Fifty Orwell Essays

by George Orwell

irrelevancies in which this controversy is usually wrapped up.

  The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a

  plea for discipline versus individualism. The issue truth-versus-untruth

  is as far as possible kept in the background. Although the point of

  emphasis may vary, the writer who refuses to sell his opinions is always

  branded as a mere egoist. He is accused, that is, of either wanting to

  shut himself up in an ivory tower, or of making an exhibitionist display

  of his own personality, or of resisting the inevitable current of history

  in an attempt to cling to unjustified privilege. The Catholic and the

  Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest

  and intelligent. Each of them tacitly claims that "the truth" has already

  been revealed, and that the heretic, if he is not simply a fool, is

  secretly aware of "the truth" and merely resists it out of selfish

  motives. In Communist literature the attack on intellectual liberty is

  usually masked by oratory about "petty-bourgeois individualism", "the

  illusions of nineteenth-century liberalism", etc., and backed up by words

  of abuse such as "romantic" and "sentimental", which, since they do not

  have any agreed meaning, are difficult to answer. In this way the

  controversy is maneuvered away from its real issue. One can accept, and

  most enlightened people would accept, the Communist thesis that pure

  freedom will only exist in a classless society, and that one is most

  nearly free when one is working to bring such a society about. But

  slipped in with this is the quite unfounded claim that the Communist

  Party is itself aiming at the establishment of the classless society, and

  that in the U.S.S.R. this aim is actually on the way to being realized.

  If the first claim is allowed to entail the second, there is almost no

  assault on common sense and common decency that cannot be justified. But

  meanwhile, the real point has been dodged. Freedom of the intellect means

  the freedom to report what one has seen, heard, and felt, and not to be

  obliged to fabricate imaginary facts and feelings. The familiar tirades

  against "escapism" and "individualism", "romanticism", and so forth, are

  merely a forensic device, the aim of which is to make the perversion of

  history seem respectable.

  Fifteen years ago, when one defended the freedom of the intellect, one

  had to defend it against Conservatives, against Catholics, and to some

  extent--for they were not of great importance in England--against

  Fascists. Today one has to defend it against Communists and

  "fellow-travelers". One ought not to exaggerate the direct influence of

  the small English Communist Party, but there can be no question about the

  poisonous effect of the Russian MYTHOS on English intellectual life.

  Because of it known facts are suppressed and distorted to such an extent

  as to make it doubtful whether a true history of our times can ever be

  written. Let me give just one instance out of the hundreds that could be

  cited. When Germany collapsed, it was found that very large numbers of

  Soviet Russians--mostly, no doubt, from non-political motives--had

  changed sides and were fighting for the Germans. Also, a small but not

  negligible portion of the Russian prisoners and displaced persons refused

  to go back to the U.S.S.R., and some of them, at least, were repatriated

  against their will. These facts, known to many journalists on the spot,

  went almost unmentioned in the British press, while at the same time

  Russophile publicists in England continued to justify the purges and

  deportations of 1936-38 by claiming that the U.S.S.R. "had no quislings".

  The fog of lies and misinformation that surrounds such subjects as the

  Ukraine famine, the Spanish civil war, Russian policy in Poland, and so

  forth, is not due entirely to conscious dishonesty, but any writer or

  journalist who is fully sympathetic for the U.S.S.R.--sympathetic, that

  is, in the way the Russians themselves would want him to be--does have

  to acquiesce in deliberate falsification on important issues. I have

  before me what must be a very rare pamphlet, written by Maxim Litvinoff

  in 1918 and outlining the recent events in the Russian Revolution. It

  makes no mention of Stalin, but gives high praise to Trotsky, and also to

  Zinoviev, Kamenev, and others. What could be the attitude of even the

  most intellectually scrupulous Communist towards such a pamphlet? At

  best, the obscurantist attitude of saying that it is an undesirable

  document and better suppressed. And if for some reason it were decided to

  issue a garbled version of the pamphlet, denigrating Trotsky and

  inserting references to Stalin, no Communist who remained faithful to his

  party could protest. Forgeries almost as gross as this have been

  committed in recent years. But the significant thing is not that they

  happen, but that, even when they are known about, they provoke no

  reaction from the left-wing intelligentsia as a whole. The argument that

  to tell the truth would be "inopportune" or would "play into the hands

  of" somebody or other is felt to be unanswerable, and few people are

  bothered by the prospect of the lies which they condone getting out of

  the newspapers and into the history books.

  The organized lying practiced by totalitarian states is not, as is

  sometimes claimed, a temporary expedient of the same nature as military

  deception. It is something integral to totalitarianism, something that

  would still continue even if concentration camps and secret police forces

  had ceased to be necessary. Among intelligent Communists there is an

  underground legend to the effect that although the Russian government is

  obliged now to deal in lying propaganda, frame-up trials, and so forth,

  it is secretly recording the true facts and will publish them at some

  future time. We can, I believe, be quite certain that this is not the

  case, because the mentality implied by such an action is that of a

  liberal historian who believes that the past cannot be altered and that a

  correct knowledge of history is valuable as a matter of course. From the

  totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than

  learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling

  caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible.

