1985 (13 page)

If man is free to evaluate, he is also free to act on his evaluations. But he cannot evaluate without knowledge, and hence cannot act without it. Education consists in acquiring both the knowledge and the terms of evaluation. Hence we are not free not to acquire an education. It is the first condition of freedom. But education which teaches how to judge and what to judge cannot be regarded as a tyrannical imposition: it is merely tradition, or the past, speaking to the present. If a new political doctrine claims that it is the duty of the rulers to free the ruled from the burden of deciding what is good, true or beautiful, then we know that it has to be rejected, since such decisions can only be made by the individual. When a political party condemns a work of art because it is false (meaning untrue to the party's view of reality) or immoral (meaning untrue to the party's view of behaviour), then we are being given a most spectacular example of trespass on the individual's right to make his own judgements. Such judgements cannot be handed over to a collective: they make sense only in terms of the individual soul.

A human being is free not only to act on his own judgements, but also free not to act on them. Most of all, and this may be the essence of his humanity, he is free to act contrary to his judgements. I am a heavy smoker, but, not finding in myself any of the symptoms of addiction, I consider myself free to smoke or not to smoke. I have been thoroughly schooled in the dangers of smoking and conclude that smoking is bad for me. Nevertheless I defy my own judgement and continue to smoke. The unwillingness to break a ‘bad habit' always looks like slavery rather than freedom, but it represents that human doggedness of choice which the Church, if not the State, has always resignedly, even sympathetically, learned to live with. There would be very little literature, whether tragic or comic, without it. The old theocracies of Geneva and Massachusetts offered to free man from his slavery to sin, meaning bad habits, by punishing him. The secular theocracies, or Socialist States, make the same offer, or else substitute ‘positive reinforcements' for punishment. They propose taking the health of the citizen, as well as his private morality, into their charge. They cannot properly do this: there are certain judgements which only the individual is qualified to make.

It is out of lack of knowledge of the nature of human freedom, and the conditions which validate its exercise, that many young people are
drawn to embrace doctrines of political oppression. If they reject tradition, and the transmission of it through education, they are rejecting their only protection against tyranny. They cannot, in other words, be sure what oppression means. Anarchism, in rejecting the past and assuming that the new is, by a kind of Hegelian necessity, better than the old, opens the way to tyranny. Moreover, the anarchist attributes evil to the State, which is the mere instrument of rule, and fails to acknowledge that the so-called free society must also find a technique for holding itself together. Bakunin saw, more clearly than most of his successors, that danger lay not only in the State but also in any powerful group that knew what it wanted – a fellowship of bankers or scientists, for instance. There is nothing magical about the State, making it uniquely engender a desire to hold on to power. A tyranny can be born out of any social group.

I have seen, in the United States, examples of young people's ‘communes' that were dangerous for two reasons. They were based on ignorance of the first principles of agronomy. How to grow grain or look after pigs is something to be learnt out of the past, and the past is rejected. They were ignorant of the nature of the principles which hold a society, however small, together. They assumed the existence of a general will in the group and then found it to be no more than a bag of quarrelling individuals. The strongest of the individuals became a leader and demanded obedience. Often obedience was exacted irrationally and, as it were, mystically. The Charles Manson group was an extreme example of a leader's taking on the properties of a messiah, a kind of bloody Jesus. The acts of violence performed by his followers were fewer in number than those perpetrated by the Nazi State, but one does not measure evil quantitatively. There is no guarantee that the social body that rejects the rule of the State will behave better than those who control the State. Because of the ignorance of tradition on which anarchic bodies are founded, there is every likelihood that it will behave worse.

