Four Dreadful Words

In 1937 Orwell wrote down what he called the real secret of class distinctions in the West, and he put it in four words, and he said they were dreadful, and they were: the lower classes smell. He did not say it as a slur. He said it as a confession. He had been brought up to believe it, as every child of his class had, and he had found that the belief survived every argument, every book, every conversion to socialism, because it was not an opinion. It was a thing that happened in the body. You can overcome a prejudice, he said, but you cannot overcome a physical reaction by an act of will; and the reaction was there, in him, when a working man sat next to him on a bus, and he thought it was more honest to say so than to pretend, as the socialists of his acquaintance pretended, that the thing did not exist.

I want to say that the thing still exists, that it has not been abolished but translated, and that the translation is the most important fact about the class that now does the talking in every Western country, and the one it is least able to see.

That class no longer believes the lower orders smell. It would be scandalised by the sentence. It has showers and so have they. What it believes instead is that they are, in a word it uses constantly and never defines, problematic: that they say the wrong things, in the wrong words, about the wrong people; that they vote in a way which can only be explained by malice or deficiency; that they have not done the work, read the statement, updated the vocabulary. And the reaction to this is, physiologically, the identical reaction Orwell described. It is a flinch. It is the slight stiffening when the man who has come to fix the boiler uses a word that was retired three years ago, and the quickening of the wish for him to finish and go. Nothing has changed in the nervous system. The trigger has been moved from the nose to the ear, and the class that moved it congratulates itself on having no prejudices, because it has never noticed that a prejudice is a thing the body does and the vocabulary only decorates.

Call it ideological hygiene, since hygiene is the right word. The old middle class washed, and knew that the working class could not, and built a wall out of that. The new one is clean in a different way. It keeps its language clean, its associations clean, its record clean, and it detects uncleanness in others with the same instant sensitivity its grandmothers brought to a dirty collar. And it is just as impassable. Orwell’s point about the smell was that no amount of good will could get over it, that you could be a socialist to the bone and still not be able to bring yourself to drink from the same cup. The modern form has the same property. A man who holds every correct opinion about the working class may find, if he is honest, that he cannot sit for thirty seconds in his own hallway with a member of it without checking his watch.

Now the hallway, because the hallway is where the thing is decided. There is a kind of person, and I have met him and been him, who would march for an abstraction in the rain. He has the word justice on a sign and means it. He has, in his head, a working class that is noble and wronged and that he would go to prison for. And then the plumber arrives, who is the working class, who is in fact the only member of it the man will see this month, and the man cannot talk to him. Not because he is cruel. Because the plumber is not an abstraction, and the man has only ever practised on abstractions. The plumber has opinions about the council and the price of diesel and a joke that is not permitted and a van with a sticker on it, and he is standing on the hall carpet in his boots, and the man who would die for the working class wants, with his whole body, for this particular specimen of it to finish with the pipe and go. Orwell saw this exactly. He wrote that the middle-class socialist of his day did not love the workers; he hated his own class, which is a different thing, and he kept the workers at a distance where they could be admired. He said, in a sentence that has not aged a day, that such a man would die rather than let a working man come into his home.

I think the mechanism is simple, and I will put it as plainly as I can. It is much easier to love people in the aggregate than one at a time, because the aggregate does not sweat, or interrupt, or hold a view, or need a cup of tea. The whole modern economy of virtue runs on this discovery. It has found that a person can be paid, in the only currency that matters to his class, which is standing, for feelings about categories, and it has arranged that he need never meet a member of one. He can centre the marginalised without ever having one in his kitchen. He can be in solidarity with the worker and pay the cleaner through an app so that the two of them never have to speak.

Which brings me to the curation, because that is the word the class uses of itself, and it is accurate. The modern professional is curated. His résumé is curated, and his causes, and his bookshelf as it appears behind him on the screen, and the statement his firm issues on the day something happens, which is written by a department and says nothing in several hundred words. All of this is the aspidistra. Orwell made the aspidistra the emblem of a certain kind of respectability: the plant in the front window, kept alive at some trouble, not because anyone liked it but because the street could see it and would know what sort of house this was. The ethical brand is the aspidistra in the window of the laptop class. It is tended with the same care and for the same reason. Nobody is helped by it. The street can see it.

