Orwell on history and objective truth
/I doesn’t take much to get me on an Orwell kick, and the most recent started with an interesting piece in First Things entitled “What Orwell Learned from Chesterton.” Somewhere during this most recent dip into Orwell’s essays, I came across an “As I Please” column from February 4, 1944—the spring before Operation Overlord, when an Englishman could visit Dover and look over the Channel into the Third Reich. It’s a fascinating short reflection, and right up my alley.
Orwell begins with an arresting apocryphal tale:
When Sir Walter Raleigh was imprisoned in the Tower of London, he occupied himself with writing a history of the world. He had finished the first volume and was at work on the second when there was a scuffle between some workmen beneath the window of his cell, and one of the men was killed. In spite of diligent inquiries, and in spite of the fact that he had actually seen the thing happen, Sir Walter was never able to discover what the quarrel was about: whereupon, so it is said—and if the story is not true it certainly ought to be—he burned what he had written and abandoned his project.
Orwell tells this story to introduce the topic of the investigation into truth in history, and considers how well Raleigh might have succeeded in his historical project. “Allowing for all the difficulties of research at that date, and the special difficulty of conducting research in prison,” Orwell writes, Raleigh “could probably have produced a world history which had some resemblance to the real course of events.” Why? Because
“A certain degree of truthfulness was possible so long as it was admitted that a fact may be true even if you don’t like it.”
Up to a fairly recent date, the major events recorded in the history books probably happened. It is probably true that the battle of Hastings was fought in 1066, that Columbus discovered America, that Henry VIII had six wives, and so on. A certain degree of truthfulness was possible so long as it was admitted that a fact may be true even if you don’t like it. Even as late as the last war it was possible for the Encyclopædia Britannica, for instance, to compile its articles on the various campaigns partly from German sources. Some of the facts—the casualty figures, for instance—were regarded as neutral and in substance accepted by everybody. No such thing would be possible now.
That’s because of ideology; everyone now has ideological reasons to obscure, hide, or attempt to alter the truth. Orwell supplies numerous examples from his personal experience and contemporary events, most notably the Spanish Civil War, in which he was a participant, as well as the Battle of Britain, Trotsky’s supposed betrayal of the Soviet Union, and the factuality of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. “In no case,” he writes, “do you get one answer which is universally accepted because it is true: in each case you get a number of totally incompatible answers, one of which is finally adopted as the result of a physical struggle. History is written by the winners.”
I was particularly struck by that last line, as it’s a perennial favorite of a certain kind of eager student who wants to let others know he’s not naïve. That is, it’s usually a species of the cynicism I wrote about last week. (It’s also easily disproven by visiting the History section at any Barnes & Noble, where you can find apologia, exonerations, and revisions in favor of any number of “losers” in history.)
But Orwell isn’t using it that way here. Rather than a universal statement about unreliability or bias, he is describing the end result of ideological struggle. This is how history will be written—even if our side wins—if we are not careful, as his next line suggests: “In the last analysis our only claim to victory is that if we win the war we shall tell less lies about it than our adversaries.”
The Allies could rightly claim to have salvaged something from the wreck of the war if they would at least be truthful about it after the fact. It’s still not entirely clear that that was the case, and insofar as even the “good guys” in a conflict like World War II take the same ideologically motivated approach to the truth as their totalitarian enemies, subjecting the truth to the claims of usefulness rather than subjecting themselves to it, they become totalitarians, too. Indeed, they share the most important characteristic of their enemies:
“The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits atrocities but that it attacks the concept of objective truth: it claims to control the past as well as the future.”
This is broadly applicable, because it’s true, and this is why history in particular is so hotly contested right now—along with everything else. Totalitarianism is, after all, total.
After a few caveats and notes about the effects of the war on freedom of the press, Orwell concludes by suggesting that “[t]here is some hope, therefore, that the liberal habit of mind, which thinks of truth as something outside yourself, something to be discovered, and not as something you can make up as you go along, will survive. But I still don’t envy the future historian’s job.”
Me neither.
You can read the entire “As I Please” piece in several places online. I found it here. I definitely recommend the MD Aeschliman piece on Orwell and Chesterton mentioned above, and if you want to begin or complement an Orwell kick like mine, let me also recommend a 2017 piece from Ben Sixsmith that gets at one of the things I most like about Orwell: “George Orwell Would Dislike You, Me, and Our Opinions.”
