1985 (9 page)

Most visions of the future are cacotopian. George Orwell was an aficionado of cacotopian fiction, and we may regard his
Nineteen Eighty-Four
as competing in the Worst of All Imaginary Worlds stakes. It has won by many lengths, with the next worst mare of the night somewhat broken-winded. But without that book Orwell might not have felt inclined to compete.

The book is
We
, by E. I. Zamyatin. Orwell reviewed it in
Tribune
on 4 January, 1946, having at last got his hands on it several years after hearing that it existed. It was always an elusive book, and, if it is easily obtainable now in most languages, that is because Orwell was influenced by it. It is not, apparently, to be found in the original Russian. Zamyatin was a Russian novelist and critic who died in Paris in 1937. Imprisoned by the Czarist government in 1906, he was put into a cell on the same
corridor of the same prison by the Bolsheviks in 1922. He disliked most governments and leaned to a kind of primitive anarchism. His title seems to allude to a slogan of Bakunin, the father of anarchism: ‘I do not want to be I, I want to be We.' This seems to mean that the antithesis of the powerful centralized State is not the individual but the free anarchic community.

We
was written about 1923. It is not about Russia; indeed, it does not portray, even obliquely, any existing political system, but it was refused publication on the grounds that it was ideologically dangerous. One can see why, despite the wildness of the fantasy and the remoteness of the setting. We are in the twenty-sixth century, and the scene is a Utopia whose citizens have so thoroughly lost their individuality that they are known only by their numbers. They wear uniforms, and are called not human beings but ‘unifs'. As the Orwellian telescreen has not yet been invented, they live in glass houses so that the State police, known as the Guardians, can supervise them more easily. They eat synthetic food and, for recreation, march about to the tune of the State anthem, which blares through loudspeakers. There is no marriage, but sex is allowed at stated intervals. For the ‘sex hour' curtains are permitted to be drawn in the glass apartments. There is a sex ration-book of pink tickets: one's partner in the act signs the counterfoil. The Single State, as it is called, is ruled by a personage as remote and vague as Big Brother: he is known as the Benefactor. He is voted to power, but he has no opponents.

The philosophy of the Single State is simple. It is not possible to be both happy and free. Freedom imposes the agony of choice, and God, in his infinite mercy, tried to shut out that agony by shutting Adam and Eve into a glorious garden where they had all they needed. But they ate the forbidden fruit of choice, were driven out of the garden and have had to pay for free will with unhappiness. It is the duty of all good States to bring back Eden and scotch the snake of freedom.

The hero-narrator is D-503, an engineer who tries to be a good citizen but, to his horror, finds atavistic impulses breaking in. He falls in love, which is forbidden. Worse, he falls in love with a woman – I–330 – who leads an underground resistance movement given to such vices as tobacco and alcohol and the use of the imagination. D-503, who is no true revolutionary, is given the opportunity to be rid of imagination, which the State declares to be a disease, by X-ray treatment. Cured, he betrays the conspirators to the police and watches unmoved while I–330
is tortured. All the dissidents are at length executed – by means of the Machine of the Benefactor, which reduces them to a puff of smoke and a pool of water: literal liquidation. Orwell comments:

The execution is, in fact, a human sacrifice, and the scene describing it is given deliberately the colour of the sinister slave civilisations of the ancient world. It is this intuitive grasp of the irrational side of totalitarianism – human sacrifice, cruelty as an end in itself, the worship of a Leader who is credited with divine attributes – that makes Zamyatin's book superior to Huxley's.

