by Peter Huber
So, as a good socialist, Orwell believes that the race ought not be to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise. As an honest man, Orwell also recognizes that the problem of the swift, strong, and wise is also a problem of the slow, lazy, and foolish. It is no small irony that Wigan Pier, which begins with a horrifying description of the working life of a coal miner in the 1930s, ends with Orwell arguing that there is no real difference between work and play, and that hard work is fundamentally good for body and soul. Nonetheless, Orwell’s early attempt in Wigan Pier to doublethink machine collectivism is oddly ineffectual. It is presented so elliptically that few casual readers will even grasp his point.
Animal Farm, by contrast, published after the war and just before 1984, is perfectly clear. Overthrowing the farmer’s economic tyranny is a good thing. But the hard part is to make sure that honest pigs who mastermind the revolution don’t then become neo-farmers themselves. The pig who frees the other animals may end up eating them, just as the machine that liberates the coal miner may end up changing him into a walking stomach. Orwell has recognized all along that socialism tends to swallow up those it sets out to save.
Orwell’s political prescriptions, once so confident, now become more and more ambivalent. An unintentionally hilarious paragraph in a 1947 essay, “The Cost of Letters,” illustrates what I mean. To understand the full irony of this little piece, keep in mind that it was written while Orwell was smack in the middle of writing 1984.
Under “full Socialism,” Orwell declares, writers will be supported by the state, and should “be placed among the better-paid groups.” In present circumstances, however, “the less truck a writer has with the State, or any other organised body, the better for him and his work.” Why so? “There are invariably strings tied to any kind of organised patronage.” But it’s also “obviously undesirable” for a writer to rely on the patronage of any individual plutocrat. “By far the best and least exacting patron is the big public.” That sounds suspiciously like the mass market. But unfortunately, Orwell says, the average citizen refuses to spend as much on books as on tobacco or alcohol. By way of taxes, then, the common man “could easily be made to spend more without even knowing it.” The government must simply “earmark larger sums for the purchase of books.” But government must of course avoid “taking over the whole book trade and turning it into a propaganda machine.” In sum, the market (“the big public”) is better than the alternatives. But still not good. The government (which is worse) could be better. So long as it doesn’t take us to 1984. Which it probably will.
But whether it ends well or badly, collectivism is still coming. Orwell is sure of it. The “ghosts” of the new machines that Orwell is always imagining are still dragging society straight to the economic ministry, the Ministry of Plenty And collectivism, says Orwell, can still “be made to ‘work’ in an economic sense.” Indeed, in 1945 Orwell calls on England’s new Labour government to nationalize land, coal mines, railways, public utilities, and banks. He still ranks class privilege under English capitalism side by side with hierarchy in the Soviet Union. In the same letter in which he describes 1984 as showing “the perversion to which a centralised economy is liable,” Orwell writes: “My recent novel is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labour Party (of which I am a supporter).”
So by this point, Orwell can only be described as thoroughly unhappy about the political options that history seems to have offered him. Capitalists are as bad as ever. The collectivists who are bound to displace them are no good either. “Bureaucrats” now rank alongside “press lords and film magnates” as “enemies of truthfulness, and hence of freedom of thought.” Now the writer’s freedom is threatened not only by “concentration of the press in the hands of a few rich men, [and] the grip of monopoly on radio and the films,” but also by “the encroachment of official bodies” like Britain’s Ministry of Information. “[T]he BBC and the film companies buy up promising young writers and geld them and set them to work like cab-horses,” but totalitarian countries are killing the arts too. Capitalism “is doomed and is not worth saving anyway,” but “the independent status of the artist must necessarily disappear with it.”
At the end, the best hope Orwell offers on how economic collectivists might somehow avoid instituting the Thought Police is much along the lines of “Poetry and the Microphone.” Maybe, somehow or other, Western civilization will muddle through. “[L]iberal capitalism is obviously coming to an end,” he says in a 1941 BBC broadcast, but freedom of thought is not “inevitably doomed,” at least not in the Western democracies. “I believe—it may be no more than a pious hope—that though a collectivised economy is bound to come, those countries will know how to evolve a form of Socialism which is not totalitarian, in which freedom of thought can survive the disappearance of economic individualism. That, at any rate, is the only hope to which anyone who cares for literature can cling.”
In other words, Orwell piously hopes that when you hand over your purse to the Ministry of Plenty, you may still somehow avoid handing over your pen to the Ministry of Truth and your thoughts to the Ministry of Love. The Ministry of Plenty is coming in any event: the Machine requires collective management, and so does common decency, which is to say democratic socialism. The only thing Orwell now understands better—and fears more—is that when you get one Ministry, you probably get them all.
• • •
Does Orwell, the consummate doublethinker, have anything at all good to say about the free market? Yes, but not much.
