Facing Unpleasant Facts

I mentioned Orwell the other day, and Ducky cautioned me, “Have to watch it with Orwell. He doesn't go for the simple answer. He was no Libertarian.”

This is what’s wrong with America. Everybody is supposed to stay in their own camp and only listen to their own orthodoxy. A libertarian reading a socialist? Careful! It’s also telling. The shabby arguments of the left reveal that they rarely crawl out of their dark, cramped ideological box.

I am an Orwell fan, having read many of his essays and a few of his lesser-known works.  Of course I know he cannot be properly categorized as a libertarian.  He was a man of the left who believed in using the power of the state for the good of humankind, but being a lover of liberty, he also looked upon government with a jaundiced eye.

Facing it, always facing it!

Orwell's greatest gift, perhaps even greater than his pen, was his power of observation and clear-eyed analysis.  Christopher Hitchens writes...

‘Facing it — ’ as Captain MacWhirr says so memorably in Joseph Conrad’s ‘Typhoon’,‘always facing it — that’s the way to get through.’

‘I knew,’ said Orwell in 1946 about his early youth, ‘that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts.’ Not the ability to face them, you notice, but ‘a power of facing’. It’s oddly well put.

A commissar who realizes that his five-year plan is off-target and that the people detest him or laugh at him may be said, in a base manner, to be confronting an unpleasant fact. So, for that matter, may a priest with ‘doubts’. The reaction of such people to unpleasant facts is rarely self-critical; they do not have the ‘power of facing’. Their confrontation with the fact takes the form of an evasion; the re-action to the unpleasant discovery is a re-doubling of efforts to overcome the obvious.

The ‘unpleasant facts’ that Orwell faced were usually the ones that put his own position or preference to the test.  (Christopher Hitchens - Why Orwell Matters)

George Orwell did not write from an ideological position and he was blessedly free of dogma. If anything, he could be called a humanist.  A man of the left, he went to Spain to fight the fascists and came away disgusted with communists.

The whole barracks was in the state of filth and chaos to which the militia reduced every building they occupied and which seems to be one of the by-products of revolution. In every corner you came upon piles of smashed furniture, broken saddles, brass cavalry-helmets, empty sabre-scabbards, and decaying food. There was frightful wastage of food, especially bread. (Homage to Catalonia)

Being caught in a communist purge of the organization he belonged to sealed the deal for him. He went from being a fascist-fighting combat veteran to a hunted criminal, in danger of being jailed and shot by the people he thought he had been fighting for. Despite this, he stated that he held no animus towards Spain or Spaniards.  Indeed, what has struck so many upon reading Homage to Catalonia is his emotional detachment from it all.

For an even greater example of writing with emotional detachment, to the point of displaying sympathy for your tormentors, see his memoir of boarding school life, Such, Such Were The Joys.

He forever remained a socialist, but spent much time examining and plucking the motes from his own eyes. Although perhaps not consciously so, he also helped his larger society do the same. He could write painful observations about the poor and the downtrodden, but he did it without the sentimentality of a Steinbeck, and he did not fetishize and coddle them as nanny-state progressives do today.

He faced unpleasant facts and adjusted his views accordingly. Have you ever changed your mind or abandoned a cherished view after facing unpleasant facts?  

Why Orwell Matters

"Thus he faced the competing orthodoxies and despotisms of his day with little more than a battered typewriter and a stubborn personality."    -- Christopher Hitchens, Why Orwell Matters

Christopher Hitchens is very much an Orwell for our times, only more caustic and with sharp edges. He wrote a book back in 2002 entitled, Why Orwell Matters. It's a great introduction to Orwell for those who may only be familiar with his two greatest works, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four.

George Orwell was many things: A brilliant essayist who was considered a mediocre novelist who ended up writing two of the 20th century's most gripping novels; a socialist who was an anti-communist; a hater of war who warned his fellows about the dangers of pacifism; a champion of the poor and benighted who could suddenly provide uncanny insight into the mind of the overlord.

George Orwell was completely unencumbered by received ideology and orthodoxy, a rare genuine freethinker. He faced life as it presented itself to him, and that's what makes him such a compelling and authentic figure even today.

He was a truly independent man, holding views anathema to both left and right. Disdained by both, until the other side deploys one of his arguments, then they fight over who the true Orwellites are. Truth is, nobody owns him. Like God, he is not on anyone's side; we can only hope to be on his side, because he was unwaveringly on the side of liberty over tyranny, humanity over bureaucratic mechanization, natural beauty with warts and all over ginned up fripperies packaged by elites and sold to the rubes.

Best of all, he was a keen analyst of life, using his experience and the light of reason to draw logical inferences that bore themselves out with frightening accuracy.  Yes, communism really was slaughtering millions.  Orwell knew it, years before the truth slipped out, even as useful idiots on both sides of the Atlantic sung the praises of Uncle Joe Stalin and wrote glowingly of strong men making the trains run on time.

If you're looking for a short and well-written introduction to George Orwell, Hitchens' book is just the thing.

Cheap Orwellian Tricks

My last post on Orwell and speech codes really struck a nerve with our leftist friend Ducky. Here’s my favorite comment from him, a piece of rhetoric I call an unsolicited Tu Quoque:

Let's see, we could spends days discussing phrases the right has deployed such as "weapons of mass destruction" or "the liberal media".
The right in general isn't interested in any precise use of language.
Merely say "sharia" and you bark like freaking trained seals.

Sorry, Silverfiddle, but you don't often find the real hard core right capable of moving past a few canned memes.

