Originally a comment by Mostly Cloudy on Decency and Julia.
Der Durchwanderer @41
If we are to be judged by how our words might one day be used by the spiritual descendents of our current political enemies, then none of us should write anything at all, because that is a game none can hope to win. Unless you are fanatically certain that history does indeed have a singular arc and that you will somehow always land on the correct side of it forevermore, that is.
You have a point there. We know that Martin Luther King, for instance, would not have approved of the politics of Rand Paul, and would be dismayed to hear Paul appropriating his words.
I suppose my main issue with George Orwell is that he helped make anti-intellectualism respectable in British society.
Orwell’s status as *the* archetypal literary defender of democratic society against totalitarianism meant that the numerous attacks on intellectuals in Orwell’s work gained a special status.
And since anti-intellectualism in British society has been mainly, since the Thatcher era, associated with the political right, there’s a similarity between Orwell’s comments on intellectuals as “disloyal”, deracinated, and treacherous, and those of later figures like Thatcher and Farage.
This might also explain why “The Sun” was able to recruit Orwell into an editorial describing people opposed to Thatcher’s government as people its readers needed to be “vigilant” against.
And conservatives like William F. Buckley, Norman Podhoretz and Michael Medved also shared the anti-intellectual views of their British counterparts. Hence why they too were able to use lengthy quotes from George Orwell’s work in their attacks on the political left.
Those are the implications I am making- Orwell’s strong dislike of intellectuals make him a uniquely attractive writer for the modern-day political right.
And this might answer the question I raised earlier, that puzzled my teenage self. *Why* is this revolutionary socialist writer always being quoted, so often by defenders of tradition and capitalism?
Is it because of his undeniable literary merit? Maybe.
Is it because his plain style of writing makes it easy for other writers to understand and quote his work? Maybe.
Or is it because Orwell’s dislike of intellectuals (who, by definition, aren’t happy with the status quo) makes him uniquely attractive to these defenders of tradition and capitalism?
If you want to read someone who’s written about this aspect of George Orwell’s work much better than I could, read the chapter on George Orwell in Stefan Collini’s excellent book “Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain.”
Comments
11 responses to “Guest post: Orwell helped make anti-intellectualism respectable”
Thanks, Ophelia.
My mention of Martin Luther King made me wonder what *his* attitude to intellectuals was.
I found this quote King made about W. E. B. Du Bois:
Dr. Du Bois was not only an intellectual giant exploring the frontiers of knowledge, he was in the first place a teacher. He would have wanted his life to teach us something about our tasks of emancipation.
https://jacobin.com/2019/01/web-du-bois-martin-luther-king-speech
Presumably someone who uses “intellectual giant” as a compliment is sympathetic to people with ” highly developed intellects.”
Thank YOU, Clouders. It’s an interesting aspect of Orwell, that I’ve mused about a lot in the past but had kind of forgotten. He did a hell of a lot of intellectual-type writing for an anti-intellectual, as of course do lots of other anti-intellectuals. I might need to dig out Christopher Lasch again…
Maybe Orwell just wasn’t making the distinction between well & poorly done intellectualism clear enough.
A relevant quote:
“The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.”
https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/john_w_gardner_101143
Jim Baerg, I can attest to that! Hastings NE, where I just came from, does accept second-rate plumbing (and service from plumbers), and they have no excellence in plumbing. They also tolerate shoddy philosophy (mostly because they believe it is difficult to understand, and shoddy philosophy often is, so it must be elevated). As a result, they also haven’t got particularly good philosophy.
I was taught by my father to do any task I undertook to the best of my ability. If I was unable to make it work after giving it sufficient effort, it probably wasn’t the right task for me.
Surely Orwell himself was an intellectual. Was he criticizing “intellectuals” in general, or, as Nullius suggested earlier, a specific subset of them?
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/09/14/orwell-would-loathe-todays-left/
We need people who are willing to criticize their own tribe. Like Orwell for one. And Ophelia, for another.
Aw, shucks.
If you want to find out what the intellectuals in 1940s Britain (who were frequently targets of Orwell’s attacks) actually thought and wrote, then the book “The War Decade: An Anthology of the 1940s” edited by Andrew Sinclair is a good starting point.
It has fine non-fiction, fiction and poetry by W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, J. B. Priestley, Graham Greene, Jack Lindsay, Elizabeth Bowen, Elizabeth Jennings, Edith Sitwell, Roy Campbell, and many more.
Test post.
I made a comment a few minutes ago, but it seems to have been caught by the spam filter.
Found it, sorry, I don’t know what confused the spam folder gnomes – I don’t see any sign-in typos.
And thank you, that sounds like an interesting anthology. (Brings to mind Bowen’s brilliant “The Demon Lover.” [shudder])