Language, Autocracy, and Resistance
George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), part 2
As I said last week, in ‘Sex, Love, and Chastity: George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), part 1’, this week I want to turn to how language works in the world of the novel.
We learn fairly early on that Winston is acquainted with Syme, who is hard at work on the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary. As their conversation (in part I, chapter 5) and Orwell’s appendix to the novel make clear, Newspeak isn’t like other languages.
It’s a language the Party are creating for the use of Party members. In the timeline of the novel, most Party members use Oldspeak (standard English) in everyday conversations, but Winston uses Newspeak when he rewrites news articles to suit the Party – more on that next week.
How does language usually work in the real world?
Left to develop naturally, languages grow and change. Words are added as the language users make new discoveries, have new experiences, and need new ways of describing things. Art and science create a lot of these new things that need new words – for example, William Shakespeare is credited with adding 1,700 words to the English language. And only rarely do governments try to control the development of a language.
The most prominent example of a government institution actually trying to do this is the Académie française, which is charged with maintaining and protecting the French language. One of my university French professors explained this through the example of the French word l’ordinateur which means computer.
While the Académie française wants people to use the French word, a lot of francophone people prefer the term le computer. With the general populace, they’re fighting a losing battle, but the Académie still holds sway over formal French.
English takes the opposite approach. It is a magpie language that takes words and grammatical structures from every language it encounters.
This approach gives us flexibility in how we express ourselves, but it also leads to a lot of frustration. Why, to give just one example, it explains why the plural of kid is kids, but the plural of child is children – the -en ending for a plural comes from German, while the -s ending is from French. English is heavily influenced by both languages and uses both structures as needed.
Still, like French (and German for that matter), English has one set of ‘rules’ for everyday or colloquial usage and another for formal writing. That’s why in casual discourse we’ve been splitting infinitives and ending sentences with prepositions with abandon for ages, but formal English is only recently ‘allowing’ such things – and even then, only occasionally.
Sometimes you’ll hear speakers of British English complaining about the increasing use of Americanisms (verbing nouns, using a lot of zeds, replacing common nouns with brand names). But there’s no official body that tries to keep the language pure in any sense of that word.
Instead, anglophones have the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), which attempts to track which words we use and how we use them by looking at how words are used in a wide variety of publications from scholarly work to cheap periodicals and the internet.
Now that the OED is completely digital, it is being constantly updated – they publish updates quarterly and note on each definition when it was last updated. If you ever have a chance to look through one of the old multi-volume hardcopy editions, take a few minutes to do so – they are fascinating books.
Newspeak
I know French and English are just two examples, but they’re enough to demonstrate that under ordinary conditions, language will change and grow over time. As I indicate above, language changes in part because people invent new words for new situations and experiences.
This is why I was so sceptical last week about how effective it would be to eliminate words for the various sex acts the Party wants to suppress. I suggested that anyone who doubted that check the teen pregnancy rate in schools that don’t allow comprehensive sex education because not understanding or having the scientific or ‘proper’ name for an act doesn’t keep people from engaging in it.
While no version of Newspeak is likely to work in real life, what is Orwell doing with it in his novel?
He’s showing how power works and how language can be used to control what and how Party members think. The purpose of Newspeak is to reduce the number of words available to Party members.
Syme explains this to Winston over lunch:
You think, I daresay, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We’re destroying words – scores of them, hundreds of them every day. We’re cutting the language down to the bone. The Eleventh Edition won’t contain a single word that will become obsolete before the year 2050. (pp. 53–4)
Syme describes the destruction of words as getting rid of waste. For example, he explains that you don’t need both good and bad, so long as you have the prefix un-. In Newspeak instead of saying something is bad, you call it ungood.
He succinctly sums up the Party’s endgame so far as language is concerned:
In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking – not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
The purpose of Newspeak is to produce orthodoxy: unthinking, unconscious obedience to the Party.
As terrifying as room 101 is, we’ll come to that in a week or two, it’s the authoritarian control of language in this novel that keeps people like me up at night.
The structure of Newspeak
As I said last week, when you read the novel, make sure you read Orwell’s appendix, ‘The Principles of Newspeak’. It’s not the most exciting thing you’ll ever read, but it very succinctly demonstrates how power works.
In it, he explains that newspeak has three levels of vocabulary so that Party members who need more nuanced language have it:
A vocabulary: the words of everyday life; everyone has and uses this vocabulary,
B vocabulary: words for politics; these are carefully crafted to make political messages more easily understood and accepted – everyone understands these words, but not everyone uses them.
C vocabulary: specialist scientific terms; specialists learn only the words relevant to their individual specialism.
As we saw in ‘Sex, Love, and Chastity’, ‘normal’ Party members need only two words for sex: goodsex (chastity) and sexcrime (everything else). Officially, only specialists who study what the Party considers to be aberrant sexual behaviour have any need for specific terms for the different kinds of sex the Party disapproves of (319).
Orwell links the ever-shrinking vocabulary of Newspeak to power:
Each reduction was a gain, since the smaller the area of choice, the smaller the temptation to take thought. Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centres at all. (p. 322)
Reducing vocabulary reduces thought and finally leads to people unthinkingly spewing forth the Party line. It is every autocrat’s dream come true.
Why does this matter now?
It may be what autocrats want, but it’s also the opposite of patriotism. Moving from the world of the novel to 2025 America, the Trump regime seems to expect all party members and officials to tow the party line without question like any good Party member in Oceania.
