{"id":16140,"date":"2026-02-12T12:15:28","date_gmt":"2026-02-12T01:15:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/?p=16140"},"modified":"2026-02-12T12:15:28","modified_gmt":"2026-02-12T01:15:28","slug":"orwells-desire-for-a-new-way-of-thinking-about-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/2026\/02\/12\/orwells-desire-for-a-new-way-of-thinking-about-science\/","title":{"rendered":"Orwell’s desire for a new way of thinking about science"},"content":{"rendered":"

In October 1945, George Orwell responded to a letter from Mr J Stewart Cook in the leftwing weekly newspaper Tribune<\/em> calling for more science education.<\/p>\n

The call can hardly have come as a surprise. War had brought science and engineering to the fore \u2013 from the Spitfire fighter plane and radar to Bletchley Park\u2019s codebreakers \u2013 and now that war was over, many thought it was time to build a brave new world. Science had won the war; the view was that it should build the peace.<\/p>\n

Only the week before, in the same newspaper,\u00a0Orwell<\/a>\u00a0had warned of the\u00a0dangers posed by the atomic bomb<\/a>. He was not a pacifist \u2013 far from it. But he started off by saying how likely it was that the world would \u201cbe blown to pieces by it within the next five years\u201d, and ended with a stark warning against big science.<\/p>\n

The bigger and more scientific the weapons, Orwell argued, the bigger and more authoritarian the state. And the bigger and more authoritarian the states that held those weapons, the greater the likelihood that an unstable stand-off between them would run and run, until the unthinkable happened.<\/p>\n

Given this scenario, which he was the first to call a \u201ccold war\u201d,\u00a0Orwell wanted to know exactly what Mr Cook meant<\/a>\u00a0by asking for more science education: did he want more scientists in laboratories, or did he want more people in general trained to think more scientifically?<\/p>\n

If it was a call for more scientists in lab coats, Orwell pondered whether there was any plausible reason for expecting it to be in the public interest. Chemists might think so, clearly, but what about the rest of us? Why more chemists over more historians, say, or more writers, or philosophers, or economists?<\/p>\n

In Orwell\u2019s view, scientists at war had shown themselves to be just as self-interested, just as nationalist, just as Nazi, and just as politically illiterate and mistaken as everybody else. A few million more was not going to make things better \u2013 and maybe worse.<\/p>\n

He wrote:<\/p>\n

The fact is that a mere training in one or more of the exact sciences, even combined with very high gifts, is no guarantee of a humane or sceptical outlook. The physicists of half a dozen great nations, all feverishly working away at the atom bomb, are a demonstration of this.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On the other hand, more science as a way of thinking had Orwell\u2019s full support. In his Tribune<\/em> response (republished in the third volume of his\u00a0collected essays<\/a>), he defined this as \u201ca rational, sceptical, experimental habit of mind\u201d.<\/p>\n

Only, Orwell averred, you don\u2019t have to be a scientist to think like this. And away from the test tubes and reactors, a scientist might not think like this. An illiterate peasant could be just as rational, just as sceptical and just as experimental, in his own domain at least. Yet no one, least of all a fellow of the Royal Society, was going to call him a ‘scientist’.<\/p>\n

The whole argument, Orwell feared, might end up dropping the notion of more scientific thinking across the population, and \u201csimply boil down to\u201d more physics, less literature, and a narrowing of thought all round.<\/p>\n

Orwell leaves it there. Not very profound, you might think, but in the best Orwellian manner, designed to catch your sleeve and make you think.<\/p>\n

When he was at Eton, Orwell wrote a short story for the school magazine called\u00a0A Peep into the Future<\/a><\/em>. In it, a mad professor takes over the school to impose a reign of terror based on the \u201cblessings of science\u201d.<\/p>\n

Until, that is, one Sunday morning in chapel, a mighty proletarian woman \u2013 \u201cmassive hands on her hips\u201d \u2013 comes striding down the aisle to take a swipe that relieves the professor of his dignity and his position. \u201cA good smackin\u2019 is what you want,\u201d she said. And a good smackin\u2019 is what he got. \u201cHe was never seen again \u2026 the reign of science was at an end.\u201d<\/p>\n

There might be shades of Big Brother in this schoolboy story, except that Orwell\u2019s novel\u00a0Nineteen Eighty-Four<\/a><\/em>, published in 1949, is not about the reign of science but a reign of terror devoted to the complete eradication of science.<\/p>\n

The whole point of the ruling party ‘Ingsoc’ (a left-fascist totalitarian regime) is the destruction of the concept of objective truth, discoverable in nature. Instead of experimentation, there is only manipulation. Instead of reasoning, there is only fear. Instead of facts, there are only lies. It is axiomatic that two plus two equals five and always will, so long as the party says so.<\/p>\n

Winston Smith\u2019s interrogator, an intelligent man by most other measures, tells Winston that he (the interrogator) could identify as a soap bubble if he wanted to, and float off. And nobody was going to say he couldn\u2019t. Winston tries and has his brain reprogrammed for the effort.<\/p>\n

Orwell\u2019s fiction was more concerned with essences than probabilities. As for his non-fiction, although he rarely invoked statistics or empirical research, he operated as near to the general scientific method as possible, given the human condition.<\/p>\n

Getting it right, seeing things \u201cas they are\u201d, was one of his\u00a0four reasons for writing<\/a>. Orwell is forever at pains to establish the facts, to reason in plain sight, to show due caution, and to experiment in the only way politico-literary criticism can experiment \u2013 by imagining the alternatives.<\/p>\n

With or without Donald Trump, there are always alternative facts, and writers must search them out. Thomas Hobbes\u2019s view of man in a\u00a0state of nature<\/a>\u00a0is not the same as fellow philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau\u2019s, and the facts are legion on both sides.<\/p>\n

Orwell\u2019s personal library contained a few popular science volumes but was mainly literary. He adhered to the scientific method like the \u201cilliterate peasant\u201d he was at heart \u2013 a man who was at his happiest in his garden, eyeing the weather and measuring the soil by instinct and experience.<\/p>\n

My new book,\u00a0George Orwell: Life and Legacy<\/a><\/em>, looks at a man who always brought the full width of his reasoning to bear, whatever the subject. But, in the end, he knew that words are an art, not a science, and there are no rules except a pitch for the truth.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This article was originally published in <\/strong><\/em>The Conversation<\/strong><\/a>.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Image: Diego Sideburns<\/a> (Flickr, CC)<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In October 1945, George Orwell responded to a letter from Mr J Stewart Cook in the leftwing weekly newspaper Tribune<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":857,"featured_media":16143,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[826,371,515],"coauthors":[827],"class_list":["post-16140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-philosophy","tag-george-orwell","tag-science","tag-science-education"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/857"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16140"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16140\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16142,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16140\/revisions\/16142"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16140"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=16140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}