Orwell the Fortune Teller
No 20th-century journalist was better at predicting trends in the 21st century.
By Kyle Smith
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“The invasion of literature by politics was bound to happen,” wrote George Orwell in his 1948 essay, “Writers and Leviathan,” because “we have developed . . . an awareness of the enormous injustice and misery of the world, and a guilt-stricken feeling that one ought to be doing something about it, which makes a purely aesthetic attitude toward life impossible.”
Looking back at Orwell’s 1940s essays, one comes across a lot of insights that remain equally applicable today. What if Orwell the essayist was a more accurate prophet than Orwell the novelist?
Today, popular entertainment is larded up with messages about the urgent truths of our time: yass-queen feminism, antiracism, anticapitalism. Orwell saw it all coming; or rather, he identified a trend that’s older than you think.
Orwell is one of the few political thought leaders claimed as an ally by both left and right, so it was fitting that he united both sides again this spring, this time in derision. Across the ideological spectrum, critics lambasted a new feature adaptation of “Animal Farm,” directed by Andy Serkis and reframed as an attack on an evil tech oligarch. (“Drowning in ideological confusion. . . . I don’t really know what’s going on here,” declared the New York Times review.)
But if Orwell is often cited as the secular prophet of the past 100 years, his fortunetelling was a bit shaky. I and others have noted that the jackbooted totalitarianism Orwell saw taking over Britain in 1949’s “1984” turned out not to be as correct as 1932’s “Brave New World,” in which Aldous Huxley (Orwell’s teacher at Eton) presaged today’s stupefying surfeit of frictionless, vacuous pleasures.
Moreover, that Orwell cast the Bolshevik purist Leon Trotsky as the offstage hero in both “Animal Farm” (in which he is called Snowball) and “1984” (Emmanuel Goldstein) is such an absurd take that Orwell himself admitted as much, undercutting his fiction in the process. In the 1946 essay “Catastrophic Gradualism,” he said that one must admit, of the Stalinist nightmare in the USSR, “all the seeds of evil were there from the start and that things would not have been substantially different if Lenin or Trotsky had remained in control.”
Orwell was perhaps at his best in foretelling the future when he switched off Prophet Mode and simply observed. Being completely honest about what was going on around him in the 1940s enabled him to make one astute remark after another about the 2020s. In the entire history of writing, how many journalists have proven to be perspicacious about events that happened more than half a century after their deaths?
Nearly everything Orwell says about how “the party” has ruined writers, in “Writers and Leviathan,” is equally true today if for “party” you simply substitute what the French have dubbed “le wokisme.” Today’s scribes adhere feverishly to the new orthodoxy, from newspaper reporters all the way up to blockbuster screenwriters. Anyone who suspects that ideology has rendered useless most criticism of politically-oriented art: Orwell said it first. “The non-literary reaction is, ‘This book is on my side, and therefore I must discover merits in it,’ ” he wrote, adding, “it often happens that party solidarity demands a plain lie.” A glance at the reviews for the embarrassingly awful, cringe-inducingly stupid, candy-colored Marxist fantasy, “I Love Boosters,” which is currently in theaters, will suffice as evidence.
Orwell said that the political self must be kept apart from the writing self—“whatever else [a writer] does in service of his party, he should never write for it. He should make it clear that his writing is a thing apart”—because “to yield subjectively, not merely to a party machine, but even to a group ideology, is to destroy yourself as a writer.” The viewer of 1,000 action movies and television spy dramas in which 120-pound women kick the stuffing out of men trained to kill nods wearily; ideological conformity requires accepting ridiculous things as true.
Similarly, in 1945’s essay “Antisemitism in Britain,” which begins with the assertion that there are about 400,000 Jews in Britain (same ballpark as today), Orwell’s words are as depressingly accurate as ever. “What vitiates nearly all that is written about antisemitism is the assumption in the writer’s mind that he himself is immune to it. . . . He thus fails to start his investigation in the one place where he could get hold of some reliable evidence—that is, in his own mind.” The way many Britons seemed to think that, at some level, Jews deserved to be subjected to the horrors of the 1940s anticipated Oct. 7, 2023. He quotes the remarks of ordinary people he has conversed with, one of whom says, on being offered a book showing atrocities against Jews, “Please don’t show it to me. It’ll only make me hate the Jews more than ever.” Orwell noted that dislike of Jews “does not at present lead to open persecution, but it has the effect of making people callous to the sufferings of Jews in other countries. It is at bottom quite irrational and will not yield to argument.” Again: just as true today.
“Politics and the English Language,” from 1946, is perhaps Orwell’s most famous essay, and should be studied intently by anyone who wants to be a writer. But take a look at the same year’s “The Prevention of Literature,” in which he describes an anticensorship conference in which the participants defend the suppression of disfavored texts. Step on any nominally “freethinking” campus today and you’ll find bookstores jauntily if nonsensically promoting “censored” or “banned” books that haven’t been censored or banned. Nearby, speeches promoting disfavored viewpoints continue to be canceled because of credible threats of violence, research is threatened for being culturally inappropriate and students want bans on speech that could upset “marginalized peoples.” “In its net effect,” writes Orwell of the event he attended, “the meeting was a demonstration in favor of censorship.”
“In England,” he wrote, “the immediate enemies of truthfulness, and hence of freedom of thought, are the press lords, the film magnates, and the bureaucrats.” But over time, “the weakening of the desire for liberty among the intellectuals themselves is the most serious symptom of all.”
There’s no exact analogue for Big Brother in America today. But that’s because there doesn’t have to be.
Mr. Smith is a Free Expression columnist at WSJ Opinion.
Excellent piece! The question mark in my previous comment was a typo!
Excellent piece?