Progressive Secularism's Orwellian Rewriting of History

Sharp-shinned hawk in my back yard

Anyone interested in the current battle between opposing faith-systems (progressive secularism vs. religious belief) needs to read Mary Eberstadt's It's Dangerous to Believe: Religious Freedom and Its Enemies. You will see why I am reading, concurrently, 1984.

Here's but one of many examples: Downton Abbey. (See "God banished from Downton Abbey, says show's historical advisor.")

Alister Bruce was in charge of ensuring that Downton Abbey was historically accurate. But this was tricky to do, since an early twentieth-century English family would have been religious.

So, to avoid being accurate, meals on the set were always shown already under way. This avoided seeing the family pray before they ate.

"The word abbey in the show’s title came in for scrutiny, over fear that it could conjure a religious subtext. The dining room table was not even allowed to show napkins folded in the pattern traditional to the time—because it suggests a bishop’s miter, apparently another possible triggering affront." (Eberstadt, pp. 32-33)

Bruce "said that executives in charge of the series had ordered producers to “leave religion out of it”, for fear of alienating an increasingly atheistic public." ("God banished from Downton Abbey," op. cit.)

So much for truth. So much for historical accuracy.

In 1984 Winston, the main character, works for the Ministry of Truth. His job is to dispose of historical facts by tossing them into a "memory hole." And then, he is to rewrite history, to make Big Brother look good.

"This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs—to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date." (George Orwell, 1984, Kindle Locations 627-630)

‘Reality control’, they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink’.

1984