If It's "Orwellian," It's Probably Not

[Dave Monroe]

If It's 'Orwellian,' It's Probably Not
By GEOFFREY NUNBERG

On George Orwell's centenary — he was born on June 25,
1903 — the most telling sign of his influence is the
words he left us with: not just "thought police,"
"doublethink" and "unperson," but also "Orwellian"
itself, the most widely used adjective derived from
the name of a modern writer. 

In the press and on the Internet, it's more common
than "Kafkaesque," "Hemingwayesque" and "Dickensian"
put together. It even noses out the rival political
reproach "Machiavellian," which had a 500-year head
start.

Eponyms are always the narrowest sort of tribute,
though. "Orwellian" doesn't have anything to do with
Orwell as a socialist thinker, or for that matter, as
a human being. People are always talking about
Orwell's decency, but "Orwellian decency" would be an
odd phrase indeed. And the adjective commemorates
Orwell the writer only for three of his best known
works: the novels "Animal Farm" and "1984" and the
essay "Politics and the English Language."

"Orwellian" reduces Orwell's palette to a single shade
of noir. It brings to mind only sordid regimes of
surveillance and thought control and the distortions
of language that make them possible.

Orwell's views on language may outlive his political
ideas. At least they seem to require no updating or
apology, whereas his partisans feel the need to
justify the continuing relevance of his politics. He
wasn't the first writer to condemn political
euphemisms. Edmund Burke was making the same points
150 years earlier about the language used by
apologists for the French Revolution: "Things are
never called by their common names. Massacre is
sometimes agitation, sometimes effervescence,
sometimes excess."

But Orwell is the writer most responsible for
diffusing the modern view of political language as an
active accomplice of tyranny. As he wrote in "Politics
and the English Language," "Political language . . .
is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder
respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to
pure wind."

That was an appealing notion to an age that had
learned to be suspicious of ideologies, and critics on
all sides have found it useful to cite "Politics and
the English Language" in condemning the equivocations
of their opponents.

Critics on the left hear Orwellian resonances in
phrase like "weapons of mass protection," for
nonlethal arms, or in names like the Patriot Act or
the Homeland Security Department's Operation Liberty
Shield, which authorizes indefinite detention of
asylum-seekers from certain nations. Critics on the
right hear them in phrases like "reproductive health
services," "Office of Equality Assurance" and "English
Plus," for bilingual education.

And just about everyone discerned an Orwellian note in
the name of the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness
project, which was aimed at mining a vast centralized
database of personal information for patterns that
might reveal terrorist activities. (The name was
changed last month to the Terrorist Information
Awareness program, in an effort to reassure Americans
who have nothing to hide.)

Which of those terms are deceptive packaging and which
are merely effective branding is a matter of debate.
But there's something troubling in the easy use of the
label "Orwellian," as if these phrases committed the
same sorts of linguistic abuses that led to the gulags
and the death camps.

The specters that "Orwellian" conjures aren't really
the ones we have to worry about. Newspeak may have
been a plausible invention in 1948, when totalitarian
thought control still seemed an imminent possibility.
But the collapse of Communism revealed the bankruptcy
not just of the Stalinist social experiment, but of
its linguistic experiments as well. After 75 years of
incessant propaganda, "socialist man" turned out to be
a cynic who didn't even believe the train schedules.

Political language is still something to be wary of,
but it doesn't work as Orwell feared. In fact the
modern language of control is more effective than
Soviet Newspeak precisely because it's less bleak and
intimidating.

Think of the way business has been re-engineering the
language of ordinary interaction in the interest of
creating "high-performance corporate cultures." To a
reanimated Winston Smith, there would be something
wholly familiar in being told that he had to file an
annual vision statement or that he should henceforth
eliminate "problems" from his vocabulary in favor of
"issues." 

But the hero of "1984" would find the whole exercise
much more convivial than the Two Minute Hate at the
Ministry of Truth. And he'd be astonished that
management allowed employees to post "Dilbert" strips
on the walls of their cubicles.

For Orwell, the success of political jargon and
euphemism required an uncritical or even unthinking
audience: a "reduced state of consciousness," as he
put it, was "favorable to political conformity." As
things turned out, though, the political manipulation
of language seems to thrive on the critical skepticism
that Orwell encouraged.

In fact, there has never been an age that was so
well-schooled in the perils of deceptive language or
in decoding political and commercial messages, as seen
in the official canonization of Orwell himself. Thanks
to the schools, "1984" is probably the best-selling
political novel of modern times (current Amazon sales
rank: No. 93), and "Politics and the English Language"
is the most widely read essay about the English
language and very likely in it as well. 

But as advertisers have known for a long time, no
audience is easier to beguile than one that is smugly
confident of its own sophistication. The word
"Orwellian" contributes to that impression. Like
"propaganda," it implies an aesthetic judgment more
than a moral one. Calling an expression Orwellian
means not that it's deceptive but that it's crudely
deceptive.

Today, the real damage isn't done by the euphemisms
and circumlocutions that we're likely to describe as
Orwellian. "Ethnic cleansing," "revenue enhancement,"
"voluntary regulation," "tree-density reduction,"
"faith-based initiatives," "extra affirmative action,"
"single-payer plans" — these terms may be oblique, but
at least they wear their obliquity on their sleeves.

Rather, the words that do the most political work are
simple ones — "jobs and growth," "family values" and
"color-blind" not to mention "life" and "choice." But
concrete words like these are the hardest ones to see
through. They're opaque when you hold them up to the
light.

Orwell knew that, of course. "To see what is in front
of one's nose needs a constant struggle" — not what
you'd call an Orwellian sentiment, but very like the
man.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/22/weekinreview/22NUNB.html?ex=1371614400&en=cf5d71d6cfdca6f9&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND

Nunberg, Geoffrey.  Going Nucular: Language,
   Politics, and Culture in Confrontational Times.
   New York: Public Affairs, 2004.

http://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/publicaffairsbooks-cgi-bin/display?book=1586482343


		
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