1985

by Anthony Burgess

  And outside the house where you sit watching it?

  Old buildings coming down, more and more high-rises. All cities looking the same, though lacking the raffish glamour of old Manhattan. Not many people in the streets at night, what with uncontrollable violence from the young. Women in trousers and men in kilts - not all, of course. Yves St Laurent makes kilts cheap and popular, arguing that men are not anatomically fitted for pants, though women are.

  And what will 2000 smell and taste like?

  The air has to be cleaner. It's a sign of grace on the part of America that America is aware of pollution, whereas so much of Europe, Italy for instance, pollutes without knowing or caring. England got a terrible shock in 1951, when smog killed off not only human bronchitics but prize exhibits at the Smithfield Cattle Show - cows and bulls worth far more than mere human beings. This mustn't happen again, so London was made into a smokeless zone. London air is breathable now, which it wasn't in the time of Dickens, and fish are returning to the Thames. When we're shocked sufficiently, then we're prepared to act. The air of the future will smell of nothing. Alas, food will increasingly taste of nothing, except additives. The steady decline of the taste of food, which I've marked since boyhood (I remember what the food of the twenties tasted like), goes on. The human body will become a better-cared-for instrument, but it will be less dedicated to pleasure than the syphilitic body of the Renaissance. Even the pleasure of sex has diminished, since there's so much of it available. Sex to me, as a young man, was unattainable caviar. Now it's hamburger steak and children of ten are allowed to eat it. The permissive age will last through 2000, and films and magazines will work hard at devising new variations on the basic copulatory theme. There's a limit, I should think. There's a law of diminishing returns. Abortion will be cheap and easy. A gloriously apt correlation between the disposability of the foetus and the availability of sex, since both proclaim the cheapness of human flesh.

  Religion?

  The Christian ecumenical movement will have reached its limit, meaning that Catholicism will have turned into Protestantism and Protestantism into agnosticism. The young will still be after the bizarre and mystical, with new cults and impossible Moon-type leaders. But Islam will not have lost any of its rigour. G. K. Chesterton published a novel called The Flying Inn at the beginning of this century, in which he fantastically depicted an England flying the star and crescent, with drink forbidden and two men and a dog rolling a barrel of rum round the roads, in constant danger from the Muslim police, trying to keep the memory of liquor alive. I see a distinct possibility of the fulfilment of the vision, say about 2100. Supernature abhors a super-vacuum. With the death of institutional Christianity will come the spread of Islam.

  I'd say that universal communism is a greater likelihood.

  Isn't the term communism a vague verbal counter, all overtones and no fundamental note, in the minds of most Americans? History may, not much later than 2000, prove that the Marxist sequence was wrong. He thought revolution would come in the highly industrialized countries, with the workers turning against the capitalist oppressor. The answer to capitalist oppression has been syndicalism, not revolution. Revolution comes about in the underdeveloped countries, and it may be that the historical sequence is poverty, communism, capitalism. Take your choice of tyrannies - you're free to. I prefer the mild tyranny of the consumer philosophy. The underdeveloped nations have no choice. Communism is what happens to Lower Slobovia, not the United States.

  Orwell says that Newspeak is fundamental to Ingsoc, that Newspeak in a sense is Ingsoc. Isn't it possible that the way language is developing, or deteriorating, we're preparing our minds for an incapacity to make rational choices, leaving them empty to be filled by some dictatorial philosophy?

  There's a huge fissure in language. On the one hand, you have the rigidities of science and technology, where terms or words or symbols mean precisely what they say, on the other you have increasing vagueness, an oscillation between total inarticulacy and polysyllabic high-sounding gibberish. In American English you have a distressingly schizoid yoking of slang and jargon, like, 'Right, now let's zero in on the nitty-gritty of the implied parameters of the ontological, shit what's the word, right, yah, constatation.' I notice a tendency to pure verbalization, especially in public utterances, which we always expect to be lying or evasive. I mean, a statement can sound as if it had a meaning, so long as there's a coherent syntactical structure. The words have just got to be organized into a pattern of some kind, but it doesn't matter what the words mean.

