HOW TO FIX A BROKEN PUBLIC LANGUAGE
Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language—so the argument runs—must inevitably share in the general collapse.
—GEORGE ORWELL
“Every February since 1940 I have found myself thinking that this time winter is going to be permanent,” George Orwell wrote in 1946.1 But the winter of that year was particularly bleak. The previous spring, while Orwell was in Germany covering the last gasp of the European war for the Observer, his wife, Eileen, had died during an operation. Now he found himself in a desolate flat in Islington with Richard, the toddler whom he and Eileen had adopted in June 1944. Richard was a consolation, but the responsibility of bringing the child up by himself was one of many cares weighing on Orwell. His own health was fragile, and that same February he suffered a hemorrhage. He was unbearably lonely. During the winter, he would approach no fewer than four young women with offers of marriage. All would be rejected.
The city outside his flat offered scant comfort. Last year’s victory bunting was gone and now London was gripped in a long cold morning after. Even though the fighting was over, rationing and the other domestic privations of war continued. Britain was exhausted and the fruits of victory were nowhere to be seen. The international scene was just as gloomy. The wartime camaraderie between the Western allies and Stalin’s USSR was a thing of the past: the struggle between democratic capitalism and communism resumed where it had left off before the war. In diplomacy’s thermometer, the mercury was falling like lead.
In many ways, this is the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four: a numb, battened-down society, its people shivering indoors or huddled behind the steamed-up windows of smoky, overheated pubs, not yet recovered from the trauma of war, already fearful of the future. It is a world of impersonal and unstoppable historical forces, of communities turned into machines, of individuals who have been stripped of agency yet left with an undiminished capacity to feel pain.
But as miserable as he was, this was George Orwell’s hour. Animal Farm had come out in Britain in August 1945 and would be published in the United States later in 1946. The book had turned Orwell into a major figure; soon no one would dismiss him as just one more voice on London’s literary left. Here was a writer who resisted ideological classification (to his discomfort he would shortly be taken up by the American anticommunist Right) and whose dark allegory seemed to transcend its time and political context. Animal Farm wasn’t just about totalitarianism. It was about how we humans create and destroy societies.
For the first time in his life, Orwell was famous. Publishers and editors had begun to compete for his services as an essayist and a reviewer, and money—not a fortune, but more than he’d ever earned before—began to flow in. Perhaps with Richard’s future in mind, perhaps to distract from his loneliness, perhaps because this really was his moment and the ideas and words just kept coming, he threw himself into writing. Between the springs of 1945 and 1946, he wrote well over a hundred articles, reviews, and essays; he also began to plan the novel that would become Nineteen Eighty-Four.
One of those essays was “Politics and the English Language.”2 Published in April 1946, it reads like an almost physical reaction to all that frantic reviewing, a cry of revulsion from someone who has consumed one atrocious piece of prose too many and, having sent the offending object flying across the room, is now intent on exacting revenge. But despite its brevity and informality, it is also the best-known and most influential reflection on public language written in English in the twentieth century.
The immediate reason for the essay’s success is that it ends with some practical advice on how to write well, or at least how not to write badly. Orwell advises against cliché, unnecessary use of long words, overwriting, excessive use of the passive voice, and pretentious foreign or technical terms. There were some then (and are many more now) who maintained that there are no “right” and “wrong” ways of speaking and writing, but a plurality of different practices each of which is as valid as the others. Orwell himself goes out of his way to insist that he is not proposing “the setting up of a ‘standard English’ which must never be departed from,” nor even promoting “what is called ‘a good prose style.’” And his final advice is not to take his practical hints too seriously—better to break the rules than to say something “outright barbarous.”
But the overwhelming majority of readers of “Politics” have cheerfully ignored both him and his critics. The essay became popular in schools and colleges precisely because parents and teachers believed that Orwell could indeed help young writers to develop a “good prose style,” and that an essay or job application, or even a simple email, written in the spirit of Orwell’s advice would be more likely to find favor than one that flouted it. And they were right. Anyone who writes professionally or trains others to do so knows that—no doubt with all due health warnings—his principles are a good place to start.
Many people also believe that Orwell effectively nailed the subject of rhetoric and public persuasion, and that everything he wrote about language then is still true today. For them, if anything has happened in the meantime, it is that the fears he expressed then have come to pass, and that the poor old English language, which he reported to be “in a bad way” seventy years ago, is in an even worse one now. To them, and more than either Animal Farm or Nineteen Eighty-Four, “Politics and the English Language” is prophetic.
What is certainly true is that George Orwell’s take on public language in his essays and novels—and in particular his acute sense of its plasticity and the treacherous ease with which it can be commandeered and perverted by malign forces—remains astonishingly influential. It was no surprise that, when searching in December 2013 for the right words to condemn the NSA’s extensive harvesting of phone data, US Appeals Court Judge Richard Leon settled on the phrase “almost Orwellian.” Sarah Palin’s “death panels” and “level of productivity in society” owe a clear debt to Nineteen Eighty-Four. But couldn’t a critic just as easily accuse the former Alaska governor of an Orwellian use of language herself?
Some words will never escape the gravitational field of Planet Orwell. The use of the adjective “big” always evokes Big Brother. Suggest that we all have a Big Conversation, as Tony Blair did, and many people will take it as final confirmation that you have decided to listen to no one but yourself. David Cameron murdered his own dream of a new era of community involvement by calling it the Big Society, a name that, thanks to George Orwell, immediately invokes its exact opposite—a Little Society with a bombed-out welfare state, and power and wealth in the hands of an elite. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the regime insists that its citizens accept that black is white, if that is what state priorities dictate; indeed, it uses the word “blackwhite” for this reversal of reality and of the meanings of words in the official new language, Newspeak. No one who has read the novel can ever entirely dismiss the suspicion that, for purposes of their own, today’s political leaders have secretly signed up for a similar program of semantic inversion.
Across the West, whether debating national security or the welfare state or anything else, politicians look for ways they can invoke Orwell’s master narrative and claim that their opponents, or some other powerful group, are using language in some distorted and instrumental way to shut down a debate or advance a secret agenda. Everyone seems to agree that there is a language conspiracy. The only disagreement is who is behind it.
