Orwell's Revenge

by Peter Huber

  In his “Second Thoughts” essay, Orwell accepts Burnham’s thesis that “a planned and centralised society is liable to develop into an oligarchy or a dictatorship.” Indeed, Burnham’s conclusions on this point “are difficult to resist. . . . The ever-increasing concentration of industrial and financial power; the diminishing importance of the individual capitalist or shareholder, and the growth of the new ‘managerial’ class of scientists, technicians, and bureaucrats . . . all these things seem to point in the same direction.” The many details of Burnham’s prewar predictions that have not been fulfilled (Hitler’s inevitable triumph, for example) “do not disprove Burnham’s theory.”

  And yet, at the end of his essay on Burnham, Orwell declares that Burnham is fundamentally mistaken after all. The most astonishing thing about this pronouncement is its timing. The essay is published in 1946. Orwell is just beginning to write 1984, the novel that will persuade millions of readers that Burnham’s geopolitical vision is correct. But when he reviews Burnham head on, Orwell concludes that Burnham has missed the one critical point. Which one? “[T]he ‘managers’ are not so invincible as Burnham believes,” says Orwell. Burnham has ignored “the advantages, military as well as social, enjoyed by a democratic country.” “[0]ne should have been able to see from the start that such a movement as Nazism could not produce any good or stable result. . . . [C]ertain rules of conduct have to be observed if human society is to hold together at all.”

  This is a perfectly sensible criticism of Burnham; the one remarkable thing about it is that it comes from Orwell’s pen, a pen that is about to write 1984, a pen that has been writing exactly the same kind of thing as Burnham for a long time. Only a few years earlier, Orwell had reviewed Bertrand Russell’s Power: A New Social Analysis. In that book, Russell argues that tyrannies eventually collapse because they depend on lies. “[W]e cannot be sure that this is so,” Orwell replies. “It is quite easy to imagine a state in which the ruling caste deceive their followers without deceiving themselves. . . . One has only to think of the sinister possibilities of the radio, state-controlled education and so forth.”

  Does Orwell then agree with Russell, that tyranny is self-destructive, or with Burnham, that tyranny is durable and strong? In 1940, when he reviews Russell, Orwell is with Burnham. In 1946, when he reviews Burnham, he is with Russell. In 1948, when he finishes 1984, he is with Burnham once again. What’s going on? The answer is “the radio . . . and so forth.” The answer is the telescreen.

  In 1946, Orwell is (temporarily) sure that Burnham is wrong. As a responsible critic, Orwell takes pains to explain why. Burnham has relied on Machiavelli, but Machiavelli’s theories, valid enough when “methods of production were primitive,” are now obsolete. World politics have been transformed. By what? By “the arrival of the machine.” Industrialism has made human drudgery “technically avoidable.” “In effect,” says Orwell, “Burnham argues that because a society of free and equal human beings has never existed, it never can exist. By the same argument one could have demonstrated the impossibility of aeroplanes in 1900, or of motor cars in 1850.” Burnham’s key mistake has been to misunderstand the political implications of new technology.

  And having written that, Orwell puts Burnham to one side and sets to work on 1984. As he writes, Orwell finds himself thinking again about just where it was that Burnham went wrong. He thinks about machines—Orwell is always thinking about machines. And then it hits him: Burnham’s geopolitical prophecies are right after all! The Orwell of the 1930s, who anticipated all of Burnham’s ideas by years, was right too. Superstate totalitarianism is coming again. Burnham didn’t correctly understand why; he blamed it all on the Machiavellian instincts of the ruling oligarchy. But Orwell now grasps the real reason. Big Brother is coming because of the advent of a new machine. He is coming by telescreen.