  But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary

  to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was

  not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened. Then

  again, every major change in policy demands a corresponding change of

  doctrine and a revelation of prominent historical figures. This kind of

  thing happens everywhere, but is clearly likelier to lead to outright

  falsification in societies where only one opinion is permissible at any

  given moment. Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration

  of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very

  existence of objective truth. The friends of totalitarianism in this

  country usually tend to argue that since absolute truth is not

  at
tainable, a big lie is no worse than a little lie. It is pointed out

  that all historical records are biased and inaccurate, or on the other

  hand, that modern physics has proven that what seems to us the real world

  is an illusion, so that to believe in the evidence of one's senses is

  simply vulgar philistinism. A totalitarian society which succeeded in

  perpetuating itself would probably set up a schizophrenic system of

  thought, in which the laws of common sense held good in everyday life and

  in certain exact sciences, but could be disregarded by the politician,

  the historian, and the sociologist. Already there are countless people

  who would think it scandalous to falsify a scientific textbook, but would

  see nothing wrong in falsifying an historical fact. It is at the point

  where literature and politics cross that totalitarianism exerts its

  greatest pressure on the intellectual. The exact sciences are not, at

  this date, menaced to anything like the same extent. This partly accounts

  for the fact that in all countries it is easier for the scientists than

  for the writers to line up behind their respective governments.

  To keep the matter in perspective, let me repeat what I said at the

  beginning of this essay: that in England the immediate enemies of

  truthfulness, and hence of freedom of thought, are the press lords, the

  film magnates, and the bureaucrats, but that on a long view the weakening

  of the desire for liberty among the intellectuals themselves is the most

  serious symptom of all. It may seem that all this time I have been

  talking about the effects of censorship, not on literature as a whole,

  but merely on one department of political journalism. Granted that Soviet

  Russia constitutes a sort of forbidden area in the British press, granted

  that issues like Poland, the Spanish civil war, the Russo-German pact,

  and so forth, are debarred from serious discussion, and that if you

  possess information that conflicts with the prevailing orthodoxy you are

  expected to either distort it or keep quiet about it--granted all this,

  why should literature in the wider sense be affected? Is every writer a

  politician, and is every book necessarily a work of straightforward

  "reportage"? Even under the tightest dictatorship, cannot the individual

  writer remain free inside his own mind and distill or disguise his

  unorthodox ideas in such a way that the authorities will be too stupid to

  recognize them? And in any case, if the writer himself is in agreement

  with the prevailing orthodoxy, why should it have a cramping effect on

  him? Is not literature, or any of the arts, likeliest to flourish in

  societies in which there are no major conflicts of opinion and no sharp

  distinction between the artist and his audience? Does one have to assume

  that every writer is a rebel, or even that a writer as such is an

  exceptional person?

  Whenever one attempts to defend intellectual liberty against the claims

  of totalitarianism, one meets with these arguments in one form or

  another. They are based on a complete misunderstanding of what literature

  is, and how--one should perhaps say why--it comes into being. They

  assume that a writer is either a mere entertainer or else a venal hack

  who can switch from one line of propaganda to another as easily as an

  organ grinder changing tunes. But after all, how is it that books ever

  come to be written? Above a quite low level, literature is an attempt to

  influence the viewpoint of one's contemporaries by recording experience.

  And so far as freedom of expression is concerned, there is not much

  difference between a mere journalist and the most "unpolitical"

  imaginative writer. The journalist is unfree, and is conscious of

  unfreedom, when he is forced to write lies or suppress what seems to him

  important news; the imaginative writer is unfree when he has to falsify

  his subjective feelings, which from his point of view are facts. He may

  distort and caricature reality in order to make his meaning clearer, but

  he cannot misrepresent the scenery of his own mind; he cannot say with

  any conviction that he likes what he dislikes, or believes what he

  disbelieves. If he is forced to do so, the only result is that his

  creative faculties will dry up. Nor can he solve the problem by keeping

  away from controversial topics. There is no such thing as a genuinely

  non-political literature, and least of all in an age like our own, when

  fears, hatreds, and loyalties of a directly political kind are near to

  the surface of everyone's consciousness. Even a single taboo can have an

  all-round crippling effect upon the mind, because there is always the

  danger that any thought which is freely followed up may lead to the

  forbidden thought. It follows that the atmosphere of totalitarianism is

  deadly to any kind of prose writer, though a poet, at any rate a lyric

  poet, might possibly find it breathable. And in any totalitarian society

  that survives for more than a couple of generations, it is probable that

  prose literature, of the kind that has existed during the past four

  hundred years, must actually come to an end.