Yet Orwell was prompted to write the two novels and “Politics and the English Language” not by general cynicism about language or politics but by a specific fear, which we should not allow our awareness of this wider influence to obscure. It was that Britain, and perhaps the entire Western world, would succumb to Stalinist totalitarianism. In the case of “Politics,” his concern was that the language of public discourse would become so debased that it could not support healthy political debate or resist infiltration by the Communist Left and their fellow-travelers.
One of the examples he quotes in the essay to illustrate atrocious prose is an impenetrable extract from an essay by the Marxist intellectual Harold Laski, based on a talk he gave at a PEN symposium held the previous year to mark the three hundredth anniversary of John Milton’s defense of press freedom, Areopagitica. (“I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate.”) Orwell had attended some of the celebrations, and for him they represented everything he despised about the British Left: its woolliness and faddism, its disgraceful unwillingness to face up to the truth about Soviet Russia. As for Harold Laski, the revered professor and political theorist who had once advocated violent Marxist revolution but who was now a leading light in the Labour Party: to George Orwell, he seems personally to have embodied the proximate anxiety of “Politics”—that the Communist Left would use a smoke screen of euphemism and gobbledygook to hide their real intent, which was to turn Britain into a controlled society on the Soviet model. No wonder Orwell decided to pick on him.
But any appreciation of Orwell’s essay must confront the awkward fact that these fears did not come to pass. The UK did not become a communist country. The Labour Party remained a democratic coalition of the Left, even though Harold Laski became its chairman for a while. It was democracy and our messy, imperfect freedom that triumphed, and communism that collapsed almost everywhere.
Nor do we truly live in an “Orwellian” world today, even though it often suits politicians and commentators to say so. The misinformation and confusion that surround us are not, for the most part, the result of a conspiracy by the government, Google, or anyone else. In the West, neither governments nor private companies have an incentive to embark on such a risky enterprise, and although many controlled societies do still exist around the world, their ability to lie without being found out or to suppress dissent certainly isn’t getting any easier. The thumb drive and the smartphone are relentless subverters of the censor’s craft.
But don’t Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013 about the mass surveillance conducted by the NSA, GCHQ, and other Western intelligence agencies argue otherwise? Didn’t they confirm at least one of Orwell’s predictions, that technology would give future governments new ways of snooping on their citizens? Yes and no. When we read Nineteen Eighty-Four today, we realize that the telescreen in Winston’s apartment, through which the Oceanic state controls him and everyone else, is an Internet-enabled interactive device with a webcam as well as a screen. It’s a remarkable feat of prescience about the technology that now dominates our lives.
What Orwell did not foresee was that in the real future, the most assiduous surveillants of Oceania’s citizens would be the citizens themselves; that they would freely choose to record every intimacy of their lives in words, sound, and pictures, and then use all available means to distribute them to as many strangers as possible. The real Winston is an exhibitionist. He wants to be watched. If his telescreen ever broke, his life would feel quite empty until he got it working again. Even the end of privacy has played out rather differently from Orwell’s predictions.
Yet that still leaves “Politics and the English Language” standing squarely in our path. It was written at the threshold of modern mass communications and during an important pivot in our understanding of language: the outworkings of both would take decades to realize, but George Orwell was already asking all the right questions.
* * *
The argument of “Politics and the English Language” is that modern public language has become stale, pretentious, confusing, and vague. The effect is to “anaesthetize” part of the reader’s brain, making coherent thought and debate difficult or impossible. The difference between the debased prose of England and the sinister language of the totalitarian regimes is one of degree rather than essence, and if left unchecked, the first may lead to the second. But Orwell refuses to accept that the battle is lost. Although “one cannot change all this in a moment,” he calls for writers to abandon the secondhand and lazy and replace them with simple, clear, original prose.
Right at the start of his essay, Orwell argues (as I do) that language can be an agent, as well as a product, of change:
Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely.
In other words, a feedback loop can allow negative changes in language to bolster the exogenous forces that originally caused them; those forces will in turn provoke a further deterioration in the language, and so the decline continues. But Orwell also believes it is possible for positive changes in the way we write not just to stop the cycle, but to throw it into reverse: “One ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.”
The heart of “Politics and the English Language” is Orwell’s analysis of what has gone wrong with the prose of his time. He identifies two broad faults, “staleness of imagery” and “lack of precision,” and then lists four of the tricks by which weak writers “dodge” the task of coherent prose composition: dying metaphors, operators, pretentious diction, and meaningless words. His hope seems to be that eliminating these bad practices will not only improve “the verbal end” but also begin to address the wider “political chaos” he sees around him.
Operators, or verbal false limbs, as he calls them, are roundabout ways of expressing a given thought when a simple word will do: render inoperative rather than break, exhibit a tendency to rather than tend to, and so on. He also deprecates the use of the passive voice rather than the active, noun constructions instead of gerunds (by examination of instead of by examining), and phrases like in view of and on the hypothesis that.
To illustrate what he has in mind by meaningless words, he points to two characteristics. First, the use of abstract words (he offers an idiosyncratic list including romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality) in contexts such as art criticism, where they “do not point to any discoverable object” and are therefore “strictly meaningless.” Second, he notes that in political discourse, a number of key terms (his examples are democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice) “have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another.” This immediately leads Orwell to discuss the tendency of oppressive forces like the USSR or the Catholic Church to use words in blackwhite, indeed “dishonest” ways: “The Soviet Press is the freest in the world” is an example.
Pretentious diction means exactly what it suggests: the voguish preference, particularly in political and literary prose, for complicated and important-sounding words where simple ones will do. His examples vary from the apposite to the eccentric—one of the words he fulminates against is predict. Orwell segues from this to an attack on the peculiar jargon of Marxist-Leninist pamphleteering and speechifying: petty bourgeois, lackey, hyena, White Guard.
His treatment of cliché—he focuses on dying metaphors, the use of worn-out figurative expressions—illustrates both the power and the limitation of his account of language. He delivers his litany of tired phrases (no axe to grind, hotbed, ring the changes on) with relish, though he declares victory too soon in the case of some “recent examples.” He claims that explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned were “killed by the jeers of a few journalists.” He would have been disheartened to learn that both would be not just alive, but (I can’t resist it) in the pink seven decades later.
