The romantic subplot is weak, and the core premise of its political analysis - linguistic relativity - has since been falsified. Many people were actively mislead by it presenting linguistic relativity as fact, feeding a narrative that by creating queer language (and post-moderninsm in general) we are creating queer people (and other post-modern “degeneracy”) that stuck around at least until the 2010s.
It can still be read as a more vague post-truth dystopia where all the other methods of suppression are understated and where newspeak is magically powerful, and its prose is fine, but I definitely wouldn’t put it above anything written by Ursula LeGuin.
I think the premise is not linguistic relativity, it’s the political bullshit itself. Something like “all countries bullshit against their own citizens, so that those citizens defend things going against their own best interests. Watch out when yours does it.” If what I’m saying is correct, the only role of that relativity would be that Orwell incorrectly believed to be one of the tools used to craft bullshit.
I’m saying this based on two things. One is the book itself; in plenty situations there’s no relativity, the bullshit pops up because people forgot what happened. Check the first two quotes for examples.
The other reason is another text Orwell wrote, Politics and the English Language. IMO the six points are bad advice (and often propagated by muppets, who didn’t understand the text in first place), and Orwell was completely clueless about language, but the premise itself is related to the one in 1984; something like “stop hiding bullshit behind walls of babble”. The last quote shows it
Quotes
[1984] It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be REDUCED to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it.
[1984] Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. A large part of the political literature of five years was now completely obsolete. Reports and records of all kinds, newspapers, books, pamphlets, films, sound-tracks, photographs—all had to be rectified at lightning speed. Although no directive was ever issued, it was known that the chiefs of the Department intended that within one week no reference to the war with Eurasia, or the alliance with Eastasia, should remain in existence anywhere.
[Politics and the English Language; emphasis in the original] 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 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. […]
EDIT - moved quotes to spoiler tags for less clutter.
It might not be the best book ever written, but I think it’s important to read. It’s one of the most cited books to support whatever people want. Once you read it, you can interpret it for yourself, and you actually know what it’s about.
The thing most people know from it is Big Brother watching you. It’s just surveillance state stuff. That’s a relatively small part of it though. It’s more about shaping culture through information control. Yeah, surveillance is part of it, but even that’s not just cameras; it’s also about having people inform the government about their neighbors, or parents, or whatever else.
Which was of course already incredibly contemporary with what Goebals, Himmler and Stalin had been up to. Everyone sees the novel as the endgame of the opposing ideology, though it’s basically a warning against those who would seek to cement their power by making opposition impossible.
Nevertheless, research has produced positive empirical evidencesupporting a weaker version of linguistic relativity:[4][5] that a language’s structures influence a speaker’s perceptions, without strictly limiting or obstructing them.
There are two types of linguistic relativity: “strong” and “weak”. Usually, when people simply say “linguistic relativity”, they’re talking about the strong view.
In the “strong” view, language limits your thought, perception, etc. You’d be completely unable to understand certain concepts, unless your language has words for them. Nowadays we know it to be false, but in Orwell’s times it was popular, and Orwell was clueless about how languages work, so he used it in 1984 (that’s where Newspeak comes from).
In the “weak” view, language doesn’t dictate your thought or perception, but influences them a bit. It’s probably true, but it’s a rather trivial conclusion.
So, for example. Let’s say there’s some language out there using the exact same word for two different concepts:
unrestricted, unchained, unbound
costless, at no exchange of money
If the strong version was true, a monolingual speaker of said language would be completely unable to tell both concepts apart. But since the weaker version is true, they can do it; it’s just they’ll have a bit of a harder time. (The language from the example is English, by the way. Cue to “free beer” and “free software”.)
I don’t know if I missed it, but I don’t think it’s been disproven. I actually think it’s true still, though maybe not as dramatic as 1984 would say.
For example, IQ tests (in particular old ones, as modern ones try to control for this) are built on a modern western sensibility. However, the way some cultures handle different concepts can be different, and it can measure it poorly.
