Are We Living in George Orwell’s 1984?

            Once upon a time, high school students were required to read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, often referred to as 1984. Now the book is banned because socialists and social justice warriors do not want the rising generation to know their true agenda. Published in 1949, Nineteen Eighty-Four became an influential political novel, maybe one with the greatest influence. The novel shines a bright but negative light on communism and gives a warning about a world where totalitarian government has control of the people.

            The novel follows the life of Winston Smith and depicts the people of Oceania living in a dystopian society and being under the surveillance of the government most of the time. The people have no freedoms, not even the freedom to think independently, an act considered to be a “thoughtcrime.” Orwell created new words, such as “Big Brother” and “Newspeak,” that are used today, and he thoroughly explored totalitarianism.

            Nineteen Eighty-Four could describe our day. Not too many years ago, I was told that referring to people illegally crossing our borders as illegal aliens was “politically incorrect. I was supposed to refer to such people as undocumented immigrants.

John Stossel published an article about how “Woke Language Is Changing the Meaning of Words.” He stated that “women” and “mothers” are now referred to in congressional hearings as “birthing people” because our “language needs to be more inclusive.” Other words that have been changed are “equality” to “equity” and “affirmative action” to “diversity.” Reporters now use words like “companion, friend, or lover” where they would once use the word “mistress.” We are told that we are guilty of “violence” when we use certain speech. 

Are we committing “acts of violence” when we use certain words or promote certain books? Some people think so, but Tim Sandefur of the Goldwater Institute says that it is dangerous to call words violence. “The only way human beings can deal with one another is through language, discussion, debate…. If we say that that’s violence, then the only way for us to relate to one another is through power.”

When Stossel asked him why anyone would listen to a white man, Sandefur replied, “Because what I say has, or doesn’t have, merit on its own…. A big problem with the social justice movement is the idea that people’s mindset is controlled by their skin color. That may be called ‘anti-racism’ today, but it’s just plain old-fashioned racism.”

Other people, like linguist John McWhorter – author of “Woke Racism” – adds, “It can be really hard for us to talk to each other, because we don’t know what the words we’re using mean. The idea is, wherever there are white and black disparities, we’re supposed to call that phenomenon ‘racism.’ … It never fully holds together.”

Activists created the word “Latinx,” a word that is rejected by Hispanic people who prefer Latino or Latina. However, the “largely white, upper-middle-class, college-educated movement” – an army of “social justice activists” – tell them that they cannot make distinctions for gender.

The bottom line is that it is difficult to know what is okay and what is forbidden. Jason Kilborn, a law professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago, used a certain word in exams for the past ten years. Recently, students were upset because he “included the N-word, with only the first letter shown.” One student said that she “had to seek counsel immediately after the exam to calm myself.” McWhorter said that those students are lying because “Claiming that kind of victimhood gives them a sense of belonging, of togetherness, a sense that they’re contributing to a struggle that their ancestors dealt with in a more concrete way.”

The law professor was suspended in the name of “social justice,” which “seeks to redistribute wealth and power between groups to suit what some political authority thinks is the right outcome,” according to Sandefur.

So, how do we keep America from becoming Orwell’s 1984? How do we stop the government from controlling our thoughts and forcing us to learn a new language, Newspeak? How do we stop social justice warriors who want to “reorganize how people live their lives, silence some groups that have been heard more often”?

McWhorter says that the only way to stop social justice is to push back against it. “Enlightened America needs to develop a backbone and start getting used to being called racist on Twitter. Just withstand it. Keep their voices out there. Make us understand what true justice is.” 

Echoes of 1984

            George Orwell wrote his dystopian novel titled 1984 in 1949. This novel is relevant today because it depicts a totalitarian government and its use of advanced technology and media manipulation to control its people. Orwell’s main character is Winston Smith who lives in Oceania, which is one of the three huge governments that exist in the world of the book. The government of Oceania is known as “Big Brother” and is controlled by a small, powerful, and mysterious group of elite people. The government keeps track of its people through the use of cameras and listening devices placed in their television sets and a secret police force who report rebellious thoughts and misbehavior.

            This novel came to my mind when I read about Amy Wax, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who is in trouble for her political wrongthink. Wax has the credentials necessary for a long academic career. However, her bachelor’s degree from Yale College, her medical degree from Harvard, and her law degree from Columbia have not stopped a campaign to get her fired. The fact that she has argued 15 cases before the Supreme Court for the Justice Department does not help her case. None of her credentials help because she continues to think differently.

            Wax has been called racist, sexist, and xenophobic many times, but she doubles down in calling for debate, evidence, and accountability. She has been attacked by students and colleagues for saying that children do better if their parents have traditional marriage values. Her critics also dislike her argument that many of today’s problems come from “the breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture” or the lifestyles of the 1940’s and 1950’s. 

That culture laid out the script we all were supposed to follow: Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.

These basic cultural precepts reigned from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s. They could be followed by people of all backgrounds and abilities, especially when backed up by almost universal endorsement. Adherence was a major contributor to the productivity, educational gains, and social coherence of that period.

            Alas, such a culture was not destined to continue because the flower children or hippies of the 1960s rebelled against the societal norm. They rebelled against their parents and leaders and went their own way, and society is reaping the results of their decisions. This author believes that Wax was absolutely correct in her argument.