Orwell’s perspective on metaphor and cliché is a narrow one. He lists Achilles’ heel as a dying metaphor. Actually, the phrase neatly expresses in two words a thought that would otherwise take a whole sentence to set out, and does not involve a clash of inappropriate images because its metaphorical use is so commonplace that it no longer evokes the image of a bipolar Bronze Age hero. Preferring a phrase like iron resolution—which he claims has lost its literal association and is therefore acceptable—to one like Achilles’ heel is nothing more than a matter of taste.
Why do people use clichés? Orwell never offers a view, but “Politics and the English Language” leaves us with the impression that it must be some combination of intellectual posturing, general laziness, and communist subversion. Actually, clichés survive because they are handy, because other people understand them immediately and, yes, because we don’t have to think about them too hard. They are an organic part of language rather than a cancerous excrescence. They certainly have a life cycle—from brilliant birth to intolerable old age—but they are more likely to be killed off by Darwinian competition from younger, fresher clichés than by conscious spring-cleaning exercises like this one.
The same is true of Orwell’s other “tricks.” We can all summon up examples of absurd circumlocution, pompous vocabulary, airy bullshit and unnecessary jargon. His advice—to use plain, concrete English and original and coherent linguistic imagery wherever one can—is obviously sound. Put as uncompromisingly as it is in “Politics,” however, it comes off as a counsel of perfection that is at odds with the way human beings actually speak and write. It’s perfectly legitimate for writers to strive for nuance, for example, and to say you are not unhappy does not mean exactly the same as saying you are happy. Nor is all jargon the same. He includes two German words in his rogues’ gallery of pretentious diction: the first, Weltanschauung, has a perfectly good English equivalent, “worldview”; the second, Gleichschaltung, refers specifically to the Nazification of German institutions in the 1930s, a meaning that is certainly not conveyed by the generic English “coordination.”
The dirty secret about “Politics and the English Language” is that despite Orwell’s claim that his main concern is clarity, what he really cared most about was the beauty of language. Indeed, the imperative to write beautifully is the last and most important of his recommendations though, as we saw, he disguises it by throwing it into the negative: “Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.” This does not mean that the essay is really about aesthetics rather than politics. It is rather that Orwell associated beauty of language with clarity, and clarity with the ability of language to express rather than prevent thought and, by so doing, to support truthful and effective political debate. Whether he was aware of it or not, he had arrived at the classical understanding of rhetoric and, in particular, the ancient belief that the civic value of a given piece of rhetoric is correlated with its excellence as a piece of expression.
A Particular Picture of Language
It is consistent with Orwell’s expansive view of the connection between language and politics that, of the five set-piece examples of bad writing he gives us, only one—a tedious Marxist harangue—deals with politics head-on. Another is about psychology, a third about literature and religion, and two about language itself, including the following extract from Interglossa by the distinguished scientist Lancelot Hogben:
Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes such egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with for tolerate, or put at a loss for bewilder.
Despite its dotty and rather splendid dissonances (the “ducks and drakes” crashing into the “native battery” or the mouth clatter of “collocations of vocables”), many readers of Orwell’s essay have probably glided over this sentence without the first idea of what Hogben is talking about.
Nor does Orwell give any indication that he is interested in the underlying substance. He machine-guns Hogben in a one-sentence burst that first mocks the scrambled imagery of playing “ducks and drakes with a battery which is able to write prescriptions,” then chides the writer for not being willing “to look egregious up in the dictionary and see what it means,” not that Hogben’s use of that word is notably egregious.
But let’s take a closer look. Lancelot Hogben was a zoologist and a political activist all his life, but he had another interest: the development of new languages. He was initially an enthusiast for Basic English, the “international auxiliary language,” which the linguist and philosopher C. K. Ogden had launched in 1930 to help with the teaching of English as a second language around the globe, but which many also hoped would contribute to world peace by fostering understanding among different peoples. Hogben came to believe that he could do a better job himself, however, and in 1943 he published Interglossa: A Draft of an Auxiliary for a Democratic World Order. Interglossa was also a new language that aimed to promote a harmonious world, but it was aimed in the first instance at the world’s scientists: “Because natural science is the only existing form of human co-operation on a planetary scale, men of science, who have to turn to journals published in many languages for necessary information, are acutely aware that the babel of tongues is a social problem of the first magnitude.”3
Hogben based the vocabulary of Interglossa on classical root words, rather than English ones, on the basis that Latin and Greek already provided the world’s scientists with a shared technical nomenclature. The bizarre sentence that Orwell quotes in “Politics” is an attempt by Hogben to argue that Interglossa’s richer vocabulary is superior to that of Basic English. A rough translation might go something like this:
One of the disadvantages of basing a universal language on English is that when (to restrict the number of words novice speakers have to learn) you use a phrase made up of short simple words to substitute for more complex ones that have been excluded from the language’s restricted vocabulary, you are forced into clumsy idiomatic English usages. For example, Charles Ogden did not want to add the words tolerate and bewilder to the vocabulary of Basic English, and therefore ended up suggesting that speakers of Basic should use the phrase “put up with” for the first and “put at a loss” for the second.
On the face of it, Orwell could have chosen Hogben’s sentence simply because it is so mangled, or because Hogben’s leftish utopianism set his teeth on edge. But around 1940, Orwell had written an earlier essay, “New Words,” published only after his death, in which he too proposed creating a new vocabulary to “deal with parts of our experience now practically unamenable to language.”4 In 1942, he produced a program for the BBC on Basic English and corresponded with Ogden about it afterward. And Interglossa seems to lurk behind other parts of “Politics,” for instance Orwell’s claim that a shift to a vocabulary based on Latin and Greek is already taking place: “Bad writers, and especially scientific, political and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones.”
For Orwell, though, the result will not be an international peace movement led by the world’s scientists, but “an increase in slovenliness and vagueness”—and perhaps something worse. He goes on to give us a list of Latinisms to avoid, including predict as well as such other seemingly innocuous specimens as expedite and clandestine. Then, in a faintly loopy footnote, he claims that English flower names like snapdragon and forget-me-not are also being insidiously replaced by Greek equivalents. This is the flip-side of utopian internationalism, a fear of deracinated (another Latinate no-no according to Orwell) alien words crowding out native ones, like the Asian longhorn beetle and other nasty foreign blights threatening our splendid English broadleafs.