As an example of this, classic Greek math is built on geometry. Having that basis on math makes solving certain problems significantly easier, but equally it makes some things, like calculus, significantly more difficult. It’s much harder to do abstract math when you’re mind is trained on concrete shapes.
The romantic subplot is weak, and the core premise of its political analysis - linguistic relativity - has since been falsified. Many people were actively mislead by it presenting linguistic relativity as fact, feeding a narrative that by creating queer language (and post-moderninsm in general) we are creating queer people (and other post-modern “degeneracy”) that stuck around at least until the 2010s.
It can still be read as a more vague post-truth dystopia where all the other methods of suppression are understated and where newspeak is magically powerful, and its prose is fine, but I definitely wouldn’t put it above anything written by Ursula LeGuin.
I think the premise is not linguistic relativity, it’s the political bullshit itself. Something like “all countries bullshit against their own citizens, so that those citizens defend things going against their own best interests. Watch out when yours does it.” If what I’m saying is correct, the only role of that relativity would be that Orwell incorrectly believed to be one of the tools used to craft bullshit.
I’m saying this based on two things. One is the book itself; in plenty situations there’s no relativity, the bullshit pops up because people forgot what happened. Check the first two quotes for examples.
The other reason is another text Orwell wrote, Politics and the English Language. IMO the six points are bad advice (and often propagated by muppets, who didn’t understand the text in first place), and Orwell was completely clueless about language, but the premise itself is related to the one in 1984; something like “stop hiding bullshit behind walls of babble”. The last quote shows it
Quotes
EDIT - moved quotes to spoiler tags for less clutter.
It might not be the best book ever written, but I think it’s important to read. It’s one of the most cited books to support whatever people want. Once you read it, you can interpret it for yourself, and you actually know what it’s about.
The thing most people know from it is Big Brother watching you. It’s just surveillance state stuff. That’s a relatively small part of it though. It’s more about shaping culture through information control. Yeah, surveillance is part of it, but even that’s not just cameras; it’s also about having people inform the government about their neighbors, or parents, or whatever else.
Which was of course already incredibly contemporary with what Goebals, Himmler and Stalin had been up to. Everyone sees the novel as the endgame of the opposing ideology, though it’s basically a warning against those who would seek to cement their power by making opposition impossible.
I mean saying it isn’t as good as anything by LeGuin is hardly an insult. Nearly everyone isn’t as good as LeGuin.
The romantic sub-plot… That’s a misunderstanding. It’s a love triangle between Winston, Julia and Big Brother. It’s not really a sub-plot at all.
But you’re right. Le Guin runs rings around it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
i’m interested–further reading on this?
There are two types of linguistic relativity: “strong” and “weak”. Usually, when people simply say “linguistic relativity”, they’re talking about the strong view.
In the “strong” view, language limits your thought, perception, etc. You’d be completely unable to understand certain concepts, unless your language has words for them. Nowadays we know it to be false, but in Orwell’s times it was popular, and Orwell was clueless about how languages work, so he used it in 1984 (that’s where Newspeak comes from).
In the “weak” view, language doesn’t dictate your thought or perception, but influences them a bit. It’s probably true, but it’s a rather trivial conclusion.
So, for example. Let’s say there’s some language out there using the exact same word for two different concepts:
If the strong version was true, a monolingual speaker of said language would be completely unable to tell both concepts apart. But since the weaker version is true, they can do it; it’s just they’ll have a bit of a harder time. (The language from the example is English, by the way. Cue to “free beer” and “free software”.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
I don’t know if I missed it, but I don’t think it’s been disproven. I actually think it’s true still, though maybe not as dramatic as 1984 would say.
For example, IQ tests (in particular old ones, as modern ones try to control for this) are built on a modern western sensibility. However, the way some cultures handle different concepts can be different, and it can measure it poorly.
As an example of this, classic Greek math is built on geometry. Having that basis on math makes solving certain problems significantly easier, but equally it makes some things, like calculus, significantly more difficult. It’s much harder to do abstract math when you’re mind is trained on concrete shapes.