Orwell's Revenge

by Peter Huber

  “Yes.”

  “After that, you don’t feel the same toward the other person any longer,” she said.

  He walked over to her and with a single finger touched the side of her cheek. “But I still do,” he said.

  She stared at him, unbelieving.

  “I’m not a prisoner,” he said. He reached down with both hands, and touched her shoulders, and gently made as if to lift her from the bench. She rose under her own strength. She looked up at him an instant longer, and then buried her face in his breast as suddenly as though ducking from a blow. She wept, clinging to him like a child. And as he led her gently toward the door, he felt her waist, still sweet, still soft, still warm.

  They walked out of the cell, and made their way down the corridor and past the guard posts.

  “Assist my agents . . .” droned the confident, smooth voice from the telescreen.

  “Lead us out, Wilkes,” Blair said. They climbed three more sets of stairs and emerged in the great white foyer of the Ministry of Love.

  At the iron doors were two more guards, hulking gorillas hung with weapons, grimacing outward toward the courtyard. They fell back as Blair and Kate passed.

  Wilkes followed them to the main gates. They walked by the last of the guard posts. Big Brother was still on the telescreen. The guards were still watching, passive, silent, and immobile. “Await further instructions,” said the calm voice. “Do not interfere with my agents . . .”

  Blair remembered the phreak again. Trust me, the phreak had said. We own the network now. It was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. And for the first time in his life, Blair knew that he loved Big Brother.

  • • •

  And now, in the age of doublethink, in the age of the telescreen, there is choice. It is so simple. One keystroke: DEFINE. A second keystroke: DELETE. One page is gone, the other remains. Which shall it be? After J984, all history is a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as is necessary. History is yours to erase. But not yours alone. And whatever your choice may be, mine may be different. What you may erase, I may save. So the ending is yours to choose. And mine. And theirs . . .

  I

  They stepped out of the Ministry together into the dawn. There was a mist in the air; the light was still dim. And for a moment he thought it was the end of the day rather than the beginning. He shut his eyes and saw their children clustered around him, and heard their voices distant and choked with pain, their faces blurred and wet. He saw himself smile when he heard them. He heard himself trying to say something to comfort them, while his gaze stayed locked on hers. He saw that her face was old, her eyes tired, her flesh wrinkled, and her teeth gone, and he saw that she was more beautiful now than ever before. And he knew that without Kate’s face close to his the separation from all else would be too painful to bear. He knew that only with Kate beside him would he ever see the face of God.

  He opened his eyes, and saw her face again, not in his imagination now but alive and young, and no longer grieving. The fog was rising and the sun was just beginning to creep down the glistening wet streets of London. The first narrow streaks of gold, like swords slitting the darkness, were cutting through the mists. The light was growing, and behind, seas of carmine cloud stretched away into inconceivable distances.

  He took her hand, and saw the light of the city and the beauty of her face. He remembered, or thought he remembered, what the first man in the world had learned, after searching all of creation for a friendship deep enough to pierce the ineffable loneliness of dying. And he knew now that even the network could never reach everywhere, that man alone was too small to reassemble the dispersed sparks of creation, that only God is infinite, that only God transcends all, not through power but through love. And he knew that where Eve is, there too will always be Eden.

  II

  “That should do it,” said O’Brien. He flicked off the novel-writing machine and pulled the pages from the tray. “Send it on down to the printer.”

  And as he heaved his bulk from the room, he reflected that this would surely be the end of all the trouble Smith’s diary had caused. It had been remarkably simple. O’Brien had supplied the new template, the new plot; the machine had done the rest. It was just a matter of rearranging a paragraph here and a sentence there, changing a name, and substituting some suitable antonym from the thesaurus. He knew it was a rubbishy book put together with scissors and paste, but it would do the job.

  “Nowadays there is no mob, only a flock,” Orwell had written. “Nitwits wanting only to be doped.” Orwell was right of course. The proles would feel better about it all now, the few who still bothered to read. Most just sat stupefied in front of their screens. In any event, the traitor’s book now had a happy ending, one suitable for the telescreen itself. Just the sort of thing the mob always demanded.

  And with the book rewritten, nothing else would have to change. This was the essence of doublethink. No need to change the world or even to see it clearly, no need to worry about the future, no need to atone for the past. Rewriting history would always be enough.

  DOUBLETHINK

  So it’s Christmas 1931, and Orwell has decided to get himself sent to prison. He wants to write about the experience, you see. While other old Etonians sip brandy at their country homes, Orwell gets roaring drunk and (with some difficulty) achieves his goal. The prison cell he is locked up in reappears in 1984, but Orwell’s original description is in his 1932 essay “Clink.”

  “One remark made by these men [fellow cellmates] struck me,” Orwell reports. “I heard it from almost every prisoner who was up for a serious offence. ‘It’s not the prison I mind, it’s losing my job.’ This is, I believe, symptomatic of the dwindling power of the law compared with that of the capitalist.”

  It’s a typical Orwellian aside, so casual, so neatly fitted to the context of his story, that you read another paragraph or two before it hits you. The force of law is giving way to the power of the capitalist! What a disgrace. And then you read on.

