Nineteen Eighty-Four

You may notice that this blog post is a departure from my usual style, both in avoiding strictly computer-related topics and in being more forthcoming with information about my personal life. The latter is partly because I can’t do the book justice without conveying what an effect it has had on me and how connected I feel to it, and the former is because I feel it is my duty (and the duty of anyone like me who reads this book, which they should) to have my reaction to the book publicly scrutinised, at least in this pseudonymous forum. Therein, of course, lies some irony, that by highlighting the evils of a surveillance society, one draws more attention to oneself and thus makes oneself a bigger target for surveillance. Perhaps my answer to that should be Winston’s unsubstantiated objection (oh, by the way, SPOILER alert) “I don’t care. In the end they will beat you. Sooner or later they will see you for what you are, and then they will tear you to pieces.” Even in a much more dangerous situation than I am in today, although perhaps not in a situation as bad as Winston’s, it would be the right thing to stand up and be counted, to register my objection against surveillance societies.

First, I should list some of the coincidences which explain why I have strong associations with this book. Of course people are talking about “Big Brother” and describing things as “Orwellian” all the time, but I can’t help feeling I’m at the cusp of a singularity when today’s Slashdot random fortune cookie was “George Orwell 1984. Northwestern 0. —Chicago Reader 10/15/82”, and yesterday I bumped into (online) a friend I hadn’t spoken to in months and one of the first things he said to me was that a month ago he had read 1984 and it was now his favourite book. There is also a quite nice symmetry in that I read the first half of the book over Christmas and the second half over Pasch, but those are, after all, some of the few times I get to relax and just read. Then there is the on-going stuff like my boss describing our Monday Morning Meetings as “30 Minutes of Hate”. I even noticed that a couple of the slightly stranger scenes in the book reminded me very strongly of events which have actually happened to me, but I’m not going to list them here, as the book consists of people acting either subversively or oppressively, neither of which it would serve me to be associated with.

So what is the message of the book?

I don’t want to influence other people’s interpretation of the book, especially if they haven’t read it yet, but I think maybe it’s the sort of book where everyone reacts differently, based on an innate reaction, because of who you are. I had thought that the book would simply make the case that a hero should fight against an oppressive state, and either win or at least be vindicated in some way. Then when Winston’s relationship with Julia started, I assumed that his love for her would be shown to transcend the difficulties he faced, and possibly even empower him to fight against the state. I now realise that, to me at least, the message of the book is the complete opposite: The world it paints is an unmitigated dystopia, and Winston is an inveterate anti-hero. The book is not supposed to reassure you that you can succeed against impossible odds, it is to warn you that you can’t win once a state has accumulated enough power. That might just be me saying “It doesn’t have a happy ending”, but the actual lasting effect it has had on me is to inspire me with the idea that my duty, the duty of every voting, law-abiding, educated citizen, is to prevent a government ever gaining the power it needs to implement a society like the one described. (It should go without saying that whatever is true for “government” is doubly true for “unregulated corporate cartel”).

I should go into a little more detail about some of these points. Firstly, the idea of Winston being an anti-hero is one where I might disagree with people to some extent. Arguably Orwell was trying to present him as an Everyman, so his readers could relate to the character, including his flaws. For me, though, either Orwell went too far, or there is a better interpretation. Winston is not a revolutionary, he is not an idealist or a metaphysician. He does question the system, and does start to believe that he would be better off if the system were different, but that seems to be as far as he thinks, and always in terms of his own needs. It is his own poverty, and sickness, and stress that drive him, almost unintentionally, into a desire to escape the control of the Party in some way. At times, it seems he cannot think further than his own base physical desires: “Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something that you had a right to.”

