A shattered world: Revisiting “1984”

I’ve been re-reading 1984 from beginning to end, which is something I don’t think I’ve done since 1984 itself, when I was graduate TA for a class about the book. I’ve looked up certain passages many times in the interim, but I’ve been struck by how I had forgotten much of the book’s actual plot.

One thing I had also sort of forgotten is what an incredibly grim book it is. Taken as prophecy — which in some ways it was clearly intended to be, although Orwell also emphasized that it was a satire of the present rather than a literal prediction of the future — the book’s message could be reduced to this famous passage:

He paused, and for a moment assumed again his air of a schoolmaster questioning a promising pupil: ‘How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?’

Winston thought. ‘By making him suffer,’ he said.

‘Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery is torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.’

Part of what gives the book its extraordinary bleakness is that Orwell was a sick and eventually dying man, as he wrote it in fits and starts between 1944 and 1948, doing much of the writing on a primitive and isolated island off Scotland. (Orwell died of tuberculosis just seven months after the book was published in the summer of 1949).

But here I want to focus on another factor, which is that it’s difficult to appreciate today what an utterly catastrophic period the years 1914-1945 — essentially all of Orwell’s life after his early childhood, as he was born in 1903 — was for the world view that had dominated much of intellectual life, at least in the western world, for many decades prior to that. Orwell captures this shift in an essay about H.G. Wells’s failure to grasp the meaning of Nazism:

 If one looks through nearly any book that [Wells] has written in the last forty years one finds the same idea constantly recurring: the supposed antithesis between the man of science who is working towards a planned World State and the reactionary who is trying to restore a disorderly past. In novels, Utopias, essays, films, pamphlets, the antithesis crops up, always more or less the same. On the one side science, order, progress, internationalism, aeroplanes, steel, concrete, hygiene: on the other side war, nationalism, religion, monarchy, peasants, Greek professors, poets, horses. History as he sees it is a series of victories won by the scientific man over the romantic man. Now, he is probably right in assuming that a ‘reasonable,’ planned form of society, with scientists rather than witch-doctors in control, will prevail sooner or later, but that is a different matter from assuming that it is just round the corner. There survives somewhere or other an interesting controversy which took place between Wells and Churchill at the time of the Russian Revolution. Wells accuses Churchill of not really believing his own propaganda about the Bolsheviks being monsters dripping with blood, etc., but of merely fearing that they were going to introduce an era of common sense and scientific control, in which flag-wavers like Churchill himself would have no place. Churchill’s estimate of the Bolsheviks, however, was nearer the mark than Wells’s. The early Bolsheviks may have been angels or demons, according as one chooses to regard them, but at any rate they were not sensible men. They were not introducing a Wellsian Utopia but a Rule of the Saints, which like the English Rule of the Saints, was a military despotism enlivened by witchcraft trials. The same misconception reappears in an inverted form in Wells’s attitude to the Nazis. Hitler is all the war-lords and witch-doctors in history rolled into one. Therefore, argues Wells, he is an absurdity, a ghost from the past, a creature doomed to disappear almost immediately. But unfortunately the equation of science with common sense does not really hold good. The aeroplane, which was looked forward to as a civilising influence but in practice has hardly been used except for dropping bombs, is the symbol of that fact. Modern Germany is far more scientific than England, and far more barbarous. Much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany. The order, the planning, the State encouragement of science, the steel, the concrete, the aeroplanes, are all there, but all in the service of ideas appropriate to the Stone Age. Science is fighting on the side of superstition. But obviously it is impossible for Wells to accept this. It would contradict the world-view on which his own works are based. The war-lords and the witch-doctors must fail, the common-sense World State, as seen by a nineteenth-century Liberal whose heart does not leap at the sound of bugles, must triumph. Treachery and defeatism apart, Hitler cannot be a danger. That he should finally win would be an impossible reversal of history, like a Jacobite restoration.

Orwell conceived the plan for 1984 while the Nazis were still very much not defeated, and he wrote it in the shadow of the triumph of a Stalinist dictatorship which was every bit as totalitarian — and indeed quite a bit more “rational” in modern bureaucratic terms — as the Nazis themselves.

The other huge development that shaped the writing of the novel was the invention and deployment of the atom bomb, which of course did not exist when he began writing the book. The novel imagines some sort of devastating nuclear exchange in the 1950s, after which three mega-states divide the world up to avoid the complete annihilation of any form of civilization. Orwell’s thoughts on the atom bomb itself are also interesting:

Considering how likely we all are to be blown to pieces by it within the next five years, the atomic bomb has not roused so much discussion as might have been expected. The newspapers have published numerous diagrams, not very helpful to the average man, of protons and neutrons doing their stuff, and there has been much reiteration of the useless statement that the bomb “ought to be put under international control.” But curiously little has been said, at any rate in print, about the question that is of most urgent interest to all of us, namely: “How difficult are these things to manufacture?” . . .

From various symptoms one can infer that the Russians do not yet possess the secret of making the atomic bomb; on the other hand, the consensus of opinion seems to be that they will possess it within a few years. So we have before us the prospect of two or three monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds, dividing the world between them. It has been rather hastily assumed that this means bigger and bloodier wars, and perhaps an actual end to the machine civilisation. But suppose – and really this the likeliest development – that the surviving great nations make a tacit agreement never to use the atomic bomb against one another? Suppose they only use it, or the threat of it, against people who are unable to retaliate? In that case we are back where we were before, the only difference being that power is concentrated in still fewer hands and that the outlook for subject peoples and oppressed classes is still more hopeless.

This was, I would say, a very plausible hypothesis in the immediate aftermath of World War II. (The other big influence on Orwell’s thought here was James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution, which he discusses in another interesting essay).

In short, 1984 was written by a man whose entire life had been dominated by the spectacle of two incredibly destructive and insane wars, that killed collectively more than 100 million people, the industrialized mass murder of the Holocaust, the global crisis of capitalism in the 1930s, the rise of a new form of comprehensive despotism in the totalitarian regimes of Germany and the USSR, and the invention of a weapon via the most advanced form of scientific technology that clearly had the potential to destroy civilization.

This was a period that pretty much destroyed the sunny optimism of previous couple of generations, which assumed that science and technology, under the control of rational secular Enlightenment thinking, were guaranteeing that the arc of history was inevitably towards progress, understood in rational bureaucratic terms, and away from the superstitious despotism and desperate poverty of the past. (This of course was never a universally held view, but it was the dominant view of the educated classes in Europe and America from at least the late 18th century until August 1914).

1984 was written amid the smoldering wreckage of the events that had annihilated that optimism, which helps explain why it is such a remarkably grim dystopia.

. . . Should probably be a separate post, but I meant to mention how Trumpism must continue to seem like an inexplicable atavism to so many sensible liberals and moderates, in something like the way that Nazism appeared to be to Wells. History simply CANNOT reverse itself so grossly.