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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 by conscious action 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 half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. 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 English 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, especially written 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 political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer. Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written.

These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad – I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen – but because they illustrate various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a little below the average, but are fairly representative examples. I number them so that I can refer back to them when necessary:

1. I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien (sic) to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate.

Professor Harold Laski (Essay in Freedom of Expression).

2. Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with for tolerate, or put at a loss for bewilder.

Professor Lancelot Hogben (Interglossia).

3. On the one side we have the free personality: by definition it is not neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as they are, are transparent, for they are just what institutional approval keeps in the forefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern would alter their number and intensity; there is little in them that is natural, irreducible, or culturally dangerous. But on the other side, the social bond itself is nothing but the mutual reflection of these self-secure integrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not this the very picture of a small academic? Where is there a place in this hall of mirrors for either personality or fraternity?

Essay on psychology in Politics (New York).

4. All the ‘best people’ from the gentlemen’s clubs, and all the frantic Fascist captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror at the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of poisoned wells, to legalize their own destruction of proletarian organizations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoise to chauvinistic fervor on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of the crisis.

Communist pamphlet.

5. If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there is one thorny and contentious reform which must be tackled, and that is the humanization and galvanization of the B.B.C. Timidity here will bespeak canker and atrophy of the soul. The heart of Britain may be sound and of strong beat, for instance, but the British lion’s roar at present is like that of Bottom in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream – as gentle as any sucking dove. A virile new Britain cannot continue indefinitely to be traduced in the eyes or rather ears, of the world by the effete languors of Langham Place, brazenly masquerading as ‘standard English’. When the Voice of Britain is heard at nine o’clock, better far and infinitely less ludicrous to hear aitches honestly dropped than the present priggish, inflated, inhibited, school-ma’amish arch braying of blameless bashful mewing maidens!

Letter in Tribune.

Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. 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 and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house. I list below, with notes and examples, various of the tricks by means of which the work of prose-construction is habitually dodged.

Dying metaphors. A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically ‘dead’ (e. g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgels for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles’ heel, swan song, hotbed. Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a ‘rift’, for instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying. Some metaphors now current have been twisted out of their original meaning without those who use them even being aware of the fact. For example, toe the line is sometimes written as tow the line. Another example is the hammer and the anvil, now always used with the implication that the anvil gets the worst of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way about: a writer who stopped to think what he was saying would avoid perverting the original phrase.

Operators, or verbal false limbs. These save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry. Characteristic phrases are: render inoperative, militate against, prove unacceptable, make contact with, be subject to, give rise to, give grounds for, have the effect of, play a leading part (role) in, make itself felt, take effect, exhibit a tendency to, serve the purpose of, etc. etc. The keynote is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purposes verb such as prove, serve, form, play, render. In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination of instead of by examining). The range of verbs is further cut down by means of the -ize and de- formations, and banal statements are given an appearance of profundity by means of the not un- formation. Simple conjunctions and prepositions are replaced by such phrases as with respect to, having regard to, the fact that, by dint of, in view of, in the interests of, on the hypothesis that; and the ends of sentences are saved from anticlimax by such resounding commonplaces as greatly to be desired, cannot be left out of account, a development to be expected in the near future, deserving of serious consideration, brought to a satisfactory conclusion, and so on and so forth.

Pretentious diction. Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate, are used to dress up simple statements and give an air of scientific impartiality to biassed judgements. Adjectives like epoch-making, epic, historic, unforgettable, triumphant, age-old, inevitable, inexorable, veritable, are used to dignify the sordid processes of international politics, while writing that aims at glorifying war usually takes on an archaic colour, its characteristic words being: realm, throne, chariot, mailed fist, trident, sword, shield, buckler, banner, jackboot, clarion. Foreign words and expressions such as cul de sac, ancien régime, deus ex machina, mutatis mutandis, status quo, Gleichschaltung, Weltanschauung, are used to give an air of culture and elegance. Except for the useful abbreviations i.e., e.g., and etc., there is no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in English. Bad writers, and especially scientific, political and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, sub-aqueous and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon opposite numbers[1]. The jargon peculiar to Marxist writing (hyena, hangman, cannibal, petty bourgeois, these gentry, lackey, flunkey, mad dog, White Guard, etc.) consists largely of words translated from Russian, German, or French; but the normal way of coining a new word is to use a Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary, the -ize formation. It is often easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentatory and so forth) than to think up the English words that will cover one’s meaning. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness.

Meaningless words. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning[2]. Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly even expected to do so by the reader. When one critic writes, ‘The outstanding feature of Mr. X’s work is its living quality’, while another writes, ‘The immediately striking thing about Mr. X’s work is its peculiar deadness’, the reader accepts this as a simple difference of opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way. Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of régime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Pétain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality.

Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

This is a parody, but not a very gross one. Exhibit 3 above, for instance, contains several patches of the same kind of English. It will be seen that I have not made a full translation. The beginning and ending of the sentence follow the original meaning fairly closely, but in the middle the concrete illustrations – race, battle, bread – dissolve into the vague phrase ‘success or failure in competitive activities’. This had to be so, because no modern writer of the kind I am discussing – no one capable of using phrases like ‘objective’ consideration of contemporary phenomena’ – would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way. The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness. Now analyse these two sentences a little more closely. The first contains 49 words but only 60 syllables, and all its words are those of everyday life. The second contains 38 words of 90 syllables: 18 of its words are from Latin roots, and one from Greek. The first sentence contains six vivid images, and only one phrase (‘time and chance’) that could be called vague. The second contains not a single fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite of its 90 syllables it gives only a shortened version of the meaning contained in the first. Yet without a doubt it is the second kind of sentence that is gaining ground in modern English. I do not want to exaggerate. This kind of writing is not yet universal, and outcrops of simplicity will occur here and there in the worst-written page. Still if you or I were told to write a few lines on the uncertainty of human fortunes, we should probably come much nearer to my imaginary sentence than to the one from Ecclesiastes.

As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It 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. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don’t have to hunt about for the words; you also don’t have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences, since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious. When you are composing in a hurry – when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech – it is natural to fall into a pretentious, latinized style. Tags like a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind or a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will save many a sentence from coming down with a bump. By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images clash – as in The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot – it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking. Look again at the examples I gave at the beginning of this essay. Professor Laski (1) uses five negatives in 53 words. One of these is superfluous, making nonsense of the whole passage, and in addition there is the slip alien for akin, making further nonsense, and several avoidable pieces of clumsiness which increase the general vagueness. Professor Hogben (2) plays ducks and drakes with a battery which is able to write prescriptions, and, while disapproving of the everyday phrase put up with, is unwilling to look egregious up in the dictionary and see what it means. (3), if one takes an uncharitable attitude towards it, is simply meaningless: probably one could work out its intended meaning by reading the whole of the article in which it occurs. In (4) the writer knows more or less what he wants to say, but an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea-leaves blocking a sink. In (5) words and meaning have almost parted company. People who write in this manner usually have a general emotional meaning – they dislike one thing and want to express solidarity with another – but they are not interested in the detail of what they are saying. A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? 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.

In our time 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 colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White Papers and the speeches of Under-Secretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, home-made turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases – bestial atrocities, iron heel, blood-stained 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 favourable to political conformity.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the 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 political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless 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. 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. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

While freely conceding that the Soviet régime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigours which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.

The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines 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. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find – this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify – that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better. 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. Look back through this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against. By this morning’s post I have received a pamphlet dealing with conditions in Germany. The author tells me that he ‘felt impelled’ to write it. I open it at random, and here is almost the first sentence that I see: ‘(The Allies) have an opportunity not only of achieving a radical transformation of Germany’s social and political structure in such a way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germany itself, but at the same time of laying the foundations of a co-operative and unified Europe.’ You see, he ‘feels impelled’ to write – feels, presumably, that he has something new to say – and yet his words, like cavalry horses answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern. This invasion of one’s mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations, achieve a radical transformation) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one’s brain.

I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who deny this would argue, if they produced an argument at all, that language merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we cannot influence its development by any direct tinkering with words and constructions. So far as the general tone or spirit of a language goes, this may be true, but it is not true in detail. Silly words and expressions have often disappeared, not through any evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a minority. Two recent examples were explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned, which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists. There is a long list of fly-blown metaphors which could similarly be got rid of if enough people would interest themselves in the job; and it should also be possible to laugh the not un- formation out of existence[3], to reduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the average sentence, to drive out foreign phrases and strayed scientific words, and, in general, to make pretentiousness unfashionable. But all these are minor points. The defence of the English language implies more than this, and perhaps it is best to start by saying what it does not imply.

To begin with it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting up of a ‘standard English’ which must never be departed from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one’s meaning clear or with the avoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is called a ‘good prose style’. On the other hand it is not concerned with fake simplicity and the attempt to make written English colloquial. Nor does it even imply in every case preferring the Saxon word to the Latin one, though it does imply using the fewest and shortest words that will cover one’s meaning. What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is to surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualising, you probably hunt about till you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meanings as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose – not simply accept – the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impression one’s words are likely to make on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally. But one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one 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.

These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the beginning of this article.

I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don’t know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – 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.

Horizon, April 1946

It feels as if Orwell has been with me all my life. Although memory is an unreliable guide, I recall my father reading Animal Farm to me as a boy. He was a Conservative voting Vet, but one who subscribed to The New Statesman and was passionate about the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War – so explained the story as political allegory as we went along.

