AGAINST CORRUPTION

To See Truly Through a Glass Darkly: C. S. Lewis, George Orwell, and the Corruption of Language (David Mills, July/August 1998, Touchstone)

Orwell's most famous short work on the corruption of language is his essay Politics and the English Language, published in 1946 and now a standard in anthologies on writing. "The decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes," he began, but each makes the other worse. "A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks." This applies to the English language. Our language "becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts."

In such English, the images are always stale and the language always imprecise. "This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing." (He would have included, had he cared about the subject, religious writing as well.)

As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a pre-fabricated henhouse.

The words you need are to hand, and these "ready-made phrases . . . will construct your sentences for you - even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent - and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself." What he called "orthodoxy," by which he meant unthinkingly following the party line, whatever party you belonged to, "demands a vague and inflated language and particularly the use of stale and unrevealing metaphors." Orthodoxy requires such a style because it does not want people to see clearly, because if they saw clearly, they might dissent.

They might dissent because "political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible." Orwell cited as examples the ways Western intellectuals excused the Soviet atrocities. "Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements." [...]

Politics and the English Language is a great and, given the status of the people he was attacking, courageous essay. Orwell was right as far as he went, but he did not go far enough, because he was not a Christian. He recognized good and evil but could not relate them to any transcendent order, and so could offer only a set of techniques to oppose people who held other views of good and evil. He objected to their calling the murder of political opponents "the elimination of unreliable elements," but had no reason to condemn those who were eliminating people they sincerely believed to be unreliable elements and thus could not condemn them for using those words to describe what they were doing.

Lewis had argued many of the same points before Orwell's essay appeared, most famously in The Abolition of Man (1943) and That Hideous Strength (1945). The crucial difference in their arguments is that Orwell was a materialist and Lewis a Christian. As a Christian, Lewis saw the universe in a greater and a clearer light, and therefore saw more clearly the use of language in a fallen world. (This is an offensive claim, perhaps, but as Lewis wrote, "Christianity claims to give an account of facts - to tell you what the real universe is like," and if Christianity is true, "it is quite impossible that those who know this truth and those who don't should be equally well equipped for leading a good life."

It was against the degradation of language into an instrument of control that he fought. "Language is an instrument for communication," he wrote in a later work, Studies in Words. "The language which can with the greatest ease make the finest and most numerous distinctions of meaning is the best. It is better to have like and love than to have aimer for both." He fought against language in which proper distinctions were not made and false distinctions employed. He wished us to "become aware of what we are doing when we speak, of the ancient, fragile, and (well used) immensely potent instruments that words are." He meant by "well used," skillfully used - because words are immensely potent instruments for evil as well as for good.

In The Abolition of Man, he argued that the danger to our language comes not first from political and economic causes but from a philosophical error, the rejection of the Tao, the fundamental and necessary, though unprovable, beliefs about right and wrong accepted by all cultures in all times. Among English artists, intellectuals, and political leaders as much as among as the Nazis they were fighting (Lewis was writing in 1943), "Traditional values are to be 'de-bunked' and mankind to be cut into some fresh shape. . . . The belief that we can invent 'ideologies' at pleasure, and the consequent treatment of mankind as mere specimens, preparations, begins to affect our very language. Once we killed bad men; now we liquidate unsocial elements. Virtue has become integration and diligence dynamism."

The process of corruption is hidden "by the use of the abstraction 'man'," he continued. The Tao teaches us what it is to be human, but reject the Tao and individual men are reduced to examples of "a mere abstract universal" that can be given any meaning you like. One can do to Man what one cannot do to the individual man or woman or child. Human nature becomes whatever those in power say it is.

The "pious wish" that men like Albert Camus and George Orwell, both of whom died too young, might have found their way to faith derives from the idea that men who felt it necessary to speak against evil would have eventually found it necessary to accept the transcendant order that belief in good and evil requires. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 12, 2003 10:26 PM