And what has it replaced? It has replaced work, by which I mean the ordinary physical duties by which decency used to be practised and measured, and which cannot be curated because nobody is watching when they are done. Sweeping a floor. Washing a sick person. Making a plain cup of tea, which Orwell thought important enough to write eleven rules about, and he was right, because the tea is a small act of attention to another body and the rules are a way of taking it seriously. Paying a man in cash on the day and shaking his hand. Sitting with a neighbour who is dying and smells of it. None of these things generates a statement. None of them can be put on a résumé or a sign. And so they have been quietly deleted from the definition of a good person, and in their place has been put a set of verbal performances, correct terms, correct silences, correct objects of concern, which can be done from a chair and verified by other people in chairs, and which together make up what might be called discursive compliance: the state of having said all the right things in the right order to the right audience and done nothing with the hands at all.

Orwell washed dishes. He did it in the basement of a hotel in Paris for seventeen hours a day, in heat and filth, as what the French called a plongeur, and he wrote that a plongeur is a slave, and that the people upstairs eating the food had no idea and would not have cared. I mention it because he was not a saint about it and did not pretend to be. He did it for a few months and got out. But he came out knowing something the people who talk most about the dignity of labour have never known, which is what labour is. It is not a category. It is your hands in grease at two in the morning. The modern class that champions it has, as a class, never put its hands in anything, and that fact is not neutral. It produces the squeamishness. A man who has never cleaned a drain cannot help flinching from the man who has; the flinch is the body’s honest report that these two have not shared an experience and never will.

Then there is the language, which Orwell would have come to first. The class that now rules the professions has built a vocabulary whose purpose is not to describe anything but to establish who is in the room. The words change every few years precisely so that the people outside cannot keep up, and the failure to keep up is read, instantly and physically, as the old uncleanness. He wrote that the great enemy of clear language is insincerity, and that when there is a gap between one’s real aims and one’s declared ones, one turns instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting ink. The declared aim of the vocabulary is inclusion. Its real aim is the oldest one in the world, which is to know a gentleman when you hear one. Four dreadful words have become forty, and they are no less dreadful for being polysyllabic.

And the neighbour. Not the worker as a class but the man next door, who is ordinary, unglamorous, kind to your dog, and who voted, last time, in the way that the people in your group chat regard as unforgivable. The modern test of decency is him. It is not the march and it is not the statement. It is whether you can stand on your shared fence and talk about the weather with a man you have been taught to regard as morally contaminated, and whether you would bring him soup if he were ill, and whether, if the question were put to you honestly, you would find his physical presence in your kitchen faintly disgusting. Orwell wrote that to see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle. What is in front of the nose is the neighbour. What is behind the nose is the smell.

The cure is not a new vocabulary and it is not a programme, and I am suspicious of anyone who offers either. The cure is the thing Orwell kept coming back to in his best essays and could find no better name for than common decency: the native generosity that does not write a newsletter, does not require a department to administer it, and consists almost entirely in small physical acts toward the particular person who is in front of you, performed without an audience. It is the cup of tea made properly. It is the sick washed. It is the plumber talked to in the hallway for as long as he wants to talk, about the diesel and the council and the joke, because he is a man and he is here. And it rests on one piece of knowledge that the credentialed class has worked very hard to forget, and that Orwell set down in 1937 as the whole point of his dreadful sentence: you cannot love a brother whose physical company you find repulsive. You can admire him from a distance. You can march for him. You can centre him. But love is a thing that happens in a room with two bodies in it, and until the flinch is gone, nothing else you say about him is true.

I include myself. That was the only honest way Orwell could write the sentence, and it is the only honest way to end an essay about it.