George Orwell

The Argument

George Orwell is the great moralist of the twentieth century who refused to be a Christian, and the refusal cost his moral framework more than he acknowledged. Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm are the most powerful literary arguments against totalitarianism ever written, and they are powered by a conviction — that truth matters, that human dignity is real, that the destruction of language is a form of violence — that Orwell himself could not fully ground in his secular worldview.

His essay Politics and the English Language is one of the most important pieces of literary criticism written in the twentieth century, and its argument is essentially theological: clear language is a moral obligation, because unclear language is a weapon of the powerful against the powerless. The connection between linguistic clarity and political integrity, between the corruption of words and the corruption of the soul, is a connection that the biblical tradition had been making for millennia before Orwell made it secular.

For literary apologetics, Orwell is the figure of the secular moralist whose moral seriousness exceeds his secular metaphysics. He cared about the truth with a passion that his avowed atheism could not justify. He believed in human dignity with a conviction that his Darwinian assumptions could not support. He was a man whose conscience had been formed by a tradition he rejected, and whose greatest work is the product of that formation.