Orwell’s vision is a parody of reality and it is fairly obtuse of you not to see that. Gernamy and Japan were our bitter enemies in the early 40’s but now they are our allies. Sadaam was our “ally” in the eighties because he was not islamic fundamentalist Iran. Political alliances are largely a matter of convenience and timing.
What do you think would have happened if we had allowed Sadaam to keep Kuwait and posibly invade Saudi Arabia? Do you think it would be wise to allow Sadaam to keep control over a significant portion of the worlds oil reserves?
Making overly broad Orwellian anologies fails to examine the actual political situations that we find in the real world.
I couldn’t agree more, however, the question was pretty generic. We may not be living in the 1984, but its not impossible to eventually walk down that path. Sometimes i wonder if we don’t take a few steps in that direction as a nation (U.S). It doesn’t even have to be noticable by the general public either. Little things combined can make a big difference, and my question was to see perhaps how close we might be in heading down that direction.
If I understand you correctly, your position boils down to these points:
Technological advancement is fundamental to society.
An Orwellian system does not grant intellectual freedom, therefore it cannot maintain existing technology has let alone create new ones.
A society that is technologically stagnant is doomed to collapse.
These are interesting ideas. Let’s consider them as they relate to the book.
1. Technological advancement is fundamental to society.
Modern civilization appears to be driven by technology the same way past civilizations were driven by conquest, but this may be an illusion caused by our immersion in it. In other words, we may not be seeing the forest on account of all the trees. Humanity is roughly two million years old, but the empirical habit of thought has existed only for about five hundred. If our species has managed to survive 99.99975% of its evolutionary history – famine, flood and plague – without the benefit of science, neither it nor technology can truly be considered fundamental.
But if technology isn’t fundamental, it isn’t inevitable either. Why couldn’t a society abandon science at an arbitrary point and choose not to progress any further? If the governments of the world were to live in a state of perpetual peace the only necessary purpose for technological advance, e.g. to prevent an enemy from conquering you, would be obsolete. You could coast on the technologies you’d developed up to that point forever.
2. An Orwellian system does not grant intellectual freedom, therefore it cannot maintain its existing technology let alone create new ones.
Consider the kid who works at the Best Buy service counter on weekends. He has no clue what semiconductors are or how they work, yet he can identify a defective memory chip inside a customer’s PC and swap it. Viewed at the component level a PC is a fairly complex piece of hardware, yet very little education and absolutely no creativity are required for someone to fix it. The telescreen as Orwell envisioned it would not have been substantially different.
Television broadcasting commenced in the United States in 1947, a year before Orwell wrote 1984. But TV is only half an invention by itself – the television camera had to be invented along with the receiver for it to have any function at all. Had we laid cable into people’s homes for TV delivery the same way we wired them for telephones (and in reality we could have used the same wires since the signal needn’t be ‘high fidelity’ to work as Orwell described) the telescreen could have been an actual invention by 1950.
If the revolution that brought the Party to power occurred in the early 60s, there’d not only be time to deploy the telescreens but time to miniaturize the electronics as well (indeed, Bell actually did unveil a videophone at the 1963 World’s Fair). By that time, the “hard part” of the invention, the work requiring creativity and intelligence, would already have been done and the invention would be an ordinary part of the fabric of society by 1984. But most importantly, once the network was established it would require no more intelligence or education to maintain than the kid at Best Buy who knows how to swap memory chips without the slightest idea how the computer he’s repairing actually works.
The same example could be applied to the airplane, the rocket, artificial sweeteners, even the atom bomb: once a technology has been invented, you no longer need the inventor (or even the society that spawned him) in order to continue to make use of the technology after that.
3. A society that is technologically stagnant is doomed to collapse.
Actually all societies are doomed to collapse the same way all species are doomed to extinction and all human beings are doomed to death. It’s the way life on Earth seems to operate. But Orwell’s point was that if you played your cards right, you could keep a particular group in power by imposing a particular social order forever, or at least until the next big meteor comes and wipes the evolutionary slate clean.
Orwell wasn’t a prognosticator, but rather an engineer. The political design of Ingsoc was so detailed and dimensionally accurate that it was impossible for anyone to build such a machine afterward without it being recognized instantly for what it was. This in turn made it much more difficult to sell revolution as the road to the Worker’s Paradise, and indeed Communist-style regimes became increasingly unpopular as the second half of the 20th century played itself out.
“1984” is not about the future, it is not about totalitarianism, and it’s not about viewscreens. “1984” is not meant to be a science fiction story, or a prediction of the future; it is, at its heart, a novel about language. It isn’t about the same things as “Brave New World” at all, and is not a comparable work. Orwell spent much of his life arguing that dishonesty, hidden agendas and imprecision in language were a serious problem in building a civilized society.
If you re-read “1984” with that in mind, it becomes clear that the whole book is about how language can be used to manipulate people, to rob them of their freedom - in fact, he isn’t very subtle about it. The entire language of Newspeak is designed to make it impossible for people to articulate thoughts the Party deems unacceptable. The Party also uses words in contradictory ways (Freedom in Slavery!) and goes so far as to say that anyone who does not agree with their use of language must be insane. The whole setting in Oceania in a totalitarian future is just a vehicle for introducing Newspeak and the other language issues. “Ingsoc” is not meant to be a warning - the book is not about what could happen in the future, it’s just a vehicle for discussing language.
That’s what Orwell was about. Hell, he wrote an essay that said it more plainly, “Politics and the English Language.” From that, Orwell writes this, which sums up his position:
Apart from a brief conversation between Winston and Syme in the cafeteria of the Ministry of Truth, the book’s Appendix is the only place Orwell discusses language in any detail. If the book were about language rather than politics, wouldn’t it be the principles of Ingsoc rather than Newspeak relegated to a brief essay at the back of the book?
I think one might understand the book more clearly if they read it for what it says rather than trying to filter it through any particular interpretation like a sieve. The object of Newspeak was to rob people of the last vestige of their humanity – consciousness – rather than to purge the language of words that had become obsolete.
Winston wasn’t persecuted because he lacked appreciation for Newspeak. He was arrested, imprisoned, tortured and rehabilitated because he happened to be, by the standards of his society, clinically insane. A full third of the novel was devoted to Winston’s treatment and recovery from mental illness, particularly his delusion of the existence of objective reality. I don’t know how you could have missed it.
You’re suggesting that the 160+ pages forming the body of the novel, the part that describes the history, structure, methods, psychology and objectives of a theoretical totalitarian regime in exquisite detail, was filler?
Not quite, but thanks for all the plusful duckspeak anyway.
Wow…some interesting comments…been trying to keep up here. Also been as busy as ever. I was thinking, a book that gets people like us to discuss this so has to have been the work of intelligence. So tell me, what are some of the more subtler elements of this story? What is pointed out that can be missed from first reading but be important.
One thing that comes to mind is the ministry buildings. Someone was telling me to pay attention to placement and shape and all that. What are some underlying elements? Let’s take a stab at that, now that we have squared away what the book is and is not…