Moon’s Day, March 25: Politics and the English LanguageEQ: How do Reason, Words and Truth build Integrity (or not)?

Welcome! Gather paper, pen/cil, old work, wits!

Integrity: Unshakeableo Structural: Pantheon o Existential: Kierkegaardo Philosophical: ThinkSayDoo Rhetorical: John Milton

George Orwell: Essayso Politics and the

English Languageo Propaganda and

Demotic Speecho The Prevention

of Literature

One has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox. ELACC12RL-RI2: Analyze two or more themes or central ideas of text ELACC12RI3: Analyze and explain how individuals, ideas, or events interact and develop ELACC12RL4-RI4: Determine the meaning of

words and phrases as they are used in textELACC12RL6: Distinguish what is directly stated in a text from what is really meantELACC12RI6: Determine an author’s point of view or purpose in a textELACC12RI8: Delineate and evaluate the reasoning in seminal British textsELACC12RL10: Read and comprehend complex literature independently and proficiently. ELACC12W9: Draw evidence from literary or informational texts to support analysisELACC12SL1: Initiate and participate effectively in a range of collaborative discussions

Integrity: Standing In StressThe Pantheon in Rome (Italy!) has stood for 2,000 years

because its parts work together to distribute stresses, giving it what engineers call “structural integrity”

(photo by Corbin Saunders … I’m so proud!)

(Did I mention my son took the picture?)

Without structural integrity, you get this:

Existential (Personal) Integrity(Remember your Kierkegaard!)

A Self is strong because of harmony between thinking, words, actions

seeking and serving Truth

A Self is weak – literally, lacks integrity – because no harmony; disconnect between

thinking, words, actionswhich thereby avoid Truth

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart (thoughts)

be always acceptable in thy sight, O Lord (Truth)(Psalm 19:14)

Philosophical/Rhetorical IntegrityA thinker/speaker/writer is strong

because thinking, words, actionsin harmony, seeking and serving Truth

John Milton: Right ReasonRational, logical, ethical thought seeking Truth,

resulting in proximity to Good and God

Areopagitica o Right Reason, strengthened by vigorous “trial by

what is contrary” (reading/rejecting Evil), allows one to withstand stress of temptation

o Words must be judged in terms of Right Reason

Paradise Lost o Satan’s words do not connect to Truth (“from the

terror of this arm doubted his empire”)o Satan’s words do not even connect to his thoughts

(“Vaunting aloud, but rack’d with deep despair”)o Satan’s thoughts do not even try to find Truth

(“The mind is its own place, and in itself/Can make a Heaven of Hell”), creating “Wrong Reason” = Sin = Hell

Eric Blair, a.k.a. George Orwell (1903-1950)

Journalist, Essayist, Novelist (Animal Farm, 1984)

Specialty: examining ways that language (spoken, written, visual, body) creates and reveals political reality

“A power of facing unpleasant facts”o “Civilized” life depends on

brutal, shameful truths we rarely see or admit

o These truths often hidden by imprecise, cloudy language – sometimes intentionally

o Job of writers/thinkers is to discover, expose truth

Today you will begin reading three of Orwell’s most famous and influential essays:

“Propaganda and Demotic Speech” (1944)

“The Prevention of Literature” (1945)

“Politics and the English Language” (1946)

TURN IN ORWELL READING GUIDES!

George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language" (1946) Adapted and edited; full version at http://georgeorwellnovels.com/essays/politics-and-the-english-language/

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language -- so the argument runs -- must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

Now, an effect can become a cause. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward regeneration….

[Bad writing] consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier -- even quicker, once you have the habit -- to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think. …

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:

1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

And he will probably ask himself two more:

1. Could I put it more shortly? 2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They 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. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear. …

It is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a "party line." Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating familiar phrases -- bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder -- one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which

suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity. ….

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges, the dropping of atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. 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. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them….

The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.

If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. …The debased language that I have been discussing is in some ways very convenient. Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves much to be desired, would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind, are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins always at one's elbow… Every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one's brain.

Let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. The worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them…. But one can be in doubt, and needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. (ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Political language …is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase -- some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse -- into the dustbin, where it belongs.

George Orwell, “Propaganda and Demotic Speech” (1944)Adapted and edited; full version available at www.wordpirate.com/Below%20Decks/The%20Grammar%20Monkey/

Propaganda%20and%20Demotic%20Speech.htm

[In this essay Orwell thinks about the practice of “propaganda” – simply, the attempt to spread information and ideas – and wonders why people often do not “get” what they are being told.]

When you examine Government leaflets and Papers, or leading articles in the newspapers, or the speeches of politicians, or the manifestos of any political party whatever, the thing that nearly always strikes you is their remoteness from the average man.

