In coming back to Orwell's 1984 after reading it in high school and noting a lifetime of references that have put it at the center of our literary culture ("Orwellian",) I am most struck by two things: the real beauty of so much of Orwell's writing and the deep darkness of the book. I am almost ashamed of having taken the work for granted, relegated it to a staple of what high school students read and discuss, and also of having found it much less interesting than I do now. I believe I can account for the change. Two things are different now: Many of us feel we are experiencing aspects of the threat Orwell portrays, and in addition, I think I am appreciating more acutely the degree to which this novel is about the nature of language and its connection to human dignity and flourishing. Now I get it: there is a deep and important relationship between words and deeds (as Chaucer observed in describing moral integrity in General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales: "the word must be cousin to the deed" ). There can be a path from text to torture.
Orwell feared Stalinism and yet fought against Fascism in the Spanish Civil War. He apparently came to regret this and after his sequence of careers- as an Imperial Civil Servant, teacher and writer. He became anti-Communist but against bureaucracy and managerial conformity as well. His seeming "all purpose" dystopia may be part of why his novel appeals to the planners of high school curricula. However, his ideas were more complicated than "balanced." He did specifically have Stalinism most in mind and was in fact worried about Ingsoc as centralizing and using efficiency in a way that would cause loss of basic freedoms.
Fortunately, in 2013 The Daily Beast published a piece that presents the text of a 1944 letter Orwell wrote explaining quite openly why he wrote 1984. He says
This is a very helpful statement, even if only a snapshot of his conscious reasons for writing as he did. He goes on to mention the attempted rewriting of history by Hitler to say the Jews started the war, and so on. Why this is now so very disturbing is obvious. Despite Orwell's own distrust of many around him who seemed less worried about socialism, and with the irony of his own use of a pseudonym (being born Eris Arthur Blair), he perfectly isolates the most chilling and persistent abuses of state power: 1) perversion of the meaning of words in the context of proclaiming that an obvious falsehood is true, and 2) endless war. The wars further nationalism and a reason for unity and distract from questioning Big Brother's version of events. Sadly, we are right now seeing how this is possible; Orwell had to have Winston Smith burn up news accounts. With the internet, there is no need. The pixels just come and go, might be erased or not but it is all very confusing isn't it? Who is to say one thing is more true than another?
If we do not resist what is happening here under Donald Trump and Steven Bannon, and if we do not see the admiration for dictator oligarchs like Putin for what it is, we run a risk that many commentators believe is unique in our history. Our own government certainly has misled us many times and maintained secrets. However, if this was done to achieve ends that leaders knew or suspected might be democratically rejected, it remains within a universe of discourse and human dignity that we know. It arises from some sense of shame and realization that some norms and rules are being broken. Vietnam and even the pretext of the second Iraq war can fit into this model.
Not so our current situation. Some "Anglo-American millionaires," to quote Orwell again as above, are seeing that Newspeak serves very well to undermine human decency. Ban enemies and name them and see if a terror attack or a war starts. That will be a useful distraction. Lie boldly and simply say that a former President personally "wiretapped" you, the videos showing you saying what war you supported or that you said many things and then the opposite- all of it can be accepted by those who are just so confused, aren't they? Don't all politicians lie?
Orwell writes beautifully. "Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make the thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one work, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten." It is not just that "war = peace" but that it does not matter to those who are not curious.
I think Orwell means here that when true loyalty has been destroyed, the body can be treated as an object by the State- no one will come to save, or rescue you. And this will be not only out of fear, but also out of having forgotten who you are. "When there were no external records that you could refer to, even the outline of your own life lost its sharpness."
We cannot let this happen to a leading democracy, and certainly not to human culture, but since thanks to Orwell and Trump we know it CAN happen, we have to make sure that we do not let a nationalist, white supremacist, ignorant, lying, misogynist, con artist, the savior of "I alone can fix it," become our destroyer. We have to use the Constitution's rule of law and our democratic institutions to put a legitimate stop to what is going on right now.
Orwell feared Stalinism and yet fought against Fascism in the Spanish Civil War. He apparently came to regret this and after his sequence of careers- as an Imperial Civil Servant, teacher and writer. He became anti-Communist but against bureaucracy and managerial conformity as well. His seeming "all purpose" dystopia may be part of why his novel appeals to the planners of high school curricula. However, his ideas were more complicated than "balanced." He did specifically have Stalinism most in mind and was in fact worried about Ingsoc as centralizing and using efficiency in a way that would cause loss of basic freedoms.
Fortunately, in 2013 The Daily Beast published a piece that presents the text of a 1944 letter Orwell wrote explaining quite openly why he wrote 1984. He says
Hitler, no doubt, will soon disappear, but only at the expense of strengthening (a) Stalin, (b) the Anglo-American millionaires and (c) all sorts of petty fuhrers° of the type of de Gaulle. All the national movements everywhere, even those that originate in resistance to German domination, seem to take non-democratic forms, to group themselves round some superhuman fuhrer (Hitler,Stalin, Salazar, Franco, Gandhi, De Valera are all varying examples) and to adopt the theory that the end justifies the means.
If we do not resist what is happening here under Donald Trump and Steven Bannon, and if we do not see the admiration for dictator oligarchs like Putin for what it is, we run a risk that many commentators believe is unique in our history. Our own government certainly has misled us many times and maintained secrets. However, if this was done to achieve ends that leaders knew or suspected might be democratically rejected, it remains within a universe of discourse and human dignity that we know. It arises from some sense of shame and realization that some norms and rules are being broken. Vietnam and even the pretext of the second Iraq war can fit into this model.
Not so our current situation. Some "Anglo-American millionaires," to quote Orwell again as above, are seeing that Newspeak serves very well to undermine human decency. Ban enemies and name them and see if a terror attack or a war starts. That will be a useful distraction. Lie boldly and simply say that a former President personally "wiretapped" you, the videos showing you saying what war you supported or that you said many things and then the opposite- all of it can be accepted by those who are just so confused, aren't they? Don't all politicians lie?
Orwell writes beautifully. "Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make the thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one work, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten." It is not just that "war = peace" but that it does not matter to those who are not curious.
Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was still privacy, love and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason.
We cannot let this happen to a leading democracy, and certainly not to human culture, but since thanks to Orwell and Trump we know it CAN happen, we have to make sure that we do not let a nationalist, white supremacist, ignorant, lying, misogynist, con artist, the savior of "I alone can fix it," become our destroyer. We have to use the Constitution's rule of law and our democratic institutions to put a legitimate stop to what is going on right now.
