Orwell’s Instructive Errors
Yes, orwell is still relevant. The particular manner in which he pierced worthless theory, faced facts and defended decency (with fluctuating success), and largely ignored the tradition of accumulated wisdom has rendered him a timeless teacher — one whose inadvertent lessons, while infrequently acknowledged, are just as valuable as his intended ones.
Those lessons are timeless but also timely, educative on the day’s latest headlines. Subject the current political chieftains of either party to Orwell’s lens and the wispiness of their rhetoric is laid plain. Start at the top. Regardless of one’s political proclivities or whether or not one just happens to like the personable Barack Obama, it’s clear that the president relishes the vague metaphor, adores the illogical argumentative sequence, and luxuriates in making words mean what only yesterday they didn’t. He does not merely redefine words, in fact, but on occasion undefines them, wiping them of their meanings — say, by insisting that words such as conservative and liberal are insignificant. The liberal president surely knows better but, as Orwell wrote, “the great enemy of clear language is insincerity.”
Desde la Hoover Institution de Standford University, Liam Julian recuerda en su ensayo la famosa frase de Orwell: “Political language . . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder sound respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
Y añade, a propósito de la "decencia" y el "orden moral natural", asuntos hoy que merecen ser bien repensados:
Orwell is important here less for the topics he wrote about — although subjects such as poverty and oppression are obviously significant — than for the observational and anti-theoretical way in which he endeavored to write about them. Theory, as Orwell saw it, offers a convenient way to separate oneself from unpleasant facts, to rationalize bothersome actions or situations. And it degrades what he called decency. “To twentieth-century political theories,” he wrote, “[the English] oppose not another theory of their own, but a moral quality which must be vaguely described as decency.” Decency comes in his message to left-wing British intellectuals: “Don’t imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist of the Soviet régime, or any other régime, and then suddenly return to mental decency.”
What is decent to Orwell is that which reflects a natural moral order, an order illuminated by lucid language and veiled by vague, careless words — the type of words that predominate in theoretical discussion. Thus did Orwell avoid theory’s entanglements. In the preface to Animal Farm, he wrote that his socialism grew “more out of disgust with the way the poorer section of the industrial workers were oppressed and neglected than out of any theoretical admiration for a planned society.”
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