  Or perhaps you think about it some more. Pushed to the limit, the force of law is . . . the Ministry of Love. And the power of the capitalist? Push that to the limit and of course you end up in . . . well, it depends who’s doing the pushing. Orwell is quite sure that the capitalist becomes a monopolist and in due course ends up running the Ministry of Plenty. But in 1943, while Orwell is imagining 1984, another Londoner is finishing up an equally challenging book that proposes a different answer. The man is Friedrich Hayek; his new book is titled The Road to Serfdom. What Hayek argues, roughly speaking, is this: in a free society the market should be more important than the prison.

  Central economic planning, Hayek reasons, requires coercive government. The Ministry of Plenty (or whatever else it may end up being called) must treat people as means, to be directed for the achievement of a plan, rather than as ends, to be treated equally under law. The Ministry is typically occupied at first by moderate and well-meaning socialists—men much like Orwell perhaps. But ministries attract men who love power of every kind—men like O’Brien. Well-intentioned plans for progress and social equality thus lead straight down the road to totalitarianism. In Orwell’s political vision, decent socialism triggers a neofascist reaction, which leads to Big Brother. Hayek paints a simpler picture: decent socialism decays into a Big Brotherhood directly.

  Is economic anarchy the only alternative, then, to economic planning through a Ministry of Plenty? Hayek sets out the answer a few years after 1984 is published, in The Constitution of Liberty. The essentially Orwellian choice between central planning, in which the Ministry controls everything, and anarchy, in which the strong prey on the weak without restraint, is false. There is a middle ground between the polar alternatives of planned and wholly unplanned economies. The alternative is the free market.

  Market mechanisms are rational and efficient: the market is orderly, bounded by rules, and well adapted to private, individual purposes. Yet the order of th
e market is spontaneous too, not centrally planned, a product of human action, not human design. Commonly accepted rules evolve over time and embody far more wisdom than any central planner can incorporate in a decree. Free markets and free speech can supply coordination of any scope and complexity. A planned society, by contrast, is inherently limited by what the minds of the planners can grasp. Small bands of hunter-gatherers could perhaps be led efficiently by a single headman. But advanced industrial society is possible only if humans are guided by rules rather than commands. Those rules—the rules of free societies and free markets—were not invented consciously, or ever even fully articulated. They exist by common consent, like the rules of grammar.

  Rules of grammar? Funny that Hayek should point to language as another example of the kind of spontaneous order that can develop without central planning. Orwell looks at the English language and sees dilapidation and decay—clear signs (he might have said) of a nation sliding down the road to serfdom. Hayek looks at language and rejoices in its spontaneous, consensual order—clear evidence (he might have said) of the possibility of civilization without Big Brother. Prophecy aside, however, Hayek and Orwell would have agreed about language: there is a middle ground between the meaningless babble of infants— “unplanned” language, perhaps—and Newspeak—a language so “planned” that it culminates in duckspeak. The middle ground is the English language itself—Oldspeak, that is—subtle, expressive, delicate, and alive, created and maintained by consent and common usage rather than by coercion and central planning. Though Orwell believes that Ministries operate better coal mines and more efficient railroads, he understands clearly that central planners would wreck the tool of his own trade, the English language. Hayek understands that coal mines and the English language are really much the same.

  Except on the subject of language, Orwell has sounded like Hayek only once in his life—at the end of Keep the Aspidistra Flying, in words I’ve already quoted: “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.” Hayek could hardly have said it better. The difference is that Hayek really believed it; Orwell didn’t. On economic matters, as we’ve seen, Orwell believed sincerely in the efficiency of socialism.

  1984 would have been rather different if Orwell had ever read The Road to Serfdom. In fact, it might never have been written at all. Except that Orwell had read The Road to Serfdom, and he wrote 1984 anyway Orwell even wrote a book review of The Road to Serfdom in 1944, though he died before The Constitution of Liberty was published.

  His review of Hayek displays Orwell’s economic theories at their gloomy, fuzzy best. To begin with, he reviews Hayek’s book—which Orwell describes as “an eloquent defence of laissez-faire capitalism”— alongside another book by K. Zilliacus, who has written “an even more vehement denunciation of it.” “[E]ach writer is convinced that the other’s policy leads directly to slavery,” Orwell observes cheerfully, “and the alarming thing is that they may both be right.” What pleasure it must have given Orwell to write that sentence! He is not often handed such a perfect opportunity to play the capitalist off against the communist and pronounce a plague on both their houses. Nonetheless, Orwell finds “a great deal of truth” in the “negative part” of Hayek’s thesis, which is that socialism leads to despotism by way of Ministries. “[C]ollectivism,” Orwell agrees, “is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamed of.” This is the Orwell most people remember today. But what comes next is Orwell too:

  [What Hayek] does not see, or will not admit, [is] that a return to “free” competition means for the great mass of people a tyranny probably worse, because more irresponsible, than that of the State. The trouble with competitions is that somebody wins them. Professor Hayek denies that free capitalism necessarily leads to monopoly, but in practice that is where it has led, and since the vast majority of people would far rather have State regimentation than slumps and unemployment, the drift towards collectivism is bound to continue if popular opinion has any say in the matter.