            The action that really got Wax in trouble was a 2017 podcast interview with Glenn Loury, economist and professor at Brown University, about affirmative action. She commented, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of (my) class, and rarely, rarely, in the top half. I can think of one or two students who scored in the first half of my required first-year Civil Procedure course.”

            Interpreting Wax’s statement to mean, “Amy Wax said black students can’t excel in law school,” her critics used it as fuel in their battle against her. The result is that she no longer teaches first-year law students at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

            Wax spoke at The Heritage Foundation on November 8 about her politically incorrect statements and the fallout from them. Then she suggested some ideas of how to counter the “radical, identity-based grievance culture” that has taken over the nation’s universities. 

Remind students that one of the central missions of the university, which justifies its existence, is to get at the truth. That requires honest debate, patience, intellectual honesty, investigation, and a lot of hard work….

No one can be heard to say, “I’m offended.” They all have permission to be offended. But they just can’t express it.

No one is allowed to accuse anyone else, in the classroom or out, dead or alive, of being racist, sexist, xenophobic, white supremist, or any other derisive, identity-based label. No slurs or name-calling. These don’t enlighten, educate, or edify. They add nothing. Give us an argument. Tell us why the other person is wrong.

No one can complain to administrators … about anything said in class.

Finally, both the government and private donors need to rethink the lavish financial support for higher education, and especially for elite and selective institutions, which serve only a teeny-tiny portion of our population and which in many ways I’m afraid, have become an anti-Western and anti-American liability.

How can we get the rich to see that supporting elite universities today might not be the wisest and more fruitful uses of their hard-earned money? What we need is a list of alternative causes and alternative institutions and goals for their money that help ordinary, average, unspecial people who have been unduly neglected by our elites and our increasingly walled off from them.

            Wax admits that the chances that her guidelines will be adopted in classrooms on college campuses are slim to nothing. In fact, she expresses little hope for them to do so in the current climate. She further states she expects that threats against professors who are politically incorrect to become worse.

Professors who hold unpopular positions or state inconvenient facts are now considered psychologically toxic. If their presence causes offense, distress, feelings of insult, fears of ill treatment, that is enough to eject them from the classroom. And of course, these perceptions and feelings are subjective, they are self-confirming, they are immune from challenge. It’s all in the mind of the beholder. And the beholder’s mind reigns supreme.

            The example of Amy Wax shows us clearly that we are living in the echoes of 1984. The rising generations are going to universities that indoctrinate them in liberal speak rather than teaching them to think critically. It is a terrible assault that is being done to the current crop of university students, but an even worse one is the fact that this group of students will affect the next one and others further down the line. They will become the parents and teachers of innocent and bright children who will have their minds clouded by the nonsense of political correctness.

George Orwell

            My VIP for this week is George Orwell because I am studying his novel 1984. The first thing that you should know is that George Orwell is the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair! He was born on June 25, 1903, in Motihari, Bihar, in British India. His great-grandfather Charles Blair was a “wealthy country gentleman in Dorset” who received income from his plantations in Jamaica. He married Lady Mary Fane, daughter of the Earl of Westmorland. His grandfather, Thomas Richard Arthur Blair was a clergyman, and his father, Richard Walmesley Blair, worked for the Indian Civil Service. His mother, Ida Mabel Limouzin Blair grew up in Burma, and she had a French grandfather. He has two sisters, one five years older and one five years younger. When he was one year old, his mother her children took to England where his father joined them a few years later. “His birthplace and ancestral house in [India] has been declared a protected monument of historical importance.”

            Blair attended school at St Cyprian’s School, a boarding school, for five years. He wrote some of his first poems there, but he hated the school. He earned scholarships to Wellington and Eton, but there were no spots available at Eton. He attended Wellington for a few months and then moved to Eton.

            Even though Blair’s great-grandparents were wealthy, the money did not pass down through the generations. His parents could not afford to send him to university, and his family decided that he should join the Imperial Police (later the Indian Police Service). He took the entrance exam and had the seventh highest score out of twenty-six candidates who passed. He accepted a post in Burma because his maternal grandmother lived at Moulmein.

            Blair returned to England when he left the service, lived a few years in Paris, and returned to England. He was a teacher at a private school for boys and later worked at a book store, all the while attempting to establish himself as a writer.

            Blair was married twice. He first married Eileen O-Shaughnessy (m. 1936; d. 1945) and then married Sonia Brownell (m. 1949). He was diagnosed with tuberculosis in December 1947. He courted Sonia Brownell, but he went to the hospital in London soon after they announced their engagement. They were married in the hospital on October 13, 1949. Early in the morning of January 21, 1950, an artery burst in his lungs. He died at age 46 in the University College Hospital in London, England. He was buried in Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire, England.

            Blair, under the pen name of George Orwell became an English novelist, poet, essayist, journalist, and critic. His work shows his interest in social injustice, opposition to totalitarianism, and support for democratic socialism. He is best known for his allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-four or 1984 (1949). He was ranked as one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945 by The Times in 2008.

Orwell’s work continues to influence popular and political culture, and the term Orwellian – descriptive of totalitarian or authoritarian social practices – has entered the language together with many of his neologisms, including Big Brother, Thought Police, Room 101, memory hole, newspeak, doublethink, proles, unperson, and thoughtcrime.