There You Go Again: Orwell comes to America

Named partly after the George Orwell and partly as reference to Ronald Reagan's famous rejoinder to President Jimmy Carter, Tuesday the New York Public Library was filled with a variety of speakers and thinkers, all assembled to reflect upon, 60 years later, Orwell's penning of Politics and the English Language ( in association with The Open Society Institute).

A fascinating kick off saw luminaries including Konstanty Gebert, who ran an underground publication in Poland as a Solidarity activist and is now an international reporter, Masha Gessen, the Moscow-based journalist, Jack Miles, Professor of English & religious studies at UC Irvine and George Soros. Charting the developments of propaganda, the panelists considered it from their various areas of expertise. Most interestingly, it seemed to me, Soros made the point that we live in an 'enlightenment fallacy', believing there is a 'truth to be understood'. Instead, he argued, the Karl Roves of this world have been winning, demonstrating that 'there is a truth to be manipulated.' He drew on Orwell's notion of 'transference' to explain how he himself has been vilified by some in the US press (with some clips from The O'Reilly Factor and Fox News adding light entertainment) and argued that having lived through Nazism and Communism, we face another significant challenge, that of the pursuit of truth when others would obscure it, often through a contemporary version of Newspeak.

The event also ties in with the publishing of What Orwell didn't know: Propaganda and the new face of American Politics which is edited by Andras Szanto and comprises 20 writers who consider this issue in three sections; 'language and politics', 'symbols and battlegrounds' and 'media and the message'.

While it was fascinating to hear George Lakoff explain his own version of 'the enlightenment fallacy' - namely that we are stuck in the incorrect notion that people are generally rational and reasonable - whereas, he argues that 'reason is 98% unconscious' and emotion is often involved, I was rather surprised that it seemed a little pedestrian. Sure, we have emotions and there is a broader cultural and intellectual world that we live in that shapes our views (and feelings), although whereas not so long ago the world was somewhat animated about competing big ideas as to how we should organise society, today what dominates is atomisation. Lakoff went on to argue that due to our 'frames' of understanding, even when Democrats attempt to negate Republican arguments, they end up reinforcing them because they simply appeal to the pre-existing frames and mindsets.

Drew Westen, professor of psychology and psychiatry at Emory University performed an 'experiment' that demonstrated how the audience could have their 'latent networks activated' to think about something, in this case it was a detergent. He went on to ask, 'Suppose someone knew how to shape and activate networks in voters?' Pause. 'They do. They're called the GOP'. He then made the point that actually there is nothing wrong with activating networks, in fact if one couldn't do that, it would be impossible to think. So really what he means is that politicians are attempting to convince us that they are best for the job. Wow.

What no one seemed to mention though is that the very art of political discourse seems to have disintegrated, not because there are so many focus groups or smart Ivy-League speech writers, but rather because in general, politics has evaporated. Instead, what we are witnessing is an emptied-out bureaucratic pass-the-baton of equally uninspiring people and ideas. Tellingly, Westen ended with a series of statements about what it means to 'support our troops' where he demonstrated how to present a credible alternative and hence impact the agenda. Basically he said what he thought clearly and boldly.

A novel idea in politics perhaps, but telling the truth as we see it would go a long way to scaling down the cynicism that pervades debate. The speakers seemed to agree that it was not so much George Bush's prowess that won 2004, but the absence of any clear alternative. With one year from today exactly until the next US presidential elections, perhaps we should bear in mind some other words from George Orwell;

'My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. [I write] because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention'.

Maybe, what we need is more propaganda, not less. Perhaps, increased heated political debate and discussion - where ideas are robustly challenged regardless of electoral outcome. Naive? The alternative, where society increasingly withdraws from the political stage, is a high price to pay.