Common sense, by George

One of my favourite pastimes is reading a biography of someone I admire, hoping a smidgen of their talent or success or wisdom will rub off. (Fat chance!)

This year I got an early summer jump-start on Bernard Crick's George Orwell (Little, Brown, 1980). It's quite dense, so it may be September before I finish it. But that's OK; Orwell's life is something you sip slowly, not gulp. I read a chapter or two, then shift to a crime novel or three; they've been improving my mind for four decades.

There's been an Orwell boomlet in the last two years - at least two new biographies and an "appreciation" by Christopher Hitchens, the arrogant British gadfly who said such nice things about Democratic Presidential hopeful Howard Dean. (From one of his TV broadcasts: "He (Dean) has no redeeming qualities as a politician or a human being." Ah, well.) Orwell, you see, is one of the few political thinkers and writers whom both sides of the ideological spectrum worldwide, right or left, genuflect to. His writings were commented upon extensively last Friday, on what would have been his 101st birthday.

Those on the left cite Orwell's adulthood-long commitment to social justice - a commitment born in his days of service in the Burmese police, where the folly and sordidness of one race ruling another became apparent.

Those on the right point to Orwell's bone-deep distrust of government. They will cite this line from Nineteen Eighty-Four: "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever". Or perhaps the Animal Farm observation that "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others".

But reading about his life, it is safe to say that were he alive today he would have little to do with either the right or left in Maltese politics. Orwell was the ultimate anti-ideologist, always seeking common sense, not partisan polemics.

Here's an acute Orwellian summation of politics: "Economic injustice will stop the moment we want it to stop, and no sooner, and, if we genuinely want it to stop, the method adopted hardly matters".

Orwell, whose real name was Eric Blair, was an indifferent student (except when it came to modern literature) and an "unclubbable man" with his solitary nature. Like one of his heroes, Jack London, he began adopting the ways of the poor, tramping about England and working as a plongeur (dishwasher) in Paris. This led to his first masterwork, Down and Out in Paris and London, my favourite of his writings.

(One of his essays - A Hanging - should be required reading for death-penalty proponents.)

In addition to learning about one of the superlative modern defenders of free speech, unfettered thought and individual rights, you can't resist as you read his biography wondering this: What would Orwell, who died much too early at age 46, have thought and written about the modern age?

As a prophet he was not always right; 1984, as we now know, looked nothing like Nineteen Eighty-Four. And, yet, the book still resonates in our nightmares and our lexicon. Big Brother, the infamous Ministries of Love and Truth, the memory hole, the Thought Police and Hate Week all remain part of our vocabulary. And Orwell's own name has become the gold standard adjective to apply when measuring the gulf between political "To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully-constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them".

I think he would have been dismayed that so much of what he posited in Nineteen Eighty-Four has come to pass, particularly the "doublespeak" of Nineteen Eighty-Four that not only dominates political discourse but the public education system. Orwell's indifferent academic success at Eton can be laid, as Crick notes, at the door of that school's antiquated curricula. Today, the chasm between "educationspeak" and normal discourse is, in its peculiar way, just as bad.

For me, above all else, it is Orwell's humanity - which had to struggle through a class-conscious upbringing and his natural shyness - that makes him most heroic and deserving of emulation.

Here's my favourite Orwell quote: "I did not know the essential fact that 'respectable' poverty is always the worst".

That, and so much else Orwell said, is what I thought about as we approached the recent electoral appointment (European elections and local council ones) on which the decidedly anti-Orwellian elements of cant, hypocrisy, disingenuousness and fear were much-used political tools.

Orwell once said he writes "because there is some lie that I want to expose". It is this fundamental lie upon which the political structure of Nineteen Eighty-Four rests. The very slogans of the party are contradictions: "War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength". Following the recent electoral campaign in Malta, I found strong resonance of these contradictions: "Dialogue is Deafness, Cooperation is Confrontation, Victory is Defeat, Truth lies in Lies".

Nineteen Eighty-Four has a narrow plot which focuses solely on the life of Winston Smith. However, Orwell makes a political point from this - Winston Smith is the only person left who is worth writing about; all the rest have been brainwashed already.

When considering the title for the novel Orwell mentioned in a letter that he was considering The Last Man in Europe - a clear indication that he saw Winston Smith as the last true free thinker in Europe. Winston's heresy is his insistence on the individual's right to make up his own mind rather than having to follow what the Party perceives as truth and so he is tortured constantly until, eventually, he has learned to "love Big Brother".

A healthy sip of Orwell before most political debates will clear your mind so you can see if there's even a soupcon of common sense to be had. For to ignore Orwell in these perilous times is to feel the boot of the powerful grinding into humanity's face - if not forever, at least for the foreseeable future.

Orwell's writing was above all a technique in honesty. That is its chief value today. His character - uncompromising, direct, transparent - was the product of a way of writing, of refusing to accept on trust the received "dialect" on any subject, of subjecting words to scrutiny - especially the big ones like "nation", "society", "democracy", "art".

All this comes through most clearly in Politics and the English Language, an essay that should be made compulsory reading for everyone writing in English. He makes here the elementary point that language may often be "ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts... If one gets rid of (bad linguistic) habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration".