Orwell's Revenge

by Peter Huber

  He had hated even more the thought of ripping out the old system he had spent so many years building. O’Brien looked back at the map on the table, and he knew that was what he hated most of all. There was no order to it. The cables snaked independently around the city, intersecting almost at random, it seemed. The map reminded him of one of those hideous bubble-like structures from the 1960s, the geodesic domes, every rib connected to every other, a shapeless globule with no central spine, no omniscient brain. The map was an abomination. On the map, the Ministry of Love seemed almost irrelevant. It was not the center of anything.

  And now, with Orwell purged, with the old-guard engineers dead or lost in forced labor camps, and the few who had survived too terrified to think, with the Ministry’s Laboratories in complete decay, the network was beginning to act up. Screens were failing in unusually high numbers. Not simply dying, but behaving erratically Suppose things got worse. Suppose the screens went completely out of control. Without telescreens, the Party was finished.

  O’Brien resettled his monstrous body in the chair. He wondered idly when it was that he had grown so fat. It seemed to have happened suddenly, as if a cannon ball had hit him and got stuck inside. One night he had gone to bed still feeling more or less young, with an eye for the girls and so forth, and the next morning he had woken up in the full consciousness that he was hugely fat. He was proud of his fatness now—he saw the accumulated flesh as the symbol of his greatness. He who had once been obscure and hungry was now fat, rich, and feared. He was swollen with the bodies of his enemies, a thought from which he extracted something very near poetry.

  But he was also old, and he knew he would soon be dead. He felt a numb weariness creeping up from his feet toward his knees. This happened every few days now. Some day, he knew, it would keep on creeping until it reached his chest. Until then, he had one great mission left—to save the Party. He had already convened the right people. He had spoken to Cooper. A competent System Manager of unquestioned loyalty would be found to investigate and correct the problems in the network.

  For perhaps twenty seconds O’Brien sat without stirring. Then he pulled his chair over to the telescreen and barked out a message in the hybrid jargon of the Ministries: COMM-ONE-OPEN. Items one comma five comma seven approved fullwise stop. Transmit. Item six doubleplus ridiculous verging crimethink stop. Delete. COMM-ONE-CLOSE. COMM-TWO-CLOSE.

  The telescreen faded into darkness.

  DOUBLETHINK

  The machine itself is the enemy. But whose? For Orwell, the answer is obvious. The telescreen empowers evil men in the Inner Party, like O’Brien and Charrington, and enslaves decent people in the Outer Party, like Winston and Julia. The telescreen is a two-way device but with one-way control. The ordinary lovers whisper and wait, helpless innocents who will inevitably be discovered and destroyed. The Thought Police watch and listen, evil brains behind the glass eye of the bottle.

  There are two obvious objections to all this, however. Orwell has thought through the first with some care. It is the objection Bertrand Russell set out in Power: A New Social Analysis. Tyrannies, according to Russell, depend on a “huge system of organised lying,” which “tends to put them at a disadvantage as against those who know the facts.” To put it in 1984 terms, tyrannies can’t build telescreens. The second objection is more important. Telescreens will not abide tyranny.

  Start with Russell’s objection. How can a state in which “two and two will make five when the Leader says so” maintain such technically complex things as telescreens? Orwell has asked himself that question many times. His review of Russell’s book includes a capsule summary of his answer. In 1984 terms, the answer is doublethink. It is “quite easy to imagine a state in which the ruling caste deceive their followers without deceiving themselves.” “Do you suppose it is beyond us to produce a dual system of astronomy?” O’Brien asks Winston Smith in 1984. “The stars can be near or distant, according as we need them,” O’Brien himself replies. “Do you suppose our mathematicians are unequal to that? Have you forgotten doublethink?”

  Now this requires a bit of a mental stretch, but it’s not completely implausible. Perhaps Orwell is right: tyrannies might conceivably develop technologies as advanced as telescreens. This would require rigid isolation of a privileged and comparatively free community of scientists and engineers. Still, one can imagine that happening, particularly after Sputnik.

  But will telescreens abide tyranny? Orwell addresses only one small part of that question seriously. Even with doublethink, science inside a totalitarian state is not going to advance as it will in liberal societies. Freedom will thus develop more powerful weapons and in time will overwhelm Slavery from the outside. Or will it? Long before 1984, Orwell had developed his answer. It appears, among several other places, in his 1943 essay, “Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War.”

  Orwell’s answer is quite simple: “Fascism, or possibly even a combination of several fascisms, [will] conquer the whole world” simultaneously. Thereafter, the need to preserve military efficiency and defend against faster scientific advance in more liberal societies will no longer exist. This is what has happened in 1984. Oceania is indistinguishable from the world’s two other totalitarian superstates, Eurasia and Eastasia. The political cultures of the three superstates have different names: Ingsoc (English Socialism), neo-Bolshevism, and Eastasia’s “Obliteration of the Self.” But “the three philosophies are barely distinguishable, and the social systems which they support are not distinguishable at all.” The result is perfect balance: the three superstates “prop one another up, like three sheaves of com.” Science atrophies, but it atrophies everywhere at the same rate, so military balance is maintained.

  Orwell thus seems to have covered his intellectual flanks. With doublethink, even tyrannies can develop telescreens. With sheaves-of-corn geopolitics, military stability can be maintained thereafter. Everything hangs together. Totalitarianism, once established worldwide, endures forever. The birth of the telescreen is the death of free speech.

  Which—if you think about it for just a second more—is still a very curious thing. After all, the telescreen—like the radio, gramophone, and the film camera it supersedes—is a medium of expression. It is the newfangled printing press, just vastly more powerful than the old. It is the supernova among far dimmer stars in what Marshall McLuhan called The Gutenberg Galaxy. And what do we find? The development of a fantastically capable new printing press means the end of literature, the end of art, the end of intellectual freedom, the end of thought itself. And that, all in all, is hard to swallow.

  • • •

  Part of Orwell’s pessimism about the telescreen derives from the medium itself. “[T]he English are not gifted artistically,” Orwell confidently declares in “England, Your England.” “They are not as musical as the Germans or Italians, painting and sculpture have never flourished in England as they have in France.” But “there is one art in which they have shown plenty of talent, namely literature.” In sum, pictures, sounds—all media other than the written word—are not really British. This quaint (and, for all I know, correct) cultural reductionism has obvious implications for a man who plans to take on the telescreen. Telescreens in the office for the convenience of insect men? Certainly. Telescreens for Wagnerian music or semipornographic Botticelli nudes? No doubt. But telescreens, being picture machines, obviously have nothing to add to the artistic freedom of England.

  That’s basically what Orwell concludes, but Orwell himself knows better. Pictures and art, even English art, belong together. Again and again in his books and essays he uses the simile of the glass walls of an aquarium to illustrate problems of separation and communication. “Good prose is like a window pane,” Orwell writes in a 1946 piece. “When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page,” he says in his brilliant 1939 essay on Charles Dickens. Seeing the picture, seeing the face—the images are all important for Orwell an
d his writing. The first, most horrifying propaganda scene in 1984 is a film clip in which helicopters are machine-gunning a woman and child in a lifeboat. “If you want a picture of the future,” O’Brien offers at the end of the book, “imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” At the end of 1984, as at the beginning, it is the picture that tells it all.

  Indeed, a complete one-line answer to Orwell’s disdain for the artistic and expressive value of telescreens is set out in Orwell’s own classic essay, “Politics and the English Language.” Orwell is explaining the art of good writing. He is emphasizing how important it is not to rush things down onto paper, especially in a day when language is dilapidated and stock clichés often substitute for hard thought. “When you think of something abstract,” Orwell explains, “you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meaning as clear as one can through pictures.” Yes, pictures.

  But there is no other sign Orwell ever imagined that picture machines might empower the artist, liberate the press, and expand intellectual freedom all around. Orwell never does manage to grasp the connection between his own vivid word-pictures and the picture-words of the telescreen.

  • • •

  For Orwell, the other thing irredeemably wrong with the picture-machine is that it’s a machine. Try as he may—and he does try—Orwell simply cannot persuade himself that machines will ever enhance personal freedom.

  In one part of his brain, Orwell understands perfectly that science, technology, and empirical thought are the very antithesis of oligarchy, collectivism, and Big Brother. In a 1943 essay, for example, Orwell— the man with his own pet theory about “English art”—scorns Nazi distinctions between “German Science” and “Jewish Science.” Science, Orwell recognizes, is one of the great enemies of totalitarian government, the most potent antidote to systematic lying. He says this explicitly in several early essays and repeats it in 1984. In 1984, the word “science” has been completely abolished, “any meaning that it could possibly bear being already sufficiently covered by the word Ingsoc.”

  Orwell is equally certain that machines are essential to reduce human drudgery and raise standards of living. Indeed, “human equality cannot be realised except at a high level of mechanical civilisation.” He thinks it a great shortcoming of capitalism that free markets develop only those machines that are commercially valuable; he is sure that “the rate of mechanical progress will be much more rapid once Socialism is established.” In 1984, as in earlier essays, Orwell assures us that minimum standards of decent living are now “technically possible” for all, because machines have made them possible. Orwell firmly believes that a certain level of machine-supplied plenty would be a blessing.

  He is equally fascinated by other good things that machines might accomplish. Though a writer himself, he scorns “hostility to science and machinery” that stems from “the jealousy of the modern literary gent who hates science because science has stolen literature’s thunder.” As a BBC broadcaster, Orwell commissions a series of talks that include “Science and the People” and “Science and Politics”; one of the first speakers is a specialist on the newfangled technology of television. “The Western man invents machines as naturally as the Polynesian islander swims,” Orwell writes in Wigan Pier. “Give a Western man a job of work and he immediately begins devising a machine that would do it for him; give him a machine and he thinks of ways of improving it. I understand this tendency well enough, for in an ineffectual sort of way I have that type of mind myself. . . . I am perpetually seeing, as it were, the ghosts of possible machines that might save me the trouble of using my brain or muscles.”

  Orwell, far better than most of his contemporaries, has brilliant insight as to what those ghosts might some day accomplish. At a technical rather than a political or sociological level, Orwell is tremendously prescient about technology. His 1984 telescreen is a practical reality today, already widely used for teleconferencing. Orwell’s “speak-writes”—machines that transcribe the spoken word into electronic text—are now being perfected. These things are familiar to us, but Orwell described them all when primitive, one-way television was the high-tech marvel of the day All of the technological props and gadgets that Orwell describes were in fact made possible by the transistor. Yet the transistor was discovered at Bell Laboratories only in 1947, the year Orwell completed his first draft of 1984.

  When he gets beyond describing the capabilities of his ghosts, however, and tries to anticipate how new machines will transform art, politics, and society, Orwell sinks back into visceral pessimism. In all his writings I have found only four, halfhearted attempts in which Orwell looks to the brighter side of what he calls “modern electrical science.” Orwell does try—he’s too honest a man not to—but he just doesn’t get very far.

  Consider two letters Orwell writes while working at the BBC. He is commissioning a talk on microfilm, which he thinks may “have very important effects.” How? Microfilm just might prevent “libraries from being destroyed by bombs or by the police of totalitarian regimes.” Microfilm, after all, makes huge amounts of text portable and easy to replicate. Thus, it both improves memory and facilitates communication. Push the logic just a bit further, and you find that civilization’s defense against bombs and the Thought Police is . . . the telescreen! But Orwell doesn’t push it.

  Then there’s an unpublished essay that Orwell wrote in 1940, titled “New Words.” Words are invented, Orwell argues, on the basis of common experience. That experience is usually visual. Primitive man gestured and cried out; eventually the cry came to substitute for the gesture. First the thought must be given an objective existence; only then can it be given a name. But for many things—dreams, for example, and other complex emotions—the first step is very difficult. “The thing that suggests itself immediately,” says Orwell, “is the cinematograph.” “A millionaire with a private cinematograph, all the necessary props and a troupe of intelligent actors could, if he wished, make practically all of his inner life known.” Perhaps this is just idle speculation on Orwell’s part, but one can hardly ignore it, coming as it does from a man whose greatest writings concern the shrinkage of vocabulary and the dilapidation of language. In fact, push the logic of “New Words” a little further and you find that the answer to Newspeak is . . . the telescreen! But Orwell doesn’t push it.

  How about radio’s power to carry culture across class and national boundaries? Once or twice, Orwell is grudgingly optimistic about this too. Radio programs “are necessarily the same for everybody,” films “have to appeal to a public of millions,” and these new media thus tend to erode class differences. National differences too. “I believe this is the most truthful war that has been fought in modern times,” Orwell writes in a 1941 essay “[T]he radio, especially in countries where listening-in to foreign broadcasts is not forbidden, is making large-scale lying more and more difficult.” A law forbidding people to listen to foreign stations “will never be enforceable.” And in 1946 Orwell is pleased to report that “after years of struggle” the BBC has agreed “to set aside one wave-length for intelligent programmes.” “[T]here are in the BBC, mostly in its lower ranks, many gifted people who realise that the possibilities of radio have not yet been explored.”

  Perhaps so, but Orwell doesn’t explore them either. And elsewhere he scoffs at “shallowly optimistic” books announcing “the abolition of distance” and “the disappearance of frontiers”:

  It is nonsense to say that the radio puts people in touch with foreign countries. If anything, it does the opposite. No ordinary person ever listens in to a foreign radio; but if in any country large numbers of people show signs of doing so, the government prevents it either by ferocious penalties, or by confiscating short-wave sets, or by setting up jamming
stations. The result is that each national radio is a sort of totalitarian world of its own, braying propaganda night and day to people who can listen to nothing else.

  Finally, there’s Orwell’s hopefully titled 1945 essay, “Poetry and the Microphone.” Orwell is reflecting on his wartime broadcasting work for the BBC. “[T]he formula we usually followed was to broadcast what purported to be a monthly literary magazine.” On Orwell’s show, the editorial staff of this magazine were sitting in their office, discussing what might go in the next number. They would read poems, essays, and so on and then discuss them. A promising start, one might think: the radio doubling as the Times Literary Supplement.

  Orwell then turns to what he sees as the larger problem: “how to imagine the radio being used for the dissemination of anything except tripe.” People have come to associate radio exclusively with “dribble,” “roaring dictators,” or “genteel throaty voices announcing that three of our aircraft have failed to return.” But Orwell makes a big concession:

  Nevertheless one ought not to confuse the capabilities of an instrument with the use it is actually put to. Broadcasting is what it is, not because there is something inherently vulgar, silly and dishonest about the whole apparatus of microphone and transmitter, but because all the broadcasting that now happens all over the world is under the control of governments or great monopoly companies.