  And indeed, Orwell has being saying that for years, too. Perhaps he reaches back into his files to refresh his memory. To his 1940 review of Bertrand Russell, the one pointing to “the sinister possibilities” of radio and so forth. Or to another book review Orwell published in 1936. “You can’t ignore Hitler, Mussolini, unemployment, aeroplanes and the radio,” Orwell had written then. Or to another review he published in 1939: “The Inquisition failed, but then the Inquisition had not the resources of the modem state. The radio, press-censorship, standardised education and the secret police have altered everything. . . . Mass-suggestion is a science of the last twenty years, and we do not yet know how successful it will be.” Or perhaps Orwell remembers his wartime broadcasts for the BBC, and pulls from the shelf his “Imaginary Interview with Jonathan Swift”:

  GEORGE ORWELL: Since your day something has appeared called totalitarianism.

  JONATHAN SWIFT: A new thing?

  ORWELL: It isn’t strictly new, it’s merely been made practicable owing to modem weapons and modem methods of communication.

  There it is again: modern methods of communication. The new telemedia are what give modern totalitarianism an altogether new power, never before seen or even imagined. 1984 is not just a rewrite of Burnham, or a variation on H. G. Wells’ The Sleeper Awakes, Jack London’s The Iron Heel, Zamyatin’s We, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, or E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops,” all of which Orwell has read and written about many times. Like the others, 1984 is a book about power. But what is politically new about Orwell’s book—radically, brilliantly new—is the combined power of oligarchy and the communicating machine. In 1984, Big Brother speaks to everyone, and Winston Smith speaks to no one. Public propaganda is everywhere; private discourse is nowhere. It’s the same with memory: the Ministry stores, collects, and rewrites everything; the private individual forgets, and forgets again. The Thought Police know every private thought; private thought itself ceases to exist. All of this hinges on the technology of telecommunications.

  And what’s most chilling about 1984 is that it seems so plausible. The Ministry installs all telescreens, and the telescreens project Big Brother’s face and voice, his eyes and ears, the Ministry incarnate. In fact, “[n]obody has ever seen Big Brother in the flesh. He is a face on the hoardings, a voice on the telescreen.” Yes, that’s it: Big Brother is sense, sound, and image inside the electronic machine itself. He is the Brain in the Bottle. The machine itself is the enemy.

  Except that that’s impossible. Even the most evil of machines require evil men behind them.

  CHAPTER 5

  The lifts worked, silently and fast. White-jacketed servants still hurried about on the softly carpeted passages in the building. The smells were of good food and good tobacco, as they had always been. But the cream-papered walls with white wainscotting, once exquisitely clean, were now beginning to show the grime of long contact with human bodies. The dark-blue carpet, rich as velvet, was now distinctly frayed.

  O’Brien sat alone in the room, by a table under a green-shaded lamp. The telescreen was dimmed to a murmur. He had once been a monstrous man, with a mane of greasy gray hair. His face, pouched and seamed, coarse, humorous, and brutal, had suggested a certain charm of manner. The charm was gone now Nothing remained but the size and brutality.

  O’Brien stretched a great, flabby arm over the desk, and picked up a memorandum. Idiots, he thought, they were all idiots and incompetents, every last one of them. He was surrounded by fools. It went to show what happened when you left things to others. The helicopters, the telescreens . . . now a pathetic little diary— they bungled everything.

  It had been different in the old days. O’Brien remembered how he had personally taken charge of breaking Winston Smith. Smith had confessed, recanted, and learned to love Big Brother. The business had been handled with dispatch. O’Brien had particularly enjoyed the hanging afterward. The Party had abolished the drop, of course. People were hanged by simply hauling them up and letting them kick and struggle. Smith had taken almost fifteen minutes to die. The Party was good at this sort of thing.

 
Yet now—now O’Brien’s own Thought Police couldn’t even find Smith’s diary. Agitators and traitors were probably paging through it at this very moment. It was outrageous, a fundamental threat to Party hegemony. The Party had taught this from the very beginning: Every citizen shall be kept for twenty-four hours a day in the sound of official propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed. Yet despite all the Party’s efforts, other channels of communication remained open.

