Orwell's Revenge (28 page)

Except on the subject of language, Orwell has sounded like Hayek only once in his life—at the end of
Keep the Aspidistra Flying,
in words I've already quoted: “Our civilisation is founded on greed and fear, but in the lives of common men the greed and fear are mysteriously transmuted into something nobler.” The lower classes live by the “money-code,” and yet they also “
contrive to keep their decency.” Hayek could hardly have said it better. The difference is that Hayek really believed it; Orwell didn't. On economic matters, as we've seen, Orwell believed sincerely in the efficiency of socialism.

1984
would have been rather different if Orwell had ever read
The Road to Serfdom.
In fact, it might never have been written at all. Except that Orwell
had
read
The Road to Serfdom,
and he wrote
1984
anyway Orwell even wrote a book review of
The Road to Serfdom
in 1944, though he died before
The Constitution of Liberty
was published.

His review of Hayek displays Orwell's economic theories at their gloomy, fuzzy best. To begin with, he reviews Hayek's book—which Orwell describes as “an eloquent defence of laissez-faire capitalism”—
alongside another book by K. Zilliacus, who has written “an even more vehement denunciation of it.” “[E]ach writer is convinced that the
other's policy leads directly to slavery,” Orwell observes cheerfully, “and the alarming thing is that they may both be right.” What pleasure it must have given Orwell to write that sentence! He is not often handed such a perfect opportunity to play the capitalist off against the communist and pronounce a plague on both their houses. Nonetheless, Orwell finds “a great deal of truth” in the “negative part” of Hayek's thesis, which is that socialism leads to despotism by way of Ministries. “[C]ollectivism,” Orwell agrees, “is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamed of.” This is the Orwell most people remember today. But what comes next is Orwell too:

[What Hayek] does not see, or will not admit, [is] that a return to “free” competition means for the great mass of people a tyranny probably worse, because more irresponsible, than that of the State. The trouble with competitions is that somebody wins them. Professor Hayek denies that free capitalism necessarily leads to monopoly, but in practice that is where it has led, and since the vast majority of people would far rather have State regimentation than slumps and unemployment, the drift towards collectivism is bound to continue if popular opinion has any say in the matter.

For Orwell, the only dim hope is that “a planned economy can be somehow combined with the freedom of the intellect.” Just how, Orwell doesn't know.

And what happens when economy and intellect converge, when the market and the mind become one, as they do in the commercialization of such things as radio, films, and television? Then, Orwell has always replied, the prospects are bleak. Gramophones inevitably lead to Goebbels. The Ministry is bound to end up owning all the airwaves. It is a law of economics, as obvious and immutable as the law of gravity

•  •  •

Unless, perhaps, you believe another Londoner of Orwell's day—another great thinker to whom Orwell himself will introduce you if you follow him far enough.

In June 1950, five months after Orwell's death, the literary magazine
World Review
dedicates its issue to Orwell's works, with
commentary by Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, and Malcolm Muggeridge, among others. The back pages of the magazine contain the usual assortment of book reviews, including one of a new book by Ronald Coase. So far as I can tell, this juxtaposition of Orwell and Coase is pure coincidence. If the editors knew it was important, they certainly didn't let on. But what a perfect coincidence it is: Orwell, the man of fuzzy economics but brilliant vision set up against Coase, a future Nobelist in economics whose interest happens to be the telecommunicating machine. Coase's book is titled
British Broadcasting: A Study in Monopoly.

Coase's book is Hayek for the telescreen. The BBC, Coase recounts, has fought for years to retain monopoly control of British airwaves. All along, the need for monopoly has been assumed, not proved. Technicians claimed monopoly was necessary because of the problem of airwave “scarcity” and radio interference. The press welcomed government monopoly to freeze out a rival outlet for advertising. Power-hungry politicians of both parties fell into line readily enough. But the economic and technical argument for a broadcast monopoly is wrong, and irreconcilable with venerable principles of free speech. The monopoly argument's “main disadvantage is that to accept its assumptions it is necessary first to adopt a totalitarian philosophy or at any rate
something verging on it.”