Similarly, his relationship to Julia exemplifies his failure to hold himself to higher ideals. After separating from his wife, he is content to let a girl, whose beauty intimidates him, seek him out, and then merely follow her instructions in the hope of realising his dream: “Nor did the idea of refusing her advances even cross his mind. Only five nights ago he had contemplated smashing her skull in with a cobblestone, but that was of no importance. He thought of her naked, youthful body, as he had seen it in his dream. He had imagined her a fool like all the rest of them, her head stuffed with lies and hatred, her belly full of ice. A kind of fever seized him at the thought that he might lose her, the white youthful body might slip away from him!” The most sentiment he seemed capable of was the “vague idea that he would like to have a bunch of flowers to offer to the girl when they met.”

Overwhelmingly, I felt, Winston is shown to be effete, almost to the point of stretching the credibility of their relationship and thus the wider story: “His first feeling was relief, but as he watched the strong slender body moving in front of him, with the scarlet sash that was just tight enough to bring out the curve of her hips, the sense of his own inferiority was heavy upon him. ‘Now that you’ve seen what I’m really like, can you still bear to look at me?’ ‘Yes, easily.’ ‘I’m thirty-nine years old. I’ve got a wife that I can’t get rid of. I’ve got varicose veins. I’ve got five false teeth.’ ‘I couldn’t care less,’ said the girl.”

When, at the end of the book, he does start to profess some sort of deeper emotional attachment to her, it seems only to be an attempt by the author to justify the significance of the events in Room 101. He still can’t help writing things as contradictory and almost unbelievable as “He hardly thought of Julia. He could not fix his mind on her. He loved her and would not betray her; but that was only a fact, known as he knew the rules of arithmetic. He felt no love for her, and he hardly even wondered what was happening to her. He thought oftener of O’Brien, with a flickering hope O’Brien must know that he had been arrested.” and “Abruptly he was sitting up with O’Brien’s arm round his shoulders. He had perhaps lost consciousness for a few seconds. The bonds that had held his body down were loosened. He felt very cold, he was shaking uncontrollably, his teeth were chattering, the tears were rolling down his cheeks. For a moment he clung to O’Brien like a baby, curiously comforted by the heavy arm round his shoulders.” and “He opened his eyes and looked up gratefully at O’Brien. At sight of the heavy, lined face, so ugly and intelligent, his heart seemed to turn over. If he could have moved he would have stretched out a hand and laid it on O’Brien’s arm. He had never loved him so deeply as at this moment, and not merely because he had stopped the pain. … In some sense that went deeper than friendship, they were intimates…”

Conclusion

Not only, then, is the book a warning about the sort of society we must never allow be created, but it is also a warning about the fallibility of human emotions, which, without constant effort, leads people to fail in their responsibilities towards themselves, their loved ones, and their society. People have said “George Orwell got it wrong… he was 25 years too early.”, and it’s true that he didn’t predict the actual technological systems that were in place in 1984 (although his 1984 was in a parallel universe that diverged from his own many years before that date). He also didn’t predict some of the technologies that are now encircling our freedoms like a trap. It is possible to see this not as a failure, though, but as an artistic statement: it doesn’t matter whether the technology is an under-estimate, or even an over-estimate, the philosophical point of the book is that a totalitarian state need only have the power to alter reality in the minds of its subjects, even with an implementation as crude as a new dictionary, the speakwrites, and the telescreens, for that grip to remain unchallenged forever.

Having said that, if Orwell had predicted and included in his book an alternative course of events, where the Party, instead of sweeping to power in a revolution, had started off as a democratic institution, and slowly implemented a surveillance state under the guise of fighting a war (even a war against an abstract noun), then perhaps people would take heed of his message more. Societies so far have been quite successful at opposing the introduction of totalitarian states, and have usually managed to revolt before a sufficiently capable infrastructure of repression has been built. What societies haven’t faced, yet, is a democratic state building this infrastructure before making its totalitarian aims known. It behoves all of us to be aware of this possibility, and to not slip into thinking “I would know if we were becoming a fascist state (and possibly even do something about it) because there would be people in black shirts marching down the streets, waving banners.” In reality, we may find ourselves living in such a state without even realising anything has changed.

Is it a significant coincidence that the author best known for writing about a surveillance state being implemented in the UK has the same surname as the Prime Minister whose administration has done the most to implement one?