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AI agents are getting pretty impressive. You might not even realize you're listening to one right now.
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We work 24.
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Seven to resolve customer inquiries.
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No hold music, no canned answers, no frustration. Visit Sierra AI to learn more. Support for the show comes from Crucible Moments, a podcast from Sequoia Capital. Every exceptional company story is defined by those high stakes moments that risk the business but can lead to greatness. That's what Crucible Moments is all about. Hosted by Sequoia Capital's managing partner, Roloff Bothe, Crucible Moments is returning for a brand new season, and they're kicking things off with episodes on Zipline and Bolt, two companies with surprising paths to success. Crucible Moments is out now and available everywhere you get your podcasts and@CrucibleMoments.com Listen to Crucible Moments today. If I asked you to name a famous writer who manages to be both incredibly well known and universally misunderstood, who comes to mind? Marx and Nietzsche are obvious candidates, but any list like this has to include George Orwell, the English journalist and essayist and the author of two of the most famous political novels of the 20th century, 1984 and Animal Farm. Whether you've read any of Orwell's work or not, you know his name and you've no doubt heard the term Orwellian used to describe people and events that are very likely contradictory. Which of course is part of the problem with Orwell. He's been stretched so much that his name is now a floating signifier that conveys just enough information to the audience to suggest something vaguely meaningful, but not enough information to truly clarify anything. But none of this is Orwell's fault. And the irony is that Orwell's greatest virtue as a writer was his clarity. He wrote so as not to be misunderstood, and yet he is now perpetually misunderstood. How did that happen and how should we understand him? Who was George Orwell and why does he matter so much today? I'm Sean Illing and this is the gray Area. Today's guest is Laura Beers. She's a historian at American University and the author of a new book called Orwell's Wisdom and warnings for the 21st century. This is an intellectual biography, but it is not, to its credit, a hagiography. Beers takes an honest look at Orwell's life, the best and the worst of it, and presents a three dimensional picture of who he was and what he fought for. That's what I wanted to explore with Beers, and whether that's still how we think of him today. Laura Beers, welcome to the Show.
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B
Thanks for having me on.
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A
I'm very glad you're here. And I'm glad you wrote a book about George Orwell, one of my heroes. So why Orwell? Who was this guy? And why are we still talking about him today?
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B
So those of us who have heard the word Orwellian bantered around probably remember Orwell vaguely, if at all, from middle school or high school and reading Animal Farmer, 1984. And it's those two works that George Orwell, who was born in 1903 in India in the British Raj and educated very well back in England, first at prep school and then at Eton, before returning to Burma as an imperial police officer. He's written several books, including Homage to Catalonia, which is a testament of his experience fighting against fascism in the Spanish Civil War. He's written a critique of inequality and the Road to Wigan Pier and another book about the urban poor, down and out in Paris and London. He's written about his experiences working in the empire in both his fiction and nonfiction writing. So there's so much about Orwell and so much that he has to offer as a journalist and as a social investigator. But I think the reason that people think about Orwell now, or the principal reason, is because the ward Orwellian has come back with a vengeance since the beginning of the first Trump administration, in the sense that Orwellian is in reference, really, to his writing in his final two books, animal farm in 1984, on disinformation and the manipulation of truth by those with political power. And now the term Orwellian may be Franz Kafka, and the term Kafkaesque is something that has similar valence. But there aren't that many people. Churchillian, I guess, would be another, whose names have become adjectives and who people have a ready association with what it means to call something Orwellian. But Orwell himself, as a journalist and as a novelist, had a comparatively short career spanning basically about 15 years. He dies young in January 1950, only a few months after the publication of his final novel, 1984. And he's really active as a writer for the 1930s and the early 1940s. But during that time, he puts out an amazing corpus of work that emphasizes the importance of integrity both in writing and in politics, the importance of speaking up and defending truth as you perceive it, of combating inequality, exploitation and abuses of power, and of really sort of championing the liberty of the individual against the tyranny of the State.
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A
You mentioned 1984 and Animal Farm. Those are, I think, unquestionably his most famous books. If anyone knows anything about Orwell, it's probably those two books. You argue that they don't do a great job of capturing the full breadth of Orwell's thought, but they are a good culmination of it. When you think about the totality of Orwell's thought, what springs to mind first? Who was he really? What did he stand for?