But Orwell himself believed that public language was in urgent need of renewal. Indeed, the extracts he quotes in “Politics and the English Language” themselves seem to represent a “babel of tongues,” to use Hogben’s phrase, with social and political consequences that Orwell asserts add up to a problem “of the first magnitude.” Having examined both Basic English and Interglossa, however, he seems to have concluded that these radical cures could be worse than the disease, and that there was nothing for it but to work with the language we’ve already got. Certainly the new language he created in Nineteen Eighty-Four is conceived as an instrument not of peace and understanding but of oppression. Newspeak’s vocabulary is restricted not to make it easier to learn or share but to limit the range of ideas that can be discussed, or even thought.
* * *
Humanity is both rational and perfectible. At present, it lives in the darkness of ignorance and prejudice, the victim of political and religious oppression, and centuries of benighted tradition. Only show them reason, however, and men and women will walk out of their prison into the light. Much of this battle must be fought in the field of language. The forces of oppression rely on the frailties of traditional discourse to peddle their myths and lies. We must replace their compromised language with one founded solely on reason and evidence.
This, broadly, is the rationalist agenda for language and society that gathered momentum in the Enlightenment and was transmitted to the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries by thinkers like Auguste Comte. It found its strongest expression in philosophical positivism. According to positivism, true knowledge can only be derived from empirical observation and logical deduction. Though he predates positivism as a movement, in 1748 the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume crisply set out the implications of positivistic rationalism for language and literature:
If we take into our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.5
By the early twentieth century, some philosophers had come to believe that most, or perhaps all, of the problems of philosophy were actually problems of language. Once terms were clarified and all nonlogical, nonempirical material was removed, the misunderstandings would disappear and what was left would be unarguably valid. Perhaps the most famous statement of this position is Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which was published in German in 1921 and in English a year later. At the end of the preface to the Tractatus, the young Wittgenstein says, “I therefore believe myself to have found, on all essential points, the final solution of the problems.”6 By “problems,” he means all of the answerable questions of philosophy.
C. K. Ogden, the inventor of Basic English, was an important figure in British positivism. He contributed to the translation of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus into English and later, with I. A. Richards, wrote The Meaning of Meaning, which explored thought and semantics through a positivist lens and in turn influenced A.J. Ayer’s classic of positivism, Language, Truth, and Logic. Basic English sprang from some of the ideas Ogden and Richards had developed in The Meaning of Meaning.
When applied to public language, the positivist approach implies that, within Aristotle’s triangular model of rhetoric, logical argument (logos) is essentially all that matters, and that expressions of belief or other forms of subjectivity (ethos) and attempts to empathize with those listening (pathos) are distracting and potentially dangerous. Language associated with cultural practices that predate the Enlightenment may harbor superstition and irrationality and so is also suspect. Rationalism prefers philosophy and social science constructed anew from first principles—no wonder that it generally resonates more with the Left than the Right.
There are passages in “Politics and English Language” that show the unmistakable influence of positivism. We’ve already encountered Orwell’s passing remark that some of the words used in art and literary criticism “do not point to any discoverable object” and therefore are “strictly meaningless.” Meaning, Orwell implies, depends on a one-for-one relation between a specific object and the word that signifies it. Elsewhere he goes further. “If you simplify your English,” he says, “you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself.”
Simplification for Orwell entails removing words and phrases that are deceitful, meaningless, or unnecessary. Like the positivists, he seems to be claiming here that the result will be a language so perspicuous that qualities like “stupidity” will be immediately apparent. These striking claims hint at some underlying theory of language, and just before he moves on to his closing practical rules, Orwell duly offers us one.
Words, he says, are dangerous adversaries, echoing Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty. To show who’s in charge, it’s important to let “the meaning choose the word, not the other way about.” He spells out what this entails:
When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing you probably hunt about till you find the exact words which seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meanings as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterwards one can choose—not simply accept—the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch around and decide what impression one’s words are likely to make on another person.
In the case of a “concrete object,” one can just about make sense of this. I’m hungry and an image of a piece of fruit appears in my mind. I consult my inner encyclopedia of fruits. Is it hard or soft? Is it round or some other shape? Is it red or orange or yellow? By a process of elimination, I come up with the entry “banana” and discover that it perfectly fits the softish, curved, yellow object in my mind’s eye.
But even this process feels quite unlike my actual experience of being hungry and thinking about a banana. Orwell’s assertion that when we see or think of concrete objects, we think “wordlessly” and then go through some process of finding the right word to match the image seems wrong. There is no sense of any kind of conscious search, unless for some reason we can’t call the name of an object or a person immediately to mind; it is only then that we reach for our mental reference books. And the moment we turn to abstract concepts, Orwell’s theory falls apart altogether. His advice here is to “put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meanings as clear as one can through pictures and sensations.” Take a Republican attempting to express visceral objection to Obamacare. What would it mean for him to “get one’s meanings as clear as one can” by resorting to pictures and sensations?
The way our brains process conscious meanings feels intrinsically linguistic: the words spring to mind as quickly as the meanings and feel inseparable from them. Indeed, they sometimes seem to appear before the meanings and provide the material from which any new meaning has to be constructed. This is the very process Orwell warns us to avoid. It is, however, the way our brains generally work.
By 1946, some former adherents had concluded that positivism was unsustainable. One of them was Ludwig Wittgenstein. Philosophical Investigations, his most important later work, begins with a passage from St. Augustine that presents a theory of language more or less identical to the one Orwell offers us in his essay. St. Augustine, Wittgenstein says, “gives us a particular picture of the essence of human language It is this: the individual words in language name objects—sentences are combinations of such names. In this picture of language we find the roots of the following idea: every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands.”7
But then Wittgenstein points to the limitation inherent in this scheme: “If you describe the learning of language in this way you are, I believe, thinking primarily of nouns like ‘table,’ ‘chair,’ certain actions and properties; and of the remaining kinds of word as something that will take care of itself.”