This is why we’re seeing things like loyalty tests in the FBI and why state leaders keen to signal their loyalty are doing things like subjecting new teachers to ideology tests.
The Republicans are wrapping the flag around these autocratic moves and calling them patriotism. To resist it, as Jack Hopkins argues, we must ‘remind each other – and ourselves – that patriotism is not blind loyalty. It’s the courage to hold your country accountable.’
Back to language, thinking about the role of language in Nineteen Eighty-Four helps us see our own world more clearly. Today, I’ll focus on two twenty-first century, real world issues: generative AI and the rise of autocracy.
Generative AI
Unlike writers like Aldous Huxley, Orwell wasn’t especially concerned with possible technological advancements. Nevertheless, in his novel the Party does use technology to produce low-quality entertainment (songs, plays, novels, and pornography) for the proletariat, or people who aren’t Party members.
It’s a gross understatement to say that Party members have little respect for the proletariat, or proles. Syme is representative when he says to Winston, ‘The proles are not human beings’ (p. 56).
The Party uses the rubbish entertainment it manufactures to pacify the proles and make them easy to manage.
I say it manufactures the entertainment because there’s no real creative process or thought behind its production. Songs are ‘composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator’ (p. 46). Plays, novels, and pornography are also mechanically produced.
Julia works in the fiction department, using one of the kaleidoscopes to manufacture novels:
She could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. But she was not interested in the final product. She ‘didn’t much care for reading’, she said. Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam, or bootlaces. (p. 136)
She doesn’t see herself as a writer or an artist. She simply uses a machine to produce fiction in the same way factories produce jam and bootlaces.
The purpose is to create a commodity that can be consumed, not to produce art, to communicate a truth, or to facilitate human expression.
The kaleidoscope’s workings aren’t described in detail, but they seem to be used to mechanically remix set characters, scenes, and phrases. They’re not trying to write the next great novel; they just need something sufficiently new to package and sell.
On reading Nineteen Eighty-Four this time (the first time I read it was in the late 1990s), I was struck by the similarities between these kaleidoscopes and generative AI:
The fiction Planning Committee serves a similar purpose to the human typing in prompts to gen AI.
The Rewrite Squad is similar to the editing process people undertake on text produced by AI to make it sound ‘more like me’ or ‘more human’.
Both quickly and efficiently spit out reams of text on any subject within the parameters of the technology, which necessarily limits the language available for the products because machines, unlike humans, can’t play with language and create new words or expressions.
These technologies foster the conditions necessary for autocracy to flourish.
Autocracy and language
In the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Newspeak is created for the express purpose of limiting Party members’ ability to think, while mechanically produced entertainments keep the proles pacified so it doesn’t occur to them that they could revolt against their treatment by the Party.
The Party understands this, and Winston comes to realise it in Part I, chapter 7:
If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, 85 per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. The Party could not be overthrown from within. Its enemies, if it had any enemies, had no way of coming together or even of identifying one another. (p. 72)
Autocracies want to hold on to power. For the Party this means controlling members and pacifying the masses.
That doesn’t mean pandering to the proles. They really only need to keep them comfortable enough they don’t see the point in organising a revolt. Comfortable enough, doesn’t mean actual comfort.
The Party also needs to keep the proles from realising a better life is possible. The mechanically produced entertainment serves this purpose well. It provides distraction, but not knowledge; entertainment, but no inspiration. Autocrats are afraid of inspiration because it leads to action.
Newspeak, as I discuss above, serves this purpose for Party members. They know they’re not allowed to think or say anything the party doesn’t want them to, and the language is restricted to reduce the chance that anyone would try. I’ll get into thoughtcrime and doublethink in a future edition of Scandalous Books.
Timothy Snyder discusses language and autocracy in chapter 9 of On Tyranny: Twenty lessons from the twentieth century (2017). The lesson in that chapter is ‘Be kind to our language’. If you haven’t had a chance to read Snyder’s book, try to make time for it soon – it’s short and to the point.
In 2021, Snyder recorded a series of videos on his YouTube channel in which he reads the lesson for each chapter and then discusses how his thinking on it has developed since publishing the book. In the video on chapter 9, in addition to imploring us to step away from the internet and read books, he talks about how the internet has a similar effect on our language to Newspeak in Orwell’s novel.
Snyder explains that the algorithms that govern so much of what we see online, and particularly on social media, depend on identifying the trigger words that will make us stop the scroll and click to read more. We then take these trigger words into our daily conversations and slowly but surely reduce the words we have available for self-expression.
What evidence does Snyder have for this? The simple fact that you can predict how someone will express themselves if you know what media they’ve been consuming.
Snyder doesn’t directly address generative AI, but from what I’ve read about the technology, it seems to be speeding up this language shrinkage by making everyone who uses it write the same way. I discuss some of my thoughts on this in a blog post called ‘Should I Just Let Generative AI Write It for Me?’
How do we resist this aspect of autocracy? Snyder argues, and I agree, we resist by reading books and writing and thinking for ourselves.
In his video, Snyder describes what happens when you walk into a library: you look at all the books on the shelf, not just the one you went in to get, and you inevitably find something you haven’t read before that looks interesting. When you read that book, it affects you in unpredictable ways.
Unpredictability is the bane of autocracy.
Orwell understood this. One of Winston’s most transgressive acts is buying a blank journal and sitting in an unobserved part of his flat to write his thoughts in it.
Reading and writing are acts of resistance.