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B
I think first and foremost, he is a writer who stands for a defense of truth in political writing and political speech, and also just a sense of being true to your own convictions, both in your politics, but in the way you live your life. And you can see that in the critique of the Pig Society and Animal Farm, or of the society created by Ingsoc and Big Brother in 1984. These are societies that don't place a value on truth, where truth is manipulated in the interest of those in power, but in terms of a kind of a more positive defense of truth. I think you see that in other places in Orwell's writing more clearly, most particularly in his wartime essay the lion and the Unicorn, but also in a lot of his short form journalism. And I think one of the things that we tend to miss out on when we throw around the term Orwellian in the 21st century moment is we use Orwellian principally to talk about censorship and the shutting down of speech. It was used most famously in recent years by Josh Hawley And Donald Trump Jr. In the aftermath of the January 6 uprising, when they claimed that the views of Trump and his supporters were being canceled by a woke left who was misrepresenting what had happened on January 6, and that this was Orwellian cancellation of right wing voices. But Orwell was not just an advocate for free speech, even though he was that, but he was an advocate for truth in speech. He's someone who argues that you should be able to say that two plus two equals four. And he argues that against those who would say that two plus two equals five. So it's not about the right to say, say whatever you want, but about the right to speak truthfully.
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A
He said that one of his great strengths was, and now I'm quoting, his power of facing unpleasant facts. That's such an interesting phrase, the use of the word power, especially, as opposed to just saying, the ability to face unpleasant facts. What do you think he meant by that?
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B
Well, Orwell is writing in the context of the late 1930s, when the left in Britain and across the west feels this need to defend the Soviet Union, because the Soviet Union is the 1 socialist society in the west in that period. And Orwell was in the awkward position of someone who identified throughout his career as a socialist and on the political left, but who was very clear eyed about the abuses of Stalinist totalitarianism and was unwilling to kind of toe the general party line in Western Europe by socialists who were very defensive of Stalinist Russia. And so for him, this power of facing unpleasant facts is partially a willingness to stand up to most of his colleagues within the political left in Western Europe and call them out for. For their support of the Soviet Union and say that we can't be afraid that it will undermine the cause of socialism to talk about the abuses of power of this ostensibly socialist society in Russia and that if we are going to attain a better tomorrow, that we have to be honest about the mistakes and missteps on our own side, as well as critiquing capitalism and critiquing fascism. And he was a vocal critic of both. And I think that's where the power comes in, because you have to have a lot of political courage. And I mean, we can see the absence of that political courage today on both sides of the spectrum to actually stand up against your party and say, well, I broadly agree with the position of these people on this side of the political spectrum. I am going to call out the errors within my own party in addition to critiquing my opponents.
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A
Yeah, I just, I agree with so much of that. You know, for me, on some level, just the whole power facing thing is really just the willingness to notice when there's a conflict between what you want to be true and what's actually true, which is a very simple thing. I know, but the vast majority of us do not do this. Intellectuals rarely do this. But he did. And I think that is one of the many attributes about him that make him stand out.
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B
Yeah. And he actually, in 1984, he creates this whole idea of double speak and double think, which is really the ability to hold two mutually contradictory ideas in your head at the same time and to speak a language that encompasses that contradiction. And in some ways this is a criticism of his colleagues within the left who are, on the one hand, espousing a rhetoric of equality and liberty, and on the other hand, in the same breath, supporting the Soviet Union, which he sees as a brutal tyranny. And those two things are mutually contradictory. And yet many of the members of the left in his time are holding both ideas simultaneously. Right. And this becomes for him the model of doublethink.
- [12:17]
A
It's Pretty striking, too, and I guess revealing that Orwell was on the right side of every major ideological struggle of his century. Imperialism, colonialism, fascism, communism. He was always opposed to unjust power, regardless of who was wielding it and who was victimized by it. And that, to me, says so much about him. And I guess if you had to attribute that to anything, it's that really unusual commitment to intellectual honesty that we're talking about here. I just think that of all his virtues, that may be the greatest.
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B
Well, I might throw in one caveat there, Sean.
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A
Yeah, go for it.