For Wittgenstein, language is self-evidently far more than a collection of words each of which has a single meaning that is derived from its relationship with a “discoverable object.” In a series of deft thought experiments, he demonstrates how a word can mean different things in different circumstances. Wittgenstein argues that words derive their meaning from the context in which they are used. So, whereas a positivist might simply dismiss any talk about God as nonsense, Wittgenstein thinks of theological discourse as a “language-game” taking place within a social and cultural context in which words like soul, God, and sin do indeed have meaning. As he says of religious teaching about the soul: “Now do I understand this teaching?—Of course I understand it—I can imagine plenty of things in connection with it. And haven’t pictures of these things been painted?”8 He is not claiming that one has to believe in the existence of the soul, merely that it is patently incorrect to suggest—as many positivists did—that the word soul is meaningless.
Wittgenstein’s critique of positivism and his insistence on the importance of the lived social context of language was soon supported, not just by other philosophers but also by anthropologists, psychologists, and students of semantics, semiotics, and the other new language-related disciplines that sprang up in the postwar years. The question of how we acquire and use language has not yet been settled, with rival approaches emphasizing environment and social interaction, biologically determined fundamental human linguistic faculties, or some combination of the two. But none of these theories, nor the most recent advances in neuroscience and developmental psychology, support Orwell’s model of language or the positivist thinking that inspired it. But news that the purest application of rationalism to the question of language had been holed below the waterline never reached the majority of Western intellectuals, let alone the public consciousness.
So where did George Orwell come to rest on the matter? As we have seen, in marked contrast to today’s prevailing orthodoxy about language, Orwell was a prescriptivist who believed that there are better and worse ways of saying things; in other words, different usages and styles of language can be objectively ranked. This is characteristic of the rationalist approach, as is his theory of language and the conviction that simpler prose will make the truth self-evident.
On the other hand, everything we know about him suggests that he would have found political correctness and other modern forms of linguistic repression repugnant and absurd. He was deeply suspicious of utopianism. Certainly by Nineteen Eighty-Four, he had come to associate the modification and simplification of language with dehumanization and tyranny. In “Politics and the English Language” itself, his theorizing about language is followed not by a call for a new vocabulary and grammar but by a set of modest and practical suggestions about how to improve our use of the language we already have.
The George Orwell of “Politics” was drawn to the idea of rationalist purity in language, but there was something about it that scared him. It seemed to threaten the plain and humane English he grew up with and, worse, he sensed within it the potential for perversion and abuse. Like a window-shopper, he looked longingly at it through the glass, and then walked on.
Blood and Soil
Now let’s eavesdrop on a completely different kind of public language. Here is Adolf Hitler addressing party and government leaders in September 1936:
Once you heard the voice of a man, and that voice knocked at your hearts, it wakened you, and you followed that voice. For years you pursued it, without ever having even seen the owner of that voice; you simply heard a voice and followed it. When we meet here today, we are all of us filled with the miraculousness of this gathering. Not every one of you can see me, and I cannot see every one of you. Yet I feel you, and you feel me! It is the faith in our Volk that has made us small people great, that has made us poor people rich, that has made us wavering, discouraged, fearful people brave and courageous.9
This is not just an example of the beguiling rhetoric that brought Hitler to power and that, more than any other public language in history, gave oratory a bad name. If we read the passage carefully, we realize that Adolf Hitler was someone else eager to broadcast a theory of rhetoric. His own.
It goes like this: modernity is terrifying, its depredations and disruptions have left us all poor and frightened, it has crushed our sense of individual meaning and worth. Yet it is still possible for all of these feelings to be expressed, confronted, perhaps even vanquished by a single “voice” that can be heard by all.
The lesser miracle is modern technology: the microphone, the loudspeaker, the radio mast that enable Hitler to be heard even by people he cannot see and who cannot see him. The greater miracle is the sense of oneness between the unique voice and its audience, a union built on shared experience but also on the German people’s collective faith in themselves as a community. What Hitler claims to be striving for is a melding of ethos and pathos into a shared state of mutual understanding and identity, almost a state of common being.
Vanishingly few politicians have Hitler’s oratorical gifts or, mercifully, his monstrous intent. But this bond of reciprocal trust and identity, or some approximation of it, is what people mean when they describe a speaker or speech as authentic. Like rationality, authenticity sounds like an obvious virtue in rhetoric. Who wants inauthentic public speakers, after all? And yet, like rationalism, authenticism—by which I mean the single-minded belief that all that really matters in public language is the speaker’s supposed authenticity—is an altogether more complex idea than it first appears, and a more dangerous one.
Adolf Hitler himself seems to have been a conscious authenticist, believing that the more “authentic” rhetoric sounded, the more persuasive it would be. He used his own story—his struggle—as a narrative template that could encompass the story, not just of the ecstatic crowds immediately in front of him but of the whole of Germany. He took immense care, in what he said and how he was portrayed in newsreels and photographs, not to look like a member of the ruling elite, or even someone who wanted to join that elite. He was determined to keep the aura of an outsider. Here was the veteran who won medals but never became an officer, the “voice” that was somehow simultaneously on the rostrum and in the crowd. He constantly adapted his words and gestures to connect with the specific audience in front of him. “For a minute he gropes, feels his way, senses the atmosphere,” wrote his sometime friend Ernst Hanfstaengl, then “suddenly he bursts forth … His words go like an arrow to their target, he touches each private wound on the raw, liberating the mass unconscious, expressing its innermost aspirations, telling it what it most wants to hear.”10 He even delayed marrying Eva Braun to the end, for fear that the presence of a wife might break the spell binding the lonely prophet to his people. Supposedly, authenticity is what is left when all artifice and instrumentality have been stripped away. In Hitler’s case, it seems to have consisted of a weird mixture of natural resonance and icy calculation.
Adolf Hitler didn’t invent authenticism nor, though it was much in the air, was it merely a product of Europe’s traumatic interwar period. Like modern rhetorical rationalism, rhetorical authenticism is a child of the Enlightenment—indeed, was a direct reaction to the rationalist school. The eighteenth-century German philosopher Johann Georg Hamann was one of the first to make the case that when you take ideas and words out of their behavioral and cultural context, they lose meaning and relevance. For this reason, he is sometimes considered a precursor of the Wittgenstein of Philosophical Investigations. But whereas Wittgenstein’s objective seems simply to have been to understand language, Hamann had an agenda, which was to restore human belief—above all, religious faith—to its pre-Enlightenment primacy.
