.
0:48:51 It seems absolutely right to me.
0:48:52 Does it seem right to you?
0:48:56 – Well, I think one of the things that really,
0:48:59 if you’re comparing Huxley and Orwell stands out to me,
0:49:04 is that Huxley has this idea that the pleasure principle
0:49:06 actually can be something maligned, right?
0:49:10 That we could be kind of stupefied into complacency
0:49:12 and that we then lose our will to revolt
0:49:15 because the opiates of the masses effectively,
0:49:19 he has a much more sophisticated bread and circuses view
0:49:22 of how people can be dominated and controlled.
0:49:26 But Orwell, the way in which people are dominated
0:49:28 and controlled in Orwell is not through pleasure,
0:49:30 but through pain.
0:49:34 I mean, 1984 is in many ways a very graphic tale
0:49:37 of someone’s torture and eventual breakdown.
0:49:41 And so for Orwell, I think the mechanisms of control
0:49:44 are about violence and both in violence
0:49:47 in terms of censorship and control of the mind,
0:49:51 but also just a kind of a brutal austerity.
0:49:55 You see Boxer, the horse and Animal Farm work to death, right?
0:49:58 And I think that’s a reflection partially of the poverty
0:50:01 that he experiences as a social investigator,
0:50:03 writing down and out in Paris, London
0:50:05 and the road to again, Pierre and the poverty
0:50:07 that he sees in empire, right?
0:50:10 He thinks that control is not through kind of
0:50:12 pacifying people in such a way that they don’t have
0:50:16 the will to revolt, but about violently repressing them
0:50:19 in such a way that they don’t have the ability to revolt.
0:50:23 And I think maybe it is true that complacency
0:50:25 is more of a threat in the 21st century
0:50:28 as rising standards of living kind of take away
0:50:31 people’s political edge.
0:50:33 Though certainly there are an awful lot of people
0:50:36 being still brutally and violently repressed
0:50:39 into conformity in our current moment as well.
0:50:44 So I guess there’s a space for both dystopias in 2024.
0:50:50 – What would you say is Orwell’s most relevant lesson
0:50:51 for the 21st century?
0:50:55 – I think the lesson that those of us in the West
0:50:59 could do best to heed is this idea
0:51:03 that people have the right and need to defend the right
0:51:06 to say that two plus two equals four,
0:51:09 but that that’s as much a responsibility as a right.
0:51:13 Being given the right to speak your truth
0:51:17 is also an obligation to have a truth to speak.
0:51:19 It’s not a right to say that two plus two equals five.
0:51:23 It’s a right to articulate truth in the space of lies
0:51:27 and disinformation and to speak out against lies
0:51:27 and disinformation.
0:51:30 And that was something that Orwell was committed to
0:51:34 throughout his own career in his journalistic writing
0:51:36 and in his personal politics.
0:51:39 And I think if he does have a legacy for the 21st century,
0:51:43 it’s that, as you say, that is a, you know, it’s a power,
0:51:45 a power of facing unpleasant facts
0:51:47 and a power of standing up for truth
0:51:50 in a time of disinformation and double think
0:51:52 that is his most important legacy.
0:51:58 – And look, maybe Huxley was the prophet of the 21st century,
0:52:01 but I will say this about Orwell.
0:52:05 He warned pretty presciently about the temptations
0:52:08 of conformism and how people,
0:52:11 how easily people, especially intellectuals,
0:52:13 give themselves over to power
0:52:17 and whatever ideas are fashionable.
0:52:20 If you don’t see evidence of that all around us,
0:52:23 I’m not sure I can help, but it’s there.
0:52:25 (laughs)
0:52:27 – Sadly true.
0:52:29 Well, that’s a grim note to end on though.
0:52:32 – I wouldn’t do that.
0:52:35 What do you think is Orwell’s most essential piece
0:52:40 of writing setting aside 1984 an animal farm?
0:52:43 If someone could only consume one work of his
0:52:47 to get the gist of it, what would it be?
0:52:50 – The one work of his that I use the most in the book,
0:52:52 which clearly is my sort of touchstone
0:52:55 for understanding Orwell, is The Road to Wigan Pier,
0:52:58 where he is really, I think, very articulate
0:53:00 about the mechanisms of social inequality
0:53:02 and the ways that social inequality
0:53:06 has a very corrosive impact on kind of,
0:53:09 both people at the top and the bottom of the spectrum.
0:53:14 But I think my personal favorite piece of Orwell’s writing,
0:53:15 other than those two novels as politics
0:53:17 in the English language,
0:53:19 which is one of his longer essays.
0:53:21 And it is this one where he picks up
0:53:23 on a lot of the themes we’ve talked about today
0:53:27 about the use of euphemism and kind of obscuring language
0:53:29 about the importance of clear speech
0:53:33 and the avoidance of overly flowery
0:53:38 but intentionally obfuscatory writing and political speech.
0:53:40 So I think that’s an excellent essay,
0:53:42 which I really recommend anyone who hasn’t
0:53:43 to get your hands on.
0:53:48 – I think it was really, truly deeply right
0:53:50 that in the end it doesn’t matter what you think,
0:53:51 it matters how you think.
0:53:54 And if your manner of thinking is honest and clear,
0:53:59 then you will land on the side of freedom and dignity.
0:54:01 And if it isn’t, you won’t.
0:54:04 And I just think that’s true.
0:54:06 – Well, I would tend to agree.
0:54:10 So we can see why we both are great admirers of George Orwell.
0:54:14 – Lore Beers, this is a pleasure.
0:54:16 Thanks so much for being on the show.
0:54:17 – Thanks a lot.
0:54:20 – The book is called Orwell’s Ghosts.
0:54:23 (upbeat music)
0:54:30 – All right, I hope you enjoyed that conversation
0:54:31 about Orwell.
0:54:32 I know I did.
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0:54:47 This episode was produced by Travis Larchuk,
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