George Orwell on Society and Writing

George Orwell, the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, a social commentator born in 1903, is as relevant today as he was in the 1930’s and 1940’s. The turbulent eras that he lived though and commented on—the depression and the Second World War—were stormier than ours to say the least. But the same dynamics at play back then are alive and well today in the early 21st century. Nationalism. Shameless manipulation of language to sway the public. Simplistic appeals to ideology, fear or religion. All these were present in 1940 and like fossils preserved in amber, no, like Dorian Gray who never seems to grow old, all of these forces are with us today. Unless the human race undergoes a sweeping psychological makeover, a remote contingency in my view, these same factors will be with us for many generations to come. We need to learn to not to repeat our past mistakes.

People and nations sometimes behave like my mother did in her declining years. When she was older, say in her eighties, my mom’s memory began to fail her. I remember that I could tell her the same joke or funny story over and over again and it always delighted her. She laughed each time never knowing that she had heard that one before, the day before. Nations are like that. They never seem to remember that they already heard the one about nationalism or religious fundamentalism, or dangerous aliens before. It was a bad joke the first time around. But they keep listening, thinking that with this telling they will hear a real rib tickler. They won’t.

Briefly, Orwell believed that Chamberlain was an idiot and had gotten his position only because he was born into the right social class—the educated and well to do. He did not deliberately sell out the country in Munich when he gave Hitler the green light to go into the Sudetenland. But Chamberlain and his coupon clipping ilk probably did view Hitler as the safeguard against something far worse—Communism. And Communism, with its theoretical embrace of a class free society, would have been devastating to the moneyed tier in Britain.

In 1940, the upper class was, in Orwell’s view, obsolete, burnt out, and degenerate. Worse, they were ineffectual and incompetent. England could not survive with them in control. He viewed the war as an opportunity to rid them from the ruling class. He advocated that the ruling class be a meritocracy where class is not a factor.

In 1940 there were others in Britain beside the elite who may have looked, in Orwell’s view, somewhat kindly on Hitler.

In 1940, of course, the Nazis and the Russians had a non aggression pact in effect (soon to be cast aside by Hitler), so the Communists in England who were in sympathy with the Russians were not opposed to Hitler—yet.

Of course, there were a few brown shirt Nazis even in England. But they were such a minority that they were almost laughable and certainly not a factor. Orwell explains that the British are not a people to celebrate militarism and open displays of warmongering.

Finally, Orwell mentions Catholics as a group which might be well-disposed to Hitler. This group, of course was much larger than the number of Communists or brown shirts. Where it stood on Hitler would be of greater importance than the others. As far as I can tell, he did not explain the reason why he thought Catholics had a partiality for Nazism. I can guess that he thought Catholics, as a group, may have felt oppressed in England, or favored Hitler as a covert Catholic or maybe as a persecutor of the Jews (although I am not aware that British Catholics were particularly anti Semitic as, say, Poles apparently are).

He also wrote about the benefits of Socialism over Capitalism. He felt that industry should be taken over by the government; that incomes should have high and low limits; that India should gradually be separated from England. He saw the impending war as a catalyst from bringing on these changes. In retrospect, Orwell was gravely mistaken on Socialism. While unchecked Capitalism will lead to horrible injustices, unfettered Socialism can be just as dangerous.

It is remarkable that Orwell wrote some of his most perceptive essays while the bombs were still falling on London and he had no idea what the outcome of the war would be. He spoke with his own clear eye and perspective disregarding his own perilous circumstances. This is what he says about that.

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As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.
They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are ‘only doing their duty’, as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life. On the other hand, if one of them succeeds in blowing me to pieces with a well-placed bomb, he will never sleep any the worse for it. He is serving his country, which has the power to absolve him from evil.

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I began reading the book as I would any other, but I soon realized the language was so vivid, the comments so colorful, that I had to go back and underline selected sentences. They were so good that I wanted to be able to easily refer back to them. Here is just a short selection.

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For long past there had been in England an entirely functionless class, living on money that was invested they hardly knew where, the ’idle rich’, the people whose photographs you can look at in the Tatler and the Bystander, always supposing that you want to.

What is to be expected of them is not treachery, or physical cowardice, but stupidity, unconscious sabotage, an infallible instinct for doing the wrong thing.

They dealt with Fascism as the cavalry generals of 1914 dealt with the machine-guns - by ignoring it.

It is a fact that any rich man, unless he is a Jew, has less to fear from Fascism than from either Communism or democratic Socialism.

Even at this moment hundreds of thousands of men in England are being trained with the bayonet, a weapon entirely useless except for opening tins.

After 1918 there began to appear something that had never existed in England before: people of indeterminate social class. In 1910 every human being in these islands could be ‘placed’ in an instant by his clothes, manners and accent. That is no longer the case.

