Orwell's Revenge

by Peter Huber

  “No,” replies Winston, after a pause.

  In prison, Winston consoles himself with the knowledge that he has not betrayed Julia. “She betrayed you, Winston,” O’Brien informs him. “Immediately—unreservedly. I have seldom seen anyone come over to us so promptly.” A while later, O’Brien asks Winston: “Can you think of a single degradation that has not happened to you?”

  “I have not betrayed Julia,” Winston replies.

  So O’Brien goes back to work. At the very last second, as the starving rats are about to tear into Winston’s eyes and mouth, Winston understands what’s expected of him. “Do it to Julia!” he screams. “Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don’t care what you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia! Not me!”

  Orwell pulls it all together when Julia and Winston meet again at the very end of the book:

  “I betrayed you,” she said baldly

  “I betrayed you,” he said.

  She gave him another quick look of dislike. . . .

  “[P]erhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn’t really mean it. But that isn’t true. . . . All you care about is yourself.”

  “All you care about is yourself,” he echoed.

  “And after that, you don’t feel the same toward the other person any longer.”

  “No,” he said, “you don’t feel the same.”

  The scene is as unspeakably miserable as the day itself, “a vile, biting day in March, when the earth was like iron and all the grass seemed dead and there was not a bud anywhere except a few crocuses which had pushed themselves up to be dismembered by the wind.” And it is the last word on love and loyalty in 1984.

  Happily, however, it is not the last word. Orwell set out his doublethought on the subject a year later, shortly before he died. It appears in his magnificent essay, “Reflections on Gandhi.” Orwell is talking about the perils of sainthood and the challenge of being human. He writes this single, wonderful sentence: “The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.”

  We should hardly be surprised, then, to find doublethink woven all through the writings of the man who invented the word. The market begins buoyant and free and ends with the parasitic monopolist. American liberty begins with Thomas Jefferson and ends with Airstrip One. Love begins with Julia and ends with rats. Life begins with friendship and ends with defeat. Poverty, socialism, England, America—Orwell loves them all, and hates them too, for they all begin beautiful and end ugly—or is it the other way around? Black is White, War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength. Doublethink is the whole point.

  And that makes the big puzzle all the more puzzling. Ask the question once again: Why did the man who saw both sides of everything so clearly believe so unequivocally that the machine itself is the enemy? Why did Orwell never doublethink the telescreen?

  • • •

  Psycholiterary criticism is usually a waste of time, but with Orwell’s views about machines and markets, it’s inescapable.

  Orwell’s hero of Keep the Aspidistra Flying is an irritating poet called Gordon Comstock. Comstock has a thing about money: he hates it. And it’s all because at school he was a poor boy among richer classmates. His life was miserable, of course. “Probably the greatest cruelty one can inflict on a child is to send it to school among children richer than itself.” “Even twenty years afterwards the memory of that school made Gordon shudder.”

  But this is not Gordon Comstock who is speaking. It is George Orwell. Orwell uses almost the same words in an autobiographical essay—“Such, Such Were the Joys”—which was published (because of concerns about libel suits) only in 1968, two decades after his death. The essay describes in Dickensian detail the miseries of Orwell’s own experiences at Crossgates, the boarding school he attended on scholarship before going on to Eton. “[T]he very rich boys were more or less undisguisedly favoured”; the “poor but ‘clever’” scholarship boys didn’t go riding, didn’t get a cricket bat, didn’t get a birthday cake, were caned more often, were publicly reminded of their poverty, and were expected to be snivelingly grateful to Crossgates for its charity.

  The effects were predictable. “I despised anyone who was not describable as a ‘gentleman,’” Orwell recalls in Wigan Pier, “but also I hated the hoggishly rich, especially those who had grown rich too recently. The correct and elegant thing, I felt, was to be of gentle birth but to have no money.” Gordon Comstock amplifies in Aspidistra. “At an earlier age than most people [I] grasped that all modem commerce is a swindle. . . . What [I] realised, and more clearly as time went on, was that money-worship has been elevated into a religion.”

  For the rest of his days, Orwell blames the humiliations of his childhood on capitalism and the laws of inheritance. He lives his adult life in almost constant rebellion against the Crossgates money-culture. Like Comstock in Aspidistra and Flory in Burmese Days, Orwell infuriates his women friends by pursuing poverty as aggressively as most men pursue wealth. In Burmese Days, Elizabeth is a shallow, crassly commercial woman, who rejects the sensitive, beauty-loving Flory. Orwell has identical problems with his own women: he despises money; they don’t. As Comstock puts it in Aspidistra, “[s]ocial failure, artistic failure, sexual failure—they are all the same. And lack of money is at the bottom of them all.”

  The rest is obvious. Money stinks, property is abominable, people who compete are tapeworms, corpses should not control property, capitalism is the enemy, and markets corrupt everything they touch. The free market is the enemy too.

  • • •

  If tapeworms and corpses will not control money and property, who will? The people, of course, which means the Ministry. Despite his deep distrust of Stalin and Hitler, Orwell the grown-up schoolboy loves the Ministry. Half of Orwell wants collectivism, wants it desperately, because “economic justice” does not arise spontaneously. Orwell knows that absent ministries, the natural economic order is Crossgates.

