Revisiting Orwell on history: faster, more intense

A few weeks ago I wrote about Orwell’s contention that modern ideological attacks on history were a threat to objective truth itself. The passage I quoted from and glossed came from a 1944 “As I Please” column. That’s still worth reading. But yesterday I ran across this passage in a much longer essay, “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” from 1942:

I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written.

This somehow manages to put the point even more pithily.

A little more, because I can’t help it:

In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that ‘the facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost everyone. . . . It is just this common basis of agreement, with its implication that human beings are all one species of animal, that totalitarianism destroys. Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as ‘the truth’ exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as ‘science’. There is only ‘German science’, ‘Jewish science’ etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’—well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five—well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs—and after our experiences of the last few years that is not a frivolous statement.

You can read more here. These passages come from a paragraph in § IV.

Compare my thoughts on cynicism in the study of history, which went viral on a small scale last month following a share from Tom Holland himself. For the mathematical implications of the denial of objective truth, see again Chesterton.