by Peter Huber
What holds for crockery holds even more for mass communications; Orwell has been predicting centralization here for years. The English press in 1938 is appallingly concentrated. Monopolists lurk behind such politically vital things as two-penny postcards and Boys’ Weeklies. The film industry is “virtually a monopoly”; so are the daily papers, “and most of all,” the radio. Even gramophone needles have been cornered by a conniving monopolist.
For Orwell, the centralization of powerful machines is inescapable economic destiny in the industrial age. “The processes involved in making, say, an aeroplane are so complex as to be only possible in a planned, centralised society, with all the repressive apparatus that that implies,” Orwell declares in a 1945 book review. The book he is reviewing maintains that advanced machines can be reconciled with efficiency and individual freedom. Orwell doesn’t believe it. For Orwell, the road to industrial efficiency leads straight to the Ministry. Immutable economic laws dictate that industrialism “must lead to some form of collectivism.” Only governments can raise the “enormous sums” needed to modernize vital industries like coal mining.
For Orwell, modern weapons raise the same basic issues, albeit with more unpleasant implications, as coal mining or the greasy frying pan. As he reasons in “You and the Atom Bomb,” “tanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons.” Expensive, complex weapons make the strong stronger; simple ones “give claws to the weak.” Regrettably, civilization is moving steadily away from private weapons toward collective ones. Nothing is more complex, more expensive, and therefore more centralizing than a nuclear bomb. Such weapons inevitably imply some monstrous, all-consuming Ministry of Peace behind.
Which leads in turn to collectivist nations, collectivist maps, a collectivist planet. The atom bomb fits perfectly with a vision of “two or three monstrous super-states . . . dividing the world between them.” Little nations are to be absorbed into big ones, just as the grocer and the milkman are to be swallowed by trusts. Orwell has been saying this for years too, and when he revisits the issue in 1945, neither Hitler’s recent immolation nor Stalin’s imminent mummification has changed his views at all. The likeliest development is an armed peace, with power concentrated in fewer hands than ever before. The world is “heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity.” “[T]he general drift is unmistakable, and every scientific discovery of recent years has accelerated it.”
The acceleration is not about to end. As Orwell knows, after radio, gramophones, and film there will come . . .
CHAPTER 4
The telescreen in Blair’s office had been behaving erratically for days. Three times already, to his intense irritation, Blair had lost a full morning of meticulously rewritten history. And all because the dark-haired girl from the Fiction Department had happened to walk by his cubicle one morning during the Two Minutes Hate. Blythe’s leering face had filled the screen, his voice had been bleating out some new piece of treason. The girl had flushed, her chest had swelled, her arm had quivered, and then, unable to contain herself, she had begun crying out “Swine! Swine! Swine!” Before he knew it, she had picked up a Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the screen. The unit had been acting up ever since.
With a deep, unconscious sigh, Blair pulled the decrepit chair up to his desk. Every day, he thought to himself, he became more and more like a sucked orange.
He worked in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth. The largest section of the Department consisted simply of persons whose duty it was to track down and collect all copies of books, newspapers, and other documents which had been superseded and were due for destruction. Blair had a far more delicate job, of creating new histories to replace old ones. It was never called forgery. All errors due for correction were blamed on prior telescreen malfunction.
Blair glanced across the hall. In the corresponding cubicle on the other side a small, precise-looking, sharp-faced man named Connolly was working steadily away, with a folded newspaper on his knee. He kept his mouth as close to the screen as possible, and spoke in a low voice as though trying to keep what he was saying a secret. He looked up, and his spectacles darted a hostile flash in Blair’s direction.
“Display mail,” Blair said to his own screen, in a carefully measured tone.
Four messages materialized on the screen, neatly arrayed by time and date, with a ten-digit source code at the top. Each was only one or two lines long. Miniplenty projections of chocolate production for this month were to be corrected, certain unpersons were to be replaced in last month’s Times . . . routine matters, though the first would require some tedious wading through lists of figures. Blair was good at these things.
The Records Department had become much more efficient in recent years, just as Orwell had planned. A curious figure, Orwell. Blair was probably one of the few left who even remembered him any more. Some years before, Blair had worked for many months expunging Orwell’s name from official Party histories, and the man was now almost completely forgotten. But Blair remembered. The act of erasing every memory of Orwell had imprinted Orwell’s story indelibly on Blair’s own mind. The telescreen, the network, the Ministries of Truth and Love: Orwell’s brilliant mind had created them all.
For years, Orwell had been a member of the Outer Party, though often suspected of being ambivalent in his love for Big Brother. Long after his disappearance, the Party hacks had continued to build the network exactly as Orwell had planned. The speak-writes-—dictation machines that converted spoken words into written text—had been manufactured precisely according to Orwell’s original design, then incorporated in the telescreens themselves. Now, everything moved through the telescreens. Orwell himself had been vaporized, of course.
In the cubicle across the way Comrade Connolly was still growling hoarsely into his screen. It was quite possible that Connolly was working on the same job as Blair. Some master brain in the Inner Party would eventually select among several independent rewrites; other drafts would be consigned to the memory holes. Orwell had invented those too. There was a hole beside every desk, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. The memory holes still existed in tens of thousands throughout the Ministry, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. It was said they led down to giant furnaces in the basement.