It is not merely that they assume non-existent knowledge: often it is right and necessary to do that. It is also that clear, popular, everyday language seems to be instinctively avoided. The bloodless dialect of government spokesmen (characteristic phrases are: in due course, no stone unturned, take the earliest opportunity, the answer is in the affirmative) is too well known to be worth dwelling on. Newspaper leaders are written either in this same dialect or in an inflated bombastic style with a tendency to fall back on archaic words (peril, valour, might, foe, succour, vengeance, dastardly, rampart, bulwark, bastion) which no normal person would ever think of using. Even posters, leaflets and broadcasts which are intended to give instructions, to tell people what to do in certain circumstances, often fail in their effect. For example, during the first air raids on London, it was found that innumerable people did not know which siren meant “Alert” and which “All Clear.” This was after months or years of gazing at A.R.P. posters. These posters had described the Alert as a ‘warbling note’: a phrase which made no impression, since air-raid sirens don’t warble, and few people attach any definite meaning to the word.

It is a nightly experience in any pub to see broadcast speeches and news bulletins make no impression on the average listener, because they are uttered in stilted bookish language and, incidentally, in an upper-class accent. At the time of Dunkirk I watched a gang of navvies eating their bread and cheese in a pub while the one o’clock news came over. Nothing registered: they just went on stolidly eating. Then, just for an instant, reporting the words of some soldier who had been hauled aboard a boat, the announcer dropped into spoken English, with the phrase, ‘Well, I’ve learned to swim this trip, anyway!’ Promptly you could see ears being pricked up: it was ordinary language, and so it got across. A few weeks later, the day after Italy entered the war, Duff Cooper announced that Mussolini’s rash act would ‘add to the ruins for which Italy has been famous’. It was neat enough, and a true prophecy, but how much impression does that kind of language make on nine people out of ten? The colloquial version of it would have been: ‘Italy has always been famous for ruins. Well, there are going to be a damn’ sight more of them now.’ But that is not how Cabinet Ministers speak, at any rate in public.

Examples of futile slogans, obviously incapable of stirring strong feelings or being circulated by word of mouth, are: ‘Deserve Victory’, ‘Freedom is in Peril. Defend it with all your Might’, ‘Socialism the only Solution’, ‘Expropriate the Expropriators’, ‘Austerity’, ‘Evolution not Revolution’, ‘Peace is Indivisible’. Examples of slogans phrased in spoken English are: ‘Hands off Russia’, ‘Make Germany Pay’, ‘Stop Hitler’, ‘No Stomach Taxes’, ‘Buy a Spitfire’, ‘Votes for Women’. Examples about mid-way between these two classes are, ‘Go to it’, ‘Dig for

Victory’, ‘It all depends on ME’, and some of Churchill’s phrases, such as ‘the end of the beginning’, ‘soft underbelly’, ‘blood, toil, tears, and sweat’ and ‘never was so much owed by so many to so few’. One has to take into account the fact that nearly all English people dislike anything that sounds high-flown and boastful. Slogans like ‘They shall not pass’, or ‘Better to die on your feet than live on your knees’, which have thrilled Europeans, seem slightly embarrassing to an Englishman, especially a working man.

But the main weakness of propagandists is their failure to notice that spoken and written English are two different things. (Indeed, from reading the left-wing press you get the impression that the louder people yap about the proletariat, the more they despise its language.) This variation exists in all languages, but is probably greater in English than in most. Spoken English is full of slang, it is abbreviated wherever possible, and people of all social classes treat its grammar and syntax in a slovenly way. Extremely few English people ever button up a sentence if they are speaking extempore. Above all, the vast English vocabulary contains thousands of words which everyone uses when writing, but which have no real currency in speech: and it also contains thousands more which are really obsolete but which are dragged forth by anyone who wants to sound clever or uplifting. If one keeps this in mind, one can think of ways of ensuring that propaganda, spoken or written, shall reach the audience it is aimed at.

One can attempt a process of simplification. The first step is to find out which of the words habitually used by politicians and media are really understood by large numbers of people. If phrases like ‘unprincipled violation of declared pledges’ or ‘insidious threat to the basic principles of democracy’ don’t mean anything to the average man, then it is stupid to use them. Secondly, in writing one can keep the spoken word constantly in mind. If you habitually say to yourself, ‘Could I simplify this? Could I make it more like speech?’ you are not likely to produce sentences like the ones government officials and writers use. Nor are you likely to say ‘eliminate’ when you mean kill.

There is also the question of accent. In modem England the ‘educated’, upper-class accent is deadly to any speaker who is aiming at a large audience. All effective speakers in recent times have had cockney or provincial accents. The ‘educated’ accent, of which the accent of the B.B.C. announcers is a sort of parody, has no asset except its intelligibility to English-speaking foreigners. In England the minority to whom it is natural don’t particularly like it, while in the other three quarters of the population it arouses an immediate class antagonism. It is also noticeable that where there is doubt about the pronunciation of a name, successful speakers will stick to the working-class pronunciation even if they know it to be wrong. Churchill, for instance, mispronounced ‘Nazi’ and ‘Gestapo’ as long as the common people continued to do so.

