Sub Terra VitaChronicle #15: Part I—Language, Clarity and Thought: Orwell and Political Speech

Sub Terra Vita

By Tim Krenz

August 31, 2015

Chronicle #15: Part I—Language, Clarity and Thought: Orwell and Political Speech

George Orwell, the pen-name of British author Eric Blair, wrote many novels, among them Nineteen-Eighty-Four. Most Americans above a certain age, hopefully, recognize both him and that capstone work. It remains accessible, quite interesting, relevant still, visionary and somewhat prophetic. That classic tale of Winston Smith battling his moral dissent against the cult of the Big Brother, and the consequences of non-conformity to the orthodoxy of that world defined as “Orwellian,” shows the end result if any society and culture fails to preserve what President Franklin D. Roosevelt defined as the “Four Freedoms”: Freedom of Conscience, Freedom of Speech, Freedom from Fear, and Freedom from Want.

Without those essential Four Freedoms, regardless of any opinions one may hold of FDR, peaceful and pluralistic government that protects those freedoms has no chance of surviving anything. The surest way to end those freedoms, to end democracy as we practice and misunderstand it, comes by ignoring politics and not caring enough to participate in it. In his most important work, fiction or non-fiction in my opinion, Orwell wrote in “Politics and the English Language,” that: “In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.” (George Orwell: Essays, p. 964)¹.

Orwell wrote from his viewpoint as a committed Libertarian Socialist, an adherent of “Fabian” tactics in advancing his personal philosophy, and also an admirer of the 1930s Anarchists and their pure and hopeless principles of individual self-, mass-movement. He wrote about his world, from experience, concerning poverty, destitution, class, inequality, colonialism, imperialism, racism, dictatorship, ideology, orthodoxy, and war.

The essay, “Politics and the English Language,” speaks an ageless wisdom about how lack of literacy, lack of meaning, a lack of context, and no definition of terms in political dialog leads inevitably to the masses pandering to the egos of political-economic ambition and greed. Orwell disdains the cults of orthodoxy or personality, whether of a church or Russian Bolshevism, whether a Stalin or a Churchill. Most of all, he disdained the hypocrites, perhaps like Alcibiades in ancient Greece, who preached a demagogue's path to war for his own, personal interests—and who ended up a traitor to those who trusted him with power (several times, in his case).

To avoid empowering, or electing those who preach theft and destruction of lives and property as a means of advancing narrow, self-interested, or corrupt political agendas, Orwell believed language the key—to unlock the hidden agenda of the unscrupulous and to protect the very civilization that allows the likes of a modern Alcibiades their four freedoms, but also prevents them from causing harm to others.

In modern politics, in a rigid bi-party structure as we have in America, maintaining message comes in the form of “sound-bytes,” beyond anything Orwell could have imagined in the state of 1946 media. He hinted at it, but today's media may still shock him if he saw it. Yet, in that year 1946, post-War, as in today's America, discussion of politics occurs in the largely vanilla ways, where “. . .political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging, and cheer cloudy vagueness.” (p. 963). And as he pointed out, “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.” (p. 964). How does Orwell find a way beyond this dilemma?

Find out next week, in: “Chronicle #16: Part II—Language, Clarity and Thought: Orwell and Political Speech”

1George Orwell: Essays. Selected and Introduced by John Cary. Everyman's Library. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.