As a teenager I read 1984, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Wigan Pier, Homage to Catalonia. By the time I started work as a journalist on small weekly newspapers it was Orwell’s essays that guided me – particularly, of course, Politics and the English Language. Later, I undertook a part-time MSc at Birkbeck with Bernard Crick and Ben Pimlott, at the time Crick’s biography of Orwell was published, so he was a constant topic of debate.

And today, Orwell feels more relevant than ever as we grapple with the “post-truth” era, with supposedly “non-linear” politics, and with the reality and tensions of a surveillance society. As Christopher Hitchens wrote in “Why Orwell Matters”, what he illustrates,  by his commitment to language as a partner of truth, is that “views” do not really count; that it matters not what you think but how you think – and that principles are more important than politics. In today’s confused and nervous society we need his voice as much as ever.

Richard Sambrook is professor of Journalism and Director of the Centre of Journalism at Cardiff University and the former Director of BBC Global News. He was a judge for the 2015 Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain’s Social Evils.

‘War, Words and Reason: Orwell and Thomas Merton on the Crises of Language’

Dr. Rowan Williams

At first sight, it seems hard to imagine a more unlikely pairing than the one announced in this lecture’s title.  George Orwell had a profound dislike of Roman Catholic writers (though – as we shall see later – he accorded a grudging respect to Evelyn Waugh as a literary craftsman), and, had he encountered Thomas Merton – especially the earlier Merton – he would undoubtedly have recoiled.  Not that Merton was exactly a conventional religious writer.  He became a Catholic in 1938 after a distinctly rackety youth, and spent most of the rest of his life as a Trappist monk in the Unites States.  But he wrote copiously, corresponding with a wide range of literary figures, including Henry Miller, James Baldwin, Czeslaw Milosz, Boris Pasternak and several Latin American poets, some of whose work he also translated; another surprising friend was Joan Baez.  He left behind him, in addition to a huge amount of journal material and many books on prayer and monasticism, a couple of incomplete drafts for novels and a fair quantity of poetry, published and unpublished, some of it dramatically ‘experimental’ in style. This year is the centenary of his birth, and the worldwide interest in his work shows no sign at all of decreasing: some 500 people attended the centenary conference about him in Kentucky this last June.  Yet when all’s said and done, he is not on the face of things a natural partner for Orwell, despite his literary contacts and concerns: he remains a wholly committed catholic Christian, and in his first published works he is, for all his extensive literary culture, often dogmatically partisan in his dismissal of all that lies outside the Catholic sphere.

He moved a fair way from this over the years; by the mid 1960’s, he was vocal in his criticisms of the Vietnam war, of the stockpiling of nuclear arms, and of racial segregation and injustice in the USA.  His correspondents now included not only poets and novelists, but peace activists and Catholic radicals like Daniel Berrigan and Dorothy Day, as well as a growing number of Buddhist and Muslim friends.   But what is most interesting for our purposes is that a central element in his critique of militarism was a stinging analysis of the language of war and weaponry.  And this is where the conversation with Orwell might begin (it’s worth noting in passing that he did not read Orwell’s ‘Politics and the English Language’ until August 1967; he admired it greatly – but interestingly his first reaction is to apply it to his own more ‘official’ writing commissions).  Earlier in 1967, he published an essay on ‘War and the Crisis of Language’, in which he develops a distinctly Orwellian polemic against the corruption of writing itself by certain aspects of modernity.  Beginning with the language of advertising (‘endowed with a finality so inviolable that it is beyond debate and beyond reason’), he works through the implications of this linguistic world in which breakfast cereals, cars and cosmetics are spoken of in the language of theology and metaphysics towards a discussion of the idiom of military planning – ‘as esoteric, as self-enclosed, as tautologous as the advertisement we have just discussed.’  The speech of strategists and of politicians talking about military strategy is characterised by a narcissistic finality.  There can be no real reply to the careful and reasonable calculation of the balance of mass killing in a nuclear war, because everything is so organised that you are persuaded not to notice what it is you are talking about.  And when that happens, you cannot intelligently converse or argue: all there is is the definitive language imposed by those who have power.  It is a natural extension of the language habitually used to describe the processes of other kinds of war.  Merton relished the comment of an American commander in Vietnam: ‘In order to save the village, it became necessary to destroy it’, and memorably summed up the philosophy of many supporters of the Vietnam intervention:

‘The Asian whose future we are about to decide is either a bad guy or a good guy.  If he is a bad guy, he obviously has to be killed.  If he is a good guy, he is on our side and he ought to be ready to die for freedom.  We will provide an opportunity for him to do so: we will kill him to prevent him falling under the tyranny of a demonic enemy.’