  In 1984 itself, Orwell acknowledges that among men there are native inequalities of talent. He spends as little time as possible on this, and Blythe’s book-within-a-book—while acknowledging these inequalities—strongly implies that equality would be inevitable but for the power-hungry oligarchy. In an earlier essay, Orwell even appeals to higher authority for support. His “Politics and the English Language” quotes a familiar verse from Ecclesiastes:

  I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

  Orwell’s ostensible purpose here is the same as with the Jefferson quotation in 1984: he is simply going to illustrate how this magnificent language would be rendered in modem bureau-crap.II But Orwell never chooses his texts by accident, especially not his biblical texts, which he uses frequently In choosing this verse of Ecclesiastes, Orwell is not just illustrating good and bad writing; he is making a political statement too. Orwell is a lilies-of-the-field kind of man. He does not want the race to go to the swift. Conveniently for Orwell, the Bible says that it doesn’t have to.

  But the Bible notwithstanding, the race normally is to the swift, and Orwell knows it. Some people are smarter, more industrious, honest, cooperative, entertaining, or agreeable than others, and those people usually get ahead. Most of the time, talent prevails, at least when freedom leaves talent to its own devices. As Damon Runyon observed, “The race may not always be to the swift nor the victory to the strong, but that’s the way to bet it.”

  For Orwell, this creates a miserable dilemma. Freedom, fo
r Orwell, begins with material sufficiency and economic equality. But it also means privacy and the “liberty to have a home of your own, to do what you like in your spare time, to choose your own amusements instead of having them chosen for you from above.” Orwell knows that material equality in a world of unequal swiftness, strength, and wisdom requires something other than laissez-faire economics, capitalism, and the “obstructive nuisance” of private property. That something is a Ministry of Plenty. Which generally means another Ministry or two. Which means Big Brother.

  Orwell runs into exactly the same problem with the wealth of nations. He desperately wants to treat all peoples and races fairly: the peasant soldier under his command in Spain, the “coolies” he oversees in Burma, the impoverished laborer he describes with deep compassion in an essay about Marrakech. The three totalitarian superstates in 1984 maintain “cultural integrity,” because if the average citizen were “allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies.” With nations, as with individuals, Orwell wants to believe that time and chance happeneth to all. He wants to, but again he cant. “[T]he divisions between nation and nation are founded on real differences of outlook,” he admits in a 1941 essay. It was once “thought proper to pretend that all human beings are very much alike,” but Orwell concedes they aren’t. So there isn’t going to be any equality in the wealth of nations unless . . . unless what? World government is one possibility, but (as Orwell has remarked elsewhere) “it would be an outrage against the laws of God and Nature for England to be ruled by foreigners.” The other road to national equality is 1984: three sheaves of com, three Parties, three Big Brothers.

  War presents Orwell with the same intolerable choice once again. Nations and cultures are not merely unequal in talent and industry; some are downright evil. To resist them you need two things: superior weapons and political unity. Superior weapons are built by the same people who build telescreens. And political unity? In England, Orwell happily reports, “there can come moments when the whole nation suddenly swings together and does the same thing, like a herd of cattle facing a wolf.” But such a nation, Orwell also knows, can be as “single-minded as the Gadarene swine” in times of peace. No matter. War is sometimes necessary, and war requires Ministries of Peace and Plenty. Which means a Party. Which means Big Brother.

  So Orwell’s brain is strangling in the coils of doublethink. For individuals, as for nations, he wants equality. The race-to-the-swiftest tendency is the problem; the Ministry is the solution. Crossgates is what descends on the nation that doesn’t have the right Ministries. Hitler—the quintessential Ministry man—is what descends on the nation that does.

  • • •

  How then can we rid the world of Crossgates while still affirming “freedom” at every turn? We can’t, except in French. And thus Orwell, the man who exhorts us to “drive out foreign phrases” from our writing, is quite unable to discuss economic theory without first crossing the English Channel.

  Perhaps the Frenchism of laissez-faire capitalism can be forgiven, but what Orwell really loves to hate is the rentier. In essay after essay he excoriates “rentier capitalism,” “the rentier-professional class,” and the “rentier-intellectual.” And what exactly is a rentier? My French-English dictionary defines it as “stockholder, fundholder; person of property, man of independent means; holder of an annuity; rentier. C’est un petit rentier, he has a small private income, he is a small investor.” Orwell’s definitions are more colorful. Rentiers, says Orwell, comprise “an entirely functionless class, living on money that was invested they hardly knew where.” They are the “idle rich,” “decayed throw-outs,” “simply parasites, less useful to society than his fleas are to a dog.” Brush aside Orwell’s fine invective, and you come back to this: the freedom Orwell can’t stand is the freedom to earn money, invest it in private property, and pass it on to your children. Which explains Orwell’s French. If he talked about the “free” market, he would then have to murder “freedom.” Linguistically, it is easier to liquidate a rentier.

