Preparing for 1984

January 2, 1983
Lakeland
Port Charlotte

Introduction:
George Orwell – Biographical Comments

After preparing my presentation on 1984, it occurred to me that George Orwell, the man, the writer, his personal history would be a help to my understanding, and perhaps to yours.

He was born in India in 1903, child of a British civil servant. The child and his sister were taken to England following a usual custom for rearing and education in the mother country. His real name was Eric Blair and he did not adopt his pen name, George Orwell, until rather late in his life.

When he was eight years old he was placed in a boarding school, St. Cyprians, where he was a student until the age of 13. Some commentators on his life felt that St. Cyprians was an experience that strongly influenced his life-long distrust of power and authority. The education system at St. Cyprians was one of continuous caning even for trivial things, surveillance (Big Brother is watching you) – even letters sent home to parents. The food, housing, and sanitation at St. Cyprians were wretched. [CJW note: proprietors “build character”]

He did well enough in his studies to qualify in a competitive examination for Eton. At Eton, he did not do well enough to qualify for college. It was not that he was idle or wasted his time. He was more interested in reading an studying subjects outside the curriculum. Particularly, he found his interest in socialist ideas, reading such non-conformist thinkers as G.B. Shaw, the Webbs, Bertrand Russell, H.G. Wells, and earlier radical thinkers.

Following Eton, there was little opportunity in England for the impoverished son of a middle class family. He took exams for foreign civil service and qualified. He was assigned to Burma, where he served in several posts, including Rangoon and Mandalay.

After a few years, he resigned, appalled and disgusted at the racialism, despotism, attitudes, and practices of the British Imperial system. The discrimination, injustice, and cruelty toward the indigenous Burmese deeply impressed him. [CJW note: Epigram: “When the white man turns tyrant, it is his own freedom he destroys.”]

So he returned, determined to be a writer. He spent poverty-stricken years, first in Paris and then in England, seldom getting anything published. At first he was not a good writer – he had to learn his craft by keeping at it in spite of the growing pile of rejection slips.

In 1937, Orwell, still Eric Blair, went to Spain to write about the Civil War and stayed to take part, joining the Republican militia. At the time, Orwell preferred the Communist party. But he became thoroughly disillusioned. He found that the Communist party did not favor real revolution of the workers. Similarly he had nothing but contempt, horror, and disgust for the Franco forces, helped as they were by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.

He had been wounded, shot in the throat in trenches dug for shorter men. He was 6’4” and neglected to duck down. His health, never very robust, was bad – the TB of which he was to die was in its early stages.

So he returned to England. In order to continue his so-far unsuccessful writing career, he was a part-time teacher, bookstore worker, and what not. There came some literary recognition. [CJW note: ardently against Nazism, tried to enlist – health] His stories of his Asian period, BURMESE DAYS, and THE STORY OF A HANGING, were published. In order not to embarrass his family, he took the pen name George Orwell. [CJW note: “such were the joys”]

But he remained an impoverished writer until his ANIMAL FARM was published. This is a savage parody of Stalinistic Communism and was a best-seller, particularly in the United States. You remember the famous phrase from that, “all are created equal, but some are more equal than others.”

He was on his deathbed when 1984 became a best-seller. He never lived to enjoy the wealth from its huge sales, dying at the age of 46.

Such was the man who wrote 1984.

He remained true to his socialist beliefs, always insisting that both equality and liberty were not only possable, but essential. He feared dictatorships, based on his experiences in Burma and Spain as well as Nazism. In a review of a book on the Russian government, he wrote (BIO, p. 247):

“The terrifying thing about the modern dictatorships is that they are something entirely unprecedented. Their end cannot be foreseen. In the past every tyranny was sooner or later overthrown, or at least resisted, because of ‘human nature,’ which as a matter of course, desired liberty. But we cannot be certain that ‘human nature’ is constant. It may be just as possible to produce a breed of men who do not wish for liberty as to produce a breed of hornless cows. The Inquisition failed, but then the Inquisition had not the resources of the modern state. The radio, press – censorship, standardized education and the secret police have altered everything. Mass suggestion is a science of the last 20 years, and we do not know yet how successful it will be.”