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B
I do think. I do think that women in his time, and certainly women in our time, would insert an asterisk there and say that he wasn't on the right side when it came to the feminist struggle during his lifetime. That the movement of women, principally for equal access to the professions, equal pay, equal political rights, and an equal place within society more broadly and particularly. Also campaigns for women's bodily autonomy, which begin. There's a political movement for abortion rights and birth control. There's an organized abortion law reform association in the 1930s in Britain and similar movements across Europe that feminists are behind as a political movement. And they see reproductive rights as tied to women's rights to bodily autonomy, but also women's equal rights within the workplace and society more broadly. And that is a campaign with which Orwell is. Is not allied. And it is something that he has been called out on partially by me in the book, but by others in recent years. You have Anna Funder's recent book Wifedom, which is a real critique of his gender politics within his marriage, done through the lens of a kind of hypothetical reimagining of his wife's side of the story in their marriage. His wife, Eileen o' Shaughnessy Blair, who dies during the Second World War. Or you have Sandra Newman's Julia, which is a novel that was recently published, which is a reimagining of 1984, told through the perspective of Winston Smith's lover, Julia, which really puts her center stage and shows in doing so how unfully realized she is as a character in Orwell's first novel. And so I think he's on the right side of almost every fight in the early 20th century. But I'm not sure that could be said in terms of the feminist movement and gender politics.
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A
What's worth knowing about him on this front, because I didn't know anything about this, and I suspect a lot of other people don't as well.
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B
One of my good friends, when I was in Graduate school used to have this expression when we were gossiping about our love lives, our feelings, and she'd go, calling Dr. Freud. But you could certainly say, calling Dr. Freud about Orwell and do a deep dive into where he gets his gender politics. Because he is, you know, he's largely raised by a mother who is a feminist and who has friends and family members who are involved in the suffrage movement, the movement for the women's vote in the early 20th century. And he is raised in a largely female environment. His father, until he eventually retires, is away in India, while Orwell and his two sisters are being raised by his mother at home in England. And then he goes off to boarding school, and all of a sudden it's a much more homosexual, social, male environment from that point on. But his childhood is feminized. But he does have this view that the natural order is one in which the male is the dominant figure, in which the kind of household is set up around male authority. And you see that then reflected not only in his fiction writing and the way that women tend to be subservient to men within the context of his fiction, but even in Animal Farm, where all the characters are animals, the female animals are less intellectually serious, more frivolous, more likely to sort of sell out ideas for their own personal gratification, in the case of Molly the Show Pony. And so there is this sense that appears throughout his writing that patriarchal society is the natural order, which seems to come into conflict when you look at the actual history of his early childhood, but is nonetheless an unavoidable kind of current of his writing.
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A
One of the things I appreciate about the book is that it's not pure hagiography. I mean, he was always this kind of weird amalgam of a socially conservative, very English person, and also kind of radical democratic, socialist. And those things did kind of sit uneasy in him and in many different ways. And I guess I will say this right, I mean, he does, in his defense, seem to have educated himself out of a lot of prejudices. He does change his beliefs when experience contradicts him. There's an integrity there. I mean, I think he was one of the first true post colonialists, for example, you know, I mean, he. He clearly has his flaws and blind spots. You just pointed to a big one. But I. I still think it's. It's fair to say he was uncommonly virtuous in these ways in terms of his intellectual honesty and his ability to evolve and change when the evidence suggested it.
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B
Yes, that is one of the things that I highlight in the book, that he has a kind of protean intellect. He's not rigid in his ideas, and if they do need a course correction, he's willing to make that course correction. I'm not sure that I would go so far as to call him the first post colonial figure, but he's an early advocate for decolonization and an early and vocal critic of Britain's role in its empire. Though I think what is notable is that when he looks at and when he critiques the British Empire, which I think he does most poignantly in his short essay Shooting an Elephant, which is an ostensibly autobiographical recollection of his experience as a young police officer in Burma, feeling compelled to shoot an elephant so that he doesn't lose face in front of the native population, even though he knows in his mind and his heart that it's the wrong thing to do, that the elephant doesn't pose a danger to the community, and that killing it will cause a significant economic loss to its owner and a sort of social harm to the community. And this essay is a real critique of the ways that empire corrupts those who govern as much as those who are governed. But throughout the story and throughout much of Orwell's writing on empire, the focus is really on those who govern as opposed to on those who are governed. They're the fully realized characters who are really damaged by their participation in empire. And the argument he's making is really that the British need to get out of empire because their participation in it is corrupting them and making them worse people and kind of impinging upon their identity as freeborn Englishmen by making them kind of complicit in this culture of tyranny and censorship and just general badness.
- [19:46]
A
All these blind spots notwithstanding, what did he actually want to see in the world? I mean, everybody knows for the most part that he was anti totalitarianism, but he was a committed democratic socialist. Did he ever really explain what he meant by socialism? What was his actual political project?
