Orwell's Revenge (15 page)

“Follow the manual. That's wot Orwell taught them Party members, when e was done. That's wot 'e told 'em. Take the blue boxes, 'e said, and follow the manual. The Party don't need nothing more than that.”

O'Brien was about to buy some more beer when the old man suddenly got up and shuffled rapidly into the stinking urinal at the side of the room. The liter was already working on him. O'Brien sat for a minute or two gazing at his empty glass. It was no use going on. The huge and simple question—“How does a telescreen work?”—had ceased once and for all to be answerable. The few scattered survivors from the ancient world were incapable of explaining it any more. They remembered a million useless things— the color of the boxes, the clothes Orwell used to wear—but all the important facts were lost.

O'Brien leaned back against the wall and felt an enveloping tiredness settle on his brain. A minute or two later the engineer was rambling on again, but O'Brien had stopped listening. It struck O'Brien for the first time that though slightly drunk, the man was filled with some deep joy that made all the other griefs of his life bearable.

O'Brien shut his eyes, and his thoughts began to drift. Dimly, as though muffled through a wall, he heard the old man repeating:

“ 'Cos the screens worked. 'E said so, didn't 'e? 'E said so all along. Trust the screens, 'e said.”

O'Brien's thoughts began to drift. If the network still worked, it was only
because Orwell, who had been dead for years, still allowed it to. The Party survived at the pleasure of a single man it had vaporized long ago.

A moment later, despite the hubbub of the surroundings, O'Brien was asleep.

Blair was dreaming. He was walking along a pitch-dark street and the air was unspeakably cold. Then through the blackness he saw a full moon that seemed so extraordinarily bright it looked like a white-hot coin in the cold night sky, its brilliance making the stars invisible. He looked up through the branches of a tree, which the moon seemed to have changed into rods of silver. The light lay thick, as though palpable, on everything, crusting the earth and the rough bark of trees like some dazzling salt, and every leaf seemed to bear a freight of
solid light, like snow. He was desperately cold.

He dreamed of a golden country, where the slanting rays of the sun gilded the ground of an old pasture, and the elm trees moved faintly in the breeze, their leaves swaying in
dense masses like women's hair. He saw horses, and ducks in flight at dawn, and he remembered it was
forbidden to dream of such things. The cold penetrated into the
deepest recesses of his unconsciousness.

He dreamed of sitting among enormous, glorious, sunlit ruins, with a woman—not doing anything, merely sitting in the sun,
talking of peaceful things. He dreamed of the world as it would be when
Big Brother had vanished, a world of privacy, love, and friendship, when the members of a family would stand by one another
without needing to know the reason, when people would live together according to a conception of loyalty that was
private and unalterable. He dreamed of a just society,
a Golden Age, of things that could not be put into words, a stream of nameless things, of
thoughts, images, and feelings. He had the sense of being drawn upward through enormous and
gradually lightening abysses.

He was dreaming, but he was also conscious of his surroundings and the bitter cold. There was a chorus of varying sound— groans, curses, bursts of laughter, and through them all the
uncontrollable chattering of teeth. He realized that all these sounds were issuing from his own mouth. And he felt a desperate longing to reach out to the woman, and to know her as well as he knew himself, to connect with her, body and soul, before he died.

After some time—several more hours, he thought—he dreamed of the sea and the seashore, and of enormous, splendid buildings or streets or ships, in which he had lost his way. He had a peculiar feeling of happiness
and of waking in sunlight. He felt a sort of rich warmth creep up his limbs and reach for his brain. He dreamed that he desperately wanted to sleep.

But he didn't dare sleep. At the very back of his skull, almost in his neck, he knew that if he slept he would never awake. With a convulsive effort, he opened his throat and tried to howl. Somewhere, as if from several yards away, he heard himself groan.

A moment later, a woman was coming toward him. The gesture of her arm filled him with
overpowering happiness. In
a single movement she reached down toward his face and touched him, more softly, he thought, than he had ever been touched before. She
drew her arm round him, and he was enveloped in the cheap scent of violets.