His Keep the Aspidistra Flying is a diatribe against money and commerce. But what do we find at the very beginning of the book? A beautifully painted scene of a street market. It is filled with the “bellowing of street hawkers”; the place is so crowded “you could only with difficulty thread your way down the cabbage-littered alley between the stalls.” There are “crimson chunks of meat, piles of oranges and green and white broccoli, stiff, glassy-eyed rabbits, live eels looping in enamel troughs,” alongside “stalls of cheap art-silk undies.” Gordon Comstock suddenly feels more cheerful. “Whenever you see a street-market you know that there’s hope for England yet,” he reflects.
Hope for England in the market? Has Orwell forgotten Coming Up for Air and his own scathing contempt for the “everlasting, frantic struggle to sell things”? Is this just some slip of a socialist writer’s pen in Aspidistra’s otherwise unrelenting attack on “money-stink”? Apparently not. At the end of Aspidistra, Orwell says it again: “Our civilisation is founded on greed and fear, but in the lives of common men the greed and fear are mysteriously transmuted into something nobler.” The lower classes live by the “money-code,” and yet they also “contrive to keep their decency” In all his writings, this is the nicest thing Orwell ever has to say about free market economies.
Yet the man who dreamed up the ubiquitous telescreen could so easily have said more. As we’ve seen, he simply cannot imagine a world in which fancy gadgets like movie cameras (“cinematographs”) are owned by the masses. In 1984 itself, the junk shop owner explains the absence of a telescreen on his premises with the words “too expensive.” Winston Smith apparently finds this quite plausible. But if one thing is evident in 1984, it is that telescreens are not expensive any more. The “too expensive” line brings to mind Lenin’s boast that he would use the capitalists’ gold to line the public urinals. What is “too expensive” for any private owner in 1984 has become all but costless when taken over by Big Brother. Telescreens are everywhere; communication has become instantaneous, automatic, and ubiquitous, too cheap to meter.
And what does that imply? Perhaps—perhaps in a world of cheap telecommunication—monopoly won’t survive after all. Orwell has said as much himself, in a column published in 1944: “[W]hen a commodity is not scarce, no one tries to grab more than his fair share of it. No one tries to make a corner in air, for instance. The millionaire as well as the beggar is content with just so much air as he ca
n breathe. . . . So also with any other kind of goods. If they were made plentiful, as they so easily might be, there is no reason to think that the supposed acquisitive instincts of the human being could not be bred out in a couple of generations.”
Yes, surely that’s it! Substitute “airwaves” for “air” here, and you are describing a telescreened society in which JunkNet is the private network for dealers in curios and antiques, and “Dr. Goebbels” is a situation comedy aired Wednesday nights on Fox Television. The mental frontiers of the cheap telescreen will be like nineteenth-century America, filled with a wildness of spirit. Young minds will be able to wander; there will be a sort of native gaiety, a buoyant, carefree feeling; there will be room for everybody. The telescreen will do for the mind what the prairie did for the body: give people room, and easy affluence too, and with those, a real sense of being free.
• • •
But Orwell never did push the logic of the telescreen quite far enough. And the question still is: Why not? Why didn’t Orwell ever imagine that the freedom of telescreens in private hands might overwhelm even the slavery of a telescreened Ministry? Or, to put the same question another way: Where is the missing chapter in 1984?
Because one chapter is indisputably missing.
With the machine and the Ministry firmly in place, the political logic of 1984 is simple. The proles’ ignorance of their own exploitation permits the ruling oligarchy to remain in power. Thus, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. To prevent education from gradually dispelling proletarian ignorance, the Party must maintain poverty, and that is done by waging ceaseless, wealth-devouring war. And so, WAR IS PEACE.
Ignorance isn’t really strength, however, nor is war really peace. So Orwell also supplies a picture of what strength and peace might be. The proles’ strength lies in their private loyalties and their procreative persistence. Sooner or later their “strength [will] change into consciousness,” and they will “blow the Party to pieces.” Real strength, then, is proletarian consciousness. And real peace is simply peace. There is no economic reason for war any more; natural resources are plentiful, and slave labor can be replaced by machines.
But how about FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, the third slogan of the Party? That’s the missing chapter. Orwell never does get around to supplying us with a positive vision of freedom. Blythe’s book—the book-within-a-book in the middle of 1984—supposedly contains one, but Winston Smith is arrested before he gets to read it. Winston’s love affair with Julia is not Freedom either; it’s just a daydream of sex, coffee, and chocolate, lived by two lost souls who are still collecting their paychecks from the Ministry of Truth. The prison scenes in Part 3 of 1984 add nothing more. We are told how Slavery is Freedom within the twisted, collectivist logic of the Party. But we learn nothing more about what real freedom might be.
Where then is Orwell’s missing chapter? If Freedom isn’t really Slavery, what is it?
PART 3: FREEDOM
CHAPTER 11
“ ’Cos the screens worked. ’E said so, didn’t e?” Now, five months later, the memory of the old engineer’s words had slipped back into O’Brien’s thoughts.
It was a sweltering summer afternoon, and the air-conditioning had failed in his office. He was at his desk again, the map of the network spread out before him. Beads of sweat rolled off his chin on to the paper, smearing the colored lines where they fell.
