The Orwell Nobody Quotes

Since February 2020, it has become apparent to a steadily-growing proportion of thinking people that medical science has fallen into anti-science hands: “I am The Science” is not the statement of a scientist but the shriek of a demigod. To anyone with an interest in miscarriages of justice, this was obviously happening in forensic science two decades earlier at the dawn of the 21^st century, which would suggest that the seeds had been sown even further in the past. In fact, the debasement of science was already being organised in the 1860s, when a “dining club” known as the X-club was created in London so that certain professional “scientists” could, by favourably reviewing each other’s work, promote each other to oligarch if not demigod status within their chosen fields. See a relevant book I reviewed here:

https://mswritingshowcase.blogspot.com/2024/05/book-review-of-popes-and-unicorns-by.html

The more palpable this debasement gets, and as further fields of scientific endeavour are added to the list of casualties, the more people start quoting phrases, passages and whole books by George Orwell. And whilst I don’t disagree with the relevance of these familiar quotations in a way, I’ve never been able to shake the feeling that as a teenager (this was not a recent experience) I read something or other by George Orwell which was even more relevant than “1984” or the more obvious essays. But the mists of time were more like a shroud of thick fog and I could not bring it to mind.

So, I recently decided to invest in the Kindle edition of something billed as “The Complete Works of George Orwell” (which it isn’t because the BBC-related stuff is missing, along with articles written for The Observer about gardening and so on.) But it’s still a huge pile of Orwellisms, so I ignored all the volumes within the collection which I knew not to be what I was looking for, and read the rest. This took a while.

Along the way, I noted that that a lot of the material which Orwell wrote around 1939 to 1941, touched on the way that many English intellectuals who dabbled with fascism, communism (or, quite often, both at different times or even the same moment) appeared to be seduced by the “scientific” nature of the NAZIs and/or the Bolsheviks. H.G. Wells comes up quite a lot within that thread of Orwell’s writings, and elsewhere he names H.G. Wells as one of his favourite writers during his boyhood. He seems to have been much less fond of George Bernard Shaw, who gets mentioned twice and both times Orwell is at pains to remind us that Shaw was not English! Neither was Dylan Thomas, who does get mentioned (favourably) in an essay about the future of poetry on the Wireless (a field which Thomas made his own broadcasting from Cardiff during the war, but Orwell was writing at the start of that experiment so didn’t know how it went). It’s interesting that the only two “racist” remarks Orwell makes should be about the person who went around Europe preaching the “science” of eugenics and recommending the use of poison gas in the euthanasia of the “workshy” and disabled people to receptive audiences including both Hitler and Stalin.

Orwell gives his former literary hero, the “authoritarian” H.G. Wells, much more time than he ever gives to Shaw but he explodes Wells’s excuse for being impressed by Hitler on the basis of the latter’s reliance for “science” by pointing out that all of Hitler’s science was state-approved “German Science” which isn’t science. Science is just science.

{BTW: This didn’t stop the Americans and Russians, upon the defeat of NAZI Germany, going potty about the superiority of the science that had just lost the war and rounding up all the NAZI “scientists” they could find and carrying them off to new lives in the super-powers’ research labs and universities. Most universities in America have now been run by at least two generations of NAZI-trained educators and it is beginning to show: “I am The Science!!” The situation in Russia is less clear, but the current government there is not entirely free of NAZI-thought and there’s something dark and home-grown there as well. In my novel The Farshoreman this is known as “prochnost.”}

Thus far, Orwell has seen and expounded the dangers of authoritarian manipulation of science as well as literature, which one would have expected to be his main concern. But he also sees, across all of his work, a difference between authoritarian regimes, which tend to either liberalise or disappear within a generation or two, and totalitarian regimes which aspire to last forever and might well do so with the help of modern technology. He also sees a difference in the limited number of ways that an authoritarian regime might corrupt science, literature and the other arts compared to what a totalitarian regime would do: it would completely change the meaning and purpose of each.

That realisation comes to Orwell about two thirds of the way through his analysis of a little-known pamphlet written by Leo Tolstoy “no later than 1903” which is a astonishing attack on the works, competence and stature of William Shakespeare, with “King Lear” as exhibit A in Tolstoy’s case against The Bard. Orwell doesn’t seek to defend Shakespeare: he seeks to understand the thinking and motivation behind Tolstoy’s diatribe and that is where George Orwell meets a truly totalitarian mind face to face and he does not like what he sees.

