That reference, of course, is to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, which, like Nineteen Eighty-Four itself, was written under the influence of We. Orwell rejected Brave New World as a possible blueprint for even a remote future: he blamed Huxley for a lack of 'political awareness'. Huxley depicts, it will be remembered, a Utopia which, like Zamyatin's, has sacrificed freedom for happiness. Perhaps, recalling Dr Johnson's strictures on the loose use of a term which is made to express the joys of heaven as well as a little girl's delight in a new party frock, the term content would be better. Pre-natal biological techniques and Pavlovian conditioning are capable of rendering the citizens of the future content with the lots which the State has bestowed upon them. There is no equality. Society is rigidly stratified, from the Alpha-plus intellectual to the Epsilon-minus semi-moron, but immobility is biologically built into the system. The family, which Freud said is responsible more than anything for human discontent, has been abolished; children are produced in test-tubes; all sex is promiscuous and sterile. It is a totally stable society, in which hedonism is the prevailing philosophy. But Orwell considers that such a society would not be dynamic enough to last long. 'There is no power hunger, no sadism, no hardness of any kind. Those at the top have no strong motive for staying at the top, and though everyone is happy in a vacuous way, life has become so pointless that it is difficult to believe that such a society could endure.'
The pursuit of happiness is, then, pointless. Is liberty? Presumably not the struggle for it. Orwell cannot conceive of a society whose rulers are not motivated by the desire to impose their wholly malevolent will on the ruled. This is 'political awareness'. The dynamic of society consists in a resistance on the part of the ruled to the will of the ruler - welcomed by the ruler as an inimical drive that merits suppression, with all its concomitant sadistic pleasures. In stating that this is what society is like, Orwell has history on his side. Why do men seek to rule others? Not for the benefit of those others. To be convinced of this is to be 'politically aware'.
And yet there have been Utopians - H. G. Wells, for one - who believed that the just society could be built. The Wellsian future is derided in Nineteen Eighty-Four - a clean innocent vision of a world full of Hellenic (or Mussolinian) architecture, rational dress and labour-saving devices, in which reason is in control and such base emotions as a lust for power and the exercise of cruelty are rigidly kept under. Had Orwell really been an Anglican rector, he would have known what term to use for describing it. He would have said that the rational society, with scientific socialism triumphant, was 'Pelagian'.
The terms Pelagian and Augustinian, though theological, are useful for describing the poles of man's belief as to his own nature, The British monk Pelagius, or Morgan (both names mean 'man of the sea'), was responsible for a heresy condemned by the Church in AD 416 which, nevertheless, has never ceased to exercise an influence on Western moral thought. The view of man which it opposes appears, to most people, monstrously implausible, even though it is part of traditional Christian doctrine. This view states that man enters the world in a state of 'original sin' which he is powerless to overcome by his own efforts alone: he needs Christ's redemption and God's grace. Original sin relates a certain human predisposition to evil to the crime of disobedience committed by Adam, in the Garden of Eden. As Zamyatin reminds us, Adam did not wish to be happy; he wished to be 'free'. He desired free will, meaning the right to choose between courses of action - in effect, between courses on which a moral judgement could be made. He did not realize that, once free, he was more likely to choose the wrong than the right. He would consult the gratification of his own ego rather than what was pleasing to God. He thus condemned himself to divine punishment, which only God's mercy could rescind.
Pelagius denied this terrible endowment. Man was free to choose salvation as much as damnation: he was not predisposed to evil, there was no original sin. Nor was he necessarily predisposed to good: the fact of total freedom of choice rendered him neutral. But he certainly possessed the capability, with no hindrance from unregenerate forces within, to live the good life and, by his own efforts, to achieve salvation at the end. St Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, reaffirming the orthodox doctrine of original sin and the need to pray for divine grace, loudly condemned Pelagius. But Pelagius has, in more than fifteen hundred years, refused to be silent.
