Orwell's Revenge

by Peter Huber

Orwell was on the mark when he imagined that two-way television might some day become practical. But what he never grasped was that the telescreen he envisioned was more telephone than television. (Telescreens appear 119 times in 2984, microphones 7 times, gramophones once—and telephones never once.) Yes, the telescreen has pictures, but so far as politics, propaganda, and spies are concerned, that’s secondary. What’s important is that the telescreen is a two-way device—it can transmit as well as receive—and that means that it has to be addressable. It has to work like a letter, not a poster. Missing that point is Orwell’s biggest mistake. Televisions are collectivism they broadcast indiscriminately to everyone, just as a Ministry of Crockery would do everyone’s washing up. Broadcast television is the collective farm of communications, perfect for Goebbels and the Ministry of Truth. But a telephone can’t work unless it is personal, individual, and specific. Same with a telescreen. And for that reason, both are seditious.

  If he had ever grasped the telescreen’s power to spread people out and disaggregate their affairs, Orwell would have had to rethink all his views about history and memory. When the Caliph Omar destroyed the libraries of Alexandria, Orwell notes sadly in a 1944 essay, he kept the public baths warm for eighteen days with burning manuscripts, and great numbers of tragedies by Euripides and others perished. Ever since the Spanish Civil War, Orwell has been horribly fascinated by an even more chilling possibility: the despot’s power not simply to destroy what has been written but to rewrite it. By falsifying every paper, every news clip, every photograph, a Franco or a Stalin might perhaps recreate history itself. As Orwell puts it in 2984: “[I]f all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth.” The key assumption here is contained in a single word: “all.”

  In a telescreened society, records multiply far too fast to be systematically falsified. Caliphs can irrevocably transform Greek tragedy into warm bath water only when there is a single, central repository where the never-copied manuscripts of Euripides are stored. In the hyper-centralized, Ministry-dominated society that Orwell is always imagining, the idea that every single record might be falsified is vaguely plausible. But records can in fact exist simultaneously in many places, and communication can multiply records without limit. The telescreened society, then, should be one in which the collective memory is better than ever, constantly refreshed and expanded as information is transmitted and shared. Orwell recognized microfilm’s capacity to “compress a very large amount of information into a very small space” and saw here a possible protection against “bombs [and] the police of totalitarian regimes.” Today the technological successors to microfilm are in tens of millions of hard drives and compact optical disks built into millions of modem-equipped personal computers.

  What next? The cheap, ubiquitous, decentralized telescreen reshapes society in its own image. Orwell knows this too—or half knows it at least. In The Lion and the Unicorn, for example, Orwell sees great significance in the rise of a new group “of indeterminate social class.” These people are living in townships made economically viable by “cheap motorcars.” In a major 1944 essay, “The English People,” Orwell argues that England needs to be “less centralised,” less dominated by the urban culture and economy of London. He sees more efficient cross-country bus service as an important part of the solution. The future England, Orwell writes, lies “along the arterial roads.” So Orwell understands: society is defined by how people connect. Cars, buses, and arterial roads move people.

  Telescreens move pictures. If you move the pictures efficiently enough, you’ll completely reverse the world’s dreaded slide toward centralized monopoly. Orwell has been telling himself for years that whether it is benignly socialist, or malignly fascist, centralized control is much more powerful than decentralized capitalism: it eliminates waste, invents better machines, and wages war more effectively. It is easy to smile at Orwell for believing that, but in fact all he is really saying is that cooperation is good and that he can’t imagine men cooperating on a large scale except through Ministries. Yet with the gadget he did imagine, even the enormous levels of coordination required to transform aluminum and glass into an airplane can be maintained far from the shadow of any central Ministry The “tele” in telescreen, after all, means “distance.” The telescreened society has no need for marble edifices to house either Captains of Industry or Ministers of Plenty. Instead of towering huge and high above the antlike masses, as they did before the telescreen, corporations and ministries now thin down and spread out. The pyramid of Cheops gives way to the geodesic dome, the fisherman’s net of the telescreen network. Telescreens make possible collectivism by choice—a commonwealth society based on individual willingness to share and cooperate.