The free market is the enemy too.
But whose? For the young Orwell, the answer is obvious: the free market is the enemy of the working man. Capitalism is Slavery Collectivism is Freedom.

Not just economic freedom, but individual freedom too. Through the 1930s, Orwell remains confident that “democratic socialism” will not merely tolerate but actually promote art and civil liberty Collectivism will be much more efficient than capitalism, artists will get a goodly share of the new socialist abundance, and free thought will prosper every bit as much as the economy. This is the lilies-of-the-field Orwell. This is the Orwell who in 1938, in all seriousness, can write: “The only regime which, in the long run, will dare to permit
freedom of speech is a Socialist regime.”

Then Hitler scorches the bloom off Orwell's socialist lily. By the beginning of World War II, Orwell has begun to appreciate that economic collectivism requires a Ministry, and that once people get used to a Ministry of Plenty they may accept Ministries of Truth, Peace, and Love too.

In his 1940 essay “Literature and Totalitarianism,” Orwell takes a hard look at his lily daydreams for the first time. He is still quite sure “that the period of
free capitalism is coming to an end.” It's what comes next that (for Orwell) is new. Until now, Orwell admits, “[i]t was never fully realised that the disappearance of economic liberty
would have any effect on intellectual liberty.” Socialism “was usually thought [by Orwell] as a sort of moralised liberalism.” The state was going to take charge of your economic life but wasn't going to touch your personal freedom. The arts were going to flourish far more than under liberal capitalism, because artists would no longer have to worry about money. In this 1940 essay, Orwell concedes he was probably wrong. “Now, on the existing evidence, one must
admit that these ideas have been falsified.”

From then on, Orwell never can quite decide how civil liberties will survive the demise of the free market, which he still hopes for, or the rise of socialism, which he still desires. “Mechanisation and a collective economy,” Orwell states firmly in 1940, lead to “endless war and endless under-feeding for the sake of war, slave populations toiling behind barbed wire, women dragged shrieking to the block, cork-lined cellars where
the executioner blows your brains out from behind.” But only a few months later Orwell will write to his (left-wing) publisher: “You are perhaps right in thinking I am over-pessimistic. It is quite possible that freedom of thought etc. may survive in an economically totalitarian society We can't tell until a collectivised economy has been
tried out in a western country.” Orwell's uncertainty about this endures for the rest of his life. In a 1945 book review he criticizes another author for mistakenly “assuming that a collectivist society
would destroy human individuality.” Yet in a letter written soon after
1984
is published, Orwell summarizes his book as “a show-up of the perversions to which a
centralised economy is liable.”

•  •  •

Orwell had doublethoughts about socialism from the beginning.
The Road to Wigan Pier,
an underrated and often misunderstood book published in 1937, sets out some of these at length. In the first half of the book, Orwell paints a chilling picture of life in the slums of a coal-mining town. In the second half, he reproaches his comrades of the left for making a religion out of machines, which threaten to transform man into “a kind of walking stomach”
without hand, eye, or brain. This is a perfectly cogent argument against too many machines. It is also a cogent argument against the idle side of socialism, and in my view is plainly intended as such. Lazy men, Orwell is telling us, can come to
depend on industrious neighbors quite as easily as on industrial machines. A free market forces people to work productively which may mean killing labor in the Wigan Pier coal mines. Socialism forces people to share, which for those on the receiving end may mean brain-in-a-bottle dependency.

So, as a good socialist, Orwell believes that the race ought not be to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise. As an honest man, Orwell also recognizes that the problem of the swift, strong, and wise is also a problem of the slow, lazy, and foolish. It is no small irony that
Wigan Pier,
which begins with a horrifying description of the working life of a coal miner in the 1930s, ends with Orwell arguing that there is no real difference between work and play, and that hard work is fundamentally good for body and soul. Nonetheless, Orwell's early attempt in
Wigan Pier
to doublethink machine collectivism is oddly ineffectual. It is presented so elliptically that few casual readers will even grasp his point.

