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Margaret Thatcher privatised British Telecom in 1984. The FTSE 100 index ticked into life. Frankie Goes to Hollywood topped the singles charts in the UK with a piece of considerate advice about male orgasm postponement. Even when Wham! celebrated monogamy, the song was titled “Freedom”, as though to fit the individualist age.
What I am getting at here is that George Orwell’s 1984 was not — this can’t be stressed enough, was not — prophetic. “Airstrip One” never succumbed to dictatorship and the suppression of private romance. If Orwell was perceptive about totalitarianism in general, so were other writers, earlier. (Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon came out in 1940.) So why the enduring interest in Saint George? Why the latest spate of writing? Why will I read most of it?
It is, surely, the way he was right. A non-graduate, a trader in common sense: if there is such a thing as ostentatious plainness, Orwell had it. He is the opposite of the clever fool, that person of fabulous intelligence and erratic judgment who can be trusted to fall for ideas that most people would laugh out of town. To that extent, he is a relief from our times.
Clever fools surround us. Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are much-cited. But the Santa Clara Valley, the world centre of ill-directed brainpower, has worse than them. Tech bros — and no few sisters — are susceptible to libertarianism, quack lifestyle regimens of the 4am ice-bath type and, if not the Russian view of the Ukraine war, then a spurious even-handedness.
The problem traverses the ideological spectrum. The movement known as woke could only have been incubated and hatched on campuses. Few places have so much intellectual potential. Few places have so little, well, I am going to call it “lived experience”. When the cultural left makes contact with that less credentialed but longer-in-the-tooth movement called the electorate, see how it struggles.
Then there is the phenomenon known as “effective altruism”, which has shown impressive academic rigour, towering smarminess and so little basic guile as to get caught up with Sam Bankman-Fried. It can say, by way of defence, that other people fell for Elizabeth Holmes. Those dupes in turn can point to the mass market for amateur psychotherapy and self-help mumbo jumbo. And so the carousel of eloquent, educated naïveté goes round.
There have always been clever fools: Cambridge spies, eugenics-smitten Fabians, Hitler appeasers with All Souls fellowships. During his leadership of the Pentagon, Robert McNamara, the ultimate genius/sucker, fought the Vietnam war as a hedge fund quant might.
The problem existed in pockets back then, however, because so few people went to university. Now it is almost ambient. We have lived through a tremendous expansion of cognitive training without a commensurate increase in that unteachable trait known as our judgment. It was the correct reform. But the law of unintended consequences forever applies. Various glitches in the modern world — the fads, the conspiracies, the psychobabble — might be explained as surplus mental capacity casting restlessly around for some outlet.
The scientist Peter Turchin has argued that underemployed graduates are potential social trouble. Why would that be much less true of the most successful graduates? To embrace a dangerous dogma, whatever it is, probably takes some resentment, but it definitely takes some grounding in conceptual thought. A vast minority of the public now has it.
Taken too far, this argument can cross into the populist and condescending notion that hope, as someone who should have known better once wrote, “must lie in the proles”. So, to stipulate: cleverness is often worth the foolishness. You’d rather have a Musk around than not.
But the rise of the clever fool does explain the lasting — in fact, the gaining — interest in Orwell. He stands out much more now than in his own time, when non-graduates weren’t rare (Winston Churchill, Harry Truman, Ernest Bevin). It is alien to us, and most beguiling, that a “thought leader” of world consequence could lack a degree, much less two or three, and keep abstract nouns to a minimum. If, more than any writer in the English language, people feel safe in Orwell’s hands, it is because he is respite from everything around us. His plainness is now exotic.
Email Janan at [email protected]
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