One of the handful of mandates which I have tried to keep front and center in my mind—and in my actions—is the pursuit of truth.
When asked what I most took away from my education at Yale, it was the respect for the pursuit of truth. When asked what I discovered at Procter & Gamble which most surprised me in the beginning and which was most foundational to my decision to stay with P&G for a career, I cite my recognition of the ever-present commitment to pursue truth no matter where it led and no matter how inconvenient the finding.
Little would I have imagined that now in my 80th year I would have felt the concept of truth being so challenged or feel so compelled to reignite my commitment to taking the time to dig deep enough to try to find it.
Undoubtedly, the presidency of Donald Trump has driven much of this animus. My appreciation of the challenge we face has also been deepened by my re-reading George Orwell’s novel 1984. Now, a few weeks after doing that, I have been further motivated by reading the “biography” of 1984, called The Ministry of Truth, written by Dorian Lynskey, This book describes Orwell’s life experience which led to his authoring 1984 shortly before his death in 1949. It also illuminates the many writers whom Orwell had come to know who influenced his thinking. Still, with all those influences, there is no doubting the originality of Orwell’s work.
The most influential chapter of Orwell's experience came from his participation in the Spanish Civil War. He went to Spain to support Communists who formed part of the coalition fighting Franco’s Nationalist, Nazi-supported opposition. His experience in Spain was sobering and disillusioning. He came to see the cynicism, cruelty and dishonesty of the Communists. He left this experience feeling there was really no difference between the debilitating totalitarian control of Communism and Nazism.
It is mind-opening, though probably not surprising, to see how 1984 has been viewed differently depending on the bias of the beholder. Liberals viewed it as an indictment of Russia, which it surely was in part. The right viewed it as an indictment of the liberal left, including the Labor Party in the UK. The ambiguity in 1984 was part of Orwell’s design, but there was one constant overarching caution in his message, that being the recognition of the challenge we face in pursuing truth. And how different forms of fanaticism and totalitarianism, enabled more than ever today by technology, can challenge the very existence of the possibility of truth.
Orwell’s pronouncement on the importance of the moral value of truth is registered again and again. Without a consensus reality, Orwell argued, “there can be no argument; the necessary minimum of agreement cannot be reached.” As Lynskey writes, Orwell was clear-eyed enough to know that one can’t always get to the objective truth but if one doesn’t at least accept that such a thing exists, then all bets are off.
The dangers of group think are also highlighted again and again. As Franz Borkenau, an Austrian writer, scribed: “Civilization is bound to perish not simply by the existence of certain restrictions on the expression or thought...but by the wholesale submission of thinking to orders from a party’s center.”
Orwell worried about fanaticism of any type. In 1940, he wrote, “The future, at any rate the immediate future, is not with the ‘sensible’ men. The future is with the fanatics.” How right he was—and still is.
Orwell draws the “connection between personal happiness and readiness to believe the incredible.” It is this “frame of mind” that has induced whole nations to fling themselves into the arms of a Savior.”
In 1984, Orwell describes a picture “in the earliest 20th century” that could well describe today.
In an essay called “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” written seven years before 1984, Orwell understood better what he had seen unfolding in Spain: “For the first time I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship was implied by an ordinary lie. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines.’”
This was new, he thought. Totalitarian regimes were aligned on such a grand scale that Orwell felt that “the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world.” Orwell continued, “If the leader says of such and such an event, ‘it never happened’—well it never happened. If he says that two and two are five—well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs.” Orwell wrote. And well it should.
Here is the moral and intellectual foundation of 1984.
Orwell’s generation experienced the consequences of Big Lies so absurd that they could only be sustained by the extreme control of totalitarianism, the kind depicted in 1984. As Lynskey points out, and I agree, 21st century authoritarians don’t need to go that far. “They don’t require belief in a full-blown ideology, and thus they don’t require violence of terror police,” writes the historian Ann Applebaum, in a 2018 essay for The Atlantic. “They don’t force people to believe that black is white, war is peace, and state farms have achieved 1000% of their planned production.” Instead, they rely on “medium-sized lies: all of them encourage their followers to engage, at least part of the time, with an alternative reality.”
All this brings Lynskey, at the end of his book, to Donald Trump. “Donald Trump is no Big Brother,” he writes. Nor is he simply a throwback to the 1930s. “He has the cruelty and power hunger of a dictator but not the discipline, intellect or ideology.” Lynskey depicts a more apt comparison being Joe McCarthy, “a demagogue who displayed comparable levels of narcissism, dishonesty, resentment and crude ambition and a similarly uncanny ability to make journalists dance to his tune even as they loathed him.”
Lynskey cites chilling precedents in Orwell’s 1984. For example, referring to Hillary Clinton, Trump’s call to his supporters to “lock her up.” Trump meets most of the criteria Orwell used to define fascism: “Sometimes cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist and anti-liberal.”
Capturing our own moment I believe, Orwell contended that such men could only rise to the top when the status quo has failed to satisfy people’s need for justice, security and self-worth.
Social media has undoubtedly made the process of disseminating “fake news” (ironically being used to attack “real news”) far easier as it has become the primary news source for millions of Americans without meaningful editorial oversight.
In conclusion, Orwell feared that “the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world.” As Lynskey writes, perhaps Life magazine’s original review of 1984 identified the essence of Orwell’s message best: “If men continue to believe in such facts as can be tested and to reverence the spirit of truth and seeking greater knowledge, they can never be fully enslaved.”
That outcome can never be taken for granted—not today, not ever.
No comments:
Post a Comment