- [20:09]
B
Well, I talk about this in the end of the book in a chapter on his kind of blueprint for revolution. So this is written early in the war, in 1941, during the Blitz, when London and other industrial and port cities around Britain are being continuously bombed. And there is a real sense that Britain might not be able to hold out and might not be able to win the war. And Orwell is effectively making the argument that British society needs to change, needs to revolutionize itself in order to be able to successfully defeat Hitler. And the ways in which he argues that Britain needs to revolutionize itself are effectively to achieve a greater equality that's both economic and social. So he argues for a limitation of incomes so that you don't have wealth disparities that are greater than 10 to 1. And so he's arguing for doing away with the vast income inequalities that characterize not only Britain, but the United States and much of the west in the early 20th century, but also to break down those sort of more insidious social inequalities that really tore apart, as he saw it, British society. So class snobberies, a sense that somehow certain people were just people you could never identify with and never have a solidaristic kind of joint feeling with because of their different accents, their different way of dress, their different smell. Orwell is obsessed with smell. And he has one quote that he got a lot of flack for at the time and sense in the Road to Wigan Pier, where he says that upper class children like himself, or as he defines himself, lower upper middle class children, are taught from early childhood that the working classes smell. And he says that if there ever is to be true social inequality, that those ideas have to be unlearned and that they have to no longer be taught. And part of the way that he hopes that will be achieved is through equality in education, which he puts a real emphasis on. He himself is privately educated, and in fact he went to Eton, which is the poshest of the private schools in England, but he believes that private school should be a abolished because he thinks that social equality is best achieved through universal state education.
- [22:28]
A
What would you say is the prime value of reading Orwell today? What makes this moment Orwellian and how are people misusing that term? Because one of the things you say very early on in the book is that, yeah, we're living in an Orwellian moment, but not in the sense that most people think we are. So maybe we can get a proper definition of Orwellian and then say a bit about what makes this moment Orwellian and how people are getting it wrong or right, as the case may be.
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B
So I think the things that really concerned Orwell and that for me, characterize Orwellian in terms of his writing in his final two novels, are the accretion of state power and the accretion of media power, so that you have one controlling narrative and little space for dissenting voices within a political conversation. The role of surveillance and the way in which people are constantly being watched and judged and Also the importance of the way that he emphasizes disinformation and the manipulation of truth as a vehicle of those who want to seize power and hold power illegitimately. And I think all of those things in different ways are very apparent in our 21st century moment. We are being constantly surveilled, but outside of TikTok or mainland China, it's principally not a state that is surveilling us so much as large private corporations. And the ends to which they might be putting that data that they're collecting are a broader conversation. So I think in that sense, we're being watched. And this is the Orwell of the giant eye that you often see on posters or book covers or T shirts. But we're also living in an age where you do have a lack of space for dialogue and you do have kind of one dominating, controlling voice for a lot of people. And for some, like in Putin's Russia or in Xi's China, that's through active state censorship. But for other people in the democratic west, it's through the kind of funneling of the way that people consume information and these kind of information vacuums where you can live in an ostensibly free society but never hear a genuine exchange of opinion and never hear dissenting voices. And Orwell was a real critic of that way of living. Right? He believed in the importance of truth, but he also believed and the importance of a free dialogue and exchange of ideas. And I think in rereading Orwell now, that's what really stands out to me, is that we are living in a moment, I think, where the importance of a free political dialogue and of reaching truth through a free exchange of ideas is in peril.
- [25:46]
A
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C
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- [29:41]
A
One of Orwell's enduring obsessions was the uses and abuses of language. Why was he so intensely concerned about that?
- [29:54]
B
I think part of it is he was a little boy who wanted to be a writer. I've been in his archives at the British Library in the University College London, and the UCL Archive has his notebooks from when he's a young boy, in his first attempts at story writing. So he understood reality through the medium of the spoken and particularly the written word. He also wrote poetry. But I think the other reason that language seems so integral for his understanding of the world was his time spent in Burma when he was a young man. So he doesn't go on to college, to university after school. He leaves School at 18 and he immediately signs up to serve in the Indian Police Service. So he's a very young man when he goes to Burma and the ips, and there he feels constantly stifled, like you can never speak your mind. That though for white men and women the censorship is entirely informal, that effectively he is more strictly censored than Winston Smith in 1984, because he has to be what the British would call a Paka Sahib, like a sort of upstanding gentleman. And that means to adhere to a whole bunch of. To effectively to group think. And much of that groupthink is to him abhorrent, is in defiance of the actual reality as he experiences it around him. But there's no real scope for speaking his mind. And so I think his critique of censorship really emerges and this comes through in his first novel about his time in Burma, Burmese Days of that experience of empire.