Animal Farm,
by contrast, published after the war and just before
1984,
is perfectly clear. Overthrowing the farmer's economic tyranny is a good thing. But the hard part is to make sure that honest pigs who mastermind the revolution don't then become neo-farmers themselves. The pig who frees the other animals may end up eating them, just as the machine that liberates the coal miner may end up changing him into a walking stomach. Orwell has recognized all along that socialism tends to swallow up those it sets out to save.

Orwell's political prescriptions, once so confident, now become more and more ambivalent. An unintentionally hilarious paragraph in a 1947 essay, “The Cost of Letters,”
illustrates what I mean. To understand the full irony of this little piece, keep in mind that it was written while Orwell was smack in the middle of writing
1984.

Under “full Socialism,” Orwell declares, writers will be supported by the state, and should “be placed among the better-paid groups.” In present circumstances, however, “the less truck a writer has with the State, or any other organised body, the better for him and his work.” Why so? “There are invariably strings tied to any kind of organised patronage.” But it's also “obviously undesirable” for a writer to rely on the patronage of any individual plutocrat. “By far the best and least exacting patron is the big public.” That sounds suspiciously like the mass market.
But unfortunately, Orwell says, the average citizen refuses to spend as much on books as on tobacco or alcohol. By way of taxes, then, the common man “could easily be made to spend more without even knowing it.” The government must simply “earmark larger sums for the purchase of books.” But government must of course avoid “taking over the whole book trade and turning it into a propaganda machine.” In sum, the market (“the big public”) is better than the alternatives. But still not good. The government (which is worse) could be better. So long as it doesn't take us to
1984.
Which it probably will.

But whether it ends well or badly, collectivism is still coming.
Orwell is sure of it. The “ghosts” of the new machines that Orwell is always imagining are still dragging society straight to the economic ministry, the Ministry of Plenty And collectivism, says Orwell, can still “be made to ‘work'
in an economic sense.” Indeed, in 1945 Orwell calls on England's new Labour government to nationalize land, coal mines,
railways, public utilities, and banks. He still ranks
class privilege under English capitalism side by side with hierarchy in the Soviet Union. In the same letter in which he describes
1984
as showing “the perversion to which a centralised economy is liable,” Orwell writes: “My recent novel is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or on
the British Labour Party (of which I am a supporter).”

So by this point, Orwell can only be described as thoroughly unhappy about the political options that history seems to have offered him. Capitalists are as bad as ever. The collectivists who are bound to displace them are no good either. “Bureaucrats” now rank alongside “press lords and film magnates” as “enemies of truthfulness, and
hence of freedom of thought.” Now the writer's freedom is threatened not only by “concentration of the press in the hands of a few rich men, [and] the grip of monopoly on radio and the films,” but also by “the encroachment of official bodies”
like Britain's Ministry of Information. “[T]he BBC and the film companies buy up promising young writers and geld them and set them to work like cab-horses,” but totalitarian countries
are killing the arts too. Capitalism “is doomed and is
not worth saving anyway,” but “the independent status of the artist
must necessarily disappear with it.”

At the end, the best hope Orwell offers on how economic collectivists
might somehow avoid instituting the Thought Police is much along the lines of “Poetry and the Microphone.” Maybe, somehow or other, Western civilization will muddle through. “[L]iberal capitalism is obviously coming to an end,” he says in a 1941 BBC broadcast, but freedom of thought is not “inevitably doomed,” at least not in the Western democracies. “I believe—it may be no more than a pious hope—that though a collectivised economy is bound to come, those countries will know how to evolve a form of Socialism which is not totalitarian, in which freedom of thought can survive the disappearance of economic individualism. That, at any rate, is the only hope to which anyone
who cares for literature can cling.”