London had been transformed. Once subdued and secretive, the stallkeepers now openly touted their goods everywhere but in the immediate vicinity of the Ministries. Where there had been only the stamp and shuffle of feet, and surreptitious whispers in between telescreens, the noise of the market now filled the streets. The shelves were piled high with scarves and colored bolts of cloth, soaps and scents stacked in profusion, chocolate, coffee. Even O’Brien had found himself marveling at the abundance. The most remarkable thing was that no one would accept the Party’s dollars and ration books any more; the proles seemed to have created their own private currencies. Somehow they maintained private accounts, an elaborate set of intersecting books to track each other’s debts and credits. O’Brien couldn’t imagine how it was all coordinated.
The network was behaving worse than ever. Was it sabotage? Was some technical wizard working his way across London, vandalizing thousands of telescreens? O’Brien felt a spasm of fear in his entrails. Perhaps the man had even found some electronic fuse to the whole thing, which when lit would cause a complete collapse of communication. Without warning, the screens would go dark all across London. The network would die. Big Brother would be left blind, deaf, and mute. There would be a great uprising. It would be over in an instant.
There came a soft knock at the door.
“Come in, come in,” growled O’Brien.
Burgess entered, as oily and shiny as ever. His shirt showed two large damp patches at the armpits. He gave a kind of awkward bob in greeting, and made his way across the room.
“Well?” said O’Brien.
“They found it last March, but no one told me! Not a word! A thought criminal from the Ministry of Truth . . . it was in his apartment.” The words gushed out. “When I finally got hold of it I handed it to the technical types at the Ministry, of course. They did nothing with it for all this time!” Burgess was white with anxiety. “So then I took a look myself. Didn’t really read it of course. I saw at once that it was treason, so I didn’t really read it.” He looked at O’Brien fearfully.
“I take it this is about the network,” O’Brien said acidly.
Burgess had obviously finished his prepared speech and was now at a loss for words. Breathing heavily, he undid the straps of his briefcase. He pulled out a slim black volume and almost dropped it on the desk in front of O’Brien. “It does say things about telescreens,” Burgess replied at last.
O’Brien opened the book to the first page. The words were written in pen, in clumsy letters. His eyes skimmed down the page. Toward the bottom, the letters grew bolder, and the handwriting was no longer cramped or awkward. Printed in large, neat capitals were the words:
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
O’Brien looked up at Burgess. “Get out.”
Burgess scuttled to the door.
For a moment O’Brien’s eyes wandered around the room. He was alone, he was safe, the telescreen was off. Yet for some reason he was possessed by a nervous impulse to glance over his shoulder and cover the page with his hand. The room was stifling, but for an instant there seemed to be a chill in the air. He leafed forward into the book. On the third page he came across a bold title, and began to read:
THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF NETWORKED INDIVIDUALISM
1. Ignorance Is Strength
Among all the Party’s lies there is one great truth: Strength in numbers. To survive a war a nation must be united. Patriotism—blind patriotism—is the single most important source of national power. As a positive force there is nothing to set beside it. What is critical is emotional unity. . . .
Suddenly, as one sometimes does with a book of which one knows that one will ultimately read and reread every word, O’Brien opened it at a different place and found himself in a new section. He went on reading:
3. War Is Peace
If the enemy had not fired the rocket bombs at London we would have fired them at ourselves. War is essential to destroy the products of human labor. By destroying goods we maintain poverty. By maintaining poverty we prevent education. By preventing education we preserve the Party’s control. Because of the war all records must be centralized under a unified command. The consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival. By keeping our subjects at war, we ensure they will never rise up against us. WAR IS PEACE.
The Party recognizes that other things being equal in war, the side with the better arms will win. We conse
quently cannot ignore external reality in ways that impair military efficiency. In philosophy, religion, ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one is designing a rocket or a bomb they have to make four. So the Party maintains communities of scientists, who must continuously develop various devices connected with warfare—better explosives, stronger armor, new and deadlier gases and disease germs, or a device for focusing the sun’s rays through lenses suspended thousands of kilometers away in space. Yet all this is only idle daydreaming; the art of war is not in fact advancing at all.
It doesn’t have to. Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia are evenly matched in their military incompetence. They prop one another up, like three sheaves of corn. The ceaseless wars they fight are mostly frauds, waged on vague frontiers in the third world. They involve very small numbers of people, mostly highly trained specialists, and cause comparatively few casualties. The wars swallow up prosperity, but aside from that they are just an illusion, like all else in the age of doublethink.
To maintain the illusion, we must rigidly maintain our cultural integrity. The average citizen of Oceania never sets eyes on a foreigner, never even learns a foreign language. If it were otherwise, he might discover that foreigners were not so very different, nor so very much to be feared or hated. War would then end. Cut off from contact with the outer world, and with the past, the citizen of Oceania is like a man in interstellar space, who has no way of knowing which direction is up and which is down.