As a final quotation from Orwell, and pertinent to preparing for 1984, he said once in response to savage criticism from the Communist left on his ANIMAL FARM:

“Liberty is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

Sermon Starts Here:

In my time there is no other literary work which has so grasped the horrors of total tyranny than George Orwell’s novel 1984. When it was first published in 1949, one reviewer wrote that it was “timely as the label on a poison bottle.” Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wrote “the most powerful and terrifying novel I have read in years, Orwell’s brilliant and despairing glimpse into the totalitarian future plumbs the depths of human pride and degradation more vividly than anything since Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor.”

As we enter the early stages of 1983, I am taking a look at Orwell’s 1984. His despairing prophecies have proved inaccurate. The all-encompassing tyranny will not happen here – at least in 1984. But was he wrong only in dating the book prematurely? Re-reading 1984 has made me particularly sensitive to the values I believe most Unitarian Universalists hold as a priority – freedom and human dignity. Is 1984 a serious warning or Orwell’s foolish and fearful fantasy?

1984 is a dismal, totally oppressed world of food shortages, miserable housing, and continuous war. There are three superpowers in the world – Oceania (the British Isles and America), Eurasia (present Europe and the Soviet Union), and East Asia (China, Japan, Korea). [CJW note: neo-Bolshevism, obliteration of the self] Winston Smith, the central character of 1984, lives in London which is part of Ingsoc (English socialism), one of the provinces of Oceania. Oceania is at war always with Eurasia or East Asia. The war is always centered for control of what we know as the Near East – the Arabian countries and India.

The enemy changes without notice. One moment, Oceania is at war with Eurasia, next East Asia. As all information is strictly controlled, occasionally the thought occurs to Smith that there is no war at all. The war may be a propaganda device to justify cruel repression and severe shortages.

The population in Ingsoc is divided into the Inner Party, the Outer Party, and the Proles – the Proletarians. The latter are little more than beasts of burden doing the heavy work. They are controlled by daily hate sessions against the enemy. They are also diverted from rebellious ideas by TV amusements, beer, football, and gambling.

The Inner Party controls completely. Big Brother is the ruler. He is constantly pictured on posters [and] the TV screen with the slogan, “Big Brother is watching you.” Big brother face is strong, dominating, attractive, a man in his late forties. But does he exist? Winston Smith wonders this, as no one seems to have ever seen Big Brother in person. Smith does not even know anyone in the Inner Party and does not inquire. No one inquires because the Thought Police are omnipresent, alert for the smallest signs of non-conformity. Non-conformity is thought crime and the penalty for thought crime is death, after excruciating torture.

The Party has three main slogans constantly drummed into the people:

War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength

Surveillance is constant. Every residence has a TV, even as we do, with one crucial difference. In 1984, the “telescreen” cannot be turned off and it is two-way. One never knows when one is being watched, when the telescreen is recording what one is reading or writing.

The government of Big Brother is divided into four ministries:

The Ministry of Truth – responsible for news (propaganda), entertainment, education, and the fine arts
The Ministry of Peace – which concerns itself with war
The Ministry of Love – which maintains law and order, thought control and administers torture, brainwashing, executions
The Ministry of Plenty – which is responsible for economic affairs and telling lies about the constant shortages of goods and services.

Winston Smith works for the Records department of the Ministry of Truth. He is one of thousands of minor bureaucrats whose task is to alter and revise events and history, to erase from the records someone whom the Inner Party has decided to make a non-person, to change all names and places when the Inner Party sends word that the war is with Eurasia, not East Asia, or vice versa. Any event may be revised:

“Who controls the past
Controls the future
Who controls the present
Controls the past.”

Winston Smith has memories of a different age, contrives to read forbidden books, and is betrayed by someone he thought sympathetic, but who actually was a member of the Thought Police.

In the end, after cruel torture and sophisticated and demonic mind control, Smith is brainwashed. The final lines of the book:

“He gazed up at the enormous face [of Big Brother]. Forty hears it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark mustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the side of his nose. But it was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”

Now in titling this talk, “Preparing for 1984,” you may wonder if I fear that before 24 months have ticked off, Big Brother will rule our lives, actions, thoughts. No, I do not. No thought police have knocked on my door recently. I speak my thoughts freely and publicly as you do and may. We have press, TV, radio uncontrolled in its expressions by the government. Those who own the media may print, picture, and say whatever they choose. What they choose to communicate, however, is subject to other controls, overt and subtle – they are profit-making enterprises, except for PBS and NPR. Profit-making enterprises are concerned not only with reporting and editorials, but with circulation, advertising and their percent of the viewing audience. But that’s another story, and we do have available other sources of information if we choose to seek them out.

