Perhaps the most well known words describing George Orwell are V.S. Pritchett's: he called Orwell "the conscience of his generation" (qtd. Miller 56). It is not difficult to see why. Almost all of Orwell's writing deals directly with public issues that he felt strongly about. He rarely let his ideological leanings influence his judgement. He knew an abuse when he saw it; it did not matter if it was perpetrated by the Right or by the Left. This fair judgment combined with his clear and direct prose style make it easy to see him as a sage, an honest man among crooked ideologues, a man you could trust to determine your political philosophy. He is not a sage, however. He deliberately distances himself from ideologies and orthodoxies—philosophies which presume to explain the history of the world on the basis of a few simple principles like the competition for wealth or the competition for reproductive success. This is sad in a way; it is hard not to imagine what his talents could have accomplished in political and moral theory. But Orwell's decision to focus instead on specifics, on battles, on issues and on deceptions, has made him more powerful than any sage. Orwell's honesty has given him power over all ideologies because he reminds them to deal with the facts, no matter how messy the facts may be.

George Orwell's distaste for ideology can be traced to his experience in the Spanish Civil War. In 1937, Orwell left England to report on the war between the Republican Government and the Nationalist insurgents in Spain, joining the Republican Army shortly after his arrival. In his months there he came to realize the dishonesty that accompanied the political orthodoxies of right and left. In "Looking Back on the Spanish War" he writes:

In the Spanish Civil War one's ideology dictated the facts instead of vice versa. About the specific case of atrocities Orwell wrote, "Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence" (Spanish War 191). And the saddest part about atrocities, Orwell tells us, is that both sides commit them.

It didn't take Orwell long to realize that in Spain, Left and Right, Communist and Fascist were all guilty of atrocities and deception. But could he develop his own ideology? Was it even possible to reconcile a theoretical position with the facts instead of proceeding the other way around? This question presumes that one could find objective facts, and this would have been very difficult in Spain. Both sides lied; all newspapers were fraudulent; as Orwell put it, "History stopped in 1936" (Spanish War 197). But if Orwell could not make any inferences about anything that he read or heard, he could still rely on the few facts he had witnessed. His individual experience gave him a powerful ability to contradict some of the deceptions circulated by both sides. He could, for instance, state confidently that both sides committed atrocities, that neither side was as pure as it claimed. His individual experience, however, was not wide enough to allow him to form any ideology from it. Like all humans, he felt the temptation to generalize, but the few feeble attempts he makes at formulating ideological principles are blatantly false. For instance, in a chapter about atrocities around the world he writes: "there is little question that what one may roughly call the 'whites' commit far more and far worse atrocities than the 'reds'" (Spanish War 192-3). This "principle" was untrue of the Spanish Civil War and is ridiculous considering Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao's China.

Orwell seems to have come to realize the futility of seeking for underlying principles in his last novel, 1984. Winston Smith, his hero, works at the Ministry of Truth in a totalitarian superpower, altering the records of the past to conform to present party doctrine. The past records, however, were as fictitious as the new ones. He reflects on his work: "it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connection with anything in the real world" (37). Who can form a political theory if there are no political facts? Any choice of ideology is arbitrary and dishonest in a totalitarian world.

If Orwell could not honestly support any political theory, what could he honestly assert? Orwell always has a point, he could never have tolerated a world where it was impossible to say anything and so he restricted his reporting to the facts he could be relatively sure of—the ones he had witnessed himself. "When I sit down to write a book," Orwell explains in his essay "Why I Write," "I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention" (315). George Woodcock explains this highly-personal form of polemic in his essay on Orwell "Prose Like a Window-Pane": "Description . . . is the original external purpose, to which is added . . . the desire to discuss what has been described, so that the argument follows experience" (164). As in the Civil War this form did not allow him to make the tidy generalizations that characterize much political writing. Instead, his writing took a new form, nearing a true political theory by exposing political lies. He could not offer any ideological truth but by determining what was definitely false he could gradually narrow the options. He is like a man fumbling on a piano to remember an old tune—he might not know the right notes and he might never be able to play the whole song but he certainly knows which notes are wrong.

This method of writing—approaching the truth by uncovering deceptions—led Orwell to his greatest works and became an art form in his prose. Homage to Catalonia, Animal Farm, and 1984 were all designed to shatter the myth of benevolent totalitarianism in Russia. All his prose in fact was infected by this negation method. His essay on Dickens starts by demonstrating that contrary to critical opinion Dickens was not a "proletarian," a "revolutionary," or a "reactionary." Similarly, his essay on Kipling starts with the assertion that Kipling was not a "fascist." Many of his literary essays proceed in this manner. "Politics and the English Language" is largely meant to refute the notion that we cannot save our language from its decline. On the opposite end of the spectrum, in science, Orwell uses the same tactic. In "What is Science?" Orwell attacks the assumption that "hard" scientists—physicists, astronomers, and chemists—are naturally more qualified to make decisions on public policy.

"What is Science?" also contains Orwell’s clearest exposition of his writing method. In his essay he argues that "scientific education ought to mean the implanting of a rational, sceptical, experimental habit of mind" (Science 373) that could be used in studying any subject instead of being exclusive to science. Orwell applied this "method" to his writing. He always remained "rational" and "sceptical", distrusting all the ideologies of his time. His writing was also "experimental"—proceeding from direct experience. But it was experimental in a higher sense as well. Orwell not only wrote about the things that he happened to witness; he also sought out direct experience. When he studied the mining community in England in The Road to Wigan Pier he did not just interview miners or the industrialists who employed them; instead he went into the mines himself, risking his health and his life miles underground. After he left his post in the imperial police he spent time among the poor in London and Paris, working as a dishwasher to gain the experience that would lead to a book about the working class in those two cities—Down and Out in Paris and London. When he went to Spain to report on the war, it probably never occurred to him to remain a reporter; to really experience the war he had to become a soldier. In his monograph Orwell, Raymond Williams writes:

This was Orwell’s scientific method of writing: seeking out experience and using it to combat deception, hoping that his writing could change something, that he could force history to be "differently determined."

