How George Orwell predicted our very online political discourse

In 1945 George Orwell wrote Notes On Nationalism, which describes how “nationalism” makes people impervious to facts. Reading it recently, I was astonished by how little had changed. Memes and Twitter flame wars might be incomprehensible to Orwell, if he were alive today, but the basic way we argue about politics has hardly changed.

In the essay, Orwell describes how nationalism warps people’s thinking. Nationalism was as serious a political problem in 1945 as it is now, but what Orwell described as nationalism is not the belligerent belief in a nation-state to exclusion of all others. What Orwell examines in the essay is better understood as ideology.

Orwell defines nationalism as “identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests.” He goes on to say: “Nationalism in the extended sense in which I am using the word, included such movements and tendencies as Communism, political-Catholicism, Zionism, Antisemitism, Trotskyism and Pacificism.”

Competing ideologies

Why he didn’t say ideology and used the word nationalism instead I don’t know, but his use of nationalism fits the term ideology. Most people think an ideology is having an ‘ism’, such as feminism, socialism, etc. People typically associate isms with the left or the extreme right, although they can be many ideologies that don’t have a handy one-word phrase to sum them up. They can be as all-encompassing as any ism, but are also more difficult to describe, more opaque and correspondingly more difficult to convince someone that they have an ideology. Yet, nonetheless, they are ideologies.

One of the key aspects of nationalism that still applies today as much as it did in the 40s, is that for a nationalist, everything is about the competition of your ideology against others. Orwell wrote: “A nationalist is one who thinks solely, or mainly, in terms of competitive prestige. He may be a positive or a negative nationalist - that is, he may use his mental energy either in boosting or in denigrating - but at any rate his thoughts always turn on victories, defeats, triumphs, and humiliations.”

This perfectly sums up the world of 24/7 news and social media discourse, where those who follow politics like it’s a sport constantly keep track of the scores, the owns, the dumps, the who-is-ups and the who-is-downs of it all. Politics isn’t a debate about competing ideas, but about competing scores on who has delivered the most public humiliations to the other side.

Focusing on the dunk

Related to this is that the very online discourse focuses on minor political exchanges, rather than the big issues facing the world. A dunk on an unpopular MP or commentator will be shared more widely than actual news (sometimes even making it to the front page of newspapers). The discourse favours witty putdowns or dumps over what’s happening in terms of legislation, the economy, debates, etc.

The same was true in 1945 when Orwell wrote: “Moreover, although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge, the nationalist is often somewhat uninterested in what happens in the real world. What he wants is to feel that his own unit is getting the better of some other unit, and he can more easily do this by scoring off an adversary than by examining the facts to see whether they support him. All nationalist controversy is at the debating-society level. It is always entirely inconclusive, since each contestant invariably believes himself to have won the victory.”

A small victory in Twitter discourse is of much more interest to a nationalist than a substantial news story about rising costs of living or health policy. Also, to nationalists any exchange can be a victory. Hence you can see two different stripes of nationalists tweet the same clip of two people shouting incomprehensible things at each other and both claiming the unintelligible noise is their side is owning the other. As there are a lot of nationalists on social media, our discussion is not engaging in substantive issues.

Double standards

Following on from that, Orwell wrote about something I had assumed was an entirely modern phenomenon: the bold-faced claim that when our side does something (usually bad) it’s okay, but when the other side does the same thing it’s beyond the pale. Orwell wrote: “A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage – torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians - which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by our side.”

This double standard appears to be eternal. Witness Remainers deploring the Leave campaign’s underhand attempts to influence the Brexit referendum’s outcome with lies, dodgy Facebook ads and possible Russian interference - whilst also saying without a hint of self-awareness that if there were a second referendum the elderly shouldn’t be allowed to vote, as they won’t experience the long-term consequences of Brexit.

These are both slightly different attempts to influence the outcome of a vote and can be summed up by Orwell saying: “The sense of right and wrong becomes unhinged also. There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when our side commits it.”

Commentators are like astrologers

Orwell also described the modern social media political talking heads. “Political or military commentators, like astrologers, can survive almost any mistake, because their more devoted followers do not look to them for an appraisal of the facts but for the stimulation of nationalistic loyalties,” he said. Commentators can make any number of ludicrous or inaccurate statements on social media and never lose their following of people who agree with them.

From backers of the Iraq war to people who called the Brexit referendum wrong, or who claimed Brexit would be easy, to the million online talking heads who said that all Labour needed to do was get rid of Jeremy Corbyn and put a sensible Remainer with a neat suit in his place and they’ll be 20 points ahead, for a commentator who shares your nationalism there is no amount of mistakes that cannot be forgiven.

People who claimed that Saddam Hussein definitely had WMD and this was a fact, are still political commentators favoured by those who share the New Labour ideology. Have they admitted they got the biggest call of the 2000s wrong? Of course not. There’s no need to. Just keep posting to those who share your ideology, and no amount of mistakes will tarnish your reputation in your follower’s eyes.

The truth is out there, but we don’t care

Related to the endless rounds of ideological dumping is the process of how rhetoric takes the place of truth. Orwell wrote: “What were the rights and wrongs of the Warsaw rising of August 1944? Is it true about the German gas ovens in Poland? Who was really to blame for the Bengal famine? Probably the truth is discoverable, but the facts will be so dishonestly set forth in almost any newspaper that the ordinary reader can be forgiven either for swallowing lies or for failing to form an opinion. The general uncertainty as to what is really happening makes it easier to cling to lunatic beliefs. Since nothing is ever quite proved or disproved, the most unmistakable fact can be impudently denied.”

Did Boris Johnson lie about the benefits of Brexit? Was Jeremy Corbyn in league with the IRA or the SWP? Was Clinton’s email server illegal? What happened when Narendra Modi

was governor of Uttar Pradesh? Was austerity a means to transfer wealth to the rich? The truth of these things are discoverable and many talented journalists spend years writing on these topics, publishing detailed long reads breaking down the facts, and they reach fewer people than a post in a Facebook group or a viral tweet. Posts that are high in rhetoric will be lapped up by the nationalistic supporters of a side over a detailed investigation any day.

Nationalism is escapable

We think that modern politics is conducted differently than it was in the 1940s. We have created 24/7 news, legions of political commentators, the social media dunk, and the viral tweet, but the way we do politics for the nationalists haven’t changed much in the intervening 77 years. What has changed is that all this is inescapable because social media is in everyone’s pocket and the latest bad take is only a twitch away.

There is some hope as not everyone is a nationalist. Even people who are nationalists aren’t nationalists all the time. Orwell wrote: “One has no right to assume that everyone, or even every intellectual, is infected by nationalism. Secondly, nationalism can be intermittent and limited. An intelligent man may half-succumb to a belief which attracts him but which he knows to be absurd, and he may keep it out of his mind for long periods, only reverting to it in moments of anger or sentimentality, or when he is certain that no important issue is involved.”

So we’re not doomed to forever comment wars and cycles of takes and dunks, but as communication technology brings political debates more constantly into our lives, the problems that Orwell identified have got worse. It’s a shame to think that these problems are worse now than in Orwell’s time, but at least we are aware of these problems. If we can summon the will to change how we do politics, we can make things better.

Branch of the National Union of Journalists (BNUJ)., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons