George Orwell & Today’s America
As so many others, I first read George Orwell’s Animal Farm in high school.
Before the start of summer vacation, we were given a list of books that had to be read, followed by written book reports to be turned into our English teacher in the fall. Animal Farm was on my list that first summer. It was not the last required book I read by Orwell during those years. It was followed by the dystopian novel 1984 the year after.
From then on and throughout college, I read more and more of Orwell for both school and pleasure. I became lost in the pages of Down and Out in Paris and London. It was first published in 1933 at the height of the worldwide depression. It was Orwell’s experiences in two very different cities and countries as an extremely poor person.
I was especially enthralled with his depiction of being a plongeur (dishwasher) in the renowned Hotel X in Paris. At the time, I was working in restaurants as a cook, having just recently been promoted from a dishwasher. His description of the social status of restaurant and hotel employees was much more hierarchical than was my experience. My own restaurant days were more similar to the kitchens that Anthony Bordain described in his writing.
It wasn’t until I read Orwell’s letters and essays that I began to know how much more he had to offer. Even today, when I occasionally pick up an Orwellian book, it still is timely and insightful. When one lives in a country of alternate facts and an administration of lies, you understand why reading Orwell becomes so relevant. It is not a coincidence that Animal Farm and 1984 are being re-read and newly discovered by Americans today.
Orwell was the pen name of Eric Blair. He was born in India in 1903. His parents were both members of the empire’s civil service. He grew up in England but became part of the Indian Imperial Police while still in his teens. It was while serving in Burma, then considered a protectorate of India, that he began seeing the needs of people, especially the poor, in a different light. After five years, he returned to England and resigned from the Imperial Police.
Once he began authoring his novels, essays, and autobiographical works, you can see his evolution from English imperial bureaucrat to anarchist, socialist, communist, and finally social democrat. His acting as a journalist and serving in the Republican militia during the Spanish Civil War began to ameliorate his views on communism but did leave him as a fierce anti-fascist.
He returned to England in the late 1930s. You notice in his book, Coming Up for Air, an older man’s desire to see what was good in English life and the fear of the gathering storm clouds of WW II. During the war, he was unable to fight due to wounds suffered in Spain. He worked for the BBC and was editor of the Labour Party’s newspaper.
With the ending of the war, he fixated on what both fascism and Stalinism had done to the world. His seminal works Animal Farm and 1984 expressed how he felt about the politicization of language. How, by the repeated governmental use of falsehoods, exaggerations and lies, democracy can deteriorate to such an extent that dictatorship and totalitarianism can flourish. By the time of his death in 1950, his social and political views had evolved, and he became a social democrat with a strong libertarian streak.
What would Orwell make of 2019 America? Would he see a country where our constitutional institutions, while not broken, were being stretched? A nation where the head of government doesn’t understand or believe in the principles of the Founders. In Orwell’s time, threats to England were external, coming from other countries. Stalin and Hitler were not members of a fifth column. They were a clear enemy that needed to be beaten for the English way of life to survive.
The United States is lurching toward the state that Orwell imagined. The underpinning of norms in the behavior of our elected leaders has brought us to this place. The economic devastation of the 1930s gave us the soaring oratory of FDR. The social and economic morass of our current decade has brought us the myopic speech of Donald Trump.
One used language to bring the nation together while the other uses it to tear us apart. As Orwell envisioned in his essay Politics and the English Language, bad and inarticulate use of language “conceals and prevents thought.” Clarity of language in politics brings light to our discussions on our agreements and disagreements. With possession of incontrovertible and agreed facts and statistics, we can fully debate the pros and cons of policy. Reasonable people may disagree.
We cannot forge ahead and settle our political differences if we consider those people with different opinions as enemies. Too many in politics today view compromise as a betrayal. In a nation of 330 million people, compromise represents a rational alternative to a civil breakdown. Like a marriage or friendship, our nation cannot sustain the politics of winner take all.
Unfortunately, we live in the world of Twitter where ideas longer than 280 characters are not found. Slogans have been substituted for ideas. Orwell’s 1984 predicted a country where slogans are substituted for political thought such as “Peace is War,” “Slavery is Freedom,” and “Ignorance is Strength.” The fictional Oceana is where Big Brother is the leader and all loyalty is to him. All power rests with Big Brother who has his own political language known as Newspeak. Anyone who speaks an unapproved idea is accused of doublespeak. The Ministry of Love punishes the offenders.
History and literature should not only be looked upon as statements and stories of the past. They are guides to what could be the future. Human beings repeat mistakes because they are human. If we do not want to repeat mistakes of the past, then we need to know our history and literature. Orwell’s depictions of the world in the 1930s and 1940s should be regarded as a lesson to Americans in 2019.