For Orwell, the telecommunicating machine necessarily leads to the Ministry. In the jargon of economists, Orwell believes wholeheartedly in efficient “natural monopoly.” For Coase, it is the Ministry that monopolizes the communications system; the monopoly is neither natural nor efficient. Orwell is certain that complex machines cannot be owned and managed effectively by small capitalists. Coase knows that private property and markets can manage even something as ephemeral as the ether. Orwell believes that Ministry-owned machines are more efficient in theory, though Ministries often go bad in practice. For Coase, theory and practice are the same: the Ministry is rotten from the outset. Orwell thinks that the Ministry-controlled machines will in theory produce Abundance and Truth, though not always in practice; Coase knows that giving the airwaves to the Ministry produces Scarcity and Lies. Give the airwaves to the market, Coase says, and you get more Plenty and more Truth, because markets always produce more
goods. You will also get advertising, capitalism, Salvador Dali, and all the other free market things Orwell despised. But you will not get Big Brother.

I have not come across any indication that Orwell ever read anything by Coase, but he surely would have reacted to Coase in much the same way as he did to Hayek. To be sure, small ownership avoids Big Brother, but the small owners don't last; they get swallowed up into trusts, and still larger trusts, and then the Ministry. Just look at the grocer and the gramophone needles. Monopoly, the Ministry, centralization of one kind or another is stronger, avoids waste, is more efficient, and so always takes over in the end—and nowhere more certainly than in connection with complex machines like steam engines and radio transmitters. Coase just hasn't grasped the modern economic realities. Little shopkeepers and big science belong to different eras, different generations. They coexist only in fiction.

In the fiction of H. G. Wells, for example. As a boy,
Orwell loved Wells, but as a man he finds him ridiculous. Wells “writes about journeys to the moon and to the bottom of the sea, and also he writes about small shopkeepers dodging bankruptcy. . . . The connecting link is Wells's belief in Science. He is saying all the time, if only that small shopkeeper could acquire a scientific out-look,
his troubles would be ended.” But who could seriously believe that shopkeeping and science—the market and the machine—might save the world? Wells could. Hayek could.
Coase could. But Orwell can't. When Orwell thinks of the radio and the market, he invariably thinks of Goebbels and the Ministry.

•  •  •

Suppose, however, that Orwell had somehow overcome his distaste for gramophones, radios, and films. And suppose he had also understood that telescreens might some day end up as consumer goods in the hands of the masses. Where then might his doublethoughts about the telescreen have led him?

First, to a fundamentally different understanding of the machine itself. Remember the Physical Jerks and Jane Fonda? Winston Smith, among tens of thousands of Londoners aged thirty-something, gets screamed at personally when he doesn't bend low enough. But there is
really no other comparable display of two-way telescreen powers anywhere else in
1984.
At only two other points in the book do telescreens talk back: once in a prison cell and once in a room that is used by Charrington, a member of the Thought Police, to entrap people like Winston and Julia. Neither of these displays of telescreen technology is very impressive. Even in 1948, it wasn't all that hard to spy on one designated target in one specific room.

Orwell was on the mark when he imagined that two-way television might some day become practical. But what he never grasped was that the telescreen he envisioned was more telephone than television. (Telescreens appear 119 times in 2984, microphones 7 times, gramophones once—and telephones never once.) Yes, the telescreen has pictures, but so far as politics, propaganda, and spies are concerned, that's secondary. What's important is that the telescreen is a two-way device—it can transmit as well as receive—and that means that it has to be
addressable.
It has to work like a letter, not a poster. Missing that point is Orwell's biggest mistake. Televisions are collectivism they broadcast indiscriminately to everyone, just as a Ministry of Crockery would do everyone's washing up. Broadcast television is the collective farm of communications, perfect for Goebbels and the Ministry of Truth. But a telephone can't work unless it is personal, individual, and specific. Same with a telescreen. And for that reason, both are seditious.