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Orwell’s relevance to today is in his pinpointing of the force that drives behavior: self interest. Find out what a person or group needs and you can predict their behavior in a given setting. Chamberlain wanted the status quo; the Communists wanted a classless society; the Nazis wanted their superior race to dominate (and maybe to feel that they weren’t such losers in the previous war). And so on. This is not a novel discovery to be sure. But one that one must constantly bear in mind when understanding why nations are acting they way they are.
On Language and Writing

Here is my favorite passage of George Orwell:

Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

The inflated [literary] style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms,…

Orwell wrote a short piece on effective writing. The following are some of the most valuable comments and suggestions that he made in it.

A. Dying metaphors. A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically "dead" (e.g. iron resolution ) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness.

B. Operators or verbal false limbs. These save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry. Characteristic phrases are render inoperative, militate against, make contact with, be subjected to, give rise to, give grounds for, have the effect of, play a leading part (role) in, make itself felt, take effect, exhibit a tendency to, serve the purpose of, etc., etc.

C. Pretentious diction. Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate, are used to dress up a simple statement and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgments.

D. Meaningless words. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning. Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly ever expected to do so by the reader.

Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.


A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:
1. What am I trying to say?
2. What words will express it?
3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?
4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

And he will probably ask himself two more:
1. Could I put it more shortly?
2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

I think the following rules will cover most cases:
1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never us a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Dear Santa,

I hope that this letter finds you in good health. Please convey my respects to the misses, the elves and to the rest of your family and friends.

[If you don’t have much time and would like to know what I would like for Christmas, you can skip to the last paragraph of this letter.]

I pick up my pen in the annual ritual that I have been following during the closing days of each year for the past 57 years. Maybe it was fewer than 57 years since I couldn’t have been corresponding with you when I was two. As far as I know though, I have always wanted something for Christmas even when I was two.

I remember when I was older—maybe seven or eight—it was on the night before the big day, my sisters, all of whom were older than I was, took me to the bedroom window. It was just before we were to go to bed. They pointed up to the sky at a particularly bright light that seemed like just a star to me and told me that that was your sleigh moving through the heavens. (I am sure they didn’t use such a big word as “heavens.”) It was a very clear night, I remember to this day. I will never forget feeling so overwhelmed. I really studied the light, and I could now see that indeed it was moving through the sky. That was no star! That was you in your sleigh coming to my house! I could not sleep that night at all. I was so thrilled.

Do you remember when you brought me Sam? That was the greatest gift you could bring me. What a nice dog he was. Just a mutt, wasn’t he? Big and shaggy. Where did you get him? How did you get him in your sleigh?

I think I heard Sam before I came down that morning to the living room where the tree was. I am sure you knew that in my house when I was a kid, we always lined up on the stairs Christmas morning in age order—first my father, my mother, then Sharon, Donna, Jeanne, then me. My father entered the room first to be certain that you had left, had eaten the cookies and milk we left you, and to turn on the tree lights. On the stairs, I heard something kind of, I don’t know, whimper or yip. For the life of me, I could not figure it out.

I never dreamed it would be a dog because Donna and Mother had asthma. It was not a good idea to get a dog or a cat to make their breathing worse. But you must have checked with my parents and they somehow said it would be ok. I wanted a dog for so long. On my paper route I had a lot of dog friends who followed me around as I delivered the Tarrytown Daily News six days a week.

Sam was by far the friendliest dog in the world. I think we had him for about a week or so. I don’t know if you ever knew this. He was sick almost from the beginning. It was distemper, whatever that is. All I know is that he was sick and really suffering. The problem was that that year, it had snowed heavily and we couldn’t get Sam to a vet. We were snowed in. When we finally could get out, my father took him to the vet and they had to put him to sleep because he was so far gone. Dad told us that the vet said he could have saved him if we had gotten him there in time.

That was the worst thing to hear. I wish I never knew that. It made Sam’s loss that much more difficult to take.

It may have been my first lesson on the fragility of life. My keenest lesson on the fleeting nature of life came to me though on December 24, 1967. That’s right, Christmas Eve while you were on your annual visit to our house. That is the day that my sister Donna Marie Cuff died. Right in the house at 19 Glenwolde, Tarrytown. I was there when she literally breathed her last. She breathed out but never breathed in again. Think of it. Don’t we all believe that our breathing will go on forever? I can tell you that it doesn’t, because I saw that it doesn’t. She was 24.

Donna was four years older than I was and she looked just like me. Ski jump nose, freckled face, chestnut brown hair. We used to look at each other and say: “Gee, I didn’t know there was a mirror right here,” and laugh.

It is trite but true: we were soul mates. We shared so much. Sensitive, that is, easily hurt. Insecure. Lost. Searching. Troubled.

