continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.”
Like many educated in the British system in the second half of the 20th century, the world-view one had acquired in childhood owed a great deal to George Orwell. Shaped by the optimism of the postwar democratic welfare state and, more fretfully, by the Cold War, that world-view was intolerant of cruelty and injustice and committed to the freedom of the intellect, yet moderately tempered about the prospects for large-scale political change.
It was, in large part, a mythological world-view. But since acquiring it meant reading quite a bit of Orwell in our English classes, we were also given the tools to take apart myths, spot political cant, identify wilful obscurantism, and to believe that words could and should find ways of getting us to attend to the world that were not dishonest.
It’s fair to say that for many it feels as if the broadly left, tolerant humanism that Orwell once represented has been abandoned. Or perhaps it has abandoned us. In any case, its absence is conspicuous. Since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a politics of lying, denial and fear has crept back into daily life. Big organisations are once more messing with our minds. Self-censorship has again become routine in some quarters, as has violent disinhibition in others. Yet the sense of a common culture in which dissent and diversity could be nurtured is missing.
The question now cannot be whether we should abandon Orwell – various high-minded attempts have been made to do this over the years, but he remains present – but which Orwell we should be cultivating for our own “over-the-top-Orwellian” times.
