Lecture 5: Orwell - Politics and the English Language

Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus has been very influential on Logical Positivist thinking and the idea that every proposition must be either proven or disproven, using the verification principle (Wittgenstein) or the falsification principle (Popper), and if this cannot be achieved, the statement is meaningless. Therefore it was believed that for a statement to be meaningful, it must first be proven to be true. However, the logical problems of this (that you cannot prove or disprove the very statement of the verification principle) meant that Wittgenstein later declared his first book to be nonsense. This first book was, in fact, a very short book, but because of the way that every single word and phrase was put under the microscope, the footnotes gave lots of detail especially in analysing the meaning.

He later said “that which we cannot speak, we must remain silent” which brought into question what language is, ontologically. He was studying the intricacies of language and meaning, but in order to do this he had to use language in order to explain it. This links to the use of computer language, which is series of logical symbols and ‘propositions’ which are tested constantly in order to make the computer code work. This apparently Anglo-Saxon tradition of testing language is used by American universities who dismiss European (mainly German and French) traditions such as Cartesian philosophy as being meaningless. This is because these ideas and thought trains cannot be either proven or disproven.

Language therefore became the focus of philosophical thought; to Wittgenstein, language is everything as we need to have language to express ideas; without language we cannot facilitate ideas and therefore they cannot exist. The Tractatus, therefore, has a picture theory of language; 1) that the world consists of facts and 2) that a fact is a picture of a state of affairs. Therefore by controlling language, we can control the picture of the state of affairs and paint what we like.

George Orwell picked up on this idea and ran with it in 1984, showing that if you can control the ‘facts’, you can control the world and you can manufacture a ‘reality’ by manipulating the facts or language. He who controls the present controls the past, he who controls the past controls the future was a key theme and slogan in the book.

Orwell has had a far-reaching and continuing influence; 1984, Big Brother state, Room 101, thought crime, thought police and the adjective “Orwellian” have become synonymous amongst English and Philosophy students, not to mention the huge cultural heritage he has created. As journalist and broadcaster he was very successful, but he is most famous for his novels Homage to Catatonia, Animal Farm (a metaphor for the Russian Revolution), and 1984. His interesting CV does not stop there, as in the 1950s he worked for the CIA. Politically, he was a disillusioned socialist and became anti-communist, using his novels to speak out against it and the way that the ‘great idea’ that it was founded upon was corrupted by those that used it. He was, therefore, very much of the same mind as Hannah Arendt.

In the 1930s, Orwell was close to various communist intellectuals, however when he found out the truths that they were covering up, the truth of “The God that Failed” in particular, he was horrified but at the same time fascinated by their capacity for self delusion. This also brought to his attention the way that they manipulated language and the similar use of language by totalitarians. The Communist program for linguistic reform in the USSR, in particular, shocked Orwell. Certain words were banned, certain letters which had special religious significance were taken out of the alphabet and a Utopian politically correct language was created. New words were created such as politbureau and prolecult. The idea was to remove the facility to discriminate by taking the words away. This left a language made up of jargon, cliché, metaphor, ritual and slogan after slogan. It was a form of language designed to prevent thought and was very much based on Wittgenstein’s ideas that language is plastic and controls thought.

This was one of the basic premises of Orwell’s 1984 in which the state has created NewSpeak, a dictionary which they make smaller and smaller with every edition, in an attempt to control the words that people have available to them so that they can control their thoughts. The political party, Ingsoc (English Socialists) is true by definition and it is a ‘thought crime’ to go against what they say, punishable by death, a death so complete that all records of the life that preceded it are “abolished, annihilated: vaporised”. This is a ‘big brother state’ which began all talk of such things, in which everyone is punished by the expectation of being constantly monitored. Language is corrupted, as can be seen in party slogans such as “War is Peace”, “Freedom is Slavery” and “Poverty is Plenty”; meanings are turned around and upside down until the language is no longer recognisable, as is acknowledged in the fact that “that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?... The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact, there will be no thought, as we understand it now.” There is constant world war, and every time allegiance changes, there are members of the party that go through all records and articles to delete anything that suggests that this wasn’t always the way that they thought. (This is now done in press and is referred to as ‘weeding out’ weaker articles that undermine later ones.) The NewSpeak dictionary is made smaller and smaller until it eventually will simply consist of “I love big brother” and by limiting language in this way, they are limiting thought.

Orwell has also created ‘Orwellian language’ which is a term for loaded language which manipulates the meaning by the use of words. For example, ‘Fair vote’ automatically makes you think that that would be the best policy because of the intrinsic idea of fairness. This is manipulating people and trying to stop people from thinking about the actual meaning that is behind that voting system (as it has been used in recent referendum campaigns). In this way, almost all advertising is Orwellian as they want you to like the product straight away and not even consider the negatives. This would be even worse if it weren’t for strong regulation. This use of language does render phrases meaningless, for example the Hovis slogan “It is as good for you now as it has always been” which could also be said of radiation or cancer. Similar nonsense slogans include “a PC is not a stereotype” and the New York Times’ “All the news that’s fit to print”.

Orwell also wrote a list of rules about Politics and the English Language, giving guidelines on how to write in a way that doesn’t manipulate thought or try to hide the truth;
1) Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print (which tabloid journalism breaks, all the time).
2) Never use a long word where a short one will do (which goes against what we have been taught all through school).
3) If it is possible to cut a word out, do it.
4) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5) Never use a foreign phrase, scientific word or jargon where you can think of an English equivalent.
6) Break any of these rules sooner than saying anything outright barbarous.

Orwell also saw language as a kind of class, a social barrier. This is clearly demonstrated in the separation between Concrete Germanic Peasant Nouns and Frenchified Elite words (as Horrie showed us in a delightful table that doubled as a fun word game). The basic idea of this is that the Latin or French root words are seen as ‘better’ and more sophisticated, when really the Anglo-Saxon peasantry language is more truthful and does not try to confuse or hide meaning.

We then finished up the lecture by going through some uses of language which demonstrated how many words can be used, and yet nothing very much said. Much like this blog post.