Hamann never fully developed his ideas, but they nonetheless entered the mainstream of European thought through a chain of influence, from Hegel and Kierkegaard to Nietzsche and Heidegger. Sometimes, as for Kierkegaard, religion—and the sense of what is lost when a society loses a language capable of expressing religious belief—is central to the picture. For Nietzsche, by contrast, authenticity consists of abandoning the false illusions of religion and the moral system that depends on it, and developing instead a new sense of what it means to be human. Hamann’s contemporary, the philosopher and poet Johann Gottfried Herder, had made the critical link among language, culture, and nationhood, and increasingly the idea of authenticity of language became associated with another potent idea with roots in the Enlightenment: nationalism.
In Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, published in German in 1927, human existence is understood to consist of different modes of being in a spectrum between the most authentic, in which Dasein—his word that encompasses both individual and collective human being—most clearly and deeply understands itself and its situation in the world, and the inauthentic, where Dasein is lost to itself in the crowd of Man, the undifferentiated human “they.” Critically, language can also be divided into Rede and Gerede, pure discourse and the inauthentic and rootless rumor and gossip of the crowd.
Heidegger formally presents authenticity and inauthenticity as value neutral, but even in Being and Time, the unspoken sense is that the authentic is superior to the inauthentic—something to be aimed at and admired rather than merely described. And when it comes to Heidegger’s politics, there is little room for doubt. By the early 1930s, the man whom some consider the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century had reached the conclusion that Adolf Hitler was the embodiment of German Dasein, and that it was through Hitler and his revolution that the German people were now “in the process of rediscovering their own essence” and an “authenticity” grounded in “blood” and “soil.”11 For a time Heidegger was a Nazi party member and an influential advocate for the regime. It’s likely that he would have taken much the same view as Hitler himself about why his oratory was so potent: that its authenticity sprang directly from a shared sense of identity and being between the leader and his nation.
As we saw in chapter 2, the association of authenticity of speech with authenticity of character and, in particular, the sense that “rhetoric” (crafty, manipulative speech) is a reliable indicator of inauthenticity of character, goes back in English literature at least to Shakespeare. It was also alive in the literature of Orwell’s own time. Here, for example, T. S. Eliot contrasts the logos of St. John’s gospel—Christ as the “Word” or ultimate ground of reason and order—with the crisis in modern secular discourse:
Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them. The Word in the desert
Is most attacked by voices of temptation …12
The “merely chattering” voices echo Heidegger’s Gerede, the gossipy hubbub of everyday human life within which, but also against which, authentic Dasein must differentiate itself and find deeper meaning. The relatively recent neologism chatterati, a combination of chatter and literati that was intended to evoke a noisy, pretentious dilettantism, proposes the same conflict. Our thoughts about culture and politics are meaningful and profound, theirs are vapid and irritating—but theirs still threaten to overwhelm ours. Authenticity surrounded by inauthenticity, fighting to be heard. Simple home truths battling against a sea of alien lies. This is the paradigmatic conflict the authenticist seeks to establish, and then proposes to resolve.
Like the rationalists, authenticists prize simplicity of language, not because they value reason but because they associate simple expression with honesty of emotion and at least the appearance of being willing to engage with the lowliest members of the chosen community. Whereas rationalists venerate the facts to the exclusion of almost everything else, authenticists often find them suspect, calling them factoids or statistics—which in the antitechnocratic language of authenticity amounts to the same thing—to distinguish them from the bigger “truths” they prefer to promote. Rationalism fetishizes dialectic. For authenticists, what matters most is not argument but story: their “truths” are inextricably bound up with the narratives they tell about their community. The facticity of a given claim matters less than its fit with the narrative. If something feels true, then in some sense it must be true.
* * *
Authenticism is obviously at its most disturbing when considered in the context of twentieth-century totalitarianism. It takes many forms, however, and though it remains attractive to political and religious fanatics everywhere, it also underpins the rhetoric, tactics, and strategies of many peaceful democrats. And today it’s just as likely to be deployed by a left-wing party as a conservative one.
For many on Left, the privileged background of some conservative leaders makes them incapable by definition of identifying with and speaking the language of ordinary people. The Bushes were all born with silver spoons in their mouths, David Cameron went to Eton, Mitt Romney was a hedge fund guy: Don’t listen to them because they cannot possibly understand you.
But the democratic Right is just as capable of playing the authenticity game. A good number of Republicans decided that there was some aspect of Barack Obama’s identity that they just didn’t like. Was it, perhaps, the fact that he is black? Hell, no, what do you think we are? But maybe he’s a Muslim. Maybe he wasn’t born in America. Convinced that a person like that shouldn’t be in the White House, they have cast doubt on one part of his background after another in the hope that something would finally stick and undermine public trust in what he said.
One of the many charges laid against President Obama was that he is a head-in-the-clouds intellectual—for true authenticists, all intellectuals are by definition inauthentic, notwithstanding the fact that the whole notion of authenticity was invented by intellectuals. Britain’s conservative press did a brutally effective job in pressing that same charge home against Ed Miliband, whom they depicted as a weird and out-of-touch egghead. His own attempts at visible authenticity ended miserably. A video of him looking into a TV camera and trying various expressions, as a voice off-camera says “Okay, Ed, look natural, no, look natural Ed, look natural,” sums up the paradox of political authenticity today. Success comes not from actually being yourself but from conforming to a standard of acceptable “authenticity”—represented in this case by having the knack of relaxing in front of a television camera—which is not the result of direct public responses but which been largely defined by spin doctors and the media.13 Indeed there’s a standard-issue authenticity playbook for the mainstream politician: Roll up your sleeves and lose the tie; show visible concern, maybe a controlled flash of anger; walk about a bit but remember the shot list—we always want to see the punters sitting behind you.
The public sees through it in an instant, of course. Real authenticity is a sweaty shambles. Neither you nor your audience knows what’s going to happen next. Nobody’s emotions are fully under control. The cameras have to follow it not like some deadbeat corporate marketing event but like live sport. It’s often an embarrassment. Once in a while it changes history.
Authenticism surges through Western politics in discrete waves, and in Britain, America, and many continental European countries we are living through a major wave right now. Brexit is a clear example, but only one of a chaotic series of authenticist assaults on rationalist elites that go beyond traditional party, ideology, or interest. For pure antipoliticians like Donald Trump, rhetorical “authenticity”—their ability to reject the entire public discourse of the established political classes—is their central point of differentiation.