In secularizing these views of man, we tend to forget about sin and concentrate on what is good for society and what is not. The Wellsian brand of Pelagianism blamed criminal impulses on environment. What priests called 'original sin' was a reaction to poverty, slum tenements, enforced ignorance and squalor. A scientific socialism would extirpate what was called crime. Man was not just morally neutral: being a social animal, he wanted to be a 'good', or responsible, member of society; it was his environment that had been getting in the way. But, if there are secular Pelagians (though not so many as before about 1933), there seem to be no secular Augustinians. Those who deny the possibility of moral progress, who insist on the destructive, libidinous urges in man as an unregenerable aspect of his condition, take, of necessity, a traditional theological stance. If anything can be done to improve man, it must come from without - from God, or the Life Force, or a miraculous extraterrestrial virus brought in by a UFO.
The polarity is, however, not all that rigid. We are all both Pelagian and Augustinian, either in cyclical phases, or, through a kind of doublethink, at one and the same time. Orwell was Pelagian in that he was a Socialist, Augustinian in that he created Ingsoc. It sometimes seems that the political life of a free community moves in the following cycle: a Pelagian belief in progress produces a kind of liberal regime that wavers when men are seen not to be perfectible and fail to live up to the liberal image; the regime collapses and is succeeded by an authoritarianism in which men are made to be good; men are seen not to be so bad as the Augustinian philosophy teaches; the way is open for liberalism to return. We tend to Augustinianism when we are disgusted with our own selfishness, to Pelagianism when we seem to have behaved well. Free will is of the essence of Pelagianism; determinism (original sin makes us not altogether responsible for our actions) of Augustinianism. None of us are sure how free we really are.
Invoking two opposed, but interpenetrating, kinds of theology, we find ourselves flirting with terms like good and evil. These, cut off from their base, tend to become semantically vague though strongly emotive. It is embarrassing to hear a politician use them, less embarrassing - though still disturbing - to hear him juggling with right and wrong. Strictly, the moral duality which these words represent is within the province of the State, while good and evil relate to theological permanencies. What is right, what is wrong? Whatever the State says. It is right to hate Eastasia and then, in the next breath, wrong. It is right to eat potatoes in a time of glut, wrong to eat them in a time of shortage. The Conservatives are wrong and we, the Socialists, are right - a matter of premises. The laws of the State are always changing and, with them, the values of right and wrong. The need to oppose unchanging values to the State's flighty judgements makes us ready to say that this enactment is good, even though it is wrong, and that one, though right, evil.
It has always been easier to point to examples of evil than of good. An Augustinian might say: inevitably, since evil is in our nature, and good not. Good, anyway, is a word with a wide spectrum of meaning: we are liable to confuse ethical good with what, for want of a better term, we must call aesthetic good. One of the great human mysteries is supposed to be provided by the Nazi death camps. A commandant who had supervised the killing of a thousand Jews went home to hear his daughter play a Schubert sonata and cried with holy joy. How was this possible? How could a being so dedicated to evil move without difficulty into a world so divinely good? The answer is that the good of music has nothing to do with ethics. Art does not elevate us into beneficence. It is morally neutral, like the taste of an apple. Instead of recognizing a verbal confusion we ponder an anomaly, or, like George Steiner, assert
that a devotion to art renders men less sensitive to moral imperatives. 'Men who wept at Werther or Chopin moved, unrealizing, through literal hell.' There is no real mystery.
When we say, 'God is good,' what do we mean? Presumably that God is beneficent and works directly on his creation to secure its happiness. But it is difficult to imagine and harder to believe. It is far easier to conceive of God's goodness as somehow analogous to the goodness of a grilled steak or of a Mozart symphony - eternally gratifying and of an infinite intensity; self-sufficient, moreover, with the symphony hearing itself and the eaten also the eater. The goodness of art, not of holy men, is the better figure of divine goodness.
