Politics and the English Language: 1946

More than 60 years ago George Orwell wrote an insightful Phillipic rightfully pointing out the sad state of the English language. The complete text of his brilliant essay can be found here: http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm

The opening sentence puts forth the proposition, setting forth Orwell's "agenda" from the beginning.

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.

Orwell takes this premise, and examines one of its underlying, mythic assumptions

Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

Orwell challenges this underlying assumption, and then makes some rather bold statements:

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. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible.

Orwell continues logically, and tells us (a) the situation is NOT hopeless, (b) offers a curative perscription, and (c) why this matters

Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.

Orwell gives us an example of the kind of writing he is criticizing, translating a passage of good English into "modern" English (of the worst sort). I'll present the translation into modern English first:

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.

None of us who've ever been involved with tech writing, or the production of corporate swill are unfamiliar with such bubble-headed babble. Truthfully, I think I used to succumb to the temptation and compose comparable pablum. One hates look into THAT mirror. The original, which Orwell translated, comes from the Book of 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.

Quell difference!! This example gives one pause. It gave me a headache. And it infects the political in a hurry. Just read the "great" metropolitcan daily op-ed pages. Or Victor Davis Hanson, or some letter-to-the editor writers for examples. Better yet, read blogs, and get examples of much better writing.

Orwell makes a sweeping statement that cuts to the jugular of the problem

The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness.

In the departure from concreteness that destroy the bulwarks protecting us from jackal-purveoyrs of propaganda. Our defenses must be refortified.

One of my favorite, and most influential books of my life, is Stuart Chase's The Tyranny of Words. Chase's excursions into semantic blockages illustrates how Hitler, by using vague but emotive words, could appeal to the reptillian parts of the brain, and rouse the German peoples up to hatred, genocide, and ultimately, suicide.

WORDS ARE VERY POWERFUL. The pen is mightier than the sword, this we know, but, "the pen's" effects can be seriously blunted, made impotent, when rendered carelessly, frivolously, thoughtlessly. Or, perhaps even intentionally. When the owners / publishers of the "great" daily metropolitcan newspapers have a mandate to maximize profits rather than to inform the public, incentives exist to desensitize the readers. Thus, rather than getting relevant facts, the readers get story lines, familiar story lines, with which they become comfortable, but, it's an numbing kind of comfort. And corporate advertisers won't be offended by those pesky facts, which, so often have a liberal bias.

Obviously, the U.S. has a two-party system for splitting up the boodle, the spoils of war. Just as obviously, one party is "liberal" and the other is "conservative." There are differences, fundamental earth-shattering differences in what the parties do when holding a majority in office.

The liberals try to help the less fortunate, perhaps not as much as some of us would like, but, nonetheless. Liberals believe that chance, the random mating of sperm and egg plays the primary role in determining who gets the good life, and who gets battered by life.

The conservatives try to help the most fortunate. They believe that because they are the most fortunate, they have earned thier good fortune, by being righteous. And that the poor are poor because they are lazy; that the poor are poor owing to the moral agency (or lack thereof) of the poor.

And these two polar opposite world views have profound consequences for all our nations citizens.

If you've ever been poor, hard working but unemployed, hard working but only marginally employed, you know on which side of the political spectrum you'll align.

But, I digress. Back to Orwell. As I read the following stunning words, the image of one prominent politician in particular, who shall remain namelss, invaded my mind, and I reeled:

The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestoes, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases -- bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder -- one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.

Later today, I'll cover Orwell's recommended antidotes.