Orwell’s critique of England’s official Left was to undergo some modification in July 1945, when, at the first opportunity they got, the British electorate, by a landslide, threw out their wartime rulers and put in a Labour government, which would remain in power till 1951 – beyond what would be left of Orwell’s lifetime – during which period Labour finally got its chance to reshape British society along ‘socialist’ lines. Orwell, being a perpetual dissident, must have been delighted to help the party confront its contradictions, notably those arising from its wartime acquiescence to, and participation in, a repressive, Tory-led government. Once having enjoyed and exerted that sort of power, how likely would Labour be to choose not to extend its scope, rather than stick to the ideals of its founders, and go back to fighting on the side of the oppressed? Project this will to power four decades into the future, and you could easily end up with Ingsoc, Oceania and Big Brother.
What is clear from his letters and articles at the time he was working on Nineteen Eighty-Four is Orwell’s despair over the post-war state of ‘socialism’. What in Keir Hardie’s time had been an honourable struggle against the incontrovertibly criminal behaviour of capitalism towards those whom it used for profit had become, by Orwell’s time, shamefully institutional, bought and sold, in too many instances concerned only with maintaining itself in power. And that was just in England – abroad, the impulse had been further corrupted, in immeasurably more sinister ways, leading at length to the Stalinist gulags and the Nazi death camps.
Orwell seems to have been particularly annoyed with the widespread allegiance to Stalinism to be observed among the Left, in the face of overwhelming evidence of the evil nature of the regime. ‘For somewhat complex reasons,’ he wrote in March of 1948, early in the revision of the first draft of Nineteen Eighty-Four, ‘nearly the whole of the English Left has been driven to accept the Russian regime as “Socialist”, while silently recognizing that its spirit and practice are quite alien to anything that is meant by “Socialism” in this country. Hence there has arisen a sort of schizophrenic manner of thinking, in which words like “democracy” can bear two irreconcilable meanings, and such things as concentration camps and mass deportations can be right and wrong simultaneously.’
We recognize this ‘sort of schizophrenic manner of thinking’ as a source for one of the great achievements of this novel, one which has entered the everyday language of political discourse – the identification and analysis of doublethink. As described in Emmanuel Goldstein’s The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, a dangerously subversive text outlawed in Oceania and known only as the book, doublethink is a form of mental discipline whose goal, desirable and necessary to all Party members, is to be able to believe two contradictory truths at the same time. This is nothing new, of course. We all do it. In social psychology it has long been known as ‘cognitive dissonance’. Others like to call it ‘compartmentalization’. Some, famously F. Scott Fitzgerald, have considered it evidence of genius. For Walt Whitman (‘Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself’) it was being large and containing multitudes, for Yogi Berra it was coming to a fork in the road and taking it, for Schrödinger’s cat, it was the quantum paradox of being alive and dead at the same time.
The idea seems to have presented Orwell with his own dilemma, a kind of meta-doublethink – repelling him with its limitless potential for harm, while at the same time fascinating him with its promise of a way to transcend opposites – as if some aberrant form of Zen Buddhism, whose fundamental koans are the three Party slogans ‘War is Peace’, ‘Freedom is Slavery’ and ‘Ignorance is Strength’ were being applied to evil purposes.
The consummate embodiment of doublethink in this novel is the Inner Party official O’Brien, Winston’s seducer and betrayer, protector and destroyer. He believes with utter sincerity in the regime he serves, and yet can impersonate perfectly a devout revolutionary committed to its overthrow. He imagines himself a mere cell of the greater organism of the State, but it is his individuality, compelling and self-contradicting, that we remember. Although a calmly eloquent spokesman for the totalitarian future, O’Brien gradually reveals an unbalanced side, a disengagement from reality that will emerge in its full unpleasantness during the re-education of Winston Smith, in the place of pain and despair known as the Ministry of Love.
Doublethink also lies behind the names of the superministries that run things in Oceania – the Ministry of Peace wages war, the Ministry of Truth tells lies, the Ministry of Love tortures and eventually kills anybody whom it deems a threat. If this seems unreasonably perverse, recall that in the present-day United States, few have any problem with a war-making apparatus named ‘the Department of Defense’, any more than we have saying ‘Department of Justice’ with a straight face, despite well-documented abuses of human and constitutional rights by its most formidable arm, the FBI. Our nominally free news media are required to present ‘balanced’ coverage, in which every ‘truth’ is immediately neutered by an equal and opposite one. Every day public opinion is the target of rewritten history, official amnesia and outright lying, all of which is benevolently termed ‘spin’, as if it were no more harmful than a ride on a merry-go-round. We know better than what they tell us, yet hope otherwise. We believe and doubt at the same time – it seems a condition of political thought in a modern superstate to be permanently of at least two minds on most issues. Needless to say, this is of inestimable use to those in power who wish to remain there, preferably forever.