Orwell’s Essay is entitled “Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool” (it’s published in more than one collection of Orwell’s work) and it seems that he had to go to some lengths to lay hands on a good translation of Tolstoy’s pamphlet, though this seems to have been towards or after the end of the second world war when almost anything might have been difficult to get, regardless of political sensitivity. The document seems to have been too obscure (in the West) to attract censorship in any case.

After going in circles a bit trying to understand the logic of Tolstoy’s arguments, Orwell concludes that Tolstoy’s own life story mimics much of the plot of King Lear and that Tolstoy is outraged by this, especially as he made the same mistake: he gave up his wealth, his lands and the copyright on most of his work to move across Russia and live the life of a peasant. Lear gives up being king for a quiet life.

Both Tolstoy and Lear made the mistake of expecting the same care and respect from others they had whilst in wealth and power, after they had given it up. In effect, both of them expected that everything would turn out the way they expected, simply because that was what they wanted to happen!

At this point, Orwell starts to deal with what the pamphlet says about Tolstoy’s view of art and science and it is in fact explicit. This is a brief fair use quotation, that deserves wider attention. Tolstoy sees art and writing as legitimate only as “parables”:

The parables - this is where Tolstoy differs from the average vulgar puritan – must themselves be works of art, but pleasure and curiosity must be excluded from them.

Science, also, must be divorced from curiosity. The business of science, he says, is not to discover what happens, but to teach men how they ought to live. So also with history and politics.

Tolstoy’s vision, in other words, is not simply that the governed may not question their governors, which has been a common belief of governors through the ages, but that nobody may ever question anything, ever. Every branch of learning and discovery is turned into a submissive study of how to live one’s life, but a life without learning, with nothing new, ever, is a life without meaning and not really life any more. This goes beyond anything which Hitler or Stalin did or thought and it excels even King Nebuchadnezzar II. And yet, here in 2025, this is the very direction in which the global elite are taking us. We won’t be able to undo it by following the money because there will not be any money. We won’t be able to spread subversive ideas because there will be no thought. (Many politicians these days have a lot of trouble with thinking and have already largely contracted this nasty chore out to think-tanks, which are all seriously misnamed.) Curiosity becomes a crime, as does pleasure. Tolstoy may even be the source of the conclusion which Gino Giovanni and Benito Mussolini came to between them: private thoughts are selfish and should be banned.

Interestingly, Orwell sums up what Shakespeare is telling us through the play “King Lear” thus (another short fair use quotation):

If you live for others, you must live for others and not as a roundabout way of getting an advantage for yourself.

That is not going to be a popular message in either Davos or Connaught Square!

Are failures in forensic science and criminal justice a symptom of failings in science itself?

 Below is the text of a comment placed by the blog author on this YouTube video

https://youtu.be/sv7Z6OSF6Tg  which may have a far wider relevance.

The video is embedded at the bottom of this article. 

 

There are two underlying problems [with scientific evidence] which have led justice into error, not just in the Lucy Letby case but many others from the murders of Leslie Moleseed to Jill Dando and beyond:

The first is that we've had sufficient generations of lawyers without any training in scientific thinking (if they had this, they would not need [much] specific scientific knowledge to cross-examine effectively) for a total absence of scientific thinking to have become respectable for lawyers. If you challenged me to name lawyers who excelled at scientific thinking I would nominate Reginald Hine and Jan Christian Smutts, both of whom published books and papers in natural history at a time when that included what are now seen as six or seven different disciplines, all of which have featured in forensic evidence since the 1950s. Robert Hitchens had a good grasp of engineering and navigation, too, and navigation really does require disciplined thinking! Even after Smutts became a field marshal (he never really wanted to be a soldier and for most of his career he wasn't) he was active in the field of international law to the point of helping to draft the UN Charter whilst still authoring papers on natural history. These men seem extraordinary today, but they were not at all untypical of their generations (Hitchens really was the generation after the other two).

The second is that Science itself has been willfully transformed from a community where even the great men listened to lesser known colleagues, into a hierarchy where the strength of one's position and reputation counts for much more than the strength of one's arguments and evidence is selected rather than tested. The dangers this state of affairs extend far beyond the courtroom, but it is in the courtroom that we can see the hierarchy in operation and study it in detail: the nature of modern scientific publishing is such that it's very hard for us to do it elsewhere, especially in the field of medicine and public health policy.

