From Orwell to Today: The Battle of Free Expression in a Polarized World

In the summer of 1946, George Orwell took the world through the journey of why he writes.  He delved into his childhood, his passion for literary description, his early development, and inspiration. In ‘Why I Write’, he discussed the conditions that shaped his life, more as a duty rather than a career. For Orwell, it is doubtful that “one can assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development.” He believes that understanding a writer is to understand the age he lives in and the social and political debates that underpin it—through which one acquires “an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape.” At any given time, one is, in his state of mind and experiences, invariably influenced by the social milieu that produced him as well as the social and political debates at play. In such epochs, one ultimately carves out a space using his innate ability to write, speak, and address the prevailing social issues of an era. Orwell in his writings reminds us of that call to action, of our responsibility for the survival of our civilization, to take on and confront the inequity of our time and provide a direction under the most challenging circumstances. In the Orwellian sense, we do not make history, it makes us. It's only men obsessed with power and fame that create situations out of which they make themselves heroes. But the greatness of history is that we accidentally step into the roles of heroes. Thus, one is called out of duty, not that he aspires to be great, but that the challenges of one’s epoch make him so. This is what drives social change.

In his writings, Orwell fears tyranny, but more than that he fears the loss of our ability to express ourselves on issues that threaten humanity, and for this, he believes, that it is a revolutionary act, to tell the truth, to stand up to fascism, especially in times of universal deceit. In a time of universal deceit, he writes, "telling the truth is a revolutionary act". David Brooks, in The Second Mountain, writes about vocations, and moments and circumstances where one finds his vocation through which he sees the world.. ‘All of us are stationed’, Brooks believes, ‘at certain moments, and the circumstances throw concrete problems before us that demand to be answered.’ For Orwell, it was fighting against totalitarianism, to free the individual from servitude to a state or institutions. His works ‘Animal Farm’ and ‘1984’ served to depict the terrors of totalitarianism and centralized dictatorship. Orwell's prophetic visions extended beyond communism, foretelling a decentralized threat in a polarized society, most of which encapsulate our own epoch. 

Orwell, more than anyone, imagines, and quite vividly depicts a totalitarian and fascist future, where our freedom and ability to distinguish facts from fiction becomes illusive, ushering in a time where the line between good and evil is blurred like tiny fickles of paint in a dusty mirror. He warned that this would become so diffused, so entrenched in our everyday lives, that it becomes almost impossible to eradicate.

By resisting (whether at the category of the personal or political), one helps to uproot deceit and control. Like Orwell, the political point is to expose a lie, to bring attention to a particular social issue (s). ‘When I sit down to write a book’, he writes, 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.” 

As a socialist, Orwell despised the politics of the Soviet Union, viewing totalitarianism as a dangerous human creation. He believed it was his duty to confront the social forces at play, even if it meant standing up to power, irrespective of his political convictions. 

 To confront an issue, as Orwell confronted in his life, one must, in spite of his political conviction, be willing to stand up against one’s society. As in Baldwin’s conception of it, he must be a perpetual witness to history. 1984 was a masterpiece, in which Orwell describes the terror of totalitarianism, yet the pictures he depicts are a prediction of the future that involves centralized dictatorship as witnessed in the last few decades with the rise of identity politics and political correctness. He perhaps realized that totalitarian communism or any form of dictatorship was a threat to personal freedom. And his prediction amid our social fragmentation, not only exists on the totalitarian communist bloc, we’re witnessing a decentralized terror from across different spectrums of society with a polarized social and political system. The left has become desperate, and even more so, the right has lost all meaning, while the issue of personal liberty of the individual is at stake. The specter of this political and social fragmentation has created a plague, which instead of creating a marketplace of ideas, is creating a system that punishes dissident views. 

Putting aside earning a living, for Orwell, there are four motives for writing that underpins a writer’s influence, one of which is to serve a political purpose. Orwell's desire is “to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive for.” Every generation faces a struggle of social fragmentation, but one can seldom deal with these struggles without being offensive. Social forces, especially dominant ones, are hostile. To create a culture of dissent, one must first voluntarily confront oneself,  then confront society again as a witness. More importantly, one must face the ideas that underpin tyranny and be willing to, sometimes, most times, risk personal security for the social good.

The moral burden today is that one is willing to confront the darkness that encapsulates his time. Writing about the moral responsibility of an artist in the Creative Process, James Baldwin sums it up better that ‘an artist is also enjoined to conquer the great wilderness of himself’. ‘The precise role of the artist, then, Baldwin posits, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place’. 

How do we make the world a better place today, when our sense of reality, usually an external imposition from the dominant culture and idea, is situated and perceived differently? In a world increasingly polarized and stifling of dissent, Orwell's gift to us is a stark warning. He reminds us that if one has something to say, regardless of society's polarization,  one cannot afford to remain silent. This is especially true at the moment the Israel-Palestinian conflict has thrust upon us. The images we've seen of torn and discarded bodies on our screens as Israel continuously bombs the homes of innocent civilians and children remind us of where Orwell says our loyalty should lie: surely not to a murderous state, but to humanity. The conflict, in all its atrocities, has highlighted  the most dominant aspects of the human crisis, and moral and spiritual decline we face as people justify genocide ‘as self-defense.’ Today, all of us, are stationed at a unique time in history when the individual is atomized and treated as disposable and superfluous being, and more than anything, our true gift of speech can only have one fundamental purpose: to amplify the voice of the oppressed, of the Palenstians and stand in solidarity with the ‘wretched of the earth.’