  Example?

  Well, a newsman asks a president or a cabinet minister if there's going to be a war, and the reply is something like, 'There are various parameters of feasibility, all of which merit serious examination in the context of the implications of your question, Joe. The overall pattern of strike capability on both sides of the hypothetical global dichotomy is in process of detailed scrutiny, and the termporal element involved cannot, of course, be yet quantified with any certainty. Does that answer your question, Joe?' And Joe has to say, 'Thank you, sir.' Apart from what we can call the Language of Professional Evasion, there's an increasing tendency in ordinary communication to use technical language which has not been clearly understood. Things like 'a meaningful relationship,' which ought to mean a love affair, and 'you're overreacting,' which probably means: you're being damnably and unneccessary rude. Then there are all the acronyms, which a lot of people use without being able to reconstitute into the component antilogarithms - God, now I'm doing it. I mean, SALT and MASH and CHAOS.

  What's CHAOS?

  Council of the Hagiarchy of Anathematists of Onanistic Sex.

  What will the English language be like in, say, the year 3000?

  As sound? As semantemes and morphemes? Let's consider sound first. Remember there are many forms of English, all with equally respectable ancestries, but it seems that, on both sides of the Atlantic, we're accepting a kind of educated norm - newsreader's English, call it. It's not all that different in London from what it is in New York. New York English is conservative as to its sounds; it's closer to Pilgrim Father English, or Shakespearean English. London English has moved on a bit, bringing in the long a oibaaaath, for example, and making home sound like heume. Now, I always say that if Chaucer knew about the inherent instability of long vowels, he'd be able, in 1400, to predict what speech would be like in 2000. He'd know, for instance, that mouse, which he pronounced like the French mousse, would end up like the German Maus. What I mean is, it's possible to make rough prophecies about phonological change in English. You can't, by the way, necessarily hold change back by fixing language through film and tape and cassette. Spoken language tends to go its own way. I'll make one prediction about vowel sounds in the year 3000 - they'll all tend to move towards the middle of the mouth, approaching the sound we make at the end of lava or the beginning of apart. Consonants haven't changed much since the year 1000, and I don't think there'll be much change a thousand years ahead, but vowels will sound more and more like each other. Light and loud will be differentiated mainly by the final consonants. All this must sound frivolous, but you want to get the feel of the future -

  How about language as meaning?

  Have you noticed one curious, and rather endearing, thing about Nineteen Eighty-Four - the penchant for rural metaphors or similes that Orwell passes on to his characters? O'Brien talks of taking the child from the mother as we take an egg from the hen. The three superstates are spoken of as leaning on each other to keep each other upright, like three stooks in a hayfield. Winston and Julia have no doubt that the bird they heard singing was a thrush. There's too much country knowledge in this story of the ultimate urban culture. What's happening with our language already, and is going to happen far more, is the steady elimination of rural particularities, so that elm and oak and sycamore will have no very clear meaning, and all trees will be summed up as tree. Birds will be bird. Flowers will be flower. Language will become more and more abstract i
n its vocabulary, and its speakers will occasionally erupt against this in more and more ingenious obscenities, but obscenities too will be very generic. There'll be a large everyday technical vocabulary to replace the old natural one - words for the parts of a refrigerator, a tape deck and so on. But language will be cut off from its roots in basic physical experience. Language of the brain rather than of the body.

  How about words like love, honour, duty, God, fidelity, treason, hate, infamy?

  It is going to be extremely difficult, in the absence of a traditional system of moral values, to give words like that any precise meaning. There's a vague emotional connotation attached to each, but little more. It's here that the danger lies. Any dictatorial regime can take hold of these words, exploit the emotional response they excite, but provide its own definitions. 'God is the supreme being. I am the supreme being. Therefore I am God.' Yeah, man, but you ain't, you know, like spiritual. 'What do you mean by spiritual?' You tell me, man. 'With pleasure.'

  Koestler says that we can only get rid of national enmities based on international misunderstanding by having a world language. Is that possible?

