Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" in the Age of Pseudocracy

Hans Ostrom, William Haltom

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351013857
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Rhetoric
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" in the Age of Pseudocracy visits the essay as if for the first time, clearing away lore about the essay and responding to the prose itself. It shows how many of Orwell's rules and admonitions are far less useful than they are famed to be, but it also shows how some of them can be refurbished for our age, and how his major claim—that politics corrupts language, which then corrupts political discourse further, and so on indefinitely—can best be re-deployed today. "Politics and the English Language" has encouraged generations of writers and readers and teachers and students to take great care, to be skeptical and clear-sighted. The essay itself requires a fresh, clear, skeptical analysis so that it can, with reapplication, reclaim its status as a touchstone in our era of the rule of falsehood: the age of "pseudocracy."

1
Introduction

Be Careful What You Assign—Your Students Might Read It

George Orwell is well known to have legions of admirers who will leap to the keyboard to attack anyone who criticizes their hero. We academics are all supposed to admire him, and especially to regard his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” (henceforth P&EL) as a deathless masterpiece of political and literary insight, and to urge our students to read it. Two distinguished evolutionary biologists devoted recent blog posts to ladling renewed praises on P&EL….

Well, apologies in advance to Orwell fans, but I have always found P&EL sickening. A smug, arrogant, dishonest tract full of posturing and pothering, and writing advice that ranges from idiosyncratic to irrational. Let me comment on just one of its sillinesses.¹

As the overwrought characterization of Geoffrey Pullum above dramatizes, “Politics and the English Language”² may be at once the most celebrated and most castigated source regarding political communication in English-speaking letters.³ We also suspect that fulsome praise and carping critique alike distract writers and readers from George Orwell’s contributions to the betterment of communication. Celebrations and condemnations of rules and peeves neglect Orwell’s major claim: Political decay and linguistic rot increasingly make each other worse. In the 21st century Orwell’s admirers and his scoffers find themselves awash in immoral rhetoric and amoral rationalization created both for increasingly credulous audiences who expect fantasies and abhor facts and for increasingly distrustful audiences who take facts for falsehoods and falsehoods for facts.⁴ Yet scoffers and admirers alike bring up clichés, metaphors, passive voice, jargon, or other small-bore matters that Orwell addressed⁵ on his way to and from more momentous matters. Have we, the inheritors of Orwell’s insights, squandered Orwell’s bequest in “Politics and the English Language”? We regard this question to be rhetorical in more ways than one.

Attention to minor diversions in “Politics and the English Language” and neglect of major theses explain substantially but not completely both the essay’s wide appeal and its near ubiquity in discussions of deceptive language, especially deceptive language in service of politicking, governing, and other aggrandizements. Orwell in his essay raised grave threats—politicos misuse language to make lies sound truthful and murders seem respectable—that the propaganda-laden 20th century and the image-suffused, fragmented 21st century exacerbated. Debasements of politics and language that he did and did not anticipate demand the attention of citizen and intellectual alike. By contrast, Orwell’s rules for modern political writers around 1945, his excoriations of foggy phrases and mindless clichés, and his other gripes and gibes entertain his readers greatly but reduce decadent language or decadent politics little if at all.

Those who recall the essay may properly delight in its lampooning academic and bureaucratic prose, its accusing writers of “swindles and perversions,” and its parodic dismantling of the pretentious and the precious, but such burlesque distracts and detracts from Orwell’s most terrifying and compelling general portents, we maintain. His vaudeville distracts attention from corruptions of power, position, and prominence that matter far more than the parlance to which he drew attention. Moreover, the burlesques train his adherents to mock certain kinds of academic, bureaucratic, and politic expressions much the way that Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert did: with the very ironic infotainment⁶ that suffuses public discourse. Such mockery may not always be politically impotent, but parody often inclines audiences to under-appreciate the plain appeal of imagery, dramaturgy, spin, symbolism, and propaganda. Consequently, some threats Orwell identified and other threats he did not foresee rule the political culture long after the laughter subsides. The parts of the essay too seldom recalled have been eclipsed by the wickedly entertaining parts such that “Politics and the English Language” has become barely political and almost entirely beside the point that he explicitly set for his enterprise.