That reference, of course, is to Aldous Huxley's
Brave New World
, which, like
Nineteen Eighty-Four
itself, was written under the influence of
We
. Orwell rejected
Brave New World
as a possible blueprint for even a remote future: he blamed Huxley for a lack of ‘political awareness'. Huxley depicts, it will be remembered, a Utopia which, like Zamyatin's, has sacrificed freedom for happiness. Perhaps, recalling Dr Johnson's strictures on the loose use of a term which is made to express the joys of heaven as well as a little girl's delight in a new party frock, the term
content
would be better. Pre-natal biological techniques and Pavlovian conditioning are capable of rendering the citizens of the future content with the lots which the State has bestowed upon them. There is no equality. Society is rigidly stratified, from the Alpha-plus intellectual to the Epsilon-minus semi-moron, but immobility is biologically built into the system. The family, which Freud said is responsible more than anything for human discontent, has been abolished; children are produced in test-tubes; all sex is promiscuous and sterile. It is a totally stable society, in which hedonism is the prevailing philosophy. But Orwell considers that such a society would not be dynamic enough to last long. ‘There is no power hunger, no sadism, no hardness of any kind. Those at the top have no strong motive for staying at the top, and though everyone is happy in a vacuous way, life has become so pointless that it is difficult to believe that such a society could endure.'

The pursuit of happiness is, then, pointless. Is liberty? Presumably not the struggle for it. Orwell cannot conceive of a society whose rulers are not motivated by the desire to impose their wholly malevolent will on the ruled. This is ‘political awareness'. The dynamic of society consists in a resistance on the part of the ruled to the will of the ruler – welcomed
by the ruler as an inimical drive that merits suppression, with all its concomitant sadistic pleasures. In stating that this is what society is like, Orwell has history on his side. Why do men seek to rule others? Not for the benefit of those others. To be convinced of this is to be ‘politically aware'.

And yet there have been Utopians – H. G. Wells, for one – who believed that the just society could be built. The Wellsian future is derided in
Nineteen Eighty-Four –
a clean innocent vision of a world full of Hellenic (or Mussolinian) architecture, rational dress and labour-saving devices, in which reason is in control and such base emotions as a lust for power and the exercise of cruelty are rigidly kept under. Had Orwell really been an Anglican rector, he would have known what term to use for describing it. He would have said that the rational society, with scientific socialism triumphant, was ‘Pelagian'.

The terms Pelagian and Augustinian, though theological, are useful for describing the poles of man's belief as to his own nature, The British monk Pelagius, or Morgan (both names mean ‘man of the sea'), was responsible for a heresy condemned by the Church in
AD
416 which, nevertheless, has never ceased to exercise an influence on Western moral thought. The view of man which it opposes appears, to most people, monstrously implausible, even though it is part of traditional Christian doctrine. This view states that man enters the world in a state of ‘original sin' which he is powerless to overcome by his own efforts alone: he needs Christ's redemption and God's grace. Original sin relates a certain human predisposition to evil to the crime of disobedience committed by Adam, in the Garden of Eden. As Zamyatin reminds us, Adam did not wish to be happy; he wished to be ‘free'. He desired free will, meaning the right to choose between courses of action – in effect, between courses on which a moral judgement could be made. He did not realize that, once free, he was more likely to choose the wrong than the right. He would consult the gratification of his own ego rather than what was pleasing to God. He thus condemned himself to divine punishment, which only God's mercy could rescind.

Pelagius denied this terrible endowment. Man was free to choose salvation as much as damnation: he was not predisposed to evil, there was no original sin. Nor was he necessarily predisposed to good: the fact of total freedom of choice rendered him neutral. But he certainly possessed the capability, with no hindrance from unregenerate forces within, to live
the good life and, by his own efforts, to achieve salvation at the end. St Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, reaffirming the orthodox doctrine of original sin and the need to pray for divine grace, loudly condemned Pelagius. But Pelagius has, in more than fifteen hundred years, refused to be silent.

In secularizing these views of man, we tend to forget about sin and concentrate on what is good for society and what is not. The Wellsian brand of Pelagianism blamed criminal impulses on environment. What priests called ‘original sin' was a reaction to poverty, slum tenements, enforced ignorance and squalor. A scientific socialism would extirpate what was called crime. Man was not just morally neutral: being a social animal, he wanted to be a ‘good', or responsible, member of society; it was his environment that had been getting in the way. But, if there are secular Pelagians (though not so many as before about 1933), there seem to be no secular Augustinians. Those who deny the possibility of moral progress, who insist on the destructive, libidinous urges in man as an unregenerable aspect of his condition, take, of necessity, a traditional theological stance. If anything can be done to improve man, it must come from without – from God, or the Life Force, or a miraculous extraterrestrial virus brought in by a UFO.