The goodness of a piece of music and the goodness of a beneficent action have one thing in common - disinterestedness. The so-called good citizen merely obeys the laws, accepting what the State tells him is right or wrong. Goodness has little to do with citizenship. It is not enacted out of obedience to law, to gain praise or avoid punishment. The good act is the altruistic act. It is not blazoned and it seeks no reward. One can see how it is possible to glimpse a fancied connection between the goodness of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony - composed in deafness, disease, squalor and poverty - and that of the saint who gives his cloak to the naked, embraces the leper, dies to save others. But Beethoven's goodness is outside the field of action, to which the saint is so committed. Art is a vision of heaven gratuitously given. Being quasi-divine, it is beyond human concerns. Unlike the heaven of Christian doctrine, it is as freely available to the morally evil as to the morally good: the equivalent of St Augustine's God's grace, impartially bestowed. This, to the narrower moralist, renders it suspect.
What, then, is the good act? To clothe the naked, tend the sick, feed the hungry, teach the ignorant. These separate acts add up to a concern with promoting, or restoring, in a living organism its native capacity to act freely within the limits of its natural environment. These acts are always good, but they are not always right. Ignorance is strength, says Ingsoc. The Nazis said: let the Jews shiver, starve and die. The good act admits no differentiation of race or species in its object. It is good to mend the broken wing of a bird or to save the life of a Gauleiter. The goodness of the saint is characterized by total disinterestedness; the goodness of lesser beings may have motives mixed, unaware, not clearly understood; but the good act tends to grow wild and be unrelated to expediency, policy or law. The good intention, as we know too well, may have evil consequences. Charles Dickens, involved in a train crash, went around pouring brandy indiscriminately down the throats of the injured, thus killing several. He was not, however, a murderer. But the capacity to perform the truly good act is related to a high degree of intelligence and knowledge. Progress may be regarded as a gradual increase in human capacity to understand motivation and free good intentions from the evil of ignorance.
Evil, in its purest form, shares with good this attribute of disinterestedness. If good is concerned with promoting the ability in a living organism to act freely, evil must be dedicated to taking such freedom away. If we are Pelagians, we accept that man has total liberty of moral choice. To remove that choice is to dehumanize. Evil is at its most spectacular when it enjoys turning a living soul into a manipulable object. To confer death is evil enough, but torture has always been regarded as worse. The State has a considerable interest in dehumanizing. It tends to arrogate to itself all matters of moral choice, and it does not care much to see the individual making up his own mind. It is essential that men in power maintain a distinction between the will of the ruler and the will of the ruled. The will of the ruler must, ideally, be totally free; that of the ruled of a greater or lesser freedom, according to the greater or lesser autocratic nature of the State. The State is the instrument whereby the ruler manifests power over the ruled. In so far as this instrument must meet as little opposition as possible in performing its function, it may be said that evil as manifested in the State can never be wholly disinterested. But Orwell's cacotopia represents the establishment of an authority so sure of itself that it can afford to find its chief delight in committing evil for its own sake - that is to say, slowly, deliberately, systematically reducing men and women to gibbering subhuman creatures screaming under torture. This is the ultimate cacotopia, to which Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and a host of little autocracies have tended but which they have never been able to achieve.
It is perhaps typical of Orwell's wholly secular culture that he could see the possibility of evil only in the State. Evil was not for the individual: original sin was a doctrine to be derided. Orwell's Socialism permitted, even insisted, that man should be capable of moral as well as economic improvement. His Augustinian pessimism only applied to that projection of man known as the oligarchical State. The State is the devil, but there is no God. The view that evil is somehow outside the individual still persists in a West that has discarded all but the rags of its traditional beliefs. Evil is accepted, to be seen in the My-Lai massacre, in the Charles Manson slaughters, in the daily rapes and murders that animate the streets of major American cities. But it is comforting to believe that this evil is not built into the human entity, as Augustine taught,' but comes from without, like a disease. The devil and his attendant demons own the monopoly of evil, and they are concerned with possessing human souls and lighting them up with all the panoply of evil, from blasphemy to cannibalism. They can, perhaps, be exorcised. But evil does not grow in man himself. The superstitious feel happier about their own back-slidings if they can attribute them to the Father of Lies. The Orwellians blame it all on Big Brother.
