If I asked you to name a historical figure who manages to be both incredibly well-known and universally misunderstood, who comes to mind?
Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche are obvious candidates. But any list like this has to include George Orwell, the English essayist and the author of two of the most famous political novels of the 20th century: 1984 and Animal Farm.
Whether you’ve read any of Orwell’s work or not, you’ve no doubt heard the term “Orwellian” used to describe people and events that are very likely contradictory, which of course is part of the problem with Orwell. He’s been stretched so much that his name is now a floating signifier that conveys just enough information to suggest something vaguely meaningful but not enough information to truly clarify anything.
The supreme 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 perpetually misunderstood. How did that happen? And how should we understand Orwell?
Laura Beers is a historian at American University and the author of a new book called Orwell’s Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the 21st Century. This is an intellectual biography but it is not, to its credit, a hagiography. Beers takes an honest look at Orwell’s life — the best and the worst of it — and presents a three-dimensional picture.
So I invited Beers on The Gray Area to talk about who Orwell was, his complicated legacy, and how he speaks to this political moment. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Orwell said that one of his great strengths was his “power of facing unpleasant facts.” That’s such an interesting phrase, especially the use of the word “power.” What did he mean by that?
Well, Orwell is writing in the context of the late 1930s, when the left in Britain and across the West felt this need to defend the Soviet Union. And Orwell was in the awkward position of someone who identified throughout his career as a socialist, but who was very clear-eyed about the abuses of Stalinist totalitarianism and was unwilling to toe the general party line in Western Europe by socialists who were very defensive of Stalinist Russia.
For him, this power of facing unpleasant facts is partially a willingness to stand up to most of his colleagues within the political left in Western Europe and call them out for their support of the Soviet Union, and say that we can’t be afraid that it will undermine the cause of socialism to talk about the abuses of power of this ostensibly socialist society in Russia. And that, if we are going to attain a better tomorrow, we have to be honest about the mistakes and missteps on our own side as well as critiquing capitalism and critiquing fascism, and he was a vocal critic of both.
What would you say is the prime value of reading Orwell today?
The things that really concerned Orwell, and you can really see them in his final two novels, are the accretion of state power and the accretion of media power so that you have one controlling narrative and little space for dissenting voices within a political conversation.
Also, the role of surveillance and the way in which people are constantly being watched and judged. And the importance of disinformation and the manipulation of truth as a vehicle of those who want to seize power and hold power illegitimately. All of those things in different ways are very apparent in our 21st-century moment.
One of the things that makes 2024 different from 1984 is that we are being constantly surveilled, but outside of TikTok or mainland China, it’s principally not a state that is surveilling us so much as large private corporations. In that sense, we’re being watched, and this is the Orwell of the giant eye that you often see on posters or book covers or T-shirts. But we’re also living in an age where you do have a lack of space for dialogue and you do have one dominating, controlling voice for a lot of people.
For some, like in Putin’s Russia or in Xi’s China, that’s through active state censorship. But for other people in the democratic West, it’s about the ways that people consume information and these information vacuums, where you can live in an ostensibly free society but never hear a genuine exchange of opinion and never hear dissenting voices. And Orwell was a real critic of that way of living. He believed in the importance of truth, but he also believed in the importance of a free dialogue and exchange of ideas.
One of Orwell’s enduring obsessions was the uses and abuses of language. This is why he was so sensitive to the role of euphemisms in our political language. What did he have to say about that?
As he sees it, the problem with euphemisms is that they elide truth, they paper over ugly realities. So, for example, when you talk about “illegal immigrants” as a catch-all phrase, that elides the actual lived experience of a lot of the people who risked their lives to cross the border and the ways in which many of them are victims, many of them are under threat, and gives this sense of menace to an entire group through this term that is meant to obscure as much as it categorizes or clarifies.
So he’s very conscious of the power of language and the narrowing of acceptable political language. He knows that if you can’t talk about ideas, they lose their political power because they’re unable to be articulated. At the end of 1984, Orwell had this amazing appendix which his early US editors wanted to cut and he insisted that the book couldn’t be published without it. It’s a short history of Newspeak, which is the language of IngSoc in 1984. You can see how it works to reduce language and therefore reduce the acceptable range of political ideas that can be thought and articulated.