If we maintain our vigilance to halt inroads on the 1st Amendment that would limit our freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, then the horrors of Orwell’s 1984 will not happen in this country. Such vigilance is our task and responsibility.

A considerable obligation in such vigilance is not to go-along on programmed turnabouts of the meaning of words. Words and phrases mean what they indicate. I believe one of our most precious possessions is the English language. Freedom, liberty, parliament, representative democracy, the people’s right to choose are value words which should not be demeaned or bastardized to the end that they will fade into insignificance.

There is a lighter side to this. Watching some commercials and their claims, I never know whether to be hilariously amused or outraged.

A clipping I have is both amusing and instructive:

“A staffer at the World Council of Churches provided a glossary that is to be of help in bureaucracies, be they sacred or secular. It includes, “Potential for growth – You will be offered a low starting wage. Innovative – Can you straighten out the mess the last person left? To perform general duties – The coffee had better be good, and you may have to edit a magazine. Conscientious – Go easy on the photocopying machine. Ability to work in a team – The last person who held this job had a nervous breakdown. Willing to learn – You will be offered a low starting wage. Imaginative – Imagine that the job is terrific. Enthusiastic – The work would bore a chimpanzee.” (One World)

However, there is, in my view, a much more serious aspect. This talk began germinating in my thoughts when our President announced that he was re-naming the MX nuclear missile “The Peacekeeper.” Renaming does not change the reality that it is a nuclear weapon of war. Did you see the cartoon in THE LEDGER, Dec. 6th? [shows political cartoon of missile named Peacekeeper, submarine named Gandhi, tank named Plowshare, and fighter jet named Heavenly Messenger]

I have the uneasy feeling that chemical weapons may be renamed “angelic clouds” and germ warfare, “bacterial blessing.” After substituting “revenue enhancement” for tax increase and “user fee” for gasoline tax, the turnabouts in meaning seem endless. Two derivatives of Murphy’s Law can be recalled. First, Leahy’s Law: “If a thing is done wrong often enough, it becomes right.” Second, Maier’s Law: “If the facts do not conform to the theory, they must be disposed of.”

If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a donkey have? 5? No, 4 – calling a tail a leg does not make it a leg. (Lincoln - folk wisdom of a wiser and greater President).

One of the chilling events in George Orwell’s 1984 was the plan of the Inner party to replace English with what was named Newspeak. Orwell writes (p. 303), “the purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible.”

Much more necessary to us is the plain statement Jesus is reported to have said in the Sermon on the Mount, “But let your communication be ‘yea, yea’ or ‘nay, nay.’” (Matthew 5/37)

Or at greater length, the enduring advice Hamlet gave to the players (Act II, Sc. 2). Part of what Shakespeare put in Hamlet’s mouth:

“Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it as many of our players do, I had as Leif the town crier spoke my lines ....

“Suit the action to the word, the word to the action ....

“And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them.”

George Orwell was wrong in posting 1984 as a year in which totalitarian cruelty was entirely in command in Great Britain and the Americas. Many of the events he narrated in his novel did not happen. Writing in 1949, he predicted an atomic war in the 1950s – a war which led to 3 Super Powers, all totalitarian. Now it seems uncertain, rather, unlikely, that there could be enough survivors from a nuclear war to form even totalitarian states.

A French nobleman visiting Russia noted, “It is a government in which the government says what it pleases, because it alone has the right to speak.” That was in 1839. (See Hugh Thomas, HISTORY, p. 534). [CJW note: tradition – different]

But do not blithely assume that it can’t happen here. It can if we are docile, let “experts” in the Pentagon, White House, and conservative think tanks do our thinking for us and rest placidly under the assumption that government and military experts know best. From George Orwell’s biography, p. 265, Orwell’s diary entry:

“Stephen Spender said to me recently, ‘Don’t you feel that any time during the last ten years you have been able to foretell events better than, say, the Cabinet?’ Where I feel that people like us understand the situation better than so-called experts is not in any power to foretell specific events but in the power to grasp what KIND of world we are living in. At any rate, I have known since about 1931 that the future must be catastrophic.”

Unitarian Universalism has been called a religion of “words,” whereas orthodox Christianity is “The Word.” Well, if that’s a criticism, it’s one I accept gladly.

Thomas Paine’s words, Thomas Jefferson’s words, James Madison’s words, Abraham Lincoln’s words, were born of the struggle for freedom and the experience shaped those words and phrases. Our obligation is to maintain the values and do our best to prevent distortion of their meanings.