It is no longer the done thing to challenge assertions by any "scientific expert" even though the challenging and testing of assertions and the supporting evidence (on those occasions when that is actually offered) is the true basis of scientific progress! The number of genuine scientific breakthroughs has declined since about 1950 and it's been in freefall since 1972-ish, but the number of "scientific ideas" being reported in the press has grown enormous and bewildering. And that's because we're not allowed to question ANY of it. If the idea comes from someone in authority or someone the authorities endorse as an expert, it must be true, and if it comes from anywhere else it must be misinformation or a conspiracy theory. A forest of ideas, none of which we may test, prevents any new growth in human knowledge because there is no light at all on the forest floor where the seedlings are.

Book Review of Anyone Who Tells You That Doctor-assisted Suicide is Always Dignified and Painless is lying: Here is Proof by Jack King

 

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A scientifically-informed polemic on an ethical subject.

At 96 pages, this book is an easy read on a difficult subject and it needs to be. Precisely because there’s nothing false or specious about it to allow one to put it down, a longer volume would be dispiriting and a shorter one perhaps glib and unconvincing. The author also admits, to his credit, to having condensed his arguments in order to keep the sale price low. It is not a fun book to read by any means, but it is satisfying in that it conveys information about the current global trend towards assisted suicide that many readers may have suspected or felt in their bones, but either could not prove or articulate.

The title is very long relative to the length of the text, but the book does what it says on the tin and the author, a retired GP with forty years experience, does explain why the impression given to both Parliament and the public, that there’s a well-trusted drug or drugs which people can take which puts them peacefully and reliably to sleep, is completely false. There is no agreed solution to this problem: in none of the countries where assisted suicide is legal, is there a regulatory body checking that lethal drugs work as planned or any truly reliable advice about what to use. Far from being tested and professional, doctors are improvising their lethal cocktails with crushed barbiturate tablets and traumatic outcomes are widely-reported, but also obscured rather than quantified by official data because a death certificate for assisted suicide means there is no investigation and no autopsy, though in the case of execution by lethal injection an autopsy is a legal requirement and the reports do not make pleasant reading for anyone but a vengeful relative of a murder victim. Do harmless elderly patients deserve to be treated worse than convicted murderers?

The author goes to some lengths to make the point that the setting of a time limit in legislation so that people may only be helped to die if they have X number of months left to live, is hopelessly unscientific because such a prognosis is based on guesswork and only accurate when it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy and the patient expects to die. (Perhaps the whole time-framing exercise is intended to make the entire population accept the concept of everyone having a set date by which they are expected to go tits-up?)

He has also done what other “dissident” doctors have not dared to do, and he makes it clear that the motive in extending assisted dying to young people whose only illness is mental, is quite simply that the only really desirable transplant organs are those taken from a young and physically-healthy persons who die under controlled conditions in a medical facility. The author does not mention that this requirement is already catered for in Communist China by making political detainees into organ donors (no-one wants to buy organs from criminal prisoners who might have used both narcotics and prostitutes; by contrast innocent dissidents whose only “crime” is religious practice are seen as ideal donors) but the underlying principle is identical.

He further sees a self-reinforcing interaction between the rising cost of worsening healthcare and the positive payoff for government in people dying rather than drawing pensions or needing hospice care. He sees that the worsening care might be done on purpose in order to coerce people towards suicide as an alternative, but he either does not see, or had no space for, the strong possibility that the upwards spiral of healthcare costs and the downwards spiral in healthcare standards are both completely avoidable, because there’s a strong regulatory bias against approving innovative uses for cheap drugs and non-drug treatments whose safety has already been proved over years of their original use. This arises mainly because of vested interests (both financial AND reputational) embedded in both regulatory and scientific research bodies. This is why the book gets four stars rather than five: it isn’t flawed but it’s maybe two subjects and two pages away from being better.

This book is available as a low cost paperback and an even cheaper kindle E-book from Amazon in the UK on this link:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0FJW8FNGT/

  

In the Americas:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0FJW8FNGT/

It was published in the UK by EMJ Books on the 23^rd of July 2025.

