Why Orwell Matters

by Christopher Hitchens

He would appear never to have diluted his opinions in the hope of seeing his byline disseminated to the paying customers; this alone is a clue to why he still matters.

The three great subjects of the twentieth century were imperialism, fascism and Stalinism.

An old radical adage states that the will to command is not as corrupting as the will to obey.

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Jean-Paul Sartre — who was regarded with great suspicion by Orwell — once made a telling point about fictional and science-fictional monsters. What we fear, he said, is a creature of great cunning and energy, quite devoid of any moral or mammalian scruple. This, as he went on to say, is an exact description of our very own species in time of war or scarcity.

Given the title Coming Up for Air, it is touching also to reflect that Orwell voyaged to North Africa in a vain attempt to heal his lungs.)

Coming Up for Air is still read as a masterly evocation of an English Edwardian rural childhood, with its yearning for a time of peace and, perhaps more important, a time of security. It may also be the origin of a well-known saying: ‘Has it ever struck you that there’s a thin man inside every fat man, just as they say there’s a statue inside every block of stone?’

The will to command and to dominate is one thing, but the will to obey and be prostrate is a deadly foe as well. At one point in a short earlier article, Orwell asked himself if decency and powerlessness were inversely related. Nobody has ever made this point more forcibly than he does in Nineteen Eighty-Four, just as nobody since Dostoyevsky has come so close to reading the mind of the Grand Inquisitor. With a part of themselves, humans relish cruelty and war and absolute capricious authority, are bored by civilized and humane pursuits and understand only too well the latent connection between sexual repression and orgiastic vicarious collectivized release. Some regimes have been popular not in spite of their irrationality and cruelty, but because of it. There will always be Trotskys and Goldsteins and even Winston Smiths, but it must be clearly understood that the odds are overwhelmingly against them, and that as with Camus’s rebel, the crowd will yell with joy to see them dragged to the scaffold. This long and steady look into the void was Orwell’s apotheosis of ‘the power of facing’.

Orwell’s wager, in spite of some lapses into pessimism, was that the profane were well able to understand the language of the temple, and thus to penetrate the supposed secrets of authority. He did of course deploy a ‘subjective’ and unquantifiable tool, something that cannot be taught or inherited, but the old name for this X-factor is intellectual honesty.

‘Objectivity’ though in practice as unattainable as infinity, is useful in the same way, at least as a fixed point of theoretical reference. A knowledge of one’s own subjectivity is necessary in order even to contemplate the ‘objective’; our modern idiom slightly mangles the work of Heisenberg and Godel in order to convey this awareness. Terms such as ‘neutral’, ‘detached’, let alone ‘fair-minded’, ‘disinterested’ or ‘evenhanded’ do not all convey the same meaning; they are merely aestheticized forms of the same subjective aspiration.

But what he illustrates, by his commitment to language as the partner of truth, is that ‘views’ do not really count; that it matters not what you think, but how you think; and that politics are relatively unimportant, while principles have a way of enduring, as do the few irreducible individuals who maintain allegiance to them.