Besides the ambivalence within the Left as to Soviet realities, other opportunities for doublethink in action arose in the wake of the Second World War. In its moment of euphoria, the winning side was making, in Orwell’s view, mistakes as fatal as any made by the Treaty of Versailles after the First World War. Despite the most honourable intentions, in practice the present division of spoils among the former Allies carried the potential for fatal mischief. Orwell’s uneasiness over the ‘peace’ in fact is one major subtext of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
‘What it is really meant to do,’ Orwell wrote to his publisher at the end of 1948 – as nearly as we can tell early in the revision phase of the novel – ‘is to discuss the implications of dividing the world up into “Zones of Influence” (I thought of it in 1944 as a result of the Teheran Conference) …’
Well, of course novelists should not be altogether trusted as to the sources of their inspiration. But the imaginative procedure bears looking at. The Teheran Conference was the first Allied summit meeting of the Second World War, taking place late in 1943, with Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin in attendance. Among the topics they discussed was how, once Nazi Germany was defeated, the Allies would divide it up into zones of occupation. Who would get how much of Poland was another issue. In imagining Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, Orwell seems to have made a leap in scale from the Teheran talks, projecting the occupation of a defeated country into that of a defeated world. Though China had not been included, and the Chinese revolution in 1948 was still in progress, Orwell had been in the Far East and knew better than to ignore the weight of Eastasia when arranging his own Zones-of-Influence scheme. Geopolitical thinking in those days was enchanted with the ‘World-Island’ idea of British geographer Halford Mackinder – meaning Europe, Asia and Africa considered as a single landmass surrounded by water, ‘the pivot of history’, whose heartland was Nineteen Eight-Four’s ‘Eurasia’. ‘Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island,’ as Mackinder had put it, and ‘Who rules the World-Island commands the world,’ a pronouncement not lost on Hitler and other theoreticians of realpolitik.
One of these Mackinderites with connections in intelligence circles was James Burnham, an American ex-Trotskyist who around 1942 had published a provocative analysis of the world crisis then current called The Managerial Revolution, which Orwell discussed later in a lengthy article in 1946. Burnham, at the time, with England still reeling under Nazi assault and German troops at the outskirts of Moscow, argued that with th
e conquest of Russia and the global heartland imminent, the future would belong to Hitler. Later in the war, while serving with the OSS, with the Nazis headed for defeat, Burnham changed his mind in a lengthy afterthought, ‘Lenin’s Heir’, in which he now argued that unless the United States did something about it, the future, actually, would belong to Stalin and the Soviet system, and not Hitler after all. By this point Orwell, who took Burnham seriously but not uncritically, may have sensed that the man’s thinking was sort of on the flighty side – nevertheless traces of Burnham’s geopolitics can be found in the tripartite world balance of power of Nineteen Eight-Four, with Burnham’s victorious Japan becoming Eastasia, Russia, the pivotal heartland, controlling the Eurasian landmass, and the Anglo-American Alliance transmogrifying to Oceania, which is the setting for Nineteen Eighty-Four.
This grouping of Britain and the United States into a single bloc, as prophecy, has turned out to be dead-on, foreseeing Britain’s resistance to integration with the Eurasian landmass as well as her continuing subservience to Yank interests – dollars, for instance, being the monetary unit of Oceania. London is still recognizably the London of the post-war austerity period. From the opening, with its cold plunge directly into the grim April day of Winston Smith’s decisive, act of disobedience, the textures of dystopian life are unremitting – the uncooperative plumbing, the cigarettes that keep losing their tobacco, the horrible food – though perhaps this was not such an imaginative stretch for anyone who’d had to undergo wartime shortages.
Prophecy and prediction are not quite the same, and it would ill serve writer and reader alike to confuse them in Orwell’s case. There is a game some critics like to play, worth maybe a minute and a half of diversion, in which one makes lists of what Orwell did and didn’t ‘get right’. Looking around us at the present moment, for example, we note the popularity of helicopters as a resource of ‘law enforcement’, familiar to us from countless televised ‘crime dramas’, themselves forms of social control – and for that matter at the ubiquity of television itself. The two-way telescreen bears a close enough resemblance to flat plasma screens linked to ‘interactive’ cable systems, circa 2003. News is whatever the government says it is, surveillance of ordinary citizens has entered the mainstream of police activity, reasonable search and seizure is a joke. And so forth. ‘Wow, the Government has turned into Big Brother, just like Orwell predicted! Something, huh?’ ‘Orwellian, dude!’
Well, yes and no. Specific predictions are only details, after all. What is perhaps more important, indeed necessary, to a working prophet, is to be able to see deeper than most of us into the human soul. Orwell in 1948 understood that despite the Axis defeat, the will to fascism had not gone away, that far from having seen its day it had perhaps not yet even come into its own – the corruption of spirit, the irresistible human addiction to power, were already long in place, all well-known aspects of the Third Reich and Stalin’s USSR, even the British Labour Party, like first drafts of a terrible future. What could prevent the same thing from happening to Britain and the United States? Moral superiority? Good intentions? Clean living?
What has steadily, insidiously, improved since then, of course, making humanist arguments almost irrelevant, is the technology. We must not be too distracted by the clunkiness of the means of surveillance current in Winston Smith’s era. In ‘our’ 1984, after all, the integrated circuit chip was less than a decade old, and almost embarrassingly primitive next to the wonders of computer technology circa 2003, most notably the Internet, a development that promises social control on a scale those quaint old twentieth-century tyrants with their goofy moustaches could only dream about.