We propose in this volume to rescue Orwell’s obscured major point from Orwell’s gaudy prose and the essay’s fans. We also propose to transform his diagnoses and prescriptions into resources so that a classic 20th-century statement for writers may serve as a 21st-century guide for readers, viewers, listeners, and other “content-consumers” whom we take to be our immediate audience as well as for writers, producers, performers, and other “content-providers” whom he explicitly took for his immediate audience. In so doing, we introduce three ironies:⁷

• Irony One—The Non Sequitur: Orwell’s capacious claim at the beginning and end of his essay—that the decline of politicking and the decline of communicating reinforced one the other—barely followed from, led into, or even related to some of the essay’s most memorable passages, yet that claim has proved reasonably prescient for reasons that Orwell could not have anticipated. Perhaps useless for political writers in 1945–46, the large-scale claim within which he elected to work might be very useful to political readers in the 21st century.
• Irony Two—Gripes and Gibes: The gibes and gripes with which Orwell regaled his readers have proved so memorable that they are much more likely to be quoted or recalled than his momentous claim, so his piquant prose obscured his major point. Between his expansive pretext and extravagant postscript, he skewered doubletalk, euphemizing, and other practices in the infotaining but unenlightening manner of a pedant; his “catalogue of swindles and perversions,” so often recalled or reproduced, distracted writers and readers alike from far more significant insights that underlay Orwell’s intellectual infotainment.
• Irony Three—Memorable Misdirection: Because Orwell highlighted six rules that were and are less useful or sensible than the six questions that he buried at the end of a long paragraph,⁸ his writing pointed political writers to specific directives that could remedy neither general political and linguistic decline (his major, overall point) nor particular, recurring problems with political phrases (his intermediate-level point). Consequently the directives for which “Politics and the English Language” is often invoked have eclipsed his far more useful advice for students, readers, and writers.

These three ironies, separately and together, explain why and how critics and celebrants have largely squandered the most significant lessons of a classic document. We deem it bad enough that, owing to these ironies, those who read “Politics and the English Language” may long recall Orwell’s drollery and parody but quickly forget his wisdom and especially his discernment. We deem it worse that those who revel in Orwell’s particulars distract themselves from the larger concerns that he said he was on about. We deem it worst that lessons that might improve writing, reading, thinking, politicking, and governing in the 21st century fade from collective recollection even as familiar passages, tropes, and catalogues persist to abet pedantry.

Beyond these three ironies and taken as a whole, Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” makes evident and obvious sense less consistently than we might expect from a classic or than we might recall from reading it long ago. Orwell hastily assembled much of his case⁹ and erred, but more problems and errors have followed from what readers, especially admirers, have done with the essay. He assembled a rickety framework that linked his peeves about writing to political decay in English or British politics. We think he hyped his piece.¹⁰ Since 1946 the essay’s shaky scaffolding has swayed but never toppled because the errant tropes, hackneyed phrases, phony grandiloquence, and other lousy writing against which he inveighed have persisted as objects of ridicule—the intellectual infotainment to which we referred—thanks in part to academics like us. “Swindles and perversions” (his hyperbolic terms) continue to present easy targets. However, such devices explain ever less about linguistic decadence, let alone political decay. Consequently, particulars have come to represent the essay while the larger concerns to which Orwell related the particulars have faded from many memories. Close readers of the essay dispute ever finer points and subtleties but may neglect not only more important issues in the essay but also the dominating ubiquity of propaganda, imagery, and truthiness.

To the degree any works of literature remain touchstones in 21st-century cultures, Orwell’s does so. It not only retains its classic status, but it is still taught in colleges, and it is at least considered, even by detractors, as a foundation of works that concern bad writing. When we—an English professor and a political scientist—set out to address 21st-century political language, then, we saw the sense of starting with a foundational essay even in these anti-foundational times.

However, our aim is not simply to pay homage or indeed to pay any homage. Instead, we pay the essay the compliment of taking it seriously. We encounter anew its limitations and, more important, the effects those limitations may have had on generations of readers who barely recall the essay or the novel 1984 yet imagine they have a clear grasp of Orwell’s wisdom and warnings. Additionally, as professors, we have observed generations of collegiate teachers in many disciplines who reenact the flaws of the essay when they allegedly teach students to write and to think critically. Such teachers often direct students away from critical thinking by overreacting to minor matters, as well as by enforcing personal preferences as if they were eternal verities of good writing and adept thinking.