  We already have a world auxiliary - English. It's the language of commerce and air traffic, for instance. Ogden and Richards made, in the thirties, a reduced form of English, limited to about 850 words, called Basic. The British Government bought the rights to it, and it was in that that Orwell saw the possibility of language clear and simple and orthodox imposed on the people by the State. There can be an agreed imposition of a kind of Basic in all the countries of the world - a second language taught compulsorily in schools. But that can never be allowed to replace the first language.

  Can governments tell us what words to use and what not to use - as with Newspeak?

  They're certainly telling us what words we may not use. And it's not the governments so much as the pressure groups working on the governments. I don't doubt that, in Britain, there'll be a Restriction of Language Act. Certain racist terms, like kike and sheeny and wog and wop and, most terrible of all, nigger, are already taboo, as the four-letter obscenities used to be, and the next step is to make them illegal. The Gay Liberation movement - which ought to be prevented, by law if need be, from limiting a fine old word to a coy, giggly, totally inaccurate and quite arbitrary signification - will demand that terms like poofter, fag, pansy and so on be made illegal. Even your bowl of pansies on the dining-room table may be against the law, unless you call them geraniums. And then there are the forces of Women's Liberation, which demand a reorientation of generic pronouns, so that he and his cannot be used for either sex, and for that matter the generic term man - which in German corresponds to the pronoun one - must be replaced by some fabricated monstrosity like manwoman or, better, womanman. The Rights of Womanman. Already chairman has become chairperson, and there has been a response from accoucheurs, who want midwife turned to midperson. Now the Women's Lib philologists are probably working on tallboy, carboy, chessman and, conceivably, talisman. We're moving in the direction of increasing restrictions on speech as well as action, but few of these spring from a Big Brother kind of lust for centralized control. They derive from what, I suppose, must be termed a democratic situation.

  We have an anomaly before us, then - pressurizable governments aware of their weakness, and yet increasing loss of liberty?

  The governments of the West - and this may apply soon to the governments of the Soviet bloc - are less concerned about political orthodoxy than with people paying their taxes. Fiscal tyranny is not the worst tyranny you can get, but it's nasty enough, and it's going to get worse.

  It only applies to people with money, and the great majority of the world's inhabitants earn too little to be taxed. Hadn't we better cease thinking narrowly about the future of the West - whether or not there's going to be more freedom or less - and concentrate on the future of the planet?

  It's too much. As Voltaire said, we must cultivate our own Hesperides.

  Hesperides?

  Gardens of the West. Progress won't come through dilution, everybody being poor together.

  Are you pessimistic about man, or manwoman?

  Man has survived the first thirty-three years of the Era of the Bomb. He'll survive whatever new horrors are in store for him. He's remarkably ingenious.

  And if he doesn't survive?

  There remains Life. You remember the words of Lilith at the end of Shaw's Back to Methuselah? I do:

  'Of Life only is there no end; and though of its million starry mansions many are empty and many still unbuilt, and though its vast domain is as yet unbearably desert, my seed shall one day fill it and master its matter to its uttermost confines. And for what may be beyond, the eyesight of Lilith is too short. It is enough that there is a beyond.'

  That's what I believe in - mind, free mind, trying to understand itself as well as the world without, and to hell with the little men who try to stop free enquiry and the State is all that matters and no one has a right to hear Beethoven while the Third World starves.

  You're under arrest.

  I beg your pardon?

  You're under arrest.

  You're joking. Yes, joking. I knew somehow you were joking.

  But for a moment you thought I was serious.

  Yes, I did. God help me, I did. You think even the right to free speech may be a lulling device of Big Brother? You think he's really watching us? That he'll emerge as the persona of some great industrial combine, an international octopus, just when we least expect him?

  We have to be on our guard.

  I'll accept that.

  Monaco 1978

  1 Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (London: Victor Gollancz, 1937; new edition, Penguin, 1989), p. 204.

  2 Quoted in Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life (London: Secker & Warburg, 1980), pp. 322-3.