Guest post: Orwell helped make anti-intellectualism respectable

Oct 19th, 2023 | By
Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Originally a comment by Mostly Cloudy on Decency and Julia.

Der Durchwanderer @41

If we are to be judged by how our words might one day be used by the spiritual descendents of our current political enemies, then none of us should write anything at all, because that is a game none can hope to win. Unless you are fanatically certain that history does indeed have a singular arc and that you will somehow always land on the correct side of it forevermore, that is.

You have a point there. We know that Martin Luther King, for instance, would not have approved of the politics of Rand Paul, and would be dismayed to hear Paul appropriating his words.

I suppose my main issue with George Orwell is that he helped make anti-intellectualism respectable in British society.

Orwell’s status as *the* archetypal literary defender of democratic society against totalitarianism meant that the numerous attacks on intellectuals in Orwell’s work gained a special status.

And since anti-intellectualism in British society has been mainly, since the Thatcher era, associated with the political right, there’s a similarity between Orwell’s comments on intellectuals as “disloyal”, deracinated, and treacherous, and those of later figures like Thatcher and Farage.

This might also explain why “The Sun” was able to recruit Orwell into an editorial describing people opposed to Thatcher’s government as people its readers needed to be “vigilant” against.

And conservatives like William F. Buckley, Norman Podhoretz and Michael Medved also shared the anti-intellectual views of their British counterparts. Hence why they too were able to use lengthy quotes from George Orwell’s work in their attacks on the political left.

Those are the implications I am making- Orwell’s strong dislike of intellectuals make him a uniquely attractive writer for the modern-day political right.

And this might answer the question I raised earlier, that puzzled my teenage self. *Why* is this revolutionary socialist writer always being quoted, so often by defenders of tradition and capitalism?

Is it because of his undeniable literary merit? Maybe.

Is it because his plain style of writing makes it easy for other writers to understand and quote his work? Maybe.

Or is it because Orwell’s dislike of intellectuals (who, by definition, aren’t happy with the status quo) makes him uniquely attractive to these defenders of tradition and capitalism?

If you want to read someone who’s written about this aspect of George Orwell’s work much better than I could, read the chapter on George Orwell in Stefan Collini’s excellent book “Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain.”

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