Some day we may have a genuinely democratic government, a government which will want to tell people what is happening, and what must be done next, and what sacrifices are necessary, and why. It will need the mechanisms for doing so, of which the first are the right words, the right tone of voice. The fact that when you suggest finding out what the common man is like, and approaching him accordingly, you are either accused of being an intellectual snob who was to ‘talk down to’ the masses, or else suspected of plotting to establish an English Gestapo, shows how sluggishly nineteenth-century our notion of democracy has remained.

George Orwell, “The Prevention of Literature” (1945)(excerpts adapted from http://georgeorwellnovels.com/essays/the-prevention-of-literature/)

[Orwell starts with a brief account of a conference honoring Milton’s Areopagitica. At the time England was battling Germany in World War II; and Orwell notes that, while speakers praised “freedom” in general, no one at the conference quoted from Milton’s essay itself, and no one criticized the various kinds of censorship – including book-banning –going on during the War.]

[In modern times] Any writer who wants to retain his integrity finds himself thwarted by the general drift of society rather than by active persecution. The sort of things that are working against him are the concentration of the press in the hands of a few rich men, the grip of monopoly on radio and the films, the unwillingness of the public to spend money on [unusual or disturbing] books, the encroachment of official bodies like the Ministry of Information, which help the writer to keep alive but also … dictate his opinions, and the continuous war atmosphere of the past ten years, whose distorting effects no one has been able to escape. Everything in our age conspires to turn the writer, and every other kind of artist as well, into a minor government official, working on themes handed down from above and never telling what seems to him the whole of the truth.

In the past, the idea of rebellion and the idea of intellectual integrity were mixed up. A heretic — political, moral, religious, or aesthetic — was one who refused to outrage his own conscience. His outlook was summed up in the words of the Revivalist hymn:

Dare to be a DanielDare to stand aloneDare to have a purpose firmDare to make it known

To bring this hymn up to date one would have to add a ‘Don't’ at the beginning of each line. For 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. The independence of the writer and the artist is eaten away by vague economic forces, and at the same time it is undermined by those who should be its defenders.

The controversy over freedom of speech and of the press is at bottom a controversy of the desirability, or otherwise, of telling lies. What is really at issue is the right to report contemporary events truthfully, or as truthfully as is consistent with the ignorance, bias and self-deception from which every observer necessarily suffers….The writer who refuses to sell his opinions is always branded as a mere egoist. He is accused, that is, of either wanting to shut himself up in an ivory tower, or of making an exhibitionist display of his own personality, or of resisting history in an attempt to cling to unjustified privilege. [But] freedom of the intellect means the freedom to report what one has seen, heard, and felt, and not to be obliged to fabricate imaginary facts and feelings. The familiar tirades against ‘escapism’ and ‘individualism’, ‘romanticism’, and so forth, are merely a forensic device, the aim of which is to make the perversion of history seem respectable….The argument that to tell the truth would be ‘inopportune’ or would ‘play into the hands of’ somebody or other is felt to be unanswerable.

Totalitarianism demands the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth. Totalitarianism usually tends to argue that since absolute truth is not attainable, a big lie is no worse than a little lie. It is pointed out that all historical records are biased and inaccurate, or on the other hand, that modern physics has proven that what seems to us the real world is an illusion, so that to believe in the evidence of one's senses is simply vulgar philistinism. A totalitarian society would probably set up a schizophrenic system of thought, in which the laws of common sense held good in everyday life and in certain exact sciences, but could be disregarded by the politician, the historian, and the sociologist. [Many] people would think it scandalous to falsify a scientific textbook, but would see nothing wrong in falsifying an historical fact. It is at the point where literature and politics cross that totalitarianism exerts its greatest pressure on the intellectual.

In England the immediate enemies of truthfulness, and hence of freedom of thought, are the press lords, the film magnates, and the bureaucrats, but on a long view the weakening of the desire for liberty among the intellectuals themselves is the most serious symptom of all.

Literature is an attempt to influence the viewpoint of one's contemporaries by recording experience. And so far as freedom of expression is concerned, there is not much difference between a mere journalist and the most ‘unpolitical’ imaginative writer. The journalist is unfree … when he is forced to write lies or suppress what seems to him important news; 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 result is that his creative faculties will dry up. Nor can he solve the problem by keeping away from controversial topics. There is no such thing as a genuinely non-political literature…. 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.

Political writing consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of an Erector set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship. To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox.