- [31:30]
A
I think one thing that always stood out to me is how much he understood that words are not just words. Words both reflect and structure thought. The words we use actively shape our understanding of the world. And words can either illuminate or obscure, and you can always tell which end is being pursued by the nature of the language itself. I mean, this is why he was so sensitive to the role of euphemisms in our political language. What was his warning about euphemisms?
- [32:07]
B
I think the difficulty with euphemism as he sees it is that it Elijah truth, that it allows you to kind of paper over ugly Realities. Right. So if, for example, when you talk about illegal immigrants as a catch all phrase, that kind of allies the actual lived experience of a lot of the people who risk their lives to cross the border and the ways in which many of them are victims, many of them are under threat, and kind of gives this sense of menace to an entire group through this term that is meant to obscure as much as it categorizes or clarifies. And I think, you know, other ways in which, in addition to euphemism, he's very conscious of the power of language is the narrowing of acceptable political language. You know, the don't say gay law that Governor DeSantis puts in place in Florida, which is. Or sort of saying that we can't talk about systemic racism within certain school curriculum. That if you can't talk about ideas, they lose their political power if they're unable to be articulated. And in the end of 1984, Orwell actually has this amazing appendix which actually his early US editors wanted to excise. And he said the book can't be published without it. This is, to my mind, integral. But it's kind of a short history of Newspeak, which is the language of Ingsoc in 1984, and how it works to reduce language and by reducing language, to reduce the acceptable range of political ideas that can be articulated and therefore political ideas that could be held. Because he recognizes that without the ability to articulate, the ideas lose their power.
- [33:55]
A
That's right. And really, if you think about it, what are euphemisms in politics? They're just pretty words for ugly things. Enhanced interrogation, collateral damage. I mean, to get torture called enhanced interrogation is to have already done most of the work to justify it, to get people to think of it as not torture. You know, to get the murder of innocent people called collateral damage is to have already done most of the work to excuse it. These are the sorts of affronts that he is trying to call our attention to. Right?
- [34:31]
B
Yeah. He has several examples in his writing from his own time, and many of them are similar, particularly to this idea of collateral damage. But he talks about what it means to pacify an unruly population, which is effectively to use massive aerial bombardment and other techniques to silence people by blowing them to bits, by. But using the term pacifying gives an entirely different spin to the actions of colonial or other totalitarian regimes.
- [35:02]
A
Goes down smoother than murder and torture.
- [35:04]
B
Yeah. And so he cottons onto that pretty early on and is really clear about the way that language can hide as Much as it can reveal. And I think one of the great strengths of his writing is the way that he insists on clarity in written and spoken English. And so his writing is actually. I mean, in some ways it's blissfully easy to read because it's. He doesn't like to use the passive tense. He doesn't use too many adjectives. Right. It's very clear journalistic writing.
- [35:37]
A
No, that's such a great point. Right. I mean, like Orwell, he wasn't really a great writer by historical standards. I don't think anyone places him in the first tier of prose stylist, you know, but he was still so monumental. He was no Proust. Yeah, right. But he was so influential, maybe more influential than someone like that. And I think I got this from your book. It was a quote from Lionel Trilling, who once said of Orwell, if we ask what he stands for, what he was a figure of, it's the virtue of not being a genius. And that says so much. I mean, what you see often with intellectuals is a lot of rhetorical gymnastics and a. A near Herculean capacity to twist and distort reality so that it fits your ideological priors. But that's not Orwell at all. That's what he sort of stood against. And there was that commitment to seeing the world clearly and describing it simply, which, again, sounds easy, but it is rare.
- [36:35]
B
Yeah. And it's. I mean, one of his great and least read essays, Inside the Whale, which includes an essay in tribute to Henry Miller, who he very much admired as a novelist. But part of the reason that he admired him is he thought he was a clear, plain descriptor of the world as he lived in and experienced it. And that was what Orwell really aimed to be. Not someone who engaged in verbal gymnastics, as you say, not the Simone Biles of writing, but instead the Henry Miller.
- [37:06]
A
All right, 10 points for you, Luke.