But authenticism is playing out within conventional political structures as well. The Tea Party is, among other things, a rhetorical authenticist movement within the Republican Party. And yet it’s hard to have it both ways. In the 2016 presidential race, the two main Tea Party candidates, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, tried to insist that despite the fact they were both Republican senators, they were outside the cozy power structures and dubious rhetorical habits of the Washington elite. But their authenticist rejection of the existing language of politics could never be quite as full-blooded as Donald Trump’s; if victory was always going to go to the candidate who could most clearly distance himself or herself from the whole world of professional politics, the race could only ever end one way.
On the Left, there’s some complexity. Since the days of Marxist-Leninist “scientific socialism,” the rhetoric of the radical Left has aspired to a kind of utopian rationalism: evidence-backed revelation of the “contradictions” within capitalism, dreams of the workers’ paradise to come, a practical program of how to get there. But after two decades of Third Way centrism and the global financial crisis, traditional full-blooded socialism has acquired a novel aura of authenticity. The fact that politicians like Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders, and Alexis Tsipras have stuck to their principles through thick and thin has given them a credibility and iconoclastic power very like the insurgents of the Right. Many people have forgotten, and the young may simply not know, that rhetoric of this kind was itself once considered hollow orthodoxy, or that seventy years ago, far from praising it for its truth telling, George Orwell had singled it out for its intellectual evasiveness and dishonesty.
Rationalists and authenticists find it impossible to understand one another. Those few rationalists who could make any sense of the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party in 2015, or Donald Trump’s campaign to be the Republican presidential candidate a year later, assumed that their appeal must have had something to do with the extremity of their policies. While many of today’s “authentic” politicians do indeed espouse radical policies, this analysis still misses the mark. To an angry public, what was appealing was not necessarily the radicalism of the policies as such, nor even their position on the spectrum of Left and Right, but the way the speaker’s radicalism signaled a complete break with their perception of the status quo.
In Chevy Chase, Maryland, in April 2016, I met an elderly black supporter of Bernie Sanders who was following the presidential race closely. He said he knew it was unlikely that Sanders would get the Democratic nomination, so I asked him whom he would vote for if the choice came down to Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. “Donald Trump may be crazy, and he may even be a racist,” he said, “but I can deal with that. At least Trump speaks his mind. When someone lies all the time, you don’t know where you are.”
Although one shouldn’t exaggerate the phenomenon, all over America reporters have encountered voters with similar instincts. When trust in politicians is low, perceived authenticity can be more important for some citizens than almost anything else—policies, ideological affiliation, even character flaws that in other circumstances would put them off entirely.
* * *
Given that the stated purpose of “Politics and the English Language” is to warn the reader that weaknesses in language may result in a slide into totalitarianism, one might have expected George Orwell to devote some space to a consideration of the language of the totalitarian regimes of his time, namely, the recently deceased Fascist and militarist regimes of Germany, Italy, and Japan, and his own bête noire, the USSR and its satellites. But that’s not quite what we get. Orwell begins with frank speculation: “When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find—this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify—that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.”
Even when he moves to particulars, he avoids the question of Hitler’s oratory altogether and concentrates instead on trying to establish the use of euphemism as a link between the deteriorating language of Britain and that of the Soviet Union. “In our time,” Orwell writes, “political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible,” from the horrors of war to continued British rule in India. Because the truth is too brutal to be shared with the public, politicians in many countries have resorted to euphemism: the bombing of civilians is called pacification; the mass execution and imprisonment of Soviet citizens during the Terror, the elimination of unreliable elements, and so on.
But none of the examples of bad writing that Orwell quotes in his essay are in fact euphemistic. So he provides an imaginary quote (from yet another “professor”) that seeks to redefine—and thus cloak—murder and repression in the Soviet Union as “an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods,” which is “amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.” He then attempts to pull this and the other real quotations together with a bold statement and a bravura metaphor: “The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details.”
The image is arresting. We are in the Soviet Union, perhaps in one of the “Arctic lumber camps” that Orwell mentions. There are a group of corpses on the ground, prisoners who have either died of abuse or been shot in the back of the neck. But snow has been falling and is making the corpses indistinct: the snow is euphemistic language. This is a master class for Professors Laski and others: an original, perfectly controlled, and unforgettable picture that brings the thought to life in one short, simple sentence.
But then we pinch ourselves. Latin words? Are Latin words necessarily euphemistic in ways that words with other etymologies are not? Did they really sit up late into the night in the Kremlin, trying to devise fiendish new ways of infiltrating Latinate constructions into honest English prose? George Orwell clearly preferred words of what he takes to be native origin—presumably those derived from Anglo-Saxon and other early Germanic languages—to those he regarded as later foreign imports. He claims that the imports are less precise than the originals, but is the verb to predict really any less clear than to forecast or to foretell? Nowhere in his essay does he demonstrate the loss of precision that so exercises him.
He further asserts that words of Latin origin are more apt for euphemism. Modern bureaucratic euphemism thrives on abstractions, and English relies heavily on words of Latin origin for abstract nouns and verbs, so this feels like more promising territory for Orwell. But some of the most terrible euphemisms of history were rendered in resolutely native language. Special handling, half Latin and half Saxon, is the English rendering of one of the terms the Nazis used to describe the process by which they murdered the Jews of Europe, but the German word Sonderbehandlung has nothing Latin about it. Nor does the policy objective it served: in English, final solution is Latin, but the German original, Endlösung, is again wholly Germanic. In the real world, the origins of our words are all mixed up. Is climate change a euphemism for global warming because it derives from Greek via Old French and Celtic via Latin and Old French, rather than French and Saxon? Etymology is interesting, but when it comes to politics and language, it is hardly determinative.
The truth is that George Orwell preferred words and customs that, rightly or wrongly, he took to be “English,” for instinctive rather than intellectual reasons: he was a cultural and emotional nativist. Once my people had a pristine language. Then foreign influences began to distort that language. Fancy words and complicated new ways of expressing thoughts entered our language so it became muddy and indistinct and we could no longer distinguish honest speech from lies, or truthful speakers from false ones. Our task now is to purge our language of these impurities so that we can recover the straightforward and trustworthy way we used to talk to one another.