To be corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian country. The mere prevalence of certain ideas can spread a kind of poison that makes one subject after another impossible for literary purposes. Wherever there is an enforced orthodoxy — or even two orthodoxies, as often happens — good writing stops.

To exercise your right of free speech you have to fight against economic pressure and against strong sections of public opinion, but not, as yet, against a secret police force. You can say or print almost anything so long as you are willing to do it in a hole-and-corner way. But what is sinister … is that the conscious enemies of liberty are those to whom liberty ought to mean most. The direct, conscious attack on intellectual decency comes from the intellectuals themselves.

The imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity. Any writer or journalist who denies that fact — and nearly all the current praise of the Soviet Union contains or implies such a denial — is, in effect, demanding his own destruction.

George Orwell, “Propaganda and Demotic Speech”

1. Define propaganda, as Orwell uses it here:

2. Define demotic speech, as Orwell uses it here:

3. “The thing that nearly always strikes you” about official speeches and writing is, according to

Orwell, “their ___________________ from the ____________ _________.”

4. What, says Orwell, “seems to be instinctively avoided” in official writing and speaking?

5. They are full, he says, of words and phrases “which no ___________ ____________ would ever

_____________ of using.”

6. Summarize the problem he describes the Air Raid sirens and posters:

7. Summarize what he saw happen in a pub during a news broadcast about Dunkirk:

8. “The main weakness of propagandists,” says Orwell, “is their failure to notice” what?

9. “If phrases … don’t mean anything to the average man,” says Orwell, “then” what?

10. If you simplify, and make writing like speech, says Orwell, “you are not … likely to say

‘___________________’ when you mean ‘___________________.’”

11. What accent, says Orwell, is the worst for speakers to use if they want to be understood?

12. “Some day,” says Orwell, “we may have a genuinely _________________ government, … which

will want to _____________ what is ______________, and what must be _______________ next,

and ____________.”

George Orwell, “The Prevention of Literature”1. What two things does Orwell say nobody does at the conference honoring Milton’s Areopagitica?

a.

b.

2. Name two things Orwell mentions as having “distorting effects” on writers:

a.

b.

3. “In the past,” writes Orwell, “the idea of _______________ and the idea of ___________________

________________ were mixed up.”

4. A heretic,” says Orwell, “was one who refused to outrage” what?

5. “The controversy over freedom of speech,” says Orwell, “is at bottom a controversy of the

desirability, or otherwise, of” doing what?

6. “Freedom of the intellect,” says Orwell, “means the freedom to report” what?

7. “And not to be obliged,” he continues, “to fabricate” what?

8. According to Orwell, “Totalitarianism demands” what?

9. “And in the long run,” he continues, “probably demands” what?

10. “A totalitarian society,” he writes, “would probably set up a ________________ system of thought.” What does he mean?

11. “Literature,” writes Orwell, “is an attempt to” do what?

12. “To write in plain, vigorous language,” says Orwell, “one has to think ___________________, and

if one thinks ____________________ one cannot be ___________________ _________________.”

Define: orthodox –

13. “Wherever there is an enforced ____________________,” writes Orwell, “good writing ___________.”

George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”

1. “Most people,” says Orwell, agree that the English Language is in trouble, but assume what?

2. “Now, an ______________ can become a _____________,” says Orwell, and goes on to describe a

process whereby “language …. becomes ____________ and ________________ because our

_______________ are _______________, but the __________________ of our ________________

makes it ____________________ for us to have __________________ ___________________.”

3. Bad writing, says Orwell, “consists in” what?

4. “It is easier – even quicker, once you have the habit – to say

than to say ___ _________.”

5. “A scrupulous writer,” says Orwell, “will ask himself questions.” List three:

a.

b.

c.

6. Bad writing happens, says Orwell, when you “shirk” that duty and let “the ready-made phrases ….

________________ your sentences for you – even ____________your ______________ for you,” so

that you end up “partially ________________ your _______________ even from ________________.”

7. A writer or speaker who strings together clichés has, says Orwell, “gone some distance toward

turning himself into a ___________________.”

8. “Political speech and writing are largely the ______________ of the __________________.” List two:

a.

b.

9. “When there is a gap between one’s ____________ and one’s _________________ aims,” writes Orwell,

“one turns … to long words and exhausted idioms, like a _________________ spurting out ________.”

10. “If __________________ corrupts _______________,” says Orwell, “_________________ can also corrupt

________________.” He compares clichéd phrases to “a packet of ______________.”

11. “Let the __________________ choose the _______________,” says Orwell, “not the other way around.”

12. Orwell says, “The worst thing one can do with words is” what?

13. “Political language,” says Orwell, “is designed to make ________________ sound __________________ __

and _____________________ ______________________, and to give an _____________________ of

______________________ to pure _______________.”

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