- [37:08]
B
And the Olympics.
- [37:09]
A
Olympics.
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B
Reference.
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A
Well, I mean, to that point about clarity. It's that fact which makes the reality of his legacy being so weirdly shapeless and malleable, so mystifying. Right. I mean, he did write so clearly and so simply, and yet he has been so effortlessly appropriated by the left and the right. I mean, why do you think he became such a two dimensional caricature in that way?
- [37:38]
B
I think in some ways that's the risk of dying young. Right. So he's born in 1903, he dies in 1950, he's 46 years old. I say this as someone who's 45 and thinks that 46 is extremely young. When he passes away, he dies, really, before the Cold War heats up. Though he might have been the first person to use the term the Cold War in writing, actually. Really in an essay, Us and the Atom Bomb, that, that he writes shortly before his death. But he passes away before a lot of the political changes that have defined the modern moment.
- [38:16]
A
It is sort of the irony of ironies that so many people using the term Orwellian are themselves thoroughly Orwellian, which is the most Orwellian thing ever, I guess. But here we are.
- [38:31]
B
Layers and layers of Orwellian layers.
- [38:32]
A
So many layers. You know, one thing that's always interested me is how well he seemed to understand totalitarian societies without having lived in one himself. That is pretty rare, almost unheard of. How do you think he was able to do that, to have that kind of insight into the totalitarian world and psyche? Because you hear this from a lot of people who were, say, behind the Iron Curtain, who read his books and really felt like he understood their world better than anyone else they had read.
- [39:04]
B
Yes. And his experience of living in a totalitarian society is not non existent, it's just extremely brief. And he had the luxury of a comparatively easy means of escape in that. Orwell volunteered to fight against Franco's forces in the Spanish Civil war in early 1937. And he goes over to fight in Spain without really understanding much about the conflict. For him, what he's doing is fighting fascism. And he ends up enlisting with this small splinter group called the pum, which was a Marxist party allied with the Independent Labour Party in Britain. And it's really through connections from a friend that he ends up fighting alongside them. But he becomes close with his comrades in the POOM and they risk their lives fighting against Fanko's forces. Only then for the socialist led republican government, which is increasingly beholden to Stalin's Russia, because no one else is willing to sell arms or to help fund them or to give them any kind of support, material or diplomatic, in this conflict in 1937. So Soviet Russia comes in to fill that vacuum and, and gains a lot of power over the republican government as a consequence. And they use that not only to prosecute the war against Franco, but also to start an internal battle against their political enemies within Spain. And those include the independent Marxist socialists with whom Orwell is affiliated. So Orwell all of a sudden discovers firsthand what it's like to have your words turned against you, to be falsely accused of being an enemy of the very people who you're fighting alongside to see his friends imprisoned, in some cases executed, and to have to flee for your life. And ultimately he and his wife Eileen, who is with him in Barcelona, end up escaping through the Pyrenees by the skin of their teeth before they're arrested by the Republican government on orders from Russia. And so he does know, though he never lives in Eastern Europe and he never travels behind what becomes the Iron Curtain, he does have this experience of what it's like to fall victim to a totalitarian persecution and one that is manipulating truth and using language against him. He's referred to as a Trotskyist enemy of the people, as are his friends and colleagues in the poom. And it's really that experience in Spain, I think, that informs his deep rooted anti Stalinism that remains with him for the rest of his life. Sam.
- [42:22]
A
Support for the Gray Area comes from Bombas. The kids are back in school, vacations are over, and we're entering into the fourth fiscal quarter, the cozy quarter, which means it's time to slide into some bombas. They have all the comfy socks, slippers, T shirts and underwear you're going to need this fall. It's always underwear season for me, so I tried Bombas myself and I'm just telling you the truth. I have been on the Bombas sock and underwear train for a long time now. They hooked me up. I tried them. They're my favorites because they're more comfortable than the other brands I've tried and I'm just going to keep rocking them until I get out of the sock and underwear business Anyway, for every item you purchase, bombastonates to someone in need. Plus they're available for international shipping to more than 200 countries. Even Wallace and Futuna, in case you're already thinking about holiday gifts for that cousin in Matau Utu. You can go to bombas.com gray area and use code gray area for 20% off your first purchase. That's b.com gray area code gray Area at checkout. Support for the gray area comes from DeleteMe. DeleteMe can make it easy, quick and safe to remove your personal data online at a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everyone vulnerable. You simply sign up and tell Deleteme what personal information you want removed. Then their team of experts handles the rest. And it's not just a one time cleanup. Deleteme continuously monitors the web and removes your personal personal data whenever it reappears. Our colleague Claire White has used Delete Me and here's what she thinks. Delete Me is scrubbing my data, making sure that I'm safer.