  Daydream about the telescreen a while longer, and you revise all your notions about the wealth of nations. England’s only alternative to thieving colonialism, Orwell writes in Wigan Pier, “is to throw the Empire overboard and reduce England to a cold and unimportant little island where we should all have to work very hard and live mainly on herrings and potatoes.” Thus, Orwell writes off the entire wealth of the British people—the people who gave the world Shakespeare, Newton, Darwin, Adam Smith, H. G. Wells, Coase, and the glories of the English language—on the assumption that wealth comes mostly from potato farming. The man who conceived of the telescreen and understood perfectly the impoverishing effects of a Thought Police should have known better. In the age of the telescreen, an island as small as Japan, or even a waterless piece of rock like Hong Kong, can still amass the wealth of Croesus.

  The curious thing is that Orwell had almost certainly heard and studied just that argument in 1943, the same year he first thought of writing 1984. Winston Churchill had presented it in a speech given at Harvard University. For a nation like England, Churchill had said, there are “far better prizes than taking away other people’s provinces or lands, or grinding them down in exploitation. The empires of the future are the Empires of the Mind.” By a double irony, Churchill also discussed the 850-word “Basic English,” which he hoped to promote as the world’s universal second language. Basic English became a very fashionable concern around then, and Orwell himself was an enthusiast for a while. The advantage of Basic—the part Orwell liked—was that it eliminated pedantry. It also placed the Ministry of Information in full control, a thought that eventually led Orwell to 1984’s Newspeak. But Newspeak aside, Churchill’s Empires-of-the-Mind speech was a great breakthrough. Today we know that the empires of the mind are conquered not by Newspeak but by telescreen.

  Come to think of it, what can we really expect of the English language in the telescreened world? In some respects, no doubt, further dilapidation of just the kind that Orwell always feared. Pictures, which are easy, allow people to get lazy about words, which are comparatively hard. But Orwell knew that a world of pictures offers something to language too. As we have seen (i.e., read), Orwell’s unpublished “New Words” argues that the “cinematograph,” with its power to make thought visible, may be the best hope we have for expanding our vocabulary. “A millionaire with a private cinematograph [and] all the necessary props,” Orwell reflects, would be able to transform thought into visual reality and so develop new words. And yet half of what Orwell called a telescreen is the “cinematograph”—today’s videocamera. If Orwell was right in “New Words,” the migration of the rich man’s cinematograph into millions of private homes will end up adding more to language than it subtracts.

  In any event, artists will thrive in a telescreened world in which communication is too cheap to meter. Remember Keep the Aspidistra Flying, in which the rich like Ravelston get to run nice little magazines, while the poor like Comstock sell their souls to horrible American PR firms? Remember Orwell’s years of invective against the plutocrats who have monopolized all the major presses and publishing houses, and the advertisers whose money soils every commercially successful piece of writing? Remember Orwell’s 1944 column on capitalism and art, the one in w
hich the BBC and the film companies “buy up promising young writers and geld them and set them to work like cab-horses”? Remember Orwell saying that capitalism deserves to die and surely will, but Orwell knows the artist will die along with it, though he deserves to live? “I have never yet seen this dilemma solved,” says Orwell, though he is sure that “there must be a solution.”

  Well there is. It’s called the telescreen. Capitalism is not doomed; the telescreen has saved it. The telescreen saves the artist too, by giving the artist a boundless, cheap new medium of expression. It used to be said that freedom of the press belongs to those who own one, just the sort of crack that might have come from Gordon Comstock. But in the age of the ubiquitous telescreen, everyone will own a video-press. That should mean vastly more freedom of expression, not less. The telescreened world is fragmented, competitive, fluid, and richly textured, a world filled with the electronic equivalents of Bays’ Weeklies, farthing newspapers, microphoned poetry, and the comic art of Donald McGill. The starving artist may still starve, but he will be able to reach an audience anyway, at least if his poems, songs, or pictures are good enough to interest anyone outside the south-side garret he occupies in Brewer’s Yard.