  Literature has sometimes flourished under despotic regimes, but, as has

  often been pointed out, the despotisms of the past were not totalitarian.

  Their repressive apparatus was always inefficient, their ruling classes

  were usually either corrupt or apathetic or half-liberal in outlook, and

  the prevailing religious doctrines usually worked against perfectionism

  and the notion of human infallibility. Even so it is broadly true that

  prose literature has reached its highest levels in periods of democracy

  and free speculation. What is new in totalitarianism is that its

  doctrines are not only unchallengeable but also unstable. They have to be

  accepted on pain of damnation, but on the other hand, they are always

  liable to be altered on a moment's notice. Consider, for example, the

  various attitudes, completely incompatible with one another, which an

  English Communist or "fellow-traveler" has had to adopt toward the war

  between Britain and Germany. For years before September, 1939, he was

  expected to be in a continuous stew about "the horrors of Nazism" and to

  twist everything he wrote into a denunciation of Hitler: after September,

  1939, for twenty months, he had to believe that Germany was more sinned

  against than sinning, and the word "Nazi", at least as far as print went,

  had to drop right out of his vocabulary. Immediately after hearing the 8

  o'clock news bulletin on the morning of June 22, 1941, he had to start

  believing once again that Nazism was the most hideous evil the world had

  ever seen. Now, it is easy for the politician to make such changes: for a

  writer the case is somewhat different. If he is to switch his allegiance

  at exactly the right moment, he must either tell lies about his

  subjective feelings, or else suppress them altogether. In either case he

  has destroyed his dynamo. Not only will ideas refuse to come to him, but

  the very words he uses will seem to stiffen under his touch. Political

  writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases

 
bolted together like the pieces of a child's Meccano set. It is the

  unavoidable result of self-censorship. To write in plain, vigorous

  language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one

  cannot be politically orthodox. It might be otherwise in an "age of

  faith", when the prevailing orthodoxy has long been established and is

  not taken too seriously. In that case it would be possible, or might be

  possible, for large areas of one's mind to remain unaffected by what one

  officially believed. Even so, it is worth noticing that prose literature

  almost disappeared during the only age of faith that Europe has ever

  enjoyed. Throughout the whole of the Middle Ages there was almost no

  imaginative prose literature and very little in the way of historical

  writing; and the intellectual leaders of society expressed their most

  serious thoughts in a dead language which barley altered during a

  thousand years.

  Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an

  age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure

  becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost

  its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a

  society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become

  either tolerant or intellectually stable. It can never permit either the

  truthful recording of facts or the emotional sincerity that literary

  creation demands. But to be corrupted by totalitarianism one does not

  have to live in a totalitarian country. The mere prevalence of certain

  ideas can spread a kind of poison that makes one subject after another

  impossible for literary purposes. Wherever there is an enforced

  orthodoxy--or even two orthodoxies, as often happens--good writing

  stops. This was well illustrated by the Spanish civil war. To many

  English intellectuals the war was a deeply moving experience, but not an

  experience about which they could write sincerely. There were only two

  things that you were allowed to say, and both of them were palpable

  lies: as a result, the war produced acres of print but almost nothing

  worth reading.

  It is not certain whether the effects of totalitarianism upon verse need

  be so deadly as its effects on prose. There is a whole series of

  converging reasons why it is somewhat easier for a poet than a prose

  writer to feel at home in an authoritarian society. To begin with,

  bureaucrats and other "practical" men usually despise the poet too deeply

  to be much interested in what he is saying. Secondly, what the poet is

  saying--that is, what his poem "means" if translated into prose--is

  relatively unimportant, even to himself. The thought contained in a poem

  is always simple, and is no more the primary purpose of the poem than the

  anecdote is the primary purpose of the picture. A poem is an arrangement

  of sounds and associations, as a painting is an arrangement of

  brushmarks. For short snatches, indeed, as in the refrain of a song,

  poetry can even dispense with meaning altogether. It is therefore fairly

  easy for a poet to keep away from dangerous subjects and avoid uttering

  heresies; and even when he does utter them, they may escape notice. But

  above all, good verse, unlike good prose, is not necessarily and

  individual product. Certain kinds of poems, such as ballads, or, on the

  other hand, very artificial verse forms, can be composed co-operatively

  by groups of people. Whether the ancient English and Scottish ballads

  were originally produced by individuals, or by the people at large, is

  disputed; but at any rate they are non-individual in the sense that they

  constantly change in passing from mouth to mouth. Even in print no two

  versions of a ballad are ever quite the same. Many primitive peoples

  compose verse communally. Someone begins to improvise, probably

  accompanying himself on a musical instrument, somebody else chips in with

  a line or a rhyme when the first singer breaks down, and so the process