Socialism is the suicide pact of mediocrity.
Once you accept that many people do not think but simply 'feel', you'll understand the world better.
ET
London
When George Orwell died in 1950, he was known in England as a middling, somewhat old-fashioned novelist and a left-wing columnist and essayist. He was known in America for his final novels, “Animal Farm” and “1984,” but he’d never visited the U.S. He knew little about it beyond the fiction of Jack London and the legend of Abraham Lincoln’s log cabin, and he disliked America as vulgar and capitalistic.
Today Orwell is the Churchill of columnists, a moral lodestar across the English-speaking world. Like Churchill’s bust, whose comings and goings at the Oval Office are a symbolic barometer of presidential values, Orwell is a mobile partisan icon.
The author of essays such as “My Country Right or Left” was wrong as often as he was right. Orwell believed that a socialist command economy was more efficient than capitalist markets. He thought it “quite possible” that Britain’s population would shrink from nearly 49 million to “eleven millions” by 2016, when it instead rose to more than 65 million. He expected World War II to kill capitalism and bring in the revolution. “I dare say the London gutters will have to run with blood,” he wrote in 1940. “All right, let them if it is necessary.” This isn’t our Orwell.
Our Orwell is the columnist’s standby, passing the baton of authority in the 800-word relay of liberty and common sense: “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” He is the exposer of political language, which tends “to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind.” Or he is the author of “Animal Farm,” which gives many young readers their first taste of allegory and political literature, and “1984,” which gives many high schoolers their last.
The deceitful totalitarians of these novels give us the adjective “Orwellian,” but they are the least Orwellian of Orwell’s novels. He mostly wrote dismal tragedies of social deceit in an outmoded Edwardian vein. The dystopia of most Orwell novels isn’t as dramatic as the “boot stamping on a human face—forever” in “1984.” It’s the little hypocrisies of life in the English middle classes. His implication is that small deceits and capitalist exchange breed monstrous deceits and totalitarian brainwashing. Hannah Arendt reached a similar conclusion, only with more huffing and puffing. Both were snobs, and both were wrong.
It was middle-class liberals and capitalists who built a firewall against totalitarianism, first in World War II and then in the Cold War. Orwell, a “lower-upper-middle class” liberal in pseudonymous flight from his origins, coined the phrase “cold war” in 1945. He became the conscience of conflict that he didn’t live to see. He was 46 when he died of tuberculosis. If he’d visited the U.S. for treatment, he might have lived. A new drug, streptomycin, was available in America after 1946, but not in England.
If he had lived as long as Norman Podhoretz, still with us at 95, Orwell would have lived well past 1984: to 1998 and beyond. A Cold War liberal before anyone was called that, Orwell had the profile of a first-generation neoconservative: rebellious Trotskyite youth, chastened respect for the social contract, persistent fondness for Russian literature. Two of his last commissions were for Commentary magazine, which Mr. Podhoretz later edited.
It is these lost decades that give us our Orwell. Later photographs show a man exhausted by war and sickness and tired of politics, too. Yet his ideal was the combative health of Charles Dickens, whose photograph, Orwell wrote, showed “the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, a man who is generously angry—in other words, of a 19th-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.”
This rebel against conformity and ideology is the Orwell who called himself a “Tory anarchist”: the kind of person who believes in the unwritten constitution of English liberty and loathes bureaucratic regulation. He is closer to Evelyn Waugh and Ralph Emerson than to Karl Marx. Close too, for all his English suspicion of religious enthusiasm, to Dostoevsky, who wrote, “The formula ‘Two plus two makes five’ is not without its attractions,” more than eight decades before Orwell cribbed it for the totalitarian math of “1984.”
What would Orwell say now? His tweets would be popular, and he would despise social media all the more for it. His jargon-free conversational style would suit a podcast, if he could control his cough. He would be against disinformation, but even more against its use to justify censorship. He would be for free speech, and especially alert to the “contradictions and absurdities” of political speech. Above all, he would tell us to accept no counterfeits. He would warn that artificial intelligence is already shifting our language and facts, and with them what it means to be human. He might even defer to Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” on that one.
Mr. Green is a Journal contributor and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
