The Orwellian political ghost

This Week’s Winner

Percival Byron S. Bueser, 17, is a BS nursing student from Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng Maynila. He describes himself as “quite a loner: I belong to no club or organization currently. My extra-curriculars include math contests, in which I have won more than lost.” He reads mostly late 19th-century and early 20th-century classics. He admires Orwell, Ibsen, Brecht, Beckett, Thoreau, Kafka, Lewis (Sinclair) and Shaw (George Bernard).

MANILA, Philippines - What are the different motives for writing? George Orwell lists down four of his motives: 1) sheer egoism, 2) aesthetic enthusiasm, 3) historical impulse and 4) political purpose.

Of these four, Orwell claims that the political purpose is by far the most powerful, even going as far to say that “it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.”

No matter how much I want to analyze and praise 1984 and Animal Farm, his two most remembered works, this unpopular British writer’s rustic, simple life traces much more of his influences that led to his induction into the political arena. He was no politician, although in the early years of his maturity he served as police chief for the Imperial Police in Burma, and that compassed a political experience of which he had had enough after some time.

Eric Blair (Orwell’s real name) was born in Bengal in 1903. The little Eric was poor, he had known hunger early on, but he did well enough to get a scholarship at Eton, a leading college preparatory school. But he instead followed his father into the civil service, where afterwards he obtained his police desk job.

But after five years Blair flung away his job, even recalling once, “For at that time I had already made up my mind that imperialism is an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it the better.”

He lived a life of abject poverty for some time, thus making him more sympathetic to the laborers he met and this experience (detailed in Down and Out in Paris and London) may have served as the first fulcrum that would later drive his mind, his writing and his colorful prejudices and opinions.

The second fulcrum, one whose imprint on Orwell’s mind was more intense and forceful than the first, was the Spanish Civil War, where he enlisted against the dictatorial government of Franco. Here he commented: “We were lucky to get out of here alive”; a gunshot to the chest nearly killed him. At that time the Stalin totalitarian regime was already in place; Hitler and the Nazis were secure in their posts, and the ingredients for World War II were brewing and nearly cooked. Marcos, meanwhile, in a poignant, flashy remembrance, would have been studying for the bar exams at this time, or excelling at law school, or warring with the Japanese.

Orwell wrote frequently about totalitarian government. Although he did not publish any comprehensive treatise on the rights of man like Locke and Paine, he madly bludgeoned away at “unfreedom” with keen precision and glassy language (“Good prose is like a windowpane”) along with all the bugaboos and the fallacies of his era.

Animal Farm and 1984 contained the most devastating assaults on dictatorship written in the modern age. Read every page of it, and your faith in some authority will falter into one-eighth of its previous assigned value.

On these kinds of government, Orwell wrote in another essay:

Books would be planned in their broad lines by bureaucrats, and would pass through so many hands that when finished they would be no more an individual product than a Ford car at the end of the assembly line… anything so produced would be rubbish; to buy anything that was not rubbish would endanger the structure of the State.

And so in order to ward off hypocrisy and the mundane craze for political fads that are largely discredited today, together with the artificial processes of manufacturing idealisms and warping their ferocious writers, Orwell put truth and intelligence in their place. He advocated freedom of speech, a right we take for granted today without researching its origins and developments. It is also implicit in Orwell’s writings that lack of intelligence is a sin. But anyone who conceals his lack of intelligence by some ingenious trick by joining a party or writing a cloudy, inflated tract that will mask his impotence of mind is doing a worse, unforgivable Orwellian sin. His hands are hot for those who “make lies sound truthful and respectable, and… give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Consciously or unconsciously, this age is still a political age. All ages probably are. Next to the ballot box, the television set is the altar of politics. Every night on the evening news, unless it’s about a rape or murder, one watches and hears of government agendas. And we can’t help thinking that it is all nonsense and sham sketched to make an ineffectual Senate and Congress look a little more respectable than it really is.

We can’t help thinking about it. All of us probably pass through an anarchistic stage — probably around my age, 17 to 20, while others persist through a lifetime — that harbors a distrust of an untrustworthy political engine.

As Orwell bitterly invected, “Politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.”

It is this mask of political mist that, I believe, prevents us from using our intelligence efficiently. One agrees to or opposes a proposal, not because he has examined it at length and formulated his own opinion, but because it is fed to him by some enterprising propagandist who wants him to offer assent to a political view, maybe to cadge votes for his party. Reading Orwell gives me a liberating effect from the everyday, arduous, tiring acceptances of dried-up points of view into the searchlight of analysis. He preached self-reliance of the intellect; the right to think and formulate principles without leave from any other group or individual.

Orwell’s literature revitalized me into appreciating literature in general again and more. His prose is as clean as a waxed floor. He writes the clearest English among the writers I admire (perhaps overshadowing Hemingway), with clarity that is the product of honesty and solidness of purpose that enables him to look with a rifle’s eye at the very matter he has to attack.

Looking back at my own biography, I realized that at some point in my grade school career, reading and writing prose went into a hiatus. This could be ascribed less to a lack of understanding, which I have since remedied, and more to the politically charged opinions continually aired on TV or radio that atrophied my sense of beauty; and much more to the public who “do not care about the matter one way or another” but whose influence is large.

As for livelihood and artistry, Orwell remarked, “It is true that literary prostitutes… are paid huge sums of money, but the thing which is of any value to the writer as such — his freedom of expression — is taken away from him.” Of one book reviewer who reviews books the way a sharpener sharpens pencils: “It not only involves praising trash… but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feelings whatever.”

It is this rush for money, an impulse very difficult to contain, that may bring to ruin my rediscovered intellectual inspirations and that which I ought to warn and watch out for in some future time.

Today, he is remembered as an exemplar, but in his century Orwell stood alone as a nondescript, laidback contributor to the literature of his time, a man of intense bile and prejudices, a critic for and against. He faithfully and vividly reported the presence of tanks, guns and dishonesty, with sometimes turbulent but always-orderly bravado. From him, I would do well to declare intelligence a virtue. And I would also do well to find out seriously my motives for writing today, a productive hobby I divorced myself from many years ago.