“Back numbers,” said Blair to his telescreen. “Times. One-four dash two dash nine-four. Times. Three dash twelve dash eight-three.” After a moment’s delay, the front page of the corresponding issues appeared in a window on his screen.
Blair set to work. When he had finished compiling each set of corrections, the revised document would be dispatched by telescreen to higher authority. His work would be reviewed and probably approved, the back issues of the Times would be systematically destroyed, and corrected copies placed on file instead. Similar processes of continuous alteration were applied to every conceivable kind of record. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. After a while, it was not even forgery any more, just the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Garbage in, garbage out, Blair thought to himself. Somewhere or other, far away and quite anonymous, members of the Inner Party coordinated the whole effort, decreed that this fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified, and the next rubbed out of existence. Every time records were revised they were also brought into line with the latest edition of the Newspeak dictionary. This meant the records got a little shorter each year, as the vocabulary shrank. The deliberate denuding of the language had been going on for years.
A puzzling thing, Blair reflected, was that Newspeak had at one time been growing richer. He was quite sure of it. There had been a day when Newspeak had been even smaller than it was now, when the wonder of it all was how quickly the language was expanding. Intelligent people had taken pride in mastering its latest subtleties, and had s
hown off the breadth of their Newspeak vocabulary. Newspeak hadn’t been quite the rich, mellifluous Oldspeak that the proles still used, but it hadn’t had the vapid emptiness of modern Newspeak either. The language had been clipped, precise, but also powerfully expressive. Now, Newspeak was just a foolish affectation, simple to the point of being dysfunctional. Like everything else controlled by the Party, Newspeak had been overtaken by decay.
Blair was an hour into his work when the technician arrived to replace his screen. Burgess was a slow, flabby, dark man with eyes like black buttons set wide apart in his face. His skin had a greasy sheen, like the cuticle of an insect. He reminded Blair of one of the shiny black beetles that he had seen patrolling the areas of waste ground, moving with predictable, dull progress across the stones. For years Burgess had toiled as a petty engineer, going back and forth along the halls with a stack of manuals in hand. He had so distinguished himself by unfailing devotion to duty, lack of inquisitiveness, and absence of imagination, that he had finally been promoted to work on the screens, as an Assistant Sub-Deputy System Agent. This meant he was allowed to help carry replacement screens around the Ministry. Now, his mettle proved by years of acting as a porter, he had been promoted to the rank of Deputy System Agent.
Connolly, small and suspicious, and Burgess, ponderous and loyal: the Party belonged to men like these. The machines, it was said, made such men possible, even necessary. Ever since Orwell’s day, the Party had promised machines and more machines—machines to save work, machines to save thought, machines to save pain, machines for hygiene, efficiency, organization, more hygiene, more efficiency, more organization, more machines. And where did it all end? In a paradise of little fat men.
In the Party’s day-dreams, of course, the little fat men were neither fat nor little; they were men like gods. But in a world from which physical danger had been largely banished the men like gods had turned out to be men like beetles. Technological progress had eliminated danger, and physical courage had not survived. There was no need for physical strength in a world where there was never the need for physical labor. Loyalty and generosity were irrelevant—almost unimaginable—in a world where nothing went wrong. The mechanized world had grown safe and soft, and the men in it had found it impossible to remain brave and hard. Mechanical progress had produced a foolproof world—which had turned out to mean a world inhabited by fools. The Party had tied itself to electronic efficiency, and so tied men to the ideal of softness. But softness was repulsive. The Party had reduced man to a kind of walking stomach, without hand, or eye, or brain. Men had ceased to use their hands, and had lopped off a huge chunk of their consciousness.
Burgess gave Blair a stupid, malignant glance, then beckoned brusquely to two of his five assistants. He waved Blair out of the cubicle, and the team squeezed in. Three other assistants were unwrapping the new screen in the hall. Burgess carried the blue box.
The screen was about the size of an unfolded newspaper, an oversized dull mirror about five centimeters thick. The men lifted it nervously into Blair’s cubicle. A minute or two later they had unbolted the old screen, and mounted the new one in its place. There were no wires to attach, not even a power cord. One of the managers peeled a sheet of sticky paper from the front surface. Another few minutes passed, then the screen flickered into life. Almost immediately, an announcer’s fruity voice could be heard. It appeared there had been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grams a week. Only a month ago, Blair seemed to recall, the ration had been thirty grams.
Burgess elbowed his way to the screen, and shoved his assistants out of the cubicle. He propped two thick instructional binders on Blair’s desk. He opened the first with meticulous care, and stared at it intently for several minutes. Then, glancing at the manual every few seconds, he positioned the blue box in front of the screen. The man obviously had no idea what he was doing, and was terrified of missing some crucial step.
With agonizing slowness he pressed one and then another of the dozen or so buttons mounted on the front of the blue box. The box emitted a series of atonal whistles as each button was pressed. Burgess paused to turn a page in the binder; then the whistling resumed. Abruptly, the fruity voice clicked off. On the screen there appeared instead a view of the Laseprint room fourteen stories below.