He’s always really clear about the ways that language can hide as much as it reveals, and I think one of the great strengths of his writing is the way that he insists on clarity in written and spoken English. He doesn’t like to use passive tense, he doesn’t use too many adjectives. It’s very clear, journalistic writing.
To that point about his clarity, this is part of what makes his shapeless legacy so mystifying. He wrote so clearly and so simply and yet he’s been so effortlessly appropriated by the left and the right. Why do you think he became such a two-dimensional caricature in that way?
I think, in some ways, that’s the risk of dying young, right? He’s born in 1903 and he died in 1950. He dies before the Cold War really heats up, though he might’ve been the first person to use the term “Cold War” in an essay called “You and the Atom Bomb,” which he wrote shortly before his death. But he passes away before a lot of the political changes that have defined the modern moment.
What do you think Orwell got most wrong?
There are the things that he realized he got wrong before he passed away. One of those is this idea that, in order for Britain to win the war against Nazism, it would have to reform itself internally, and that doesn’t really happen. A Labor government is elected with a majority [for] the first time in 1945 and there are significant social changes that come along with that, but there is no real effective revolution and the war is won without that. And he recognized his own error, and I think some of his political pessimism in his later years is the result of the thwarting of that feeling of optimism that he had about the potential for social change in the early years of the war.
But I think more fundamentally, from our 21st-century perspective, it’s about what we were talking about earlier. He failed to appreciate the evolution of surveillance and state power. If you’re living in Russia or communist China right now, this is a very serious issue. But if you’re living in the West, your surveillance is not coming from the state for the most part; it’s coming from private corporations. And I think he just didn’t foresee the role that large corporations would play in controlling our access to information and controlling information about us in the 21st century. And I think that’s partly because he was a real technophobe and it comes through in a lot of his writing. He really sees technology as an enemy of culture and is someone who thinks that people should work the land and read books as opposed to playing with mechanical blocks.
I’ve never heard Orwell described 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 just didn’t anticipate the 21st century. If you’re looking for prophecy, a book like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is the one you want, not 1984. Neil Postman sums this up better than anyone else in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, and it’s worth reading the passage in full:
What George Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Aldous Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information, Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us, Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture, Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture.
If you’re comparing Huxley and Orwell, what stands out to me is Huxley’s idea that the pleasure principle actually can be something malign. That we could be stupefied into complacency and as a result we lose our will to revolt. Huxley has a much more sophisticated bread-and-circuses view of how people can be dominated and controlled.
For Orwell, the ways in which people are dominated and controlled is not through pleasure but through pain. 1984, in many ways, is a very graphic tale of someone’s torture and eventual breakdown. So there’s a brutal austerity to the violent mechanisms of control in Orwell. I think that’s partially a reflection of the poverty that he experienced as a social investigator, writing Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier, and the poverty that he saw at the ends of empire. He thinks that control is not through pacifying people in such a way that they don’t have the will to revolt, but about violently repressing them in such a way that they don’t have the ability to revolt.
So maybe it’s true that complacency is more of a threat in the 21st century as rising standards of living take away people’s political edge. But there are still an awful lot of people being brutally and violently repressed into conformity in our age as well, so I guess there’s space for both dystopias in 2024.
What would you say is Orwell’s most relevant lesson for the 21st century?
I think the lesson that those of us in the West could do best to heed is this idea that people need to defend the right to say that two plus two equals four, but that doing this is a responsibility as much as it is a right. Being given the right to speak your truth is also an obligation to have a truth to speak. It’s not a right to say that two plus two equals five, it’s a right to articulate truth in the space of lies and disinformation and to speak out against lies and disinformation. And that was something that Orwell was committed to throughout his own career, in his journalistic writing and in his personal politics. If he does have a legacy for the 21st century, it’s this power of facing unpleasant facts and standing up for truth in a time of disinformation and doublethink. That is his most important legacy.