“1984”, by George Orwell

 

328 pages, Penguin Books Signet Classics, ISBN-13: 978-0451524935

There are times when I am up in the middle of the night and think about George Orwell – it’s not what you think – and wonder: Just what would he think of us and the world we have created? Perhaps he would ask out loud, “How did I get it so wrong? The world hasn’t been divided into three totalitarian superstates, the privation and rationing of postwar Britain was not standardized by any Soviet-style central planning and labor camps and censorship are not the norm” – at least, not yet. Perhaps our awoken Orwell would see more parallels between our brave new world and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (reviewed on May 20^th, 2022), what with its and our legions of tranquil populations of pretty people living in a pleasing drug-and-sex induced semi-coma. And knowing what Orwell knew about real poverty, he could hardly fail to observe that the underclass of today’s Britain lives in relative splendor. Infectious diseases all but wiped out? High living standards? Daily showers? Compared even to middle-class people of his day, the average council-flats resident has comforts and leisure opportunities beyond measure. He needn’t spend twelve hours a day at harsh labor; he needn’t necessarily work at all. What Orwell hoped socialism would achieve has instead been delivered by a capitalist-funded welfare state. You’re…welcome?

None of this could have been foreseen in 1984, Orwell’s dystopian social science fiction novel in which so many now well-worn terms were first introduced: Big Brother, doublethink, Thought Police, thoughtcrime, Newspeak, memory hole, 2 + 2 = 5, proles, Two Minutes Hate, telescreen, Room 101 and, of course, Orwellian. Orwell once defined himself as a democratic-socialist in the essay Why I Write (published in the Summer 1946 edition of “Gangrel”), and he could write caustically about his former associates, as he did in this passage from his 1937 book The Road to Wigan Pier: “’Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England” (no wonder Orwell left). This is hard to square with the writer of perhaps the most famous book to stand athwart history, yelling Stop, but there we have it. And who better than a former Socialist to give warning about what his compadres were really about? Who better than an insider to tell you what is happening on the inside? Throughout 1984 we are witnesses to what to the radical left must seem like Heaven but which to everyone else can only be described as Hell: Surveillance, Futurology and Nationalism, although of a twisted kind that involves an obsessive sense of loyalty to some real-world entity; in this case, Big Brother.

All done in the name of The People, of course. Orwell thought of the People as decent enough, but he’d be baffled to observe today that the welfare state has created a class of lay-abouts who, liberated from economic anguish, shackle themselves to screens, drugs, alcohol and, in our modern world, technological terrors like the Internet. But considering the breadth of Orwell’s political thinking, it’s a matter of pure conjecture trying to decide just where on the political spectrum he’d be most at home today. Not, I think, as a Socialist, for his particular brand of socialism was primarily a response to the severe privation he suffered from while young. Rather, I would think that the modern Welfare State’s conquering of most brutal poverty would, I think, fire up the Tory side of Orwell: “Why” he would no doubt ask “does no one care about Character anymore? Should the state subsidize endless self-indulgence? Why do all of the enlightened liberals think that there should be no strings attached to welfare payments?” In Orwell’s essay on Kipling (published in the February 1942 edition of “Horizon”) he said that “‘Enlightened’ people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility”, so perhaps he wouldn’t be at all surprised at today’s domineering all-for-nothing ethos, for his bleak vision of this future – this Futurology, as he called it – was as chilling as one could imagine:

There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always…always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.

I also believe that the Left’s speech codes would make Orwell rethink his socialist instincts, for one of the most notable themes in 1984 is censorship, especially in the Ministry of Truth where photographs and public archives are manipulated to rid them of “unpersons”, those people who have been erased from history by the Party. On telescreens almost all figures of production are grossly exaggerated, or simply fabricated to indicate an ever-growing economy, even during times when the reality is the opposite. This is especially poignant, for Orwell once associated Socialism with freedom of speech and believed that it was critical to his support for the movement, as he wrote in Why I join the I.L.P. [Independent Labour Party] (published in the June 24^th, 1938 edition of “New Leader”): “And the only regime which, in the long run, will dare to permit freedom of speech is a socialist regime. If Fascism triumphs I am finished as a writer”. Today, though, it is evident that the impulse to restrict speech is primarily a phenomenon of the Left, for so much speech runs afoul of the Left’s chief obsession, which is international identity politics. That same imperative is why the Left is suspicious of patriotism and why it is such a laughingstock in the book, with love of country replaced by perpetual hatred of fictitious boogeymen and the way in which allies are abandoned and taken up with lightning speed.

The private life is gone in 1984, as houses and apartments are equipped with telescreens so one may be watched or listened to at any time. Similar telescreens are found at workstations and in public places, along with hidden microphones, the reading of mail, the employment of undercover agents and even the use of children to spy on their own parents. All done by the best and brightest to help the poor and downtrodden, of course. In The Lion and the Unicorn (published in the February 19^th, 1941 edition of “Searchlight Books”), Orwell writes of the “insularity” of his countrymen and the “[i]ntellectuals who have tried to break it down have generally done more harm than good. At bottom it is the same quality in the English character that repels the tourist and keeps out the invader”. Also in The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell says that “I worked out an anarchistic theory that all government is evil, and that the punishment always does more harm than the crime and the people can be trusted to behave decently if you will only let them alone” (Good Lord; Orwell was a Reaganite), or again when he wrote in Politics in the English Language (published in the April 1946 edition of “Horizon”): “In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’”. The Left’s present tendency to politicize everything would have simply horrified him.