Owning Orwell
I am, by most modern standards, a bad father.
A good father lets his son enjoy summer vacation. A bad father hands him a reading list.
Yet, there’s no conflict here. They are the same job seen from opposite ends of this summer, and a few decades beyond.
My son half-reads. He gets into a book the way you get into cold water: reluctant, tentative, with loads of performance, all designed to elicit an excuse to abandon the effort altogether.
Which is why I’m pushing him. And the first assignment on this summer’s reading list is George Orwell’s 1984.
I already hear what you’re saying, to which I say, shut up.
Yes, the book is a cliché.
But clichés are only truths that got famous, just like the stereotypes that feel like libel until you discover they were built on an uncomfortable amount of evidence.
Orwell witnessed the three great political catastrophes of the twentieth century up close: colonialism, fascism, and communism. Unlike many intellectuals, he managed to recognize the dangers of all three. He didn’t excuse one because he opposed another. He didn’t overlook one because it happened to wear the correct uniform.
He clocked these three aberrations so accurately that when black-market copies of Animal Farm and 1984 circulated through the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Mao’s China, and a grab bag of military juntas, one-party states, strongmen, and garden-variety dictatorships, the locals asked the same question:
“When did Orwell visit my country?”
That’s what drew me to 1984. That’s why it’s my favorite novel. Because Orwell is also on my side.
And this is where things become interesting.
Everyone thinks they own Orwell. Conservatives think he warns us about progressives. Progressives think he’s warning us about conservatives. Christians about secularism. Secularists about religion. Socialists think Orwell was warning us about fascism, while capitalists think he was warning us about socialism.
But he’s not on your side. He’s on the side of whoever is being lied to, which, ironically, sooner or later, is you.
Everyone reads Orwell and discovers, to their amazement, that he was specifically describing the people they already disliked.
Nobody reads Orwell and wonders whether he might have been describing them.
Catch up on The Anecdote:
And after he reads the book… discuss with him what he thinks of the book, then what you think… discuss…
Great piece, and what a great father you are. Happy Father’s Day tomorrow! 🤗
Orwell hit me hard when I first read him, back when I was still in school in Siberia. 1984 was banned in the Soviet Union, but my stepfather kept a hidden stash of the famous books the authorities didn’t favor. I knew where he hid them, and one day I borrowed 1984. I wish I hadn’t. With my young imagination, the book gave me nightmares, and then, not long after, my own reality started looking a lot like the one Orwell described: the surveillance, the rewritten truths, the fear of saying the wrong thing out loud.
The command of language, the prose, and the message - stayed with me. Your son is very lucky to have you as his father and mentor.