Legal Commentary

Richard Ford took issue with my generally low view of "intellectuals" over at Slate's blog. As usual, his is a thoughtful post, and I have no desire to rehearse all of his arguments. But in the course of his post, Ford takes issue with my characterization of Orwell as attacking the obscurity of intellectuals. In response to my statement about Orwell's denouncing "the obscurity of intellectuals' prose as a cloak for tyranny," Ford asks, ''But wasn't Orwell more concerned with the jargon of bureaucrats and politicians than of philosophers and literary critics? His closest modern analogue is not Martha Nussbaum on Judith Butler but rather Harry Frankfurt's On Bullshit."

I respond to this comment only because there is always value in reviving Orwell's writing, and Ford's comment (as well as one endorsement of Ford's post that accused me of "mangling Orwell") suggests the great extent to which Orwell's journalism has been forgotten.

Orwell stomped on a lot of toes: Of course, he disliked bureaucratese. But, especially during the "Popular Front" years of the 1930s, Orwell frequently directed his ire at the intelligentsia. He accused intellectuals of power worship, hostility towards ordinary social mores, and a penchant for ostracizing critics who rejected their ovine orthodoxies with sneers and boycotts. Much of this criticism was inspired by the intellectuals' lockstep support for Stalin even to the extent of temporizing about the Bukharin trials and the murder of Trotsky. But much of Orwell's anger was directed more generally at the intellectuals' desperate desire to distinguish themselves from the middle class -- a desire, Orwell believed, that led them to abandon common decency and common language.

The critical evidence supporting this statement is, of course, the second half of The Road to Wigan Pier, in which Orwell denounces everyone from sandal-wearing vegetarians to polysyllable-spewing Stalinists for discrediting the British Left in the eyes of the ordinary voter. But "Wigan Pier" is only the most famous example.

In describing Dickens' "discontent," Orwell noted that "the disappearance of it in the modern intelligentsia is a very sinister thing," further observing that "[t]he thing that frightens me the most about the modern intelligentsia is their inability to see that human society must be based on human decency, whatever the political and economic forms may be." (Letter to Humphrey House, 4/11/1940). His review of James Burnham's Managerial Revolution" decried intellectuals' "admiration... for the power, energy, and cruelty of the Nazi regime." In mocking Marxist literary critics, Orwell observed that "possessing a system which appears to explain everything, they never bother to discover what is going on inside other people's heads." (Review of Philip Henderson, "The Novel Today," 12/31/1936).

I could easily multiply the examples many times over: Orwell's attacks on intellectuals were so notorious that Alex Comfort began a response to one of Orwell's "London Letters" with the dig, "I see that Mr. Orwell is intellectual-hunting again." (Responses to "Pacifism and the War," 6/18/1942)

The theme of Orwell's attacks was that intellectuals strove so hard to distinguish themselves from ordinary people that they forgot ordinary virtues like honesty, fair play, and common speech. Orwell's blanket term for these virtues was "common decency," a phrase that recurs repeatedly in his journalism. "The common people, on the whole, are still living in the world of absolute good and evil from which intellectuals have long escaped," Orwell noted, further observing that phrases like "'don't hit a man when he's down' ... have never failed to draw a snigger from anyone of intellectual pretensions." In explaining his admiration for the conservative writer, Malcolm Muggeridge, Orwell noted that Muggeridge's patriotism was "the emotion of a middle class man" which, for all of its simplicity, was "a comelier thing than the shallow self-righteousness of the left-wing intelligentsia."

What does Orwell's famous hostility towards the intellectual class have to do with obscure language? Language was one way in which intellectuals cut themselves off from common decency. Contrary to Professor Ford's suggestion, the five examples of bad writing singled out in his classic 1946 essay Politics and the English Language were not written by politicians or bureaucrats: They were all written by private intellectuals of one sort of another -- an essay by Harold Laski, a letter to the Tribune, an essay on Psychology, a Communist Pamphlet, and an essay by one "Professor Lancelot Hogben." His special target was "pretentious words": He noted that hack academic writers were "haunted by the notion that Latin and Greek words are grander than Saxon ones," such that they coined new terms by "us[ing] a Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix." (Users of the term "hegemony," take note).

This pretentiousness served a political function: It is easier to defend the indefensible in abstract and convoluted prose, because such words do not call up any vivid mental pictures that would shock the conscience. "A mass of Latin words fall upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all details," Orwell writes: "long words and exhausted idioms" are the perfect anesthetic for disturbing thoughts.

In short, Professor Ford is most definitely mistaken in assuming that Orwell aimed his attacks primarily at bureaucratic or political speech. But it is an easy mistake to make: Most people do not read much Orwell beyond "1984" and "Animal Farm." (As you might infer, I am addicted to the four volumes of Orwell's journalism: His fiction, by contrast, is usually contrived and awkward). That's why I respond at such length: I want to make a little effort to pique interest in his classic non-fiction -- The Road to Wigan Pier, Inside the Whale," and, of course, Politics and the English Language.

Incidentally, should we approve of Orwell's anti-intellectualism? It has its costs. Because Orwell tended to use the complex web of popular belief as the benchmark for "common decency," he tended to endorse prejudices embedded in that web. Orwell has rightly been accused by Daphne Patai (in an otherwise justly forgotten book, The Orwell Mystique, of being hostile to feminism, because feminism, after all, was in tension with ordinary social mores. It is certainly undeniable that Orwell was deeply homophobic. It is not that Orwell was unaware of these prejudices: He consciously donned them, as a sort of deliberate affront to the Bloomsbury/Left Book Club set.

But Orwell himself would say that the best way to reform popular prejudice is to use popular language. Feminism is not advanced by Professor Judith Butler's polysyllables: It is advanced by plain description of honor killings, wife beatings, rapes, or, less shocking, the put-downs and petty discriminations of day-to-day sexism. All of those terms of art derived from Lacan & Co. do not mobilize outrage -- "common decency" as Orwell would say -- but put it to sleep.

That last statement, by the way, counts as a dig that invites invective. Feel free, Gentle Reader, to lay into me. But, please -- if you can manage it -- use plain and vivid speech. (Humor would be nice, as well). You might even prepare yourself for the task by (re-)reading Politics and the English Language.