The main point in all this is that creating a language which cannot be checked by or against any recognisable reality is the ultimate mark of power.  The trouble with what Merton characterises as ‘double-talk, tautology, ambiguous cliché, self-righteous and doctrinaire pomposity and pseudoscientific jargon’ is not just an aesthetic problem.  It renders dialogue impossible; and rendering dialogue impossible is the ultimately desirable goal for those who want to exercise absolute power.  Merton was deeply struck by the accounts of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, and by Hannah Arendt’s discussions of the ‘banality’ of evil.  The staggeringly trivial and contentless remarks of Eichmann at his trial and before his execution ought to frighten us, says Merton, because they are the utterance of the void: the speech of a man accustomed to power without the need to communicate or learn or imagine anything.  And that is why Merton insists that knowing how to write is essential to honest political engagement.  In an essay – significantly – on Camus, whom he, like Orwell, admired greatly, Merton says that the writer’s task ‘is not suddenly to burst out into the dazzle of utter unadulterated truth but laboriously to reshape an accurate and honest language that will permit communication…instead of multiplying a Babel of esoteric and technical tongues.’  Against the language of power, which seeks to establish a sort of perfect self-referentiality, the writer opposes a language of ‘laborious’ honesty.  Instead of public speech being the long echo of absolute and unchallengeable definitions supplied by authority – definitions that tell you once and for all how to understand the world’s phenomena – the good writer attempts to speak in a way that is open to the potential challenge of a reality she or he does not own and control.  When the military commander speaks of destroying a village to save it, the writer’s job is to speak of the specific lives ended in agony.  When the agents of Islamist terror call suicide bombers ‘martyrs’, the writer’s job is to direct attention to the baby, the Muslim grandmother, the Jewish aid worker, the young architect, the Christian nurse or taxi-driver whose death has been triumphantly scooped up into the glory of the killer’s self-inflicted death.  When – as it was a couple of months ago – the talk is of hordes and swarms of aliens invading our shores, the writer’s task is to focus on the corpse of a four year old boy on the shore; to the great credit of many in the British media, there were writers (and cartoonists and photographers too) who rose to that task.

Merton is concerned about what happens to our idea of ‘rationality’ in all this.  He observes drily that when we express our concern about nuclear armaments falling into the hands of ‘irrational’ agents who cannot be trusted, the implication is that we are the ones who exemplify sanity; so that if and when nuclear armaments are used, we can be reassured that the decision will have been a reasonable one.  Slightly cold comfort, as he says.  But this is only the most extreme version of the logic of all violent conflict.  In another essay on war, Merton argues that it is not really true that war happens when reasoned argument breaks down; it is more that ‘reason’ has been used in such a way that it subtly and inevitably moves us towards war.  In one sense Clausewitz was right: war is the continuation of diplomacy by other means.  The rationality which increasingly asserts that only our position is sane necessarily defines the opponent as lacking reason and thus lacking ‘proper’ language.  We don’t need to talk to them; which means that we don’t ultimately share a world with them; which means that their death is not an issue for us.  ‘Listening is obsolete.  So is silence.  Each one travels alone in a small blue capsule of indignation’ (another text from 1967).

In the summer of 2014, I visited South Sudan to find out more about a number of local development projects supported by Christian Aid.  The horror that had been experienced in the preceding months as the country descended into civil war was appalling enough (thank God that at last the media here is beginning to attend).  But for me the revelatory moment was realising that the conflict between the two factions in the country was not ‘about’ anything: it was a matter of sheer personal rivalry and power lust (as well as ordinary greed).  Those who had attended the peace talks in Addis Ababa confirmed that there was in a way nothing to talk about, nothing to negotiate; the only agenda was who would prevail, and considerations of the good of Sudanese society had no traction whatsoever.  Each side travelled alone.  Each gratefully assimilated the atrocities of the other side as justification for their own.  Rationality had shrunk to the size of a pair of egos wholly detached from any other reality; Merton’s diagnosis seemed (and seems) exactly apt.

Readers of Orwell will by now have felt, I imagine, more than a flicker of recognition.  The great 1946 essay on ‘Politics and the English Language’, along with several of the pieces Orwell was writing in his last years, is not about the aesthetics of writing, as the title makes plain – though it has often been used simply to make a point about the decline of the language.  Orwell is clear that linguistic degeneration is both the product and the generator of economic and political decadence.  And if so, the critique of this degeneration is not a matter of ‘sentimental archaism’ but an urgent political affair.  Like Merton, he identifies the stipulative definition as one of the main culprits: a word that ought to be descriptive, and so discussable, comes to be used evaluatively.  ‘Fascism’ means ‘politics I/we don’t like’; ‘democracy’ means ‘politics I/we do like’.  ‘Consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.’  Bad enough (and interestingly there is a not very well-known essay of 1944 by C.S. Lewis making the same general point); but this is really just a symptom of a deeper malaise.  Vagueness, mixed metaphor, ready-made phrases, ‘gumming together long strips of words’, pseudo-technical language are ways of avoiding communication.  And those whose interest is in avoiding communication are those who do not want to be replied to or argued with.  This sort of language aims to make us ignore the reality that lies in front of it and us. ‘People are imprisoned for years without trial or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic labour camps; this is called elimination of unreliable elements.’  Just as for Merton, the lethal danger in prospect is a form of speech that silences the imagination of what words truly refer to.  It denies the shared world in the name of a world controlled by self-referential power.