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B
It's not just your current information, it's your previous information, like old addresses and old emails that you might not even look at anymore but still probably contain.
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A
Sensitive information so you don't want someone getting into them. You can take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for Delete Me now at a special discount for our listeners. Get 20% off your Delete Me plan when you go to JoinDeleteMe.com Vox and use promo code vox at checkout. The only way to get 20% off is to go to JoinDeleteMe.com Vox and enter code Vox at checkout. That's JoinDeleteMe.com Vox code today, support for the Gray Area comes from Green Light. As your kids get older, you may enjoy that conversations have progressed from do you see the doggy? To dogs are part of the canine family and are in fact a direct descendant of the gray wolf. But one conversation you may not be looking forward to is the conversation about money. That's where Greenlight can help. Greenlight is a debit card and money app made for families. Parents can send money to their kids and keep an eye on kids spending and saving while kids and teens build money, confidence and and lifelong financial literacy skills. The Greenlight app also includes a chores feature where you can set up one time or recurring chores customized to your family's needs and reward kids with allowance for a job well done. I have a colleague here at Vox who uses Greenlight with his sons. He's very knowledgeable about financial issues and very picky about the financial products he uses. And he loves Greenlight. You don't have to wait to teach your kids real world money skills. You can start your risk free Greenlight trial today@greenlight.com gray area that's greenlight.com gray area to get started. Greenlight.com gray area I am clearly an Orwell admirer, have made no attempts to hide that. So let me interrupt all of this praising here to ask something a little different. Which is what do you think he got most wrong? What of all his insights? What doesn't stand the test of time for you?
- [46:36]
B
I think there are the things that he realized he got wrong before he passed away. And one of those is this idea that in order for Britain to win the war against Nazism that it would have to reform itself internally. And that doesn't really happen. A Labor government is elected with a majority for the first time in 1945. And there are significant social changes that come along with that, as there are across Western Europe and even to a lesser degree, in the United States. But there is no real effective revolution, and the war is won without that. And he recognized his own error. And I think some of his political pessimism in his later years is the result of the kind of thwarting of that feeling of optimism that he had about the potential for social change in the early years of the war. But I think more fundamentally from our 21st century perspective is the issue that I brought up earlier about kind of surveillance and state power, which, if you are living in Russia or in Communist China right now or in other regimes, is a very serious issue. But if you're living in the west, your surveillance is not coming from the state for the most part, it's coming from private corporations. And I think he just didn't foresee the role that large mega corporations would play in controlling our access to information and controlling information about us in the 21st century. And I think that's partly because he was a real technophobe. And it comes through in a lot of his writing. He really sees technology as an enemy of culture and is someone who thinks that people should work the land and read books as opposed to play with mechanical blocks. And so I think he just had a blind spot to the potential role of private corporations in kind of technological advances and the impact that they could have on society. And there's this huge irony that in 1984, Apple actually uses Orel and a kind of Big Brother. Advertisement.
- [48:39]
A
Amazing. On January 24, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh, and you'll see why 1984 won't be like 19.
- [48:50]
B
There are so many reasons why this ad is problematic. One, there's a feminine heroine, and as I've talked about, he doesn't really see women as the ones who have agency and power to revolutionize anything. But he also just was sufficiently technophobic that he would have wanted nothing to do with home computing. I think we can say with some.
- [49:07]
A
Certainty that is so helpful. I've never heard him described as a technophobe, but it actually really helps understand why he missed what he missed. I mean, my view has always been, and this is not unique to me, that Orwell really diagnosed the 20th century, but he didn't anticipate the 21st century very well. If you want to understand the 21st century, you don't read 1984. You read algeous Huxley's Brave New World. Of course, Huxley was Also a very famous English writer and novelist in the 20th century, wrote a lot of dystopian literature. And there's a famous passage from Neil Postman's book, amusing ourselves to death. I just want to read, actually, if you don't mind, because it sums this up better than I ever could, and I just want to get your thoughts. He says what George Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Aldous Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture. That's a hell of a passage. There's a lot going on there. It seems absolutely right to me. Does it seem right to you?