  O’Brien thought of Smith again. It had been an amusing case. After breaking and releasing him, O’Brien had ordered Smith rearrested some months later. It was proved at the trial that Smith had engaged in fresh conspiracies from the very moment of his release. The execution had been performed in Victory Square, as a warning to posterity. But somehow, through an unfortunate mix-up, Smith’s diary had escaped the memory holes.

  Worse still was the problem of the telescreens. That no one knew how to fix a broken unit was manageable. The Eastasian prisoners were perfectly capable of producing new ones as fast as the old ones broke down. But now the entire system seemed to be acting up. Perhaps the network was just aging, but it was impossible to say for sure. Orwell would have known, but Orwell had been purged years ago. And if the network failed, what then? At stake was the Party’s second cardinal principle of control: Every citizen worth watching shall be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police.

  O’Brien stared wearily at the enormous map spread out on the table in front of him. For several minutes his formidable, intelligent face hung motionless and baleful above the desk; then at last he leaned back in his chair again.

  The map had always reminded him of the old underground subway Many of the wires ran through the train tunnels. Years ago, O’Brien had even climbed down a long access ladder for a quick inspection. He had seen the orange cables suspended like rubber vines from hangers along the walls. Orwell had said a word or two about the enormous capacity of the system, but O’Brien had not cared to linger underground. The tunnels were home to millions of rats.

  The network consisted of several dozen rings and serpentine lines, wandering aimlessly across London, each marked on the map in a different color. There were two or three larger central rings, circling from Kensington to Liverpool Street, and some peripheral ones around Harrow in the west, and Woodford in the east. Across these straggled the other lines, from Morden to HighBarnet, from Hounslow to Cockfosters, from Watford to the East-End, from Waterloo Road across the river to Tower Hill, from the center of the city eastward to Pennyfields, and from Wapping to Whitechapel. Two major rings intersected at the Embankment not far from Waterloo Bridge. The network was densely interlinked in the heart of the city; out toward the suburbs it grew progressively thinner.

  O’Brien knew he’d never be down in the tunnels again. He was too old for that now. It didn’t bother him—he had lived well. A Party member from the beginning, he had survived the great purges and then risen to consume the best food, the best wine, the best women. His one pleasure now lay in Party affairs. The decay of his own body was tolerable. What was not tolerable was the decay of the Party itself.

  O’Brien had known—had known instinctively—that the new design of the network was a mistake. The old network had consisted of simple lines connected to simple screens. Dumb terminals, the engineers had called them; idiot boxes. Just as they should be, O’Brien had always thought. The screens had attached directly to the wires, simple copper things, easy to understand, easy to fix, easy to replace. And the wires had led directly to where wires were supposed to lead. O’Brien remembered how he had admired a map of the old system years ago, the million capillaries connected directly to a single, massive brain in the Ministry of Truth, a single, undauntable Heart in the Ministry of Love. Not at all like the tangled mess on the map in front of him now. The old network had been a formal garden of classicism. The new was a wild romantic jungle, full of stupendous beauty, and also of morasses and sickly weeds.

  He had been the last to agree to the conversion, O’Brien recalled with bitter satisfaction. The Ministry of Peace had led the charge, terrified that a single well-placed rocket bomb might bring down the whole network. Then the Ministry of Plenty had weighed in: it could no longer ensure supplies of electric power on which the old network had depended. Then the Ministry of Truth: it had demanded a system powerful enough to reach every room, to revise every record, to overwhelm every other form of communication.

  But it had been O’Brien’s own Thought Police who had finally persuaded him. It had been Orwell, in fact, the master architect of it all. Orwell had explained the logic of the new design, explained it patiently, and then explained it again. The old system was overloaded. It hadn’t been designed to handle the cataract of information that would flow from the offices and homes and public squares, and course through the tunnels to the Ministries. Only the new design could carry the load.

  And so, against his better judgment, O’Brien had capitulated. The old wires had been ripped out, vast bundles of them, tons and tons of useless copper, replaced by a few dozen of the new, orange-rubber rings. The basements of the Ministry of Love, like the main tunnels, now seemed cavernously empty. A new generation of telescreens had been deployed all over London. And for a decade, O’Brien had to admit, the system had performed just as Orwell had promised. The telescreens had worked. Every citizen shall be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the Thought Police and in the sound of official propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed. Orwell had promised it would be so. Orwell had delivered.