We wrote this book, then, for all the readers and all the teachers who have come upon or may come upon “Politics and the English Language.” Orwell purported to write for political writers, British writers, or writers in general. These content-creators, he thought, could recreate and thereby revive the English language, which had decayed owing to bad habits of writing and thinking. If writers could break their bad habits of writing and thinking, the language and thought of the polity might be improved, he hoped. This might make politics, governance, and society work better. We aspire to revive the best and most important lessons and exhortations from the essay to the betterment of those who consume communications. We aim our book at readers who watch television and films, tweet and text, and experience media created after 1945. We write for those who listen to radio and who still read newspapers and books. We think that “Politics and the English Language” still has much to offer more than half a century after its appearance. We hope this book will help those who read (and those who assign) that classic to get as much of Orwell’s wise counsel as we can highlight.

To see the steps by which we hope to reach our audience, let us anticipate the rest of our book.

Rereading “Politics and the English Language”: Chapter 2

Rereading “Politics and the English Language” closely and critically after the manner of its fierce critics, we question our own high regard for the essay, which seems to cohere fitfully at best. Orwell repeatedly wrote and argued in ways that seem to us insincere or incompetent. He violated his own strictures too often for his rules to be credible.¹¹ We marvel that an essay we have read so many times and assigned our students over the years can be as flawed as careful analysis reveals it to be. It seems the celebrity of the essay blinded us.

Our goal in Chapter 2 is not to besmirch the classic or to write ill of the dead. Rather, we intend to show how many praises heaped on “Politics and the English Language” are unmerited but also how merits of the essay often go unremarked if not unnoticed. We scrub the essay of its vices so we can recognize its virtues. For one chapter, we join those who carp at a classic so that in later chapters we may refurbish the essay’s legacy.

We identify vices and virtues via analyses of the essay. We schematize the structure of “Politics and the English Language” and anticipate that our graphing will startle many teachers who have assigned the essay because of fond recollections rather than recent re-familiarization.¹² Once our readers see that in the first two and last four paragraphs of his essay Orwell unmistakably states that his overall point is that linguistic and political decline mutually reinforce, they may ask how intermediate paragraphs bear on his self-proclaimed mission. This establishes for our readers Irony One, which, as suggested above, we occasionally label The Non Sequitur.¹³ We then read those 13 intermediate paragraphs carefully to reveal that, entertaining and evocative as they are, they relate to the overall point that Orwell set himself in the essay far less than they reiterate the notes from which he was working. Between his resounding opening¹⁴ and restrained closing,¹⁵ he sandwiched his gripes and gibes about usage in a “catalogue of swindles and perversions” and an inventory of euphemisms. This close reading exposes Irony Two, the intermediate-scale incongruity we sometimes label “Gibes and Gripes.” It also shows more connections between his gibes and gripes and his list of rules than between those complaints about usage and any other points Orwell advanced. These connections help demonstrate how his six questions have much more to do with the essay as a whole and with good writing and reading than do his six ballyhooed rules: Behold what we sometimes call the “Memorable Misdirection” of Irony Three.

Chapter 2 confirms Orwell’s own judgment that the remainder of his essay “follows” at best a shaky logic. In about 5,000 words Orwell conducted his readers from the systemic, sociological causes of mutually reinforcing political and linguistic decline to six rules for better proofreading, so the essay’s trajectory plunges into trivial fussing. In what we hope to be an assessment more charitable and productive, however, we argue that he began his essay with a doozy of a diagnosis—the decay of the English language and of the British polity explained each other; we further claim that he provided specific symptoms of decadence in political writing and politicking. The intermediate part of “Politics and the English Language,” the filling between the slices of his overall thesis, presents examples of empty phrasings, mental vices, and thinking enthralled b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Be Careful What You Assign—Your Students Might Read It
• 2 Rereading “Politics and the English Language”
• 3 You Can’t Handle the Truthiness: How “Politics and the English Language” Suits Our Pseudocracy Better Than Orwell’s Decaying Britain
• 4 Orwell’s Corpora Delectorum: How Orwell’s Memorable Offenses Have Obscured Orwell’s Forgotten Thesis
• 5 Toward Habits of Discernment: Refurbishing Orwell’s Lists Amid Pseudocracy
• Index