- [50:46]
B
Well, I think one of the things that really, if you're comparing Huxley and Orwell, stands out to me is that Huxley has this idea that the pleasure principle actually can be something malign, right? That we could be kind of stupefied into complacency and that we then lose our will to revolt because the opiates of the masses, effectively, he has a much more sophisticated bread and circuses view of how people can be dominated and controlled. But Orwell. The way in which people are dominated and controlled in Orwell is not through pleasure, but through pain. I mean, 1984 is in many ways a very graphic tale of someone's torture and eventual breakdown. And so for Orwell, I think the mechanisms of control are about violence. And both in violence in terms of censorship and control of the mind, but also just a kind of a brutal austerity. You see, Boxer, the Horse and Animal Farm worked to death. Right. I think that's a reflection partially of the poverty that he experiences as a social investigator, riding down and out in Paris, London and the Road to Wigan Pierre, and the poverty that he sees in Empire. He thinks that control is not through kind of pacifying people in such a way that they don't have the will to revolt, but about violently repressing them in such a way that they don't have the ability to revolt. And I think maybe it is true that complacency is more of a threat in the 21st century as rising standards of living kind of take away people's political edge, though certainly there are an awful lot of people being still brutally and violently repressed into conformity in our current moment as well. So I guess there's a space for both dystopias in 2024.
- [52:37]
A
What would you say is Orwell's most relevant lesson for the 21st century?
- [52:45]
B
I think the lesson that those of us in the west could do best to heed is this idea that people have the right and need to defend the right to say that two plus two equals four, but that that's as much a responsibility as a right. Being given the right to speak your truth is also an obligation to have a truth to speak. You know, it's not a right to say that two plus two equals five. It's a right to articulate truth in the space of lies and disinformation and to speak out against lies and disinformation. And that was something that Orwell was committed to throughout his own career in his journalistic writing and in his personal politics. And I think if he does have a legacy for the 21st century, it's that, as you say, that is a. You know, it's a power. A power of facing unpleasant facts and a power of standing up for truth in a time of disinformation and doublethink. And that is his most important legacy.
- [53:46]
A
And look, maybe Huxley was the prophet of the 21st century, but I will say this about Orwell. He warned pretty presciently about the temptations of conformism and how easily people, especially intellectuals, give themselves over to power and whatever ideas are fashionable. If you don't see evidence of that all around us, I'm not sure I can help. But it's there.
- [54:17]
B
Sadly true. Well, that's a grim note to end on, though.
- [54:22]
A
I wouldn't do that. What do you think is Orwell's most essential piece of writing? Setting aside 1984, an animal farm, if someone could only consume one work of his to get the gist of it, what would it be?
- [54:39]
B
The one work of his that I use the most in the book, which clearly is my sort of touchstone for understanding Orwell, is the Road to Wigan Pier, where he is really, I think, very articulate about the mechanisms of social inequality and the ways that social inequality has a very corrosive impact on kind of, you know, both people at the top and the bottom of the spectrum. But. But I think my personal favorite piece of Orwell's writing, other than those two novels, is Politics in The English Language, which is one of his longer essays, and it is this one where he picks up on a lot of the themes we've talked about today, about the use of euphemism and kind of obscuring language, about the importance of clear speech and the avoidance of overly flowery but intentionally obfuscatory writing and political speech. So I think that's an excellent essay which I really recommend anyone who hasn't to get your hands on.
- [55:37]
A
I think he was really, truly, deeply right that in the end it doesn't matter what you think, it matters how you think. And if your manner of thinking is honest and clear, then you will land on the side of freedom and dignity. And if it isn't, you won't. And I just think that's true.
- [55:57]
B
Well, I would tend to agree. So we can see why we both are great admirers of George Orwell.
- [56:04]
A
Laura Beers, this is a pleasure. Thanks so much for being on the show.
- [56:08]
B
Thanks a lot.
- [56:09]
A
The book is called Orwell's Ghosts. All right. I hope you enjoyed that conversation about Orwell. I know I did. As always, though, let us know what you think of the episode. You can drop us a line at the gray area@box.com and if you don't have time for that, you can always just rate and review the pod. That stuff really helps us. This episode was produced by Travis Larchuk, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Patrick Boyd Fact Checked by Melissa Hirsch and Alex Overington wrote our theme music. New episodes of the Gray Area drop on Mondays. Listen and subscribe. This show is part of Vox. Support Vox's journalism by joining our membership program today. Go to Vox.commembers to sign up.