  If the telescreen can let almost any artist be heard or seen, it can equally easily create as much privacy as any hermit could desire. By overcoming distance, the telescreen contains the power to create solitude. You don’t, of course, get to that conclusion by assuming that telescreen technology can be operated only from a single giant Ministry. But once you get beyond that mistaken idea, you soon imagine would-be snoopers exhausted and dispirited by distance alone. As Orwell himself has written, the two keys to privacy are distance and crowds. London offers privacy because it is vast and anonymous. The remote Scottish island of Jura, where Orwell retreats to write 1984, offers privacy because it is far from everything. Orwell’s farmhouse there becomes his office, restaurant, pub, and inn. As a writer, Orwell could make that move with just a typewriter; a telescreen offers a similar escape to professionals of almost every kind. It lets you live in one place and work, shop, or entertain in another. And at the same time, it creates communities as crowded, and therefore as anonymous, as the largest metropolis. With the telescreen, the privacy of London converges with the privacy of any wind-swept island off the coast of Scotland.

  With the telescreen, it is thus possible to have brotherhood, or at least as much brotherhood as free individuals can stand, without Big Brother. And if little brother remains on the scene, the telescreen can do much to keep him in line too. Orwell dimly anticipates some of the possibilities in a 1947 column that discusses “Cooper’s Snoopers,” the social survey unit recently established by Britain’s (Labour-run) Ministry of Information. “[S]ome people do seem sincerely to feel that it is a bad thing for the government to know too much about what people are thinking,” Orwell acknowledges, “just as others feel that it is a kind of presumption when the government tries to educate public opinion.” Well, yes, some people do sincerely feel that, including (one might have supposed) the author of 1984. But as Orwell points out—quite correctly—democracy “is only possible when the law-makers and administrators know what the masses want, and what they can be counted on to understand.” It’s the sort of line Orwell could easily have handed to O’Brien in 1984. But it also happens to be true. So long as governments exist and derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, the consent must somehow be conveyed to those in power. The telescreen, properly used, can do just that, far better than any number of social surveys or by-elections.

  All of Orwell’s gloomy visions about hypercentralized society look equally bright in the glow of the doublethought telescreen. Orwell dislikes “standardised education”; the telescreen has the power to put a private school on every desktop. Orwell hates xenophobia; the telescreen, despite Orwell’s doubts, moves “Dallas” from Los Angeles to the Alsace Lorraine. Orwell despises atom bombs, mustard gas, and weapons of mass destruction; the telescreened rocket bomb, guided by videocamera and electronic maps, flies straight down the air shaft of the enemy’s Ministry of Peace.

  The telescreened world, which we see unfolding around us today, is thus the complete opposite of 1984. It is a world in which the power of communication is decentralized, with control dispersed, the entire apparatus far beyond the reach of the insect men in the Ministry. It is a world in which state propaganda is a joke-—albeit a filthy one—a complete flop, volumes of nonsense shot into the stratosphere and listened to by no one. It is a world in which the Thought Police are driven to distraction by telephones, facsimiles, handheld video cameras, and all the other variations on the telescreen that have become so familiar in the decade since 1984. If Orwell had doublethought his telescreen to its logical conclusion, he would have foreseen the day in which the proles do the watching, and the Party is whipped into submission. As Ithiel de Sola Pool would record in 1983, telescreens are the technologies of freedom.

  • • •

  Not for Orwell. His dislike of fancy machines is visceral, almost atavistic. It slices down between the two lobes of his brain and cuts deep into the recesses of his mind.

  It is 1944, a year after he first thought of writing 1984. Orwell writes an essay for Partisan Review. “We are living in an age,” Orwell declares, where “[t]he most intelligent people seem capable of holding schizophrenic beliefs, of disregarding plain facts, of evading serious questions with debating-society repartees, or swallowing baseless rumours and of looking on indifferently while history is falsified.” And what accounts for this “schizophrenic” thinking? “Fear, I suppose,” Orwell replies. Fear and “the ghastly emptiness of machine civilisation.”