Orwell's habit of using personal experience to refute political ideologies set him at odds with the orthodoxies of his time and led him to oppose them. Having returned from the Civil War, Orwell saw England in a new light, and realized that the dishonesty of ideologies that pretended to explain all the facts was not exclusive to Spain. In fact, wherever he found ideology—in the church, in the state or in the intelligentsia—he found distortions. The facts were everywhere in conflict with theories and so Orwell made a decision to attack all orthodoxies under the banner of the facts. He does not describe this decision in his work but its result is omnipresent in his later writing. He praises Dickens, saying that he was "a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls" (104). In "Politics and the English Language" he describes the writing of these ideologies: "Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style" (166). Orwell despised all ideologies and his new writing style of negation made him a powerful enemy. Pritchett was right. Orwell was "the conscience of his generation" in the sense that he always forced ideologues to return to the facts. He never let anyone cling to an unjustified abstraction if he could help it. Lionel Trilling, in his essay, "George Orwell and the Politics of Truth" emphasizes this when he records Orwell's preference for the values of the bourgeois over the values of the intelligentsia: "Orwell, it may be said, came to respect the old bourgeois virtues because they were stupid—that is, because they resisted the power of abstract ideas" (74). Orwell shared this dislike for abstract theories that ignored the facts while claiming to explain them, preferring to ground himself in observable fact.

Orwell's struggle against orthodoxies raised another problem, however. Orthodoxies and ideologies are not simply parasitic on the human mind, they exist for a very good reason: they give a theory which explains life and gives the life of its follower a purpose and a direction. Orthodoxies are our most powerful tool for shaping our own actions. For instance, it is much easier to help the poor if our orthodoxy tells us exactly how to help them—a Christian would build a soup kitchen and a communist would build a Soviet. How can we live without these ordering influences, without a theory that tells us in general what is right and what is wrong?

Orwell makes moral judgement—conscience—the ordering force in his life. Consequently, he makes political and moral decisions on a one at a time basis. It is odd that such a logical mind should be guided by the subjective feelings of his conscience. Sometimes this method of judgement leads to pronouncements that seem silly. In his essay, "England Your England" he writes a paragraph on the idle rich concluding that "The existence of these people was by any standard unjustifiable" (269). This is a dangerous statement, especially because the only premise to this conclusion is that they do not help society. It is not a statement derived from any theory, it is derived instead from Orwell's visceral hatred for parasitic wealth. Similarly, he says of the Spanish Civil War: "The question is very simple. Shall [the poor] be allowed to live the decent fully human life which is now technically achievable, or shan't they?" (208). This sort of reductive statement is patently untrue—there are many other questions about the Spanish Civil War that deserve to be answered—but we can take it as an accurate description of his conscience's reaction to the war. But is it possible to live life only relying on conscience?

Two of the characters of Orwell's novels—John Flory of Burmese Days and Winston Smith of 1984—show the result of a life lived solely under the rule of conscience. They are both areligious and neither believes in the political orthodoxies of his time. Flory despises imperialism and Winston despises totalitarianism, but they are both moral men and so make decisions based on their conscience. . Is such an unideological moral life possible or desirable? Both characters fail their friends in the end: Flory betrays his friend Veraswami and commits suicide and Winston breaks under torture and betrays his lover Julia. Sadly, most of us would break in the same way, without an ideology to guide us. And would an unideological life be desirable, even if it was possible? Might it not be possible to hold an ideology honestly, acknowledging its weaknesses but acting on its strengths? Orwell would not have thought so, but many of his followers and students would.

Orwell lived out the moral, unorthodox life he praised: he was never religious and rarely fell in line with orthodox socialist opinion but he persisted in living a morally. Orwell lived like Winston and Flory but it is not necessary to live such a hopeless life to act on what is most powerful in Orwell's writing. The world is certainly as infested with ideologies as it was when Orwell wrote but his writings have ensured that history is "differently determined." He never saw his goal of a new class of non-conformists emerging, living morally and unattached to any ideology. But his writing is not now rejected by ideologies as it was in his time; in fact it is accepted and used to an extent that would surprise him. The right and left, who rejected him in his lifetime, now quote him more frequently than even the center. Of course they rarely use his writings to evaluate themselves; they use them to attack their opponents. But this act alone shows more intellectual honesty than the ideologies of Orwell's time showed, because, as always, to bring the argument to Orwell is to bring the argument to facts. Orwell was "the conscience of his generation" and he is the conscience of ours as well. His insistence that we examine the facts before we judge our theories has infected journalism and politics and forced them to stick closer to the truth, which suggests a new role for Orwell's philosophy and work.

Lionel Trilling named Orwell "the man who tells the truth" (79). But there are several important senses in which Orwell does not tell the truth. Orwell does not tell us any general truths about life—he gives us no ideologies. Orwell's theories are not always true—witness his statement about atrocities and "reds." Orwell does not even tell the truth about what sort of life we should live—we should not and probably could not abandon our ideologies and follow the conscience-driven life he led. Orwell does tell the facts, however, and that is his gift. His politics rarely deceive him, he relates what he knows with an admirable honesty and this makes him the enemy of any ideology which is not based on the facts. He is not of any particular orthodoxy but he functions best among them; he is not a solitary sage. He has no philosophy to give us (and it is apparent that we need one) but he ensures that we will not accept any philosophy uncritically, that facts will determine our theory and not the other way around.