If he had ever grasped the telescreen's power to spread people out and disaggregate their affairs, Orwell would have had to rethink all his views about history and memory. When the Caliph Omar destroyed the libraries of Alexandria, Orwell notes sadly in a 1944 essay, he kept the public baths warm for eighteen days with burning manuscripts, and great numbers of tragedies by
Euripides and others perished. Ever since the Spanish Civil War, Orwell has been horribly fascinated by an even more chilling possibility: the despot's power not simply to destroy what has been written but to rewrite it. By falsifying every paper, every news clip, every photograph, a Franco or a Stalin might perhaps recreate history itself. As Orwell puts it in 2984: “[I]f all records told the same tale—then the lie
passed into history and became truth.” The key assumption here is contained in a single word: “all.”

In a telescreened society, records multiply far too fast to be
systematically falsified. Caliphs can irrevocably transform Greek tragedy into warm bath water only when there is a single, central repository where the never-copied manuscripts of Euripides are stored. In the hyper-centralized, Ministry-dominated society that Orwell is always imagining, the idea that every single record might be falsified is vaguely plausible. But records can in fact exist simultaneously in many places, and communication can multiply records without limit. The telescreened society, then, should be one in which the collective memory is better than ever, constantly refreshed and expanded as information is transmitted and shared. Orwell recognized microfilm's capacity to “compress a very large amount of information into a very small space” and saw here a possible protection against “bombs [and]
the police of totalitarian regimes.” Today the technological successors to microfilm are in tens of millions of hard drives and compact optical disks built into millions of modem-equipped personal computers.

What next? The cheap, ubiquitous, decentralized telescreen reshapes society in its own image. Orwell knows this too—or half knows it at least. In
The Lion and the Unicorn,
for example, Orwell sees great significance in the rise of a new group “of indeterminate social class.” These people are living in townships made economically viable by
“cheap motorcars.” In a major 1944 essay, “The English People,” Orwell argues that England needs to be “less centralised,” less dominated by the urban culture and economy of London. He sees more efficient cross-country bus service as
an important part of the solution. The future England, Orwell writes, lies “
along the arterial roads.” So Orwell understands: society is defined by how people connect. Cars, buses, and arterial roads move people.

Telescreens move pictures. If you move the pictures efficiently enough, you'll completely reverse the world's dreaded slide toward centralized monopoly. Orwell has been telling himself for years that whether it is benignly socialist, or malignly fascist, centralized control is much more powerful than decentralized capitalism: it eliminates waste,
invents better machines,
and wages war more effectively. It is easy to smile at Orwell for believing that, but in fact all he is really saying is that cooperation is good and that he can't imagine men cooperating on a large scale except through Ministries. Yet with the gadget he
did
imagine, even the enormous levels of coordination required to
transform aluminum and glass into an airplane can be maintained far from
the shadow of any central Ministry The “tele” in telescreen, after all, means “distance.” The telescreened society has no need for marble edifices to house either Captains of Industry or Ministers of Plenty. Instead of towering huge and high above the antlike masses, as they did before the telescreen, corporations and ministries now thin down and spread out. The pyramid of Cheops gives way to the geodesic dome, the fisherman's net of the telescreen network. Telescreens make possible collectivism by choice—a commonwealth society based on individual
willingness to share and cooperate.

Daydream about the telescreen a while longer, and you revise all your notions about the wealth of nations. England's only alternative to thieving colonialism, Orwell writes in
Wigan Pier,
“is to throw the Empire overboard and reduce England to a cold and unimportant little island where we should all have to work very hard and live
mainly on herrings and potatoes.” Thus, Orwell writes off the entire wealth of the British people—the people who gave the world Shakespeare, Newton, Darwin, Adam Smith, H. G. Wells, Coase, and the glories of the English language—on the assumption that wealth comes mostly from potato farming. The man who conceived of the telescreen and understood perfectly the impoverishing effects of a Thought Police should have known better. In the age of the telescreen, an island as small as Japan, or even a waterless piece of rock like Hong Kong, can still amass the wealth of Croesus.