  So there it is, the primal traitor, the Enemy of the People, the original defiler of civilization’s purity. It is the machine that cleaves the human mind, the machine that causes schizophrenia, the machine that impels men to engage in . . .

  PART 4: DOUBLETHINK

  Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.

  1984

  THE FUTURE IS PASSED

  “It is bound to be a failure,” Orwell wrote in 1946. “[E]very book is a failure,” he added with typically Orwellian despondency. True to form—true, in fact, to the principles of doublethink—Orwell’s wildly successful 1984 is a failure. It is all fragments, all details—rotten architecture but wonderful gargoyles.

  Orwell was wrong about the telescreen. With 1984—the year itself—fading into history, we can’t seriously doubt that any more. Anyone who tries to argue otherwise is engaged in an act of doublethink as brazen as any described in 1984.

  Anthony Burgess, for example. In The Novel Now (1967), Burgess announced that “the ghastly future Orwell foretells will not come about, simply because he has foretold it: we have been warned.” Burgess was wrong. 1984 is not a self-negating prophecy; it is a self-negating book. Orwell’s vision is internally inconsistent: the science of Oceania is both fecund and sterile, the telescreen is both infinitely powerful and hopelessly weak. We did not need Orwell’s prophecy to sidestep the Orwellian future; the future was a schizophrenic mirage from the outset. “[W]hat is it, this principle that will defeat us?” O’Brien asks Winston toward the end of 1984. There is none, Orwell tells us: telescreen totalitarianism is stable and durable. But it isn’t. If the Thought Police can use telescreens, so can others—that’s just the way telescreens work, if they work at all. Networks as powerful as Orwell imagined cannot be built any other way. The world of Stalin filled with Apple computers belongs to Apple, not Stalin.

  Then there’s the problem of Orwell’s half-baked socialism, his conviction that central economic management is more efficient than competition. His defenders will insist that Orwell’s socialism only reflected his deep empathy for the down and out. To writ
e about the homeless, he went and lived with them. To learn that prison was less powerful than the market, he sent himself to prison—not as a reporter but as a common drunk. Orwell didn’t just denounce fascism; he went and fought it in Spain, long before fighting fascism was popular; the Mauser bullet shot through his neck came within a millimeter of letting him die for the convictions that he lived. It is all true: Orwell was an almost suicidally decent man. And yet, with that said, Orwell’s socialism was still half-baked. He never came close to grasping how inherently inefficient collectivism really is.

  Other defenders of Orwell will remind us—correctly again—that Orwell had a brilliant sense, not only for what was important but for what would remain important years later. The entire telemachine debate today—spanning telephones, cable television, broadcast, pagers, cellular phones, vehicle locators, dispatch systems, telemetry, remote sensing, personal communication networks, and satellite reconnaissance—is crystallized in Orwell’s writing. The choice between Orwell and Hayek, Orwell and Coase, Winston Smith and O’Brien, O’Brien and Blair—the choices between the market and the Ministry—are still the ones we grapple with today. Whatever his mistakes, Orwell is a sympathetic and intelligent observer; although his prophecies have not been fulfilled, they have not been made simply irrelevant by the passage of time.

  And I agree, of course. In fact, I cannot imagine the day when an extended dialogue with the brilliant, fluid, doublethinking mind of George Orwell will no longer be profitable. He has taken on the issues that endure. If one has once read Orwell with attention, it is not easy to go a day without quoting him, because there are not many subjects of major importance that he does not discuss or at least mention somewhere or other, in his unsystematic but illuminating way. Orwell’s Revenge is my own Imaginary Dialogue with George Orwell, my own drawn-out rewrite of Orwell’s “Imaginary Interview with Jonathan Swift.” It is a strange thing to have a 300-page conversation about contemporary problems with a man who has been dead for more than forty years; with most long-dead men, such an exercise would be a waste of time. But all of Orwell’s important thoughts remain fresh, and his concerns still preoccupy us. With that said, Orwell was still wrong about the telescreen—completely, irredeemably, outrageously wrong.