Orwell’s Ghost-- Wisdom and Warnings for the 21st Century by Laura Beers--
I happened upon this title in the Marion Library and it
reminded me that I had not read 1984 in some fifty years. I also had
been seeing his name and books bandied. All sorts of talking heads and
essayists seemed to be shouting that this or that is “ Orwellian”. I wondered what that label meant to modern
readers.
First, it does carry enough meaning to still place 1984
on best-seller lists in multiple languages some seventy years after its
publication.
Second, I re-learned that George Orwell was a pen name and
not his real name. That was Arthur Blair. His father was an imperial
administrator in India and Arthur had a pretty typical upper-middle-class
childhood, which included pricy prep
schools and the very upper crust Eton. Critical to his later development, he
did decide to eschew Oxford or Cambridge and went instead off to fight in the
Spanish Civil War in the 1930’s.
Third I learned that Orwell was a major-league misogynist.
He had little use for women even though he married two of them. He expected
them for the most part to stay home, do housework, and take care of any
children. He wrote reams about the plight of the working man, but had little to
say about the working woman. In the same vein he was also adamantly against any
and all forms of abortion.
Even though he was not a very pleasant human being, his
philosophy on government holds up well. He considered the “will to power” universal
and believed it could exist on the left or the the right political spectrum.
His indictment of totalitarianism in 1984 is alive and well in 2024 and
the work remains readable today even though in his time his main attacks were
aimed at colonial empires and Communism. Today we can easily see that cancel
culture, disinformation, and fake news are just new names for Orwell’s Ministry
of Truth?
Our present access to the internet may have increased our individual
powers, but along with that has come increased surveillance capacity on us by the
state and multinational corporations. In his day Orwell never reached the point
where he claimed freedom could exist without some form of restraint. There must
be some social responsibility to speak the truth. As Ms. Beers said, “Freedom is the right to
say 2+2=4, but not to claim that 2+2=5.”
A life can be censored and someone who continues to insist that 2+2=5 cannot
be tolerated. “Double think,” Russia calling its invasion of Ukraine “a special
operation” for instance must be corrected.
The scary thing about information today is that an idea deplatformed in
one space can find plenty of alternative spaces on which to continue. .
Give it a 3 of 5 Not
for all souls.
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