  Yet O’Brien still sometimes wondered: Did the Party really need telescreens? He remembered how he had caught Winston Smith, caught him the old-fashioned way, without all the gadgets. O’Brien had done what he always did—he had inspired trust and invited confidence. The likes of Smith needed to confide, to expose their souls even at the peril of their lives. Enemies of the Party were always like that. They couldn’t trust Big Brother, so they put their trust in other men. All you had to do was offer a sympathetic ear, a flash of understanding, a suggestion of intimacy, some small hint that you were an ally and friend. At first O’Brien hadn’t even known whether Smith was angling to join the Inner Party or the traitorous brotherhood. So he had waited, listened, and in the end Smith had told him. It was almost too funny to believe. O’Brien had gently persuaded Smith to write his seditious diary for O’Brien’s own personal enlightenment.

  No telescreen could ever have achieved that. People feared the telescreens, avoided them, obeyed them—but never willingly confided in them. Even if some poor fool had tried to confess to a telescreen, he would have been disappointed. The overwhelming odds were that no one would even have turned up to arrest him. People were of course encouraged to believe that the Thought Police watched everybody all the time, but that was obviously impossible—there were far too many people to watch. Fortunately, maintaining the illusion served almost as well. At random intervals during the Physical Jerks, for example, the Ministry would broadcast something that sounded terribly personal. “Smith!” the announcer would scream. “Yes you, Smith! Shape up there!” Every Smith in London would assume they meant him and every Baker and Jones would suppose his turn would come next. It worked, O’Brien grudgingly admitted to himself. So long as people believed they were being watched they behaved accordingly.

  And if Big Brother couldn’t watch everybody all the time, the telescreen did at least allow everybody to watch Big Brother. The Ministry of Truth used the telescreens to anesthetize people with prurience and cheap violence, to keep them believing that they lived lives like those on the telescreens, and that life had never been so good. It was a queer spectacle, O’Brien reflected, this modern electrical science, showering miracles upon people with empty bellies. The proles might shiver all night for lack of bedclothes, but in the morning they could gaze at news transmitted from San Francisco or Sao Paulo. Twenty million people were underfed, but literally everyone had access to a telescreen. W
hat they had lost in food they had gained in electricity. Whole sections of the working class who had been plundered of all they really needed were being compensated by cheap luxuries which mitigated the surface of life. It was a very satisfactory arrangement. Telescreens were efficient palliatives for a half-starved people.

  Day and night the machines bruised their ears and gripped their eyes. The people lost their ability to concentrate, to pursue any train of thought, to articulate anything for themselves. They were never alone, never out of the sound of music or Party propaganda. The music—it was always the same music for everybody—was the most important ingredient. Its function was to prevent thought and conversation, and to shut out any natural sound, such as the song of birds or the whistling of the wind, that might otherwise intrude. The telescreens were never turned off; they played all through meals, and people talked just loudly enough for the voices and the music to cancel out. The music prevented the conversation from becoming serious or even coherent, while the chatter of voices stopped one from listening attentively to the music and thus prevented the onset of that dreaded thing, thought. That was the aim—to narrow the range of human consciousness. The peoples’ interests, their points of attachment to the physical world and the day-to-day struggle, had to be as few as possible.

  Like it or not, O’Brien reflected, the telescreens were essential. Orwell’s design had worked well—still did for the most part. As promised, the network was now entirely self-powered. And for years it had seemed quite reliable. Orwell had in fact rambled on and on about this. The system was “robust,” Orwell had said, it was “fault tolerant,” it operated “peer-to-peer.” No single screen, no single cable, could bring down the whole network if it failed. It had all been meaningless jargon to O’Brien, but jargon draped in the one kind of authority—scientific—that O’Brien had never dared contradict. O’Brien had hated it.