Orwell’s rules for writing well have become familiar: don’t use secondhand metaphors, don’t use long words where short ones will do, abbreviate, use the active not the passive, never use a foreign phrase when you can find an everyday alternative in English.  They are rules designed to communicate something other than the fact that the speaker is powerful enough to say what he or she likes.  Bad or confused metaphor (Orwell has some choice examples of which my favourite is ‘The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song’) presents us with something we can’t visualise; good metaphor makes us more aware, aware in unexpected ways, of what we see or sense.  So bad metaphor is about concealing or ignoring; and language that sets out to conceal or ignore and make others ignore is language that wants to shrink the limits of the world to what can be dealt with in the speaker’s terms alone.

But there is something more to be said, which Orwell, a stout enemy of literary modernism, doesn’t quite want to say.  In some earlier essays, he had argued that it wouldn’t be the end of the world if literature became less obviously sophisticated, if the range of cultural reference in our writing had to be reduced in order to open it up to more participants.  Without quite anticipating the more recent debates about whether there is a real difference between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, there is in his work a consistent strand of scepticism about anything that looks like complexity for its own sake, and – as in the famous essay we’ve just been looking at – a feeling that it ought to be possible to say things straightforwardly.  And this is where he and Merton might part company.  Merton was an enthusiastic modernist in this respect.  A good deal of his poetry and some of his prose is written under heavy Joycean influence, and his letters to his old friend, the poet Robert Lax, use a bewildering macaronic style, bursting with puns and allusions and intricate wordplays. It is one of the ways in which he obeys his own injunction to be ‘laborious’.  He can even say that, on top of the obligation to write ‘disciplined prose’, a writer has ‘the duty of first writing nonsense…to let loose what is hidden in our depths, to expand rather than to condense prematurely.’

The paradox that Merton is asserting is that in order to be honest the writer sometimes has to be difficult; and the problem facing any writer who acknowledges this is how to distinguish between necessary or salutary difficulty and self-serving obfuscation of the kind both he and Orwell identify as a tool of power.  I doubt whether there is a neat answer to this.  But I suspect that the essential criterion is to do with whether a writer’s language – ‘straightforward’ or not – invites response.  Both Merton and Orwell concentrate on a particular kind of bureaucratic redescription of reality, language that is designed to be no-one’s in particular, the language of countless contemporary manifestos, mission statements and regulatory policies, the language that dominates so much of our public life, from health service to higher education.  This is meant to silence response.  Nobody talks like that, to quote Jack Lemmon’s immortal comment to Tony Curtis in Some Like it Hot.  And so no-one can answer; self-referential power triumphs again.  In its more malign forms, this is also the language of commercial interests defending tax evasion in a developing country, or worse, governments dealing with challenges to human rights violations, or worst of all (it’s in all our minds just now) of terrorists who have mastered so effectively the art of saying nothing true or humane as part of their techniques of intimidation. In contrast, the difficulty of good writing is a difficulty meant to make the reader pause and rethink.  It insists that the world is larger than the reader thought, and invites the reader to find new ways of speaking.  In that sense, properly ‘difficult’ writing is essentially about response: it may in the short term draw attention to its own complexity, but it does so in order that the reader may move away from the text to think about what it is in the world around that prompts such complexity. The final test is whether it makes us see more or less; whether or not it encourages us to ignore.

Orwell might still not be convinced.  But I’m not quite sure.  In his wonderful essay on Jonathan Swift, ‘Politics vs. Literature’, he resists – a bit more strongly, I think, than he would have done a few years earlier – the idea that a good book must be ‘more or less “progressive” in tendency.’  Swift is a great writer, but not because he is ‘right’: Orwell believes that Swift is unambiguously an enemy who must be fought, because he is ultimately an enemy of the human as we know it.  But what Swift does is to take something any intelligent reader can recognise – the sense of futility and revulsion about the physical world and the idiocies and vanities of human agents – and describe the world as if these were the only things of significance in it.  Orwell describe this as Swift consciously distorting the world ‘by refusing to see anything…except dirt, folly and wickedness’; and this of course sounds initially like writing that is trying to make the reader see less – just what we have identified as the essence of really bad and poisonous writing.  But I think the point is a bit different, and could be phrased in other ways than the ones Orwell uses.  Swift knows what we, his readers, all know: that most of the time we don’t want to consider the unacceptable physicality of our lives or the embarrassing vacuity of our individual and social attempts at affirming our moral credentials.  So let’s have an imagined world in which these things are made inescapable; not in a way that invites us to deny what we know but in a way that invites us to see what we have been denying; which is something very different from a text that tells us not to see what is there.  Swift, like any good writer in Merton’s or Orwell’s framework, is telling us that reality is more than we’d like it to be, and that, if we are trying to be honest, we have to engage with what we don’t like or are afraid of.  That invitation may be made by someone whose political or ideological or religious aims are repugnant; but if what he or she writes is recognisable, honesty requires us to keep reading and to admit when the writer’s strategy is well-realised.