  For Orwell, the only dim hope is that “a planned economy can be somehow combined with the freedom of the intellect.” Just how, Orwell doesn’t know.

  And what happens when economy and intellect converge, when the market and the mind become one, as they do in the commercialization of such things as radio, films, and television? Then, Orwell has always replied, the prospects are bleak. Gramophones inevitably lead to Goebbels. The Ministry is bound to end up owning all the airwaves. It is a law of economics, as obvious and immutable as the law of gravity

  • • •

  Unless, perhaps, you believe another Londoner of Orwell’s day—another great thinker to whom Orwell himself will introduce you if you follow him far enough.

  In June 1950, five months after Orwell’s death, the literary magazine World Review dedicates its issue to Orwell’s works, with commentary by Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, and Malcolm Muggeridge, among others. The back pages of the magazine contain the usual assortment of book reviews, including one of a new book by Ronald Coase. So far as I can tell, this juxtaposition of Orwell and Coase is pure coincidence. If the editors knew it was important, they certainly didn’t let on. But what a perfect coincidence it is: Orwell, the man of fuzzy economics but brilliant vision set up against Coase, a future Nobelist in economics whose interest happens to be the telecommunicating machine. Coase’s book is titled British Broadcasting: A Study in Monopoly.

  Coase’s book is Hayek for the telescreen. The BBC, Coase recounts, has fought for years to retain monopoly control of British airwaves. All along, the need for monopoly has been assumed, not proved. Technicians claimed monopoly was necessary because of the problem of airwave “scarcity” and radio interference. The press welcomed government monopoly to freeze out a rival outlet for advertising. Power-hungry politicians of both parties fell into line readily enough. But the economic and technical argument for a broadcast monopoly is wrong, and irreconcilable with venerable principles of free speech. The monopoly argument’s “main disadvantage is that to accept its assumptions it is necessary first to adopt a totalitarian philosophy or at any rate something verging on it.”

  For Orwell, the telecommunicating machine necessarily leads to the Ministry. In the jargon of economists, Orwell believes wholeheartedly in efficient “natural monopoly.” For Coase, it is the Ministry that monopolizes the communications system; the monopoly is neither natural nor efficient. Orwell is certain that complex machines cannot be owned and managed effectively by small capitalists. Coase knows that private property and markets can manage even something as ephemeral as the ether. Orwell believes that Ministry-owned machines are more efficient in theory, though Ministries often go bad in practice. For Coase, theory and practice are the same: the Ministry is rotten from the outset. Orwell thinks that the Ministry-controlled machines will in theory produce Abundance and Truth, though not always in practice; Coase knows that giving the airwaves to the Ministry produces Scarcity and Lies. Give the airwaves to the market, Coase says, and you get more Plenty and more Truth, because markets always produce more goods. You will also get advertising, capitalism, Salvador Dali, and all the other free market things Orwell despised. But you will not get Big Brother.

  I have not come across any indication that Orwell ever read anything by Coase, but he surely would have reacted to Coase in much the same way as he did to Hayek. To be sure, small ownership avoids Big Brother, but the small owners don’t last; they get swallowed up into trusts, and still larger trusts, and then the Ministry. Just look at the grocer and the gramophone needles. Monopoly, the Ministry, centralization of one kind or another is stronger, avoids waste, is more efficient, and so always takes over in the end—and nowhere more certainly than in connection with complex machines like steam engi
nes and radio transmitters. Coase just hasn’t grasped the modern economic realities. Little shopkeepers and big science belong to different eras, different generations. They coexist only in fiction.

  In the fiction of H. G. Wells, for example. As a boy, Orwell loved Wells, but as a man he finds him ridiculous. Wells “writes about journeys to the moon and to the bottom of the sea, and also he writes about small shopkeepers dodging bankruptcy. . . . The connecting link is Wells’s belief in Science. He is saying all the time, if only that small shopkeeper could acquire a scientific out-look, his troubles would be ended.” But who could seriously believe that shopkeeping and science—the market and the machine—might save the world? Wells could. Hayek could. Coase could. But Orwell can’t. When Orwell thinks of the radio and the market, he invariably thinks of Goebbels and the Ministry.

  • • •

  Suppose, however, that Orwell had somehow overcome his distaste for gramophones, radios, and films. And suppose he had also understood that telescreens might some day end up as consumer goods in the hands of the masses. Where then might his doublethoughts about the telescreen have led him?

  First, to a fundamentally different understanding of the machine itself. Remember the Physical Jerks and Jane Fonda? Winston Smith, among tens of thousands of Londoners aged thirty-something, gets screamed at personally when he doesn’t bend low enough. But there is really no other comparable display of two-way telescreen powers anywhere else in 1984. At only two other points in the book do telescreens talk back: once in a prison cell and once in a room that is used by Charrington, a member of the Thought Police, to entrap people like Winston and Julia. Neither of these displays of telescreen technology is very impressive. Even in 1948, it wasn’t all that hard to spy on one designated target in one specific room.