Book Review of the Shapeshifter’s Daughter by Sally Magnusson

 

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An absorbing novel about Viking myths in an ancient landscape.

  

The landscape is that of Orkney and it’s inextricably bound with the surrounding seascape and a past so distant that Viking myth turns out to qualify as modern re-invention.

A Surrey librarian in her late fifties learns that she has terminal cancer and decides that, rather than struggling hard to stay alive, she will die on her own terms after answering some questions about her childhood, in Orkney. “Helen” sells up everything connected with the English life she built for herself after being “exiled” at age fifteen, rents a flat near where she grew up (mostly in the library when things were bad at home) and goes there with the idea that when the times comes, she will freeze herself to death on a hillside rather than submit to what she sees as the pointless torture of end of life care. The only person she actually recognises is “Thorfinn,” who worked as a book-stacker in the library in his teens and once asked her out, unsuccessfully initially but forty-two years have passed and he still has hope.

At some other time and place, which somehow connects to Orkney in the present day, “Hel’” a half-beautiful, half hideous “monster” is betrayed by the Norse gods and exiled to the underworld, to take charge of departed souls who aren‘t going to Valhalla (almost everyone who dies, in practice).

Importantly, the historical site where Hel’ meets and collects souls is a neolithic burial mound which predates Viking culture by several times as many years as Viking culture predates ours.

The Norse gods mostly fear Hel’, but for the wrong reasons. Hel’ and Helen have things to learn from each other and that will be transformative.

And Helen finds that she can tolerate Thorfinn helping her, though it takes her rather longer to accept that he loves her and she actually wants him to love her. Hel’ learns to rediscover her role in really ancient neolithic myth: she is not the cruel and repulsive monster the Norse gods make her out to be.

This is a lovely story about finding peace as well as love, even in one’s last days. After the din and clamour, the sheer orchestrated panic, of the covid years, this is the sort of peace and love denied to so many. Thousands died with no-one allowed to hold their hand or say a soothing word. This is what they should have had.

This book doesn’t so much fill a gap in the market as a gaping hole in modern society’s soul.

The Shapeshifter’s Daughter by Sally Magnusson is published on the 6^th of November 2025 by John Murray Press.

Book Review of “I Am A Cat” Volume One by Natsume Soseki, translated by Nick Bradley

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This is a new translation of a Japanese satirical novel published circa 1905.

It is mostly about the relationship between a not-very important Japanese academic and a stray cat.

If we can judge a civilisation by how it treats its most vulnerable members, perhaps we can at least partly understand a nation by how it views its cats. Although the translator has focused on the author’s relationship with English and The English, he does have fun with German tourists too, and that is interesting for two reasons:

In 1905, the slogan which Imperial Germany used to define the role of women was known as the three Ks: Kinder, Küche, Kirche. This was widely but somewhat irreverently extended to: Kinder, Küche, Kirche, Katze.

Two of the female Japanese characters in this novel, the pair who look after “Miss Calico,” certainly see this as a duty. The other female Japanese characters are largely cat-neutral or even anti-cat.

I Am A Cat may be the first Japanese novel of its kind, but there was an English translation of a German novel, from about a century earlier (before Germany was a country, let alone an empire) about an academic’s relationship with a cat, seen in the opening passages as terribly elderly and needing to have his face dipped in a saucer of cream to make him take some nourishment. (The reviewer is trying, but failing, to remember either the German or the English title.) So, this is a genre and a basic premise which was established in German literature before the Victorian cat-craze in England, which Soseki took with him back to Japan.

But the execution of that premise is all Japanese, as far as one can tell: the male academic and his friends are very rude to nearly everyone and especially unkind to women. They enjoy misleading people in a way which makes the victim seem, and feel, extremely foolish. Soseki projects this behaviour upon the character of The Master (of the cat and little else) which is based on himself, but the cat finds it offensive and perhaps so does Soseki.

Some of the shaggy dog stories are simply too long and bullying, but the reason why this classic novel gets four stars rather than five is that the “uneducated” human characters are given Dick Van Dyke-level Edwardian Cockney accents which strike a bit of a bum note. This may, however, accurately convey the way Soseki wrote the original dialogue.

I Am A Cat by Natsume Soseki and translated by Nick Bradley is published in the UK by Vintage Classics (Random House) on the 4^th of September 2025