And this, I suppose, helps to make sense of Orwell’s conclusion to the essay on Swift – a conclusion that is not as simple as he makes it sound. ‘One can imagine a good book being written by a Catholic, a Communist, a Fascist, a Pacifist, an Anarchist, perhaps by an old-style Liberal or an ordinary Conservative: one cannot imagine a good book being written by a spiritualist, a Buchmanite or a member of the Ku Klux Klan.’ Allowing for the slightly dated references (there are not that many Buchmanites – adherents of Frank Buchman’s ‘Moral Re-Armament’ movement in its original shape – around these days), the argument is still a provocative one.  There are systems of belief that are intrinsically not capable of generating serious writing; presumably because they are not really capable of seeing specific truths in a way that can renew or reshape the reader’s world.  They may be simply dogmatic schemes without intellectual curiosity; they may be infinitely more lethal varieties of terror and bigotry.  They begin with the sort of denials that guarantee dead and self-referring language.  They give us nothing to recognise; or perhaps they fail to create in us the sense of a serious question because they are so confident of having a final answer.  Orwell grants, in other words, that even a comprehensive ideology like Catholicism or Communism will be arguing about its answers, in ways that engage the outsider: we know why they think these questions matter, even if we have no time for their answers.  The trouble with the systems Orwell writes off is that they fail to let us sense why the issues that they are worried about should matter to anyone.

Not a wholly clear argument, but it gives us some interesting criteria, once again, for identifying serious writing.  Serious writing points to enough of a common world for disagreement to be worthwhile.  Stale ideological writing never moves outside its comfort zone; bureaucratic and pseudo-technical language is indifferent to replies.  You can’t disagree; but the systems Orwell thinks are capable of producing something worthwhile are precisely systems that begin with recognisable human questions – not puzzles to which an esoteric philosophy provides solutions but themes that human beings as such characteristically worry about.  Interesting that he allows the possibility of a good book being written by a Catholic: only a few months earlier, he had written in an essay on ‘The Prevention of Literature’ that Catholicism ‘seems to have a crushing effect upon certain literary forms, especially the novel’, and asked ‘how many people have been good novelists and good Catholics?’ in the last few centuries.  Yet in 1949, he concluded that Evelyn Waugh was ‘abt [sic] as good a novelist as one can be…while holding untenable opinions’.  The Swift essay seems to have clarified somewhat his problem with the quality of writing by people holding unacceptable positions, and it would have been good to have the completed essay on Waugh that he was planning in his last months. But the point is of wider application: the relation between politics and literature is increasingly recognised by Orwell as a complex affair.  Bad writing is politically poisonous; good writing is politically liberating – and this is true even when that good writing comes from sources that are ideologically hostile to good politics (however defined).  The crucial question is whether the writing is directed to making the reader see, feel and know less or more.  And the paradox is that, even faced with systems that stifle good writing and honest imagining, the good writer doesn’t respond in kind but goes on trying to fathom what the terrorist and the bigot are saying to makes sense of people who don’t want to make sense of him or her.  Failing to do that condemns us to bad writing and bad politics, to the language of total conflict and radical dehumanisation.

Orwell wasn’t all that interested in poetry, and in the essay on ‘The Prevention of Literature’ distinguishes between the way in which poetry might survive in a totalitarian situation where (good) prose would not.  But it is clear from his text that he is thinking only of the kind of poetry that is a technically accomplished celebration of public values.  He doesn’t seem to think of poetry as necessarily a means of seeing more; Merton’s insistence in his ‘War and the Crisis of Language’ that a poet is ‘most sensitive to the sickness of language’ would not necessarily have found an echo.  And Orwell revealingly connects prose writing with post-Reformation ‘rationality’: the essay and the novel, the paradigms of Protestant writing, are what totalitarianism threatens.  It is as if poetry is more ‘Catholic’ and so less inherently truthful or critical in Orwell’s world; it can look after itself under Stalinism because what matters in poetry is not the ‘thought’ but the form.  Akhmatova, Mandelstam and others might have a view on this. But it is a mark of both Orwell’s consistency and his tone-deafness in certain respects that he makes these curious judgements.  For him, what most seriously opposes totalitarianism is the rationality of clear prose.  Yet, left to itself, this would be no more than another stipulative definition of ‘reason’; to flesh out the nature of literary resistance to totalitarianism we need a broader account of reason than this, which will allow us to think of poetry as both a challenge to some forms of putative linguistic sanity and a bid for another level of ‘reasonable’ discourse. Merton’s own ground for this is in a sophisticated theology of how the silence of God demands our own silence; and this silence uncovers for us the basic truth that speech itself arises not from the contests of power but from the imparting of life (‘In the beginning was the Word…In him was life’).  We do not have to compete with God or one another; the ‘rational’ mode of life in the world of language is exploratory, celebratory, discovering constantly new perspectives – and thus not confined to even the best expository prose.  Modernism – Joycean or otherwise – has its unexpected theological place, on the other side of silence.