She loved music. Chubby Checker, Fabian, Frankie Avalon, the Beatles, Dion and the Belmonts. Once when I was about 12, I went for my mother into the local soda shop in Irvington, on the corner of Main Street and Broadway. They had those juke boxes at each booth. Donna was in one of them with her friends. On the juke box was playing Runaround Sue. I thought she was the coolest, hippest person in the world. I could just not imagine what it would be like to go to high school, sit at a booth listening to Dion and the Belmonts, and sipping a malt. It was like something beyond my greatest dreams!

In 1960, Donna, Bobby (you know, Santa, my cousin) and I went to see The Horror of Dracula at the Music Hall in Tarrytown. Christopher Lee played Dracula. I was 12 and was too young to have seen something like that. It scared the heck out me. It was terrifying. I still remember when Jonathan Harker (even the name has cobwebs on it)drove the wooden stake into one of Dracula’s victims (who spent her days in a coffin) and she turned from this voluptuous temptress into a shriveled desiccated, hag. Ghastly! Hideous! I was so scared I can’t describe it. I was absolutely shuddering.

Then Dracula was stalking Lucy, Harker's betrothed, at her home in London. Van Helsing dutifully placed garlic around her room and put a cross on her throbbing, heaving chest. (He knew Christopher Lee had this thing for her.) Still. Still! With all that protection, Dracula got in and got to Lucy. Everyone knew she was different after that because her eye teeth started to elongate. She also had these fang marks on her neck—a telltale sign that she belonged to him and to the night. In retrospect, very sexual.

There is a point to this. When I got back home after that movie, I was in a state of extreme apprehension. I had this horrible foreboding that somewhere, lurking in my house, in some dark corner, ready to pounce when I least suspected it, was Dracula. Why he would pick that particular night after I saw the movie to get me, I never considered. But he was coming, I was sure of it. Lying in my bed that night, I listened for any creaking noise, a movement of the shade, a movement outside. All the sounds outside Lucy’s room, just before Dracula appeared, were present outside my room. It was quite a coincidence.

Donna. She slept like a baby that night. I could not understand how calm she was. With all the danger around us, she never noticed and just went to sleep. Bobby stayed over that night because we were both in a state of dread and we drove one another crazy hearing some dangerous sound that the other hadn’t perceived.

Donna loved to paint and write poems. As I recall, the poems were those of an emotional young lady who put her feelings on her sleeve. She was still trying to sort her life out when she died.

She was pretty, had a lot of boyfriends, and went to plenty of dances. One of her boyfriends, John, called after she died. I told him about her. He said he was sorry and I never heard from him again.

Donna had an ovarian cyst and it was treated surgically by removing the entire ovary with the growth on it. They didn’t remove the second one so she could have the chance to have children. Too bad they didn’t take it out at the same time, because the cancer grew onto the second ovary and it was inoperable for some reason. She did get chemotherapy but it clearly didn’t work. The tumor on her ovary grew and grew until she looked like she was pregnant. Isn’t that a bitter pill: a 24 year old beautiful girl in child bearing years looking like she was pregnant with a baby that was killing her? When she died, my mother cried for about a thousand years. None of us ever got over it. Christmas was never the same after that. Sorry Santa.

Donna’s loss impacted me tremendously and for the good. Not having her around showed me how precious life is. That it is an extraordinary gift to be enjoyed and celebrated. To this day, I have a yearning for Donna’s company. Not long after she died, I had a dream about her. It was an intense and powerful presence. She came to me and told me not to grieve for her, that she loved me, and that she was happy with God in heaven. She told me she was going but would see me when I went to God. When I woke up, I was at peace. I was full of tranquility. I had no doubt that what she told me was so. I have none now.

I now have three children and I view them as a gift from God. I feel so lucky, so fortunate, and truly grateful. What more can one ask for than to be blessed with moral, happy, healthy, educated, religious, children. Rich? I have known for a long time that I am wealthy beyond measure. Thank you, God.

I also realize my great fortune to married to such a fine woman as Mary. And, as I read somewhere, to be a good father one must first be a good spouse. The two go hand in hand. We are together to bring one another to salvation. And to help others.

Now down to the real reason that I am writing: what would I like to find under the Christmas tree this year. I hope you can arrange this Santa.

1. I would like a big hug from my wife and children;

2. I would like some assurance from my children that I can be a part of their lives. I am desperately afraid of not having that. I must confess that I miss being a prime shaper of their lives. I once was able to pick out the only books they read (because I read them to them). At one time, they accepted as gospel everything I said. In earlier times, we only did things Mary and I decided to do. All of that is over. And I miss it. Of course, I don’t want it back. To turn the clock back would be pathological. My goal as a parent is to produce independent offspring. Still I miss it. So I would like them to put my mind at rest that I can, in some small part, share in their lives.

3. Materialistically, I would like a portable DVD player, a plush king size blanket, and a book that discusses movies that are out and available.
Thanks Santa

Jack