The Liberalism of George Orwell

In a preceding post, The Liberalism of Martin Luther King, I opened with

Charles K. Rowley: In 1993, in his book, Post-Liberalism, [John] Gray poked around among the rubble of classical liberal philosophy to determine what, if anything was left. He concluded that none of the four constitutive elements of doctrinal liberalism — universalism, individualism, egalitarianism and meliorism (or human flourishing) — could survive the ordeal by value pluralism and that liberalism, as a political philosophy, therefore was dead. www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_01_1_rowley.pdf

MLK's sayings map rather well to “universalism, individualism, egalitarianism and meliorism.” Orwell was somewhat different. As a member of the academic left remarked, “rationalism is usually in the list.” Orwell, simply by hewing closely to honesty in observation, integrity in thought, and moral courage in presentation, became the Twentieth Century's most representative exemplar of liberal reason: fidelity to reality in service to the public good.

In “The Prevention of Literature” Orwell wrote, “Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth.” Orwell represents the aspect of enlightenment liberalism which leverages humanity's working material, objective reality*, through faithful correspondence of language to what the language purports to be about. Christopher Hitchens wrote:

One cannot help but be struck by the degree to which [Orwell] became, in Henry James’s words, one of those upon whom nothing was lost. By declining to lie, even as far as possible to himself, and by his determination to seek elusive but verifiable truth, he showed how much can be accomplished by an individual who unites the qualities of intellectual honesty and moral courage. (Emphasis added)

As he observed, “To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.”

Orwell worked out what this sort of cognitive integrity means (illustrating, along the way, the darker side of collectivist solidarity):

It is the peculiarity of our age that the rebels against the existing order, at any rate the most numerous and characteristic of them, are also rebelling against the idea of individual integrity. ‘Daring to stand alone’ is ideologically criminal as well as practically dangerous. ... Here I am not trying to deal with the familiar claim that freedom is an illusion, or with the claim that there is more freedom in totalitarian countries than in democratic ones, but with the much more tenable and dangerous proposition that freedom is undesirable and that intellectual honesty is a form of anti-social selfishness. - “The Prevention of Literature”

Orwell liberalism, which amounts to nothing less than a new way of being, seems deceptively simple. Think about what you see (in front of your nose) until you get past the social tyranny of preconceptions. Have the moral courage to speak plainly about what you saw (because, it being unorthodox, it will be denounced as “anti-social selfishness.” This modern, new human type, is denied the comfort of euphemism. Denied the Noble Lie. Required to forge forward in the face of powerful taboo:

The imaginative writer is unfree when he has to falsify his subjective feelings, which from his point of view are facts. He may distort and caricature reality in order to make his meaning clearer, but he cannot misrepresent the scenery of his own mind; he cannot say with any conviction that he likes what he dislikes, or believes what he disbelieves. If he is forced to do so, the only result is that his creative faculties will dry up. ... Even a single taboo can have an all-round crippling effect upon the mind, because there is always the danger that any thought which is freely followed up may lead to the forbidden thought.
...
If one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox. - “The Prevention of Literature”

Historian Fritz Stern: “Extremists of the right and the left have long attacked liberalism as their greatest enemy.” - The Liberal Founding


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(*) Note two of the Founders' emphasis on evidence and reason: “The Eighteenth Century, notwithstanding all its errors and vices, has been, of all that are past, the most honorable to human nature. Knowledge and virtues were increased and diffused, arts, sciences useful to men, ameliorating their condition, were improved, more than in any former equal period. - John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, 1815”