Whether Orwell might have accepted at least Merton’s conclusion is impossible to say.  But the Orwell who so stubbornly resisted the instrumentalising of language for political ends would have fought ultimately on the same side.  Uttering the unacceptable in prose and exploring the elusive, not-yet-captured depth of things in poetry have in common the crucial recognition that we shan’t learn about ourselves or our world – including our political world – if we are prevented from hearing things to argue with and things that leave us frustrated and (in every sense) wondering.  Our current panics about ‘offence’ are at their best and most generous an acknowledgement of how language can encode and enact power relations (my freedom of ‘offending’ speech may be your humiliation, a confirmation of your exclusion from ordinary public discourse).  But at its worst it is a patronising and infantilising worry about protecting individuals from challenge; the inevitable end of that road is a far worse entrenching of unquestionable power, the power of a discourse that is never open to reply.  Debates about international issues like Israel and Palestine, or issues of social and personal morals – abortion, gender and sexuality, end of life questions – are regularly shadowed by anxiety, even panic, about what must not be said in public, and also by the sometimes startlingly coercive insistence on the ‘rational’ and canonical status of one perspective only.  On both sides of all such debates, there can be a deep unwillingness to have things said or shown that might profoundly challenge someone’s starting assumptions.  If there is an answer to this curious contemporary neurosis, it is surely not in the silencing of disagreement but in the education of speech: how is unwelcome truth to be told in ways that do not humiliate or disable? And the answer to that question is inseparable from learning to argue – from the actual practice of open exchange, in the most literal sense ‘civil’ disagreement, the debate appropriate to citizens who have dignity and liberty to discuss their shared world and its organisation and who are able to learn what their words sound like in the difficult business of staying with such a debate as it unfolds.  Some years ago, I heard someone describing an event in the Holy Land where women from Israeli and Palestinian communities were being invited to speak with each other.  The facilitator began by encouraging the Israelis present not to use the word ‘terrorism’ and the Palestinians not to use the word ‘occupation’.  This was not a refusal to admit that both words describe unquestionable realities (or that there comes a time to use those words again); it was an invitation to an experiment in speaking so that response was not foreclosed. I don’t remember whether it worked; but I remember the sense of imaginative challenge: the pain and anger of actual dialogue (that word which is so bland and Pollyannaish as we usually hear it).

Orwell lists the sort of beliefs he thinks provide viewpoints worth arguing with.  And one of the things they have in common is that they represent ongoing arguments; they have a history of internal debate.  They continue to generate new way of articulating and refining their perspectives.  The implication is that good writing comes from a sense of conversation already begun.  We never have a world in front of us that has not been talked about and interpreted, and a philosophy that understands and accepts this is one that may be worth listening to.  Part of the problem with the language excoriated by Merton and Orwell alike is its aspiration to timelessness; because of course an unquestioned power has no history.  Its great claim is that it is natural, obvious, it never has to be learned or tested.  One of the most paralysing aspects of any uncritical orthodoxy is a lack of interest in or a positive denial of the process of learning what you believe you know.  And it is at this level that an intelligent philosophy or ideology can move beyond sheer self-assertion and self-reference.  Once we acknowledge that we speak as individuals who always have a location in time as well as space, we are that much freer to assume that our current language is still moving forward or outward.  This certainly doesn’t mean an irresistible historical trajectory towards consensus or towards a weakening of distinctive commitments; but it at least allows that what can be said at any one moment is unlikely to capture everything that could or should be said.  And if so, there is going to be some space in even the most comprehensive and ambitious of the philosophies Orwell lists for the work of the imagination, for making the world strange again. What both our authors are worried about in ‘late modernity’ could be expressed as a fear of the world being made strange – a fear common to murderous totalitarianisms and to the ‘timeless’ managerial culture of so many contemporary institutions.  You don’t have to think that the one is as bad as the other to recognise that there is an uncomfortable convergence in this nervousness about language that doesn’t behave appropriately, language that suggests there may after all be a reply waiting to be made.

