I think about two essays a lot, and in recent months, for obvious reasons, they have been on my mind again.
Near the beginning of his 1936 essay “Words and Behavior,” Brave New World author Aldous Huxley writes,
Hatred itself is not so strong that animals will not forget it, if distracted, even in the presence of the enemy. Watch a pair of cats, crouching on the brink of a fight. Balefully the eyes glare; from far down in the throat of each come bursts of a strange, strangled noise of defiance; as though animated by a life of their own, the tails twitch and tremble. With aimed intensity of loathing! Another moment and surely there must be an explosion. But no; all of a sudden one of the two creatures turns away, hoists a hind leg in a more than fascist salute and, with the same fixed and focused attention as it had given a moment before to its enemy, begins to make a lingual toilet.
Ten years later George Orwell wrote, in his essay “Politics and the English Language,”
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless [sic] villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.
It’s probably not a coincidence that these two central figures in western dystopian literature focus so specifically on language. Language is what makes actions into narrative, and narratives are what help us to make sense out of a universe that can seem senseless. Politics, religion, ideology, and tradition, are conveyed through language and consist of narratives, about who we are, who they are, and why we’re here.
I don’t have any solutions or especially fresh thoughts about current geopolitics— a word Orwell and Huxley might say serves to make the concrete reality of bombs falling on people, hostages languishing in captivity, patients dying in hospitals, military assaults, suffering and death— into abstractions. Things we can discuss in speeches or in thinkpieces without all the emotional weight. I just keep thinking about these two essays and trying to expose myself to as much of the reality as I can find from credible sources, while also taking care of my own mental health.
And hoping that the suffering of real people in real places will be at an end soon.