Orwell seemed to believe that the real world, as opposed to that of his feverish and genuinely diseased imagination, was moving in the direction of bigger and worse cacotopias. States would grow greater and more powerful. Equipped with the most devilish technology of oppression, they would more and more reduce the individual to a gibbering humanoid. The future presented an unequal contest between man and the State, and man's defeat would be humiliating and total. We must now see if his prophecy is coming true.
State and superstate: a conversation
How does today's world of international politics compare with the one that Orwell envisaged?
Very different. There are superpowers, but they don't find it easy to exercise control over the lesser states. The lesser states have not been absorbed into the big ones. The post-war age has been remarkable for the spirit of devolution, uncountable acts of decolonization, the setting up of a host of independent tyrannies, oligarchies and genuine democracies. True, we talk much of spheres of influence, interlocking systems and so on, but there are no great centralized blocs on the Orwell model, all sharing similar ideologies. And where does the power lie? The literal power that drives machines sleeps in Islamic oil. To Orwell, the Middle East was to be merely part of the trapezial zone of cheap labour for the superstates to quarrel over. Islam is one of the genuine superstates, with a powerful religious ideology whose mailed first punched Christendom in the Dark Ages and may yet reimpose itself on a West drained, thanks to the Second Vatican Council, of solid and belligerent belief.
Dear dear. But you have to admit that the main outlines of Orwell's prophecy have come true. America, Russia and China will do, surely, for the three great nightmare powers, armed to the teeth, ready for explosion.
But not exploding. There've been no dangerous naked encounters. Logomachies, yes, but no nuclear attacks on New York or Moscow or Peking.
No condition of perpetual warfare?
Two minor wars a year on average, true. India fights Pakistan, Israel fights Egypt, Jordan fights Syria. Shooting matches in Palestine, Cyprus, Kenya, Aden, Java, Indo-China, Algeria, Angola, Mozambique, Goa, Tibet, Nigeria, Greece, Dutch New Guinea, the Congo. But no engagement of the superpowers, except by proxy. Korea and Vietnam. So-called Russian advisers on the Golan Heights in 1967. Both Russians and Chinese training the guerrillas of the People's Liberation Front in South Yemen. But Russian forces have only been directly and openly i
nvolved in their own sphere of action - to counter the East German rising of 1953, to put down the Hungarians in 1956, the Czechs in 1968.
But there's the germ of Orwell's Eurasia -sovietized Europe.
How much of Europe? Western Europe became sick of authoritarianism after not only Hitler but years of Prussianism, Hapsburgism. Russia could only build Eurasia by force. And Russia's scared of using too much force. So is America. The great paradox of the period since 1945 has been the intrepidity of the little nations in the waging of little wars and the reluctance of the great powers to face each other directly.
Those looked to me very much like direct encounters, or very nearly so - the Korean armistice in 1953, the missile business in Cuba in 1962.
But the assumption that Orwell made, and he wasn't the only one - big atomic war to be followed by a thug's agreement to keep a limited conventional warfare going - seems to belong to a very remote past. We all feared the Bomb once: it was our daily nightmare. Look at the literature that came out of the late forties and the fifties. Take Aldous Huxley's Ape and Essence with its picture of post-Bomb Southern California reverted to savagery, with mutated freaks killed at birth, seasonal sex, the Lord of the Flies, Bomb-bringer, appeased with prayers and sacrifice. Take L. P. Hartley's Facial Justice, with a guilt-ridden post-atomic world in which everybody is named after a murderer and all human enterprise is blocked, because all we do is evil. Take Dr Strangelove, as late as the early sixties. Take novels like Fail-Safe. Orwell failed to see that the terror would come about before a nuclear war could get started. So did everybody else.
He failed to see, also, that mere atomic bombs would be quickly followed by thermonuclear devices of far ghastlier potential. I suppose you could sum up the nuclear age like this - the big powers scared to act except vicariously, or in minor acts of punition in their own spheres of influence; the little nations warring around the immobile feet of the giants. The giants aware of the ease with which the ultimate blast could be triggered, aware too of the consequences - not millions of dead people but a macrotonnage of ruined electronic equipment on both, or all, sides; the pygmies innocent in their belligerence.
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