On the other hand, Orwell did not foresee such exotic developments as the religious wars with which we have become all too familiar, involving various sorts of fundamentalism. Religious fanaticism is in fact strangely absent from Oceania, except in the form of devotion to the Party. Big Brother’s regime exhibits all the elements of fascism – the single charismatic dictator, the total control of behaviour, the absolute subordination of the individual to the collective – except for racial hostility, in particular anti-Semitism, which was such a prominent feature of fascism as Orwell knew it. This is bound to strike the modern reader as puzzling. The only Jewish character in the novel is Emmanuel Goldstein, and maybe only because his original Leon Trotsky, was Jewish too. And he remains an offstage presence whose real function in Nineteen Eighty-Four is to provide an expository voice, as the author of The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism.
Much has been made recently of Orwell’s own attitude toward Jews, some commentators even going so far as to call it anti-Semitic. If one looks in his writing of the time for overt references to the topic, one finds relatively little – Jewish matters did not seem to command much of his attention. What published evidence there is indicates either a sort of numbness before the enormity of what had happened in the camps or a failure at some level to appreciate its full significance. There is some felt reticence, as if, with so many other deep issues to worry about, Orwell would have preferred that the world not be presented the added inconvenience of having to think much about the Holocaust. The novel may even have been his way of redefining a world in which the Holocaust did not happen.
As close as Nineteen Eighty-Four gets to an anti-Semitic moment is in the ritual practice of Two Minutes Hate, presented quite early, almost as a plot device for introducing Julia and O’Brien, the other two major characters. But the exhibition of anti-Goldsteinism described here with such toxic immediacy is never generalized into anything racial. The strategy of pitting race against race does not seem to be found in the Party’s tool kit. ‘Nor is there any racial discrimination,’ as Emmanuel Goldstein himself confirms, in the book – ‘Jews, Negroes, South Americans of pure Indian blood are to be found in the highest ranks of the Party …’ As nearly as one can tell, Orwell considered anti-Semitism ‘one variant of the great modern disease of nationalism’, and British anti-Semitism in particular as another form of British stupidity. He may have believed that by the time of the tripartite coalescence of the world he imagined for Nineteen Eighty-Four, the European nationalisms he was used to somehow no longer exist, perhaps because nations, and hence nationalities, would have been abolished and absorbed into more collective identities. Amid the novel’s general pessimism, this might strike us, knowing what we know today, as an unwarrantedly chirpy analysis. The hatreds Orwell never found much worse than ridiculous have determined too much history since 1945 to be dismissed quite so easily.
Besides the unexpected presence of racial tolerance in Oceania, the class structure is also a bit odd. It should be a classless society, but it isn’t. It is divided into Inner Party, Outer Party and the Proles. But as the story is being told from the point of view of Winston Smith, who belongs to the Outer Party, the Proles are largely ignored, much as they are by the regime itself. Despite his admiration for them as a force for salvation, and his faith in their eventual triumph, Winston Smith doesn’t seem to know any proles himself – his only personal contact, and that indirect, is with the lady singing outside the room at the back of the antique shop where he and Julia have found their lovers’ refuge. ‘The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department.’ By Winston’s Inner Party poetic standards, the tune is ‘drivelling’, ‘dreadful rubbish’. But Orwell quotes it three times, almost word for word. Is something else going on? One cannot be sure – one likes to imagine that Orwell, a songwriter in disguise who loved writing verse that rhymed and had a beat, also came up with an actual melody for this lyric, and that while he was writing Nineteen Eighty-Four he went around humming or whistling it, perhaps for days on end, driving those in his vicinity crazy. His own artistic judgements were not those of Winston Smith, a bourgeois of the late forties projected into the future. Orwell enjoyed what we now call pop culture – his allegiance, in music as i
n politics, being to the people.
In a New Statesman review from 1938 of a John Galsworthy novel, Orwell commented, almost in passing, ‘Galsworthy was a bad writer, and some inner trouble, sharpening his sensitiveness, nearly made him into a good one; his discontent healed itself, and he reverted to type. It is worth pausing to wonder in just what form the thing is happening to oneself.’
Orwell was amused at those of his colleagues on the Left who lived in terror of being termed bourgeois. But somewhere among his own terrors may have lurked the possibility that like Galsworthy he might one day lose his political anger, and end up as one more apologist for Things As They Are. His anger, let us go so far as to say, was precious to him. He had lived his way into it – in Burma and Paris and London and on the road to Wigan Pier, and in Spain, being shot at, and eventually wounded, by fascists – he had invested blood, pain and hard labour to earn his anger, and was as attached to it as any capitalist to his capital. It may be an affliction peculiar to writers more than others, this fear of getting too comfortable, of being bought off. When one writes for a living, it is certainly one of the risks, though not one every writer objects to. The ability of the ruling element to co-opt dissent was ever present as a danger – actually, not unlike the process by which the Party in Nineteen Eighty-Four is able perpetually to renew itself from below.
Uncollected Works Page 11