Orwell, Politics, and Power

Orwell, Politics, and Power This page intentionally left blank Orwell, Politics, and Power Craig L. Carr For my ...

Author: Craig L. Carr

165 downloads 2875 Views 974KB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!

Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

Orwell, Politics, and Power

This page intentionally left blank

Orwell, Politics, and Power

Craig L. Carr

For my students

This page intentionally left blank

Contents Preface 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

ix

THE EVOLUTION OF OCEANIA THE MORAL IMAGINATION THE PRICE OF POVERTY REVOLTING PIGS TECHNOLOGIES OF POWER GOD IS POWER ORWELL INTO THE FUTURE

Bibliography Index

1 16 37 59 84 106 128 155 161

vii

This page intentionally left blank

Preface This is a book about George Orwell’s political thought; it is not another book about George Orwell. I take the distinctive political writings within Orwell’s literary corpus as a source of inspiration for theorizing about contemporary political issues and themes. I have not attempted to oﬀer yet another biography of Orwell; nor is this yet another literary critique of Orwell’s writings or an evaluation of his prose reﬂections upon the political and social conditions of his day. These works, needless to say, have already been written. What follows diﬀers from the multitude of previous studies of Orwell by taking him seriously as a political thinker and deriving a “political message” (of sorts) from his works that qualiﬁes (or so it is argued) as a timeless contribution to the political thought of the liberal tradition. My inclination as a political theorist is to take what is perhaps Orwell’s ﬁnest novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, as a source of puzzlement and consternation. Orwell himself indicated that his novel was a warning; he was less clear, however, on what his warning was supposed to be about. The novel troubles chieﬂy because in this novel Orwell supposes that power has become an end in itself and is no longer simply a means to some other desired end. If his warning is that this possibility is (1) very real and (2) important to avoid, readers can legitimately wonder (1) why is (and not was) this possibility a potential political outcome for modern society and (2) how, if at all, might this outcome be averted? My aim here is to expose and articulate answers to both these questions, answers derived from Orwell’s political writings. In so doing, I shall suggest that Orwell’s enduring contribution to political thought and theory, as well as his contemporary relevance for political thinking, rests with the political signiﬁcance of these answers. The moral of my story is relatively straightforward and can be put simply: Orwell’s fears about power becoming its own end resulted from his general belief that liberal political culture was under attack in his day by social and economic forces that undermine and erode the foundational ix

x

PREFACE

beliefs and convictions of liberal political morality. Orwell worried that truth was fading out of the world, but underlying and supporting this worry was his deeper concern that what he prosaically called decency was also, and more importantly, fading out of the world. A careful exploration of Orwell’s political writings can thus do much to sensitize his readers to the important need to cultivate, preserve, and defend those fundamental values that prevent political decay and domesticate political power. I make no claim to have gotten Orwell right or to have exposed the “true meaning” (whatever this would seem to mean) contained within Orwell’s political art. It is now rather taken as granted that art can be, and frequently is, a source of inspiration and insight that transcends the design of the artist. Over the years I have gained a strong appreciation for Orwell’s political works as a rich source of theoretical problems and challenges that repay political inquiry and theoretical rumination, and the present study brings an order and focus to these problems and challenges that expose a political lesson I think worth understanding and evaluating. This lesson, moreover, is as valuable and signiﬁcant today as it was in Orwell’s time and has not faded in importance with the collapse of Soviet communism and fascism— the two political movements that were of primary concern to Orwell during his lifetime. Whether George Orwell would smile on the lesson I have drawn from his political writings is neither here nor there. It is the lesson that matters and not the struggle to get Orwell right (whatever this is taken to mean), though I think I really do get Orwell right when I say that I think Orwell would respect this point. I have incurred many debts in the process of putting this study together, and it is a pleasure at this point to repay them. Gary Scott read earlier versions of the manuscript and oﬀered many helpful and important insights on how things might be improved. As usual, I am indebted to him for his help and support. Bruce Gilley sent many helpful suggestions and thoughts my way, and for this I am most grateful. I’ve chatted over the years with many friends and colleagues about Orwell and his political concerns, and I fear any attempt to acknowledge them all will leave someone, and perhaps many, out. Nonetheless, my thanks to Dick Flathman, Stu Scheingold, Steve Lansing, Bill Lund, Greg Hill, Norm Greene, Chuck White, Tony Lott, Karen Csaijko, Stephen Moore, Dean Darris, John Mansﬁeld, Brad Maier, Lori Kinder, Gwen Thompson, Jennifer Pennell, Nathan Austin, Dan Enbysk, and Robin Barklis. I beneﬁted greatly from the able research assistantship of David Robinson, Jeﬀ Wade and Chris Cooney; my thanks to each of them. Lastly, I want to thank the many students, undergraduates and graduates alike, who have traveled through my class on Orwell’s political thought.