Of all the various lessons to be learned from Merton and Orwell as analysts of linguistic decadence, the most obvious is that literature and drama are not a luxury in society.  Politics can’t avoid the drift towards the twin abysses of totalitarianism and triviality if it refuses to face the perils of this decadence. Good writing is many things.  For Orwell it is primarily to do with the capacity for reasoned prose and the sustained personal narratives of classical fiction.  For Merton, it includes some wilder elements, the freedom for wordplay and the absurd, as well as poetic experimentation.  But it is always writing that declines to close down either perception or argument.  This is how good writing defends us from absolute power or – which comes to much the same thing – absolute social stasis.  It leaves a trail to be followed and asks questions that require an answer: it pushes towards a future.  This obviously doesn’t mean – recalling Orwell’s observation – that good writing is ‘progressive’; only that it is aware of being between past and future, living in time.  And Merton, with another theological twist that Orwell would probably not have much appreciated, also implies that if our fundamental human problem is ‘Prometheanism’, wanting to steal divinity from God rather than labouring at being human, then good writing, with its inbuilt ironies and its awareness of its own conditions, is one of the things that stops us imagining we are more than human.

Perhaps that’s as good a definition of good writing as we’re going to find.  Destructive politics is inevitably bound up with forgetfulness of our humanity, in one way or another – the organised inhumanity of tyranny, the messianic aspirations of Communism, the passion for control on the part of managerial modernity, the naked and brutal murderousness of terrorism.  But Merton explicitly and Orwell implicitly remind us that this is not just about bad governance or oppression.  If we talk and write badly, dishonestly, unanswerably, what we are actually doing is getting ready for war. The habits of mind that make war inevitable are the habits of bad language – that is to say, the habits that grow from uncritical attitudes to power and privilege: contempt towards the powerless, towards minorities, towards the stranger, the longing for an end to human complexity and difference.  Orwell explicitly and (perhaps) Merton implicitly are trying to identify the all-important possibility that we may passionately quarrel, even that we may fight to defend ourselves against political evil in one way or another, without simply buying in to various kinds of totalitarianism, overt or covert.  Orwell has an almost mediaeval sense of what is involved in battling to the death to defend yourself against an enemy for whom you retain a degree of simply human respect, in that you do not seek to dehumanise them, to put them once and for all outside the boundaries of human discourse and exchange.

However we pursue that fight (not exactly an academic question today; and Orwell and Merton would disagree sharply here, I think, given Merton’s near-pacifism), the central moral question is whether we are going to use the language of tautology and self-justification, the language that gives us alone the right to be called reasonable and human, or whether we labour to discover other ways of speaking and imagining.  If we settle for the former, we are already planning the next round of violence.  The latter is hard and counter-intuitive because it does not promise what we most of us secretly long for, a simple end to conflict and complication.  But it is the very opposite of resignation, because it summons the writer to work, to the constant creation and re-creation of an authentically shared culture – the pattern of free and civil exchange that is neither bland nor violent.  The ‘small blue capsule of indignation’ has to be punctured again and again.  And if Merton is right, that means the writer needs rather more than just ideas; she or he needs something of the contemplative liberty to sift out the motivation towards bad writing that comes from the terrors and ambitions of the ego, and find the liberty to allow words to arrive both fresh and puzzling.  Easy to imagine Orwell’s raised eyebrows at the thought of his contemplative vocation; but if this brief attempt at staging an encounter between these two passionate and contentious writers has come anywhere near the truth, that’s what might have to be said about the calling not only of Orwell but of any writer worth reading.

Dr Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, gave the 2015 Orwell Lecture on 17th November 2015, at University College London.

George Orwell cared not only about what he wrote, but how he wrote it. His assessment of what makes for good writing – and bad writing – is as relevant today as it was in 1946, when his essay Why I Write was published. The following passage from Why I Write illuminates the central qualities The Orwell Prizes reward:

“What I have most wanted to do is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art’. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience…. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.”
George Orwell
‘Why I Write’

The Foundation encourages a broad attitude to what qualifies as ‘political’. In Orwell’s world, politics is defined in the widest sense, and this should be the approach taken by judges in their consideration of entries:

“In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia.”

‘Politics and the English Language’

The overarching values that should guide the judges are derived from Orwell’s own writing. Each year, judges are encouraged to reflect, personally and as a panel, on the ways these values can be embodied in the particular genre or medium they are considering:

• Political purpose: “Using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.” (Why I Write)
• Clarity of expression: “Good prose is like a windowpane.” (Why I Write)
• Intellectual courage: “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 Prevention of Literature)
• Critical thought: “To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance. The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment.” (Proposed Preface to Animal Farm)
• Artful writing: “Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed.” (Why I Write)

Above all, the winners should strive to meet the spirit of George Orwell’s own ambition ‘to make political writing in an art’.

The Orwell Prizes are politically independent. They do not promote the political purposes of any particular writing or take account of the political orientation of the writing. Judges are required to put aside any personal political or ideological beliefs and assess submissions purely on their merit and on whether they meet the prize criteria.