The anomaly of any commune or
kibbutz
or collective Walden (on the lines of B. F. Skinner's blueprint) is that it both denies and accepts the greater social body: it has torn itself away from the bigger fabric and yet is a pocket of it. Skinner's
Walden Two
grows its own food and generates its own power, but it cannot build either tools or machines. It cannot maintain a symphony orchestra, but it demands the right to hear Beethoven and Wagner on tape or disc. It has a library, but it cannot
publish books. The more bizarre youth communes of America have made their dwellings out of Coca-Cola cases and old car bodies – the leavings of the consumer society they detest. Antonioni's film
Zabriskie Point
ended with an apocalyptic vision of the consumer society being blasted, on good Bakunin lines, to smithereens, but the vision was in the mind of a girl with a car and a radio in it. Anarchism is not possible. Bakunin is a dead prophet.

In democratic societies like the United States and Great Britain, whose great crimes in the eyes of the young are consumerism and belligerence, breakaway societies and protest groups often succeed in denting the iron of establishment. In time they modify the laws and even increase bureaucracy. The forces of Women's Liberation and Homosexual Liberation are making it a crime to discriminate in employment rights, which is wholesome and just, but they are prepared also to modify language by fiat, so that if I, a writer, use words that betray even grammatical discrimination, I am in danger of legal punishment. The same is true, of course, of such bodies as Britain's Race Relations Board, which rightly condemns bigotry, discrimination, and ‘racist' language but renders the individual not always sure of the limits of his own acts and judgements. The trade unions are a conspicuous example, especially in Europe, of the power that collectives can have within the bigger collective of the nation. Sometimes the power is justly based, sometimes not. A government cannot invoke moral principles when dealing with the perhaps unreasonable demands of a powerful pressure group. And, outside the field of legitimate or tolerated group action, there are the politically motivated kidnappers and skyjackers blackmailing governments in a manner inconceivable on Airstrip One. Soon, we are told, our great cities will be held to ransom. This is the limit of Bakuninism. The cartoon anarchist of the old days, bearded like the saintly founder, carrying like a Christmas pudding a black smoking bomb, has been metamorphosed into a deadly monster. The revolutionaries who want to create Ingsoc differ from traditional anarchists only in lack of innocence and the possession of high intelligence. Ingsoc cannot come about in any of our existing systems of government in the West: it is waiting outside, blessed from heaven by Bakunin.

The individual alone can be a true anarch. Orwell saw this when writing
Nineteen Eighty-Four,
which is an allegory of the eternal conflict between any individual and any collective. Winston Smith, though
thirty-eight years old, is very young in his ignorance, though the ignorance is not all his own fault. The only freedom he can think of is the right to say what is true and what is false. As O'Brien rightly says, he has no metaphysics to oppose to the doctrine of the State. Even if he had a coherent system of belief, he could not prevail against the massive engine of the Party. But at least he would have had the stoic satisfaction – like that of the heroes of Seneca – of knowing precisely what he was fighting for in the battle he was bound to lose. The situation is a melodramatic inflation of that which any freedom-loving individual finds himself in today, even in a permissive democracy. The individual, of whom Thoreau is the true patron saint, is always against the State, and his liberties are, inevitably, going to be reduced in proportion as the pressure groups gain more licence. Time that could be given to improving his mind is taken up with form-filling and fighting hopelessly with bureaucrats. His money is taken from him. He cannot travel the world freely, since he is limited as to foreign currency by the exchange control regulations. Comforts like tobacco and alcohol may be taxed out of his reach. But he can still exercise free judgement on epistemological, aesthetic and moral issues and act, or fail to act, on such judgements. He can go to jail because he considers war evil. He can kill, if he thinks, after long consideration, that killing is the only possible response to an attack on his person or loved ones or property. He can steal, commit libel, act or write or draw obscenities. He must, naturally, be ready to suffer for the exercise of free will, even to the lethal limit. ‘Take what you want,' says the Spanish
dicho
, ‘and pay for it.' The important thing is that he should not act without full knowledge of the meaning of his act. That is the condition of his freedom.