Preface

xi

The eagerness and enthusiasm with which young readers engage Orwell’s political writings has never ceased to amaze me and is certainly emphatic testimony to Orwell’s great success as a writer. The questions, comments, and concerns expressed by my students have almost surely had a far greater eﬀect on the formation of my own thoughts on Orwell than I can even begin to imagine. But for their eﬀorts, curiosity, and dogged interest in Orwell’s political thinking I doubt that this book would ever have come into being. It seems only ﬁtting, then, that I should dedicate this work to each and every one of them with my most sincere thanks.

We are subjected to the production of truth through power and we cannot exercise power except through the production of truth. Michel Foucault

Almost certainly we are moving into an age of totalitarian Dictatorships—an age in which freedom of thought will be at ﬁrst a deadly sin and later on a meaningless abstraction. The autonomous individual is going to be stamped out of existence. George Orwell

xii

1 The Evolution of Oceania On January 20, 1950, a writer died. He was not regarded at the time as a great writer, and he is probably still not regarded as a great writer by many. But he wrote a great book, though it is perhaps fair to say that it is not regarded as a great novel—a minor classic, perhaps, but not a great novel. But a novel can be a great book without also being a great novel, and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is a case in point. Since this is a book about Orwell’s book, I want to introduce what follows by saying something about why I think Nineteen Eighty-Four is a great book. But ﬁrst a disclaimer. I’m happy to take the word of many a literary critic on the artistic status of Nineteen Eighty-Four. If they say, as they invariably do, that Nineteen Eighty-Four is not a great novel—not equal, say, to the likes of Joyce’s Ulysses or Mann’s Magic Mountain, I’m in no position to argue. I put bread on the table by wondering out loud about the traditional and enduring problems of political theory, and when it comes to the wonderful world of literature, I’m just an admiring novice. But political thinking is not conﬁned to political theory. Many thinkers and writers contribute to the world of political thought even though they do not do so in the traditional fashion of the political philosopher. George Orwell was one such thinker and writer. His medium was literature but his message was political. I’m interested here in the message, not the medium. His passion for art certainly came to him before his obsession with politics, and the two blended sometimes awkwardly in his writing. He was not a particularly philosophical thinker, and though a voracious reader, it is unclear how much time he spent exploring the history of political ideas, though his biographers leave the impression that it wasn’t much. But his interest in politics is in plain view, and he came to believe that “no book is genuinely free from political bias” (Orwell, 1946a: 313). His interest in 1

2

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

politics, he tells us, involves the “[d]esire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after” (Ibid.: 312–13). This is not necessarily something that all political theorists want to do; nor is it necessarily something that only political theorists attempt to do. But it is something that is commonly associated with the enterprise of political theory, and while I don’t want to say that this sort of intellectual agenda characterizes what it means to do political theory, I do think that someone who pursues this kind of agenda is likely to be of interest to political theorists. So I want to treat Orwell’s last novel as a work of political theory and explore the direction in which its author wished to push the world. That is, I intend to suppose that the political purpose that drove Orwell’s writing involved a theoretical inquiry into political life of the sort that has a traditional association with political theory. This inquiry culminates in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the political insights associated with this culmination explain why it is altogether appropriate to call this work a great book. It is this inquiry, its twists and turns, ebb and ﬂow, that is the subject of this book.1

