George Orwell

For a man who breathed his last at the young age of 46, Eric Arthur Blair—better known as George Orwell—had an almost unparalleled impact on the Anglosphere he left behind. A journalist, novelist, and diarist, his works have been read by generations of schoolchildren and his name is invoked by politicians of both the Left and the Right to accuse their opponents of the Orwellian practices of state surveillance, gaslighting, brazen lies, mob trial, and more. He likely would have despised them all.

He slammed the bourgeois intellectuals of his day for their intolerance and insularity. Sound familiar?

I recently re-read George Orwell’s 1941 essay, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, and I was taken by his description of the bourgeois, left-leaning intelligentsia of his time. They live in the shallowness of ideas, he writes, severed from the common culture and life experiences of the working class. They spend most of their time bickering with their chief enemy, the equally bourgeois ‘Blimps’ – archetypal red-faced imperialists. Though they despise each other, both the bourgeois intelligentsia and the Blimps are united in their mutual disdain for the working class.

His defence of freedom flies in the face of all that is woke and regressive today.

Most people think that George Orwell was writing about, and against, totalitarianism – especially when they encounter him through the prism of his great dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

This view of Orwell is not wrong, but it can miss something. For Orwell was concerned above all about the particular threat posed by totalitarianism to words and language. He was concerned about the threat it posed to our ability to think and speak freely and truthfully. About the threat it posed to our freedom.

The British writer confronted totalitarianism with determination but also with wit and irony

We don’t easily think of George Orwell as a comic writer. We also don’t think of him principally as a writer of novels, though he wrote six, including Animal Farm and 1984, the books that earned him enduring fame. The novel as a form claims a degree of irresponsibility or disinterestedness inconsistent with our idea of the man who created Room 101.

Orwell’s two comic novels of the 1930s, Keep The Aspidistra Flying (1936) and Coming Up For Air (1939), remind us of how essential the satiric impulse was to his anti-totalitarianism. And though they were published only three years apart, they show his progression, as England prepared for war with Germany, toward the dire seer of 1984.