Bruce Charlton discusses the greatness of George Orwell — and his fatal flaw:
My generation was fed Orwell at school from our mid teens — some of the essays such as Shooting an Elephant and Boys’ Weeklies; excerpts from the documentary books such as Down and Out.. and …Wigan Pier; and the two late political novels Animal Farm and 1984.
That Orwell was mostly correct about things was not really argued, but assumed; on the basis that he seemed obviously correct to almost everybody; so far as the English were concerned, Orwell was simply expressing the national character better than we ourselves could have done.
Orwell was claimed both by the Left — on the basis that he was explicitly a socialist through most of his life; and he was claimed by the Right — on the basis that his two best known novels are anti-communist warnings against totalitarianism.
In sum: Orwell’s influence was much as any writer reasonably could have hoped for. And his warnings about the dangers of Leftism and the operations of totalitarianism were as lucid, as explicit, and as forceful as any writer could have made them.
And yet Britain today is an ‘Orwellian’ society to a degree which would have seemed incredible even 25 years ago. The same applies to the USA, where Orwell was also revered.
In particular, the exact types of abuses, manipulations and distortions of language which Orwell spelled-out in fiery capital letters 100 feet high have come to pass; have become routine and unremarked — and they are wholly-successful, barely-noticed, stoutly-defended — and to point them out is regarded either as trivial nitpicking or evasive rhetoric.
The current manifestations of the sexual revolution, deploying the most crudely Orwellian appropriations and taboos of terminology, go further than even Orwell envisaged. The notion that sexual differences could so easily be subverted, and their evaluations so swiftly reversed; apparently at will and without any apparent limit would — I think — have gone beyond the possibilities Orwell could have realistically imagined.
(Indeed, it is characteristic of the Kafka-esque absurdity of modern Western life that a plain description of everyday reality — say in a state bureaucracy, the mass media or university — is simply disbelieved, it ‘does not compute’ and is rejected by the mind. And by this, nihilistic absurdity is safeguarded.)
I think Orwell would never have believed that people would accept, en masse, and so readily go along with (willingly embrace and enforce, indeed), the negative relabelling of normal biological reality, and he substitution of arbitrary and rapidly changing inverted norms: for Orwell, The Proles were sexually normal, like animals, and would continue so. The elites, whatever their personal preferences and practices, left them alone in this — presumably because sexuality was seen as a kind of bedrock.
And this leads to Orwell’s fatal flaw — which was exactly sexuality.
“Orwell was simply expressing the national character better than we ourselves could have done.”
Including elite character, who were all like, “Oh yeah, that’s exactly where we’re going with this.”
Orwell was not an advocate of free love — quite the contrary, in fact. And if his personal life didn’t live up to his own standards, well, who does? Orwell had high standards, and tried to live up to them, and failed, but didn’t drop his standards. Where I come from, that’s called “Christianity”