The polarity is, however, not all that rigid. We are all both Pelagian and Augustinian, either in cyclical phases, or, through a kind of doublethink, at one and the same time. Orwell was Pelagian in that he was a Socialist, Augustinian in that he created Ingsoc. It sometimes seems that the political life of a free community moves in the following cycle: a Pelagian belief in progress produces a kind of liberal regime that wavers when men are seen not to be perfectible and fail to live up to the liberal image; the regime collapses and is succeeded by an authoritarianism in which men are made to be good; men are seen not to be so bad as the Augustinian philosophy teaches; the way is open for liberalism to return. We tend to Augustinianism when we are disgusted with our own selfishness, to Pelagianism when we seem to have behaved well. Free will is of the essence of Pelagianism; determinism (original sin makes us not altogether responsible for our actions) of Augustinianism. None of us are sure how free we really are.

Invoking two opposed, but interpenetrating, kinds of theology, we find ourselves flirting with terms like
good
and
evil.
These, cut off from their base, tend to become semantically vague though strongly emotive.
It is embarrassing to hear a politician use them, less embarrassing – though still disturbing – to hear him juggling with
right
and
wrong
. Strictly, the moral duality which these words represent is within the province of the State, while good and evil relate to theological permanencies. What is right, what is wrong? Whatever the State says. It is right to hate Eastasia and then, in the next breath, wrong. It is right to eat potatoes in a time of glut, wrong to eat them in a time of shortage. The Conservatives are wrong and we, the Socialists, are right – a matter of premises. The laws of the State are always changing and, with them, the values of right and wrong. The need to oppose unchanging values to the State's flighty judgements makes us ready to say that this enactment is good, even though it is wrong, and that one, though right, evil.

It has always been easier to point to examples of evil than of good. An Augustinian might say: inevitably, since evil is in our nature, and good not.
Good
, anyway, is a word with a wide spectrum of meaning: we are liable to confuse ethical good with what, for want of a better term, we must call aesthetic good. One of the great human mysteries is supposed to be provided by the Nazi death camps. A commandant who had supervised the killing of a thousand Jews went home to hear his daughter play a Schubert sonata and cried with holy joy. How was this possible? How could a being so dedicated to evil move without difficulty into a world so divinely good? The answer is that the good of music has nothing to do with ethics. Art does not elevate us into beneficence. It is morally neutral, like the taste of an apple. Instead of recognizing a verbal confusion we ponder an anomaly, or, like George Steiner, assert that a devotion to art renders men less sensitive to moral imperatives. ‘Men who wept at Werther or Chopin moved, unrealizing, through literal hell.' There is no real mystery.

When we say, ‘God is good,' what do we mean? Presumably that God is beneficent and works directly on his creation to secure its happiness. But it is difficult to imagine and harder to believe. It is far easier to conceive of God's goodness as somehow analogous to the goodness of a grilled steak or of a Mozart symphony – eternally gratifying and of an infinite intensity; self-sufficient, moreover, with the symphony hearing itself and the eaten also the eater. The goodness of art, not of holy men, is the better figure of divine goodness.

The goodness of a piece of music and the goodness of a beneficent
action have one thing in common – disinterestedness. The so-called good citizen merely obeys the laws, accepting what the State tells him is right or wrong. Goodness has little to do with citizenship. It is not enacted out of obedience to law, to gain praise or avoid punishment. The good act is the altruistic act. It is not blazoned and it seeks no reward. One can see how it is possible to glimpse a fancied connection between the goodness of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony – composed in deafness, disease, squalor and poverty – and that of the saint who gives his cloak to the naked, embraces the leper, dies to save others. But Beethoven's goodness is outside the field of action, to which the saint is so committed. Art is a vision of heaven gratuitously given. Being quasi-divine, it is beyond human concerns. Unlike the heaven of Christian doctrine, it is as freely available to the morally evil as to the morally good: the equivalent of St Augustine's God's grace, impartially bestowed. This, to the narrower moralist, renders it suspect.