“All set, comrade,” said Burgess, his face gleaming with sweat. He was quite genial now, obviously relieved to have made it through the installation without a hitch. “Good to be back in touch again, eh, Blair?”
“Capital, capital!” Blair replied, with a weak grin. One always sought to convey a certain vapid eagerness when speaking to a member of the Outer Party. Burgess was an idiot, Blair thought behind his smile. An absolute idiot, venomously orthodox, typical of the types who controlled everything of any importance these days. The man had without exception the most stupid, vulgar, empty mind that Blair had ever encountered. He had not a thought in his head that was not a slogan, and there was no imbecility, absolutely none, that he was not capable of swallowing if the Party handed it out to him. “The human sound track” Blair nicknamed him in his own mind.
It was always the Burgess types who got promoted. People like Burgess and Connolly, across the hall. The smart ones, the ones with any spark of real technical skill, got vaporized. Bernal, for example. Bernal and his Hush-a-Screen.
Blair glanced back at his rival. Something seemed to tell him with certainty that Connolly was busy on the same job as himself. Connolly obviously suspected the same. He was doing his utmost not to let his voice carry, addressing his screen in a sort of hoarse whisper. But that never worked; the screen then picked up stray sounds from other cubicles. It was in fact a constant problem in the long, windowless hall, with the double row of cubicles and the ceaseless background drone of voices. Sometimes the noise level got so high your screen recorded complete gibberish.
Bernal, Blair reflected bitterly, had solved the problem, and had been immediately vaporized for doing so. It was appalling! Bernal, the closest thing to a friend Blair had ever had at the office, Bernal with his mocking eyes, with his irrepressible interest in the technicalities of everything—vaporized, because he had lacked discretion and the saving stupidity needed to survive within the Party.
He had arrived in the office one day hugely pleased, and announced that he had the solution to the whole problem. It was a sort of rigid plastic tent—Bernal had even built a prototype—that fitted neatly over the rim of the telescreen, creating a small zone of quiet. The “Hush-a-Screen,” he had called it. Bernal had vanished soon after. A morning came, and he was missing from work. Despite himself, Bernal had ended up a perfect member of the Party. Orthodoxy was unconsciousness.
And short of death itself, the best orthodoxy of all was a belligerent, anti-intellectual stupidity, of the kind that Burgess had been born with. Small wonder that all the useful arts in the world were either standing still or going backward. The Party dimly understood that it still needed the telescreens, still needed science for war and police espionage, and so tolerated empirical approaches in these two areas. The Party’s managers all ended up like Burgess anyway.
Blair felt a sense of helplessness take hold of him. If there is hope, Smith had written in the diary, it lies in the proles. But there was no hope. A prole’s loyalty extended only as far as a prole could see, and for only as long as he could remember. Their market was just a rubbish heap of detail, tiny things that would stay forever tiny. A prole saw no further than the stalls in the marketplace, and remembered nothing bigger than razor blades. A prole was like an ant, which can see small objects but not large ones, simply another species of insect. Only Big Brother was an eagle. He alone saw everything.
This, Blair thought in despair, was the Party’s real triumph. There were electronic files but no records, telescreens but no human contacts. Everything was connected, the past with the present, the people with Big Brother, yet all the connections ended in the empty basement of a single, huge
Ministry. There were no humans anywhere, only insects, the machine, and the Ministry.
As Blair settled back in his chair, he took a last look at Connolly across the hall. The little men who scuttled so nimbly through the labyrinthine corridors of Ministries were never vaporized. One of these days, thought Blair with sudden deep conviction, Connolly will be a System Manager.
THE ENEMY
So for Orwell, hypercentralized Ministries are economically inevitable, and nothing will slip more naturally into their adhesive hands than radios, gramophones, films, and the combination of them all, the telescreen. With that, 1984 falls into place.
One can indeed watch Orwell’s thoughts about telescreen totalitarianism evolve in other writings he publishes while 1984 is crystallizing in his mind. Those thoughts take shape most clearly in Orwell’s pre-1984 dialogue with another writer and political theorist of his day, James Burnham. The rest of the world has largely forgotten Burnham, but it has not forgotten Orwell. The principal reason is Orwell’s telescreen.
In his “Second Thoughts on James Burnham,” published in 1946, Orwell agrees with Burnham on many major points. “Capitalism is disappearing, but socialism is not replacing it,” Orwell writes. Coming instead is “a new kind of planned, centralised society” ruled by an oligarchy of “business executives, technicians, bureaucrats, and soldiers.” Small nations will coalesce into “great super-states grouped round the main industrial centers in Europe, Asia, and America.” “Internally, each society will be hierarchical, with an aristocracy of talent at the top and a mass of semi-slaves at the bottom.” This is Orwell summarizing Burnham, but it is also Burnham summarizing Orwell. For almost a decade before Burnham, in Wigan Pier, Coming Up for Air, and countless earlier essays, Orwell has been making identical predictions—and in better prose than Burnham’s.