How about the left’s use of “assault weapon,” “Rabies Radio,” “Faux News," “blood for oil” (only when a Republican is in the White House)…  But I digress. Ducky is engaging in a misdirect Tu Quoque, avoiding the main point and shouting “Waaaah! Conservatives do it too!”  Which responds to nothing, because I never claimed otherwise, but I’m sure Orwell would be impressed with the intellectual depth of Ducky’s rebuttal.

I grant him that many Americans do get into a lather at the mention of Sharia, but it’s warranted.

We have nice looking westernized Imams assuring us that Islam is a religion of peace and Sharia is as innocuous and fluffy as a basket of kittens. Meanwhile, foaming-at-the-mouth Islamists kill infidels on the streets, burn down embassies and behead Jewish reporters, all in the name of Islam.  We've even had a few "honor" killing here in the good ol' US of A.

Perhaps they are abusing the religion and abusing the terms Jihad and Sharia, but actions speak louder than words. I think a reasonable person could excuse other reasonable people the natural tendency to give more weight to loud and violent acts than they do to calmly spoken rhetoric. Actions speak for themselves, words are just easy inventions.

Language (and Image) Abuse:  All sides do it

Ducky complains of the use of certain words as code-speech or quick labels to manipulate the masses or cast shorthand opprobrium on a person or group, and I agree with him. Shorthand is convenient. Imagine having to give a citation-laden dissertation every time you spoke. But it also allows speakers and listeners to lapse into lazy, well-grooved modes of thought, so yes, critical thinking is a must.

And then, as if on cue, Jersey stepped in with this banal piece of propaganda...

When you look at the voter and immigration laws being passed in the South, and the impetus from the Tea Party to make those laws, that if proof of the culture of racism in the Tea Party. When you look at their insanely hyperbolic caricatures of Obama, from the very beginning, that is proof of racism in the Tea Party.

[…] bla bla bla […]

… the drug war is racist, our immigration policies are racist, our foreign policies are racist.

Racism remains a very serious problem in America, and most of it comes from the Right.

That statement took zero thought. Grab the words from the propaganda library and go.  You could build a 99 cent lib-speak iPhone app to come up with that!

"A wathscally wightwing wathist behind evwy twee! And behind evwy government powicy!"

Note the imperious tone and the declaration of finality Jersey uses. A big, wet clot of unsubstantiated twaddle and logical fallacies, wadded up and thrown in our faces as he admonishes us to shut our gobs!

There's no arguing that. That's not "newsspeak" or "codespeak" or a "dog whistle." It is reality.  Anyone who says otherwise deluded, ignorant, or a liar. Period.

“There’s no arguing that!” Got it? Jersey’s style conjures visions of a fat, balding liberal Archie Bunker, pontificating from his ratty recliner wearing a spaghetti-stained wife beater and jabbing his lit cigar at you for emphasis. “There’s no arguing!” “Got that?” “Period!”

Orwell explains this in more detail in his essay Politics and the English Language. I recommend you take a few minutes and read it.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.

In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia.

I think left, right and middle can all agree on that.

Speech Codes are Thought Codes

I caught a bit of Rush's Weekend in Review, and he was playing excerpts of some guy on msnbc, can't remember his name, who was breaking down the conservative counterattacks responding to the left's assaults on Herman Cain.

In a picture-perfect example of psychological projection, this young man with one name succinctly and brilliantly accused the right of employing the politically-correct left's favorite tactic:  Marginalize your ideological opponents, putting them beyond the societal pale, so you do not have to engage them in debate.

That's what a charge of racism is all about.  Rightwing tea partiers are all racists, so their ideas can all be ignored.  They're not worthy of a response.  It's a convenient dodge employed by the ideologically indoctrinated and the intellectually bereft.

"Those who control the language control the debate."

Imposing speech codes, placing certain words off-limits, and declaring as "hate speech" the legitimate criticism of certain protected groups and programs are common contemporary versions of the age-old tactics Orwell warned us of so many years ago. 

He expounded upon Oceania's peculiar language, Newspeak, in a short essay, The Principles of Newspeak:

The purpose of Newspeak was [...] to make all other modes of thought impossible.

This involved "stripping" words of "unorthodox meanings," "eliminating undesirable words" and reducing the vocabulary.

Newspeak, indeed, differed from most all other languages in that its vocabulary grew smaller instead of larger every year. Each reduction was a gain, since the smaller the area of choice, the smaller the temptation to take thought.

In our own day, "racist" is a lazy epithet to be flung only at white conservatives.  Employ it in any other fashion not authorized by the cognoscenti, and the author will be met with either puzzlement or scorn.  You may as well call a cockroach a house slipper.  People of color (and the guilty white liberals who encourage such dangerous linguistic abuse) cannot.  Be.  Racist.  Period.

In the same vein, the word fascism cannot be used without causing an indignant uproar, even if the one using it can provide ten reasons and examples showing why the word is apt.  And God forbid you should criticize the collapsing panoply of federally-funded social services that have ushered us to the brink of bankruptcy.  That would make you a hater of minorities, the poor, and old people.

Thought corrupts language, language corrupts thought

In his essay, Politics and the English Language, Orwell observes...

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

[...]  But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely.

Successful speech codes create a self-censoring feedback loop.  Taking away words is the removal of the building blocks of thought, impoverishing it, which in turn further impoverishes our speech, which further impoverishes our thoughts...

We can break this cycle of language abuse by refusing to obey speech codes and fighting their implementation at every level.  Laughing in the faces of hollow ideologues spouting the latest liberal meme won't stop it, but it will break the spell and attract critical attention that is the antidote to pseudo-intellectual claptrap designed to quash critical thought and free speech.

* - I found the "control the debate" quote in Google Books - Disciplining Dissent - Bruneau & Turk