Orwell’s appreciation of the English language was far more sophisticated than that crude program of linguistic and culture purification suggests. Nonetheless, it is what the instincts he expresses about foreign words in the essay would lead to, were they to be taken to their logical conclusion. The instincts themselves are ones that Herder himself would have recognized.
George Orwell is at least as drawn to authenticism as he is to rationalism. But it would be ludicrous to characterize him as a “blood and soil” authenticist. Englishness defines him significantly, but Orwell’s Englishness is itself radically skeptical—almost as skeptical about traditionalism’s claims and the assumptions and institutions that underpin them as he is about Soviet Marxism. Insofar as he has a personal political agenda, it is a measured one: to reform England by stripping the tradition of its social and imperial injustices, but without losing the best of its values and attitudes, and to do this by winning the case within democracy rather than by violently replacing democracy with something else.
Nonetheless, it is hard not to conclude that he associates foreignness of language with a foreign intellectualism and foreign ideas—in particular those associated with Marxism—which he regards as a threat to everything he holds dear. Soviet rhetoric plays the same role for him that papal pronouncements and the language of Catholic theology did for the English Protestant firebrands of the Reformation. He can’t quite rid himself of the fear that the foreigners may be right—a few years earlier he had seemed to accept the dialectical inevitability of revolution, musing that “I dare say the London gutters will have to run with blood”14—but he still wants to fight to prevent it, or to die in the attempt. In “Politics and the English Language,” that means taking on Harold Laski and the others, above all, for their pretentious, overintellectualized inauthenticity. They are fakes, he concludes, who use complicated gibberish to disguise their real purposes. The best way to defeat them is with some plain speaking.
This is unexpectedly close to the authenticist agenda of Donald Trump and the other antipoliticians. Authenticism is nothing like as present in “Politics” as is rationalism, but it’s there. Had George Orwell been able to see the way the story would play out—communism defeated, democracy triumphant, a new sense of hollowness, and then once again the beguiling voices of authenticity—perhaps he would have devoted more space to it.
A Lost Balance
Argument without character is lifeless. The crowd drifts away. Character without argument is dangerous. Who can tell what that spellbinding figure will actually do if those cheers are ever parlayed into real power? Ignore the mood of your audience and it’ll ignore you right back. Make it your lodestone and you risk sailing yourself and them straight onto the rocks.
A well-tempered rhetoric holds the demands of logos, ethos, and pathos in balance to achieve its goal of critical persuasion—critical in that speakers make their cases reasonably, confronting facts and arguments rather than bypassing them, inviting their listeners to reach a judgment using intellectual and emotional faculties. From ancient times to the Renaissance and beyond, people studied rhetoric to learn how to achieve exactly this balance. Like George Orwell, they thought of it as an aesthetic challenge that was also a practical political necessity. But Enlightenment rationalism held that traditional rhetoric was undesirable and unnecessary; the language of pure reason would suffice. Academic and popular interest in rhetoric, especially rhetoric as a useful skill, declined.
Yet the rationalists’ alternative project for public language proved impossible to implement. Over more than two centuries and around the world, only a handful of attempts were made to impose elements of the rationalist agenda on the language of actual human societies. It would have been no surprise to George Orwell that these experiments were all conducted by repressive regimes.
In due course even the political and philosophical underpinnings of rhetorical rationalism would weaken. “Scientific socialism” failed everywhere it was tried. The Enlightenment program to create perfect systems of mathematics and logic was shown to be impossible even in principle. Postmodernism challenged many of the other assumptions on which the Enlightenment deification of Reason rested; indeed, some postmodernist intellectuals began to talk about rationalism as if it was nothing more than another variety of white male European oppression.
Yet prescriptive rationalism still lurks in the background of today’s debate about public language. Rarely offered as a utopian program anymore, it persists in many people’s minds—nowhere more so than among the educated elites who actually make policy and run Western governments and other institutions. Technocracy is itself a product of the rationalist enterprise, so we shouldn’t be surprised that today’s policy experts contrast their world of evidence-based and hyperrational discussion with the irrational language world of retail politics. Atheist public intellectuals discuss the language of religion as if A. J. Ayer still ruled the roost and Ludwig Wittgenstein had never been born. Political correctness is inspired by the rationalist conviction that if you stop people saying prejudiced or hurtful things, over time they will stop thinking and acting prejudicially too—an unproved and psychologically implausible conjecture that the fictional inventors of Newspeak would have heartily endorsed.
In their eagerness to ensure that ethos and pathos were not overlooked in the pursuit of pure argument, the opponents of rhetorical rationalism went the other way. As we have seen, authenticism had its own philosophical underpinnings, but by the mid-twentieth century, these too had been compromised and were seen by many as an indefensible intellectual justification for demagoguery, bigotry and, in the case of Hitler and the other European dictators, the politics of murder.
Today authenticism is riding high again, but some of those old temptations—rabble-rousing, flagrant disregard for the truth, flirtation with out-and-out extremism—are back in earnest too. Its champions are as hostile to systematic, evidence-based argument as any of their forebears. They talk ceaselessly about the broken rhetoric of mainstream politicians, but their own remedy for the ills of our public language seems to consist of only anger and vituperation. They are at least as far as today’s rationalists from seeing that an equilibrium has been lost and that the only possible way of restoring our public discourse to health would be to begin to reintegrate argument, authenticity, and empathy into a reasonable whole.
Seven decades after “Politics and the English Language,” the gulf of understanding between rationalists and authenticists is wider than ever, and while we may admire Orwell’s determination to start “at the verbal end” with practical advice, it seems unlikely that we can turn things around just by selecting short words rather than long ones. Populists like Sarah Palin and Donald Trump do indeed stick to short words, and they obey some of Orwell’s other rules as well—active voice, lack of jargon, avoidance of words derived from Latin or Greek—but that hardly makes them part of the solution. The problems, and any possible remedies, lie deeper.
In later chapters, we’ll explore how those problems play out in the discussion of science, war, and the values and beliefs that divide us. But before that, I want to turn to a branch of rhetoric that George Orwell doesn’t mention once in “Politics and the English Language” but that may have been the most influential of all in shaping the way we talk to each other publicly today.