I am aware that there is something intolerably romantic about the above view of human freedom. It posits an inviolable citadel in the human skull, where, however the adversary batters the outer fortifications, the values of individualism subsist. Stone walls do not a prison make. This is very old-fashioned and shows a lack of knowledge of the resources of modern tyranny. The first of the two cinema films made of
Nineteen Eighty-Four
– now, I believe, out of circulation – ended with Winston and Julia shouting ‘Down with Big Brother,' while facing the firing squad. This wholly missed the point of the book. The Party is not concerned primarily with liquidating its enemies but with turning them into good citizens. The punishment is not important but the burning-out of heresy is essential. The seventh veil of the recusant mind must be dropped and the final nakedness exposed, ravished, impregnated. And yet, knowing that there is no untouchable citadel, many of us persist in believing, or wanting to believe, that there is a part of every individual soul that eludes the tyrant. Ingsoc knows all about the Christian martyrs, whose bodies were destroyed but voices unstilled. A martyr is, etymologically, a witness. The justice of the new State allows no witnesses.

There are a number of us these days who do not seek deliberately to go to prison but cherish a dream of being sent there to enjoy, paradoxically, true freedom. The stresses of contemporary life grow intolerable, and it is not just the State we blame. There are bills to pay, machines that go wrong and cannot be repaired, roofs that leak, buses that fail to arrive, dull work to be done, an. inability to make ends meet, insurance premiums that fall due, sickness, the panorama of the wicked world displayed in the daily press. One longs to be punished, Kafkastyle, for a crime that one has not committed but nevertheless is prepared to feel guilty for, and throw over all responsibility. There is a dream of solitary confinement, of writing
Pilgrim's Progress
or
The Ballad of Reading Gaol.
There is even a desire to be bereft of books, paper,
pencil, light, and to be forced to sustain sanity by composing in one's head an endless epic poem in heroic couplets. Nor iron bars a cage. What one does in captivity is the true test of how free one is. Ingsoc, however, knows all about the incorrigible wilfulness of the human will and will be cosily with us in the oubliette.

And yet, though Orwell's cacotopia is the epitome of all unfree societies, we hear very little about the scientific takeover of the free mind. What is to happen in 1990 or 2900 or beyond is not yet clear, but in 1984 there are no signs that the brain is to be altered by surgery or psychotechnic conditioning. Admittedly, we have an episode in the cellars of the Ministry of Love where O'Brien shows Winston that it is possible to have the Party's vision of reality blasted into one's brain.

‘This time it will not hurt,' he said. ‘Keep your eyes fixed on mine.'

At this moment there was a devastating explosion, or what seemed like an explosion, though it was not certain whether there was any noise. There was undoubtedly a blinding flash of light. Winston was not hurt, only prostrated. . . . A terrific, painless blow had flattened him out. Also something had happened inside his head. As his eyes regained their focus he remembered who he was, and where he was, and recognized the face that was gazing into his own; but somewhere or other there was a large patch of emptiness, as though a piece had been taken out of his brain. . . .

O'Brien held up the fingers of his left hand, with the thumb concealed.

‘There are five fingers there. Do you see five fingers?'

‘Yes.'

And he did see them, for a fleeting instant, before the scenery of his mind changed. He saw five fingers, and there was no deformity. Then everything was normal again, and the old fear, the hatred, and the bewilderment came crowding back again. . . .

‘You see now,' said O'Brien, ‘that it is any rate possible.'

This is nothing more than a trick, though, a demonstration of what the brain is capable of if it tries. And it becomes clear to us that the unfreedom of Ingsoc depends, in a way not at all paradoxical, on the persistence of traditional mental freedom. For, if O'Brien's statement of the Party's
programme is to be believed, the exercise of cruelty depends for its efficacy on being able to work on free minds. There may be satisfaction in being cruel to a dog, but it is a lesser satisfaction than being cruel to a human being, especially when that human being is sharply aware of what is happening and why. Ideally, the torturers of the Party would like to take a Shakespeare, a Goethe, an Einstein – with intellect bright and faculties unimpaired – and reduce him to a shrieking mass of flesh and brain tissue.