  But he doesn’t fool anyone, not even himself. Equality—the kind of material equality that Orwell wants—and freedom—real freedom of effort, intellect, and personal industry—are irreconcilable. Like it or not, the free market is a big part of freedom—not just material freedom, but freedom of thought and speech and everything else. Some people produce newspapers, films, symphonies, operas, and plays; others pay to enjoy such things, and it’s money that closes the loop. Crude as it sounds, spending money is a form of self-expression. Handing over cash is the most sincere way of declaring private preferences, whether they be crass, generous, foolish, wasteful, or ugly. Money talks. The rich like Ravelston in Aspidistra) get to run nice little socialist magazines as a hobby. The poor like Comstock) have to go off and work for horrible American advertising agencies. When it comes to freedom, mind and money walk hand in hand.

  Orwell knows this. He also knows that it doesn’t mean much to preach about higher forms of liberty to people who are digging coal fourteen hours a day and starving in the cold the other ten. He knows that the race-to-the-swift tendency pushes society away from “economic justice.” He also knows you can’t articulate any grand principles of freedom without grappling with economic freedom along the way. And he knows you can’t talk serious economic socialism without drifting toward Big Brother. In 1984, the Party has done many of the right socialist things. It has abolished private property and suppressed the free market. These are all things that Orwell the socialist believes should be done. Orwell knows that the Ministry of Plenty is a pillar of “oligarchical collectivism,” which he hates, but he knows it is also a pillar of democratic socialism, which he loves.

  So Orwell is stuck. Either he says something nice about Big Brother, which would ruin 1984, or he says something nice about economic freedom, which means (more or less) free markets, which means (roughly) the rentier-capitalist—the other enemy Orwell hates the Big Brotherhood of 1984, but he is himself a socialist. He wants collectivism without Big Brother, and he doesn’t know how to get it. The missing chapter in 1984—the chapter on Freedom—is missing because of a completely unresolvable paradox in Orwell’s own brand of Ingsoc politics.

  • • •

  Now you may suppose that I have dwelled on Orwell’s half-baked socialism to add some ad hominem weight to my rehabilitation of the telescreen. But I am not trying to discredit Orwell simply by painting him red. What Orwell believes about free markets explains, in the end, what he thinks about telescreen totalitarianism.

  It’s easy for people like Hayek and Coase to embrace the marketplace of ideas; the logic and the rhetoric of the free market is portable. It’s equally easy for people like Hayek and Coase to be optimistic about things like telescreens. More and better communicating machines in more private hands will mean more commerce, more shopkeepers, more rentiers, and more free speech too. Collectivists—or, if you prefer, democratic socialists—have a much more difficult book to write. The collectivists demand that powerful, expensive machines be expropriated and ministerialized. For efficiency, you see. Efficiency and economic justice. So when it comes to newfangled things like telescreens, the libertarian-collectivists must somehow explain how they will collectivize the media of communication without collectivizing the message, how they will collectivize your purse without touching your mind, how they will woo the Ministry of Plenty without falling into the syphilitic embrace of the Ministry of Love. But they can’t explain that. Because it can’t be done.

  Return then one last time to the question that led us to the market in the first place: Why didn’t Orwell ever consider that telescreens might promote freedom? Why didn’t he ever imagine that the slavery of a telescreened Ministry might be overwhelmed by the freedom of telescreens in private hands? That question led us to search for the missing chapter in 1984—the chapter that would have set out Orwell’s own, positive definition of
Freedom. But all we found was another negative: freedom, whatever it is, is not the rentier-infested free market. The free market, after all, leads back to Crossgates, where the rich little bastards torture and humiliate the rest.

  And oh yes, I forgot to mention this earlier. One typical indignity— one particularly memorable humiliation—for a scholarship boy at Crossgates was to be examined by richer boys on the size and power of his father’s car—the car the scholarship boy’s father of course did not own. Orwell himself remembered that, long, long afterward. A scholarship boy wouldn’t seriously consider the possibility of owning a movie camera either. Recall that when Orwell thinks of a movie camera in “New Words,” he reflexively conjures up some “millionaire” to own it. The private ownership of fancy machines evokes in Orwell almost unspeakably miserable memories. So, Orwell the adult concludes: one can defend (private) property only if one is more or less indifferent to economic justice. For Orwell, then, Freedom really is Slavery, at least when freedom extends to people who make money and then buy expensive gadgets with it. He simply cannot stand the thought of a world organized around fancy private possessions.

  He spends his adult life declaring that tomorrow’s world won’t be. Hayek is wrong. Capitalism is finished. The one world even more horrifying (to Orwell) than 1984 is a world owned by the small rentier capitalists, a society like Crossgates, in which the scholarship boy is tormented forever because his father doesn’t own a big personal computer. And that horror—his own, personal, childhood horror—is one that Orwell never does overcome. He sees everything perfectly, except for his own boyhood face in the mirror.

  Who then will own the telescreens in the future according to Orwell? Surely not the rentier-capitalists who send their spoiled sons to Crossgates. Motor cars, movie cameras, radios, telephones, dishwashers: in Orwell’s economically just world, none of these things is going to be privately owned. They’re all going to be owned by the Ministry of Crockery, or something much like it. That’s the answer to horrible Crossgates. But Ministry ownership will be pretty horrible too. That’s 1984.