1 The claim that Orwell’s political thought culminates in Nineteen EightyFour requires some qualiﬁcation. It is true, of course, in one fairly tragic sense. The sense I have in mind is tragic because this culmination is the result of Orwell’s premature death. At the rather young age of forty-six—a point in life when many political thinkers are just getting going—his frail lungs ﬁnally gave out, and he succumbed to the tuberculosis that had troubled him most of his life. (Imagine what our world would look like if, say, Hobbes, Locke, Kant, or Marx had died at age forty-six!) This is tragic not only because of Orwell’s untimely passing, but also because there are indications in Nineteen Eighty-Four that his political thinking was beginning to head in new directions and migrating away from the concerns that were the focus of attention in his early years. Viewing his novel as the culmination of Orwell’s political thought should not be understood, then, to imply that the work provides us with the completion of a coherent political ediﬁce available for analysis and critique by future generations. Perhaps this is more typical than atypical. Thinkers—political or otherwise—rarely stop thinking; they just run out of time. But it is worth wondering where Orwell’s political thoughts might have gone, where his art and his politics might have taken us, but for his unfortunate death.

The Evolution of Oceania

3

As it is, however, we are left with Nineteen Eighty-Four as the ﬁnal, though hardly ultimate, expression of Orwell’s political thought. Yet the book can be seen as a culmination of sorts. The text presents us with his ﬁnest and most troubling construction of the political paradox that is, I believe, his most enduring political legacy. To understand and appreciate this paradox, it is necessary to rehearse quickly the basics of the story Orwell tells in Nineteen Eighty-Four and to acknowledge his own declared message that motivated his decision to tell his story this way. Orwell’s story is set in his future, though the particular future he chose is now our past. The futuristic character of the story is illustrated primarily by the book’s chosen title: Nineteen Eighty-Four—a point some thirty-six years in the future of the time Orwell completed the work in 1948.2 Orwell initially thought to call the book, “The Last Man in Europe,” but eventually abandoned this title in favor of “Nineteen Eighty-Four” (Cf. Bowker, 2003: 382). This, as we shall see, is rather unfortunate since the former choice is considerably more evocative. The setting is the city of London in 1984, “chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of Oceania” (Orwell, 1961: 7). Though the story is oﬃcially futuristic, the future Orwell imagined is dreary and stagnant. It is hardly the technically progressive place Aldous Huxley imagined in Brave New World or the scientiﬁcally and rationally driven place Yevgeny Zamyatin portrays in We (Huxley, 1932; Zamyatin, 1972). (The latter novel in particular seems to have served as something of a template for Orwell’s story.3) Technological sophistication is restricted to strategies of surveillance—to the apparently omnipresent telescreens that conjure up images of Bentham’s panopticon. Oceania is a place where things have gone horribly and irreparably wrong. The mythical visage of Big Brother, the humanized symbol of political legitimacy and totalitarian control (at the same time!), is everywhere. A cruel and sadistic inner party rules its outer party colleagues with a brutal ﬁst and sophisticated cunning. The largest class in Oceania, Orwell’s famous proles, constitutes eighty-ﬁve percent of the population, but they are largely left to themselves by the inner party and are dismissed as politically indolent. In the midst of this horriﬁc situation lives Winston Smith, the novel’s curious protagonist. Winston has no love for Big Brother. He wonders about the past, about a time before Big Brother when he supposes things were simpler, more decent, and more humane; and he longs for a time when Big Brother will be eliminated and the people of Oceania can again live peacefully, civilly, and decently. He is a self-proclaimed revolutionary with the temerity to want a better political world and the courage to work for it. He is also, however, a deviant, “a minority of one,” who fails

4

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

to grasp the nature and the logic of the world in which he lives. At novel’s end, Winston is cured thanks to the intervention of his tormentor/savior O’Brien who nurses Winston back to sanity, back to Big Brother’s loving breast. There is paradox lurking here. Why, one might plausibly ask is this not a happy book? The question might seem strange given the exaggerated cruelty and torture present in the novel. But if we put this aside for the moment and think only about what transpires in the text, we can ﬁnd some reason to think it might be a happy story. The plot of the novel is focused upon a particular individual, Winston Smith, whose deviance is hard to ignore. Poor Winston has lost the ability to fathom the world in which he lives. In biological terms, the organism is at war with its environment, and when this happens, the organism cannot survive. To survive, the organism must adapt to its environment. Individuals must belong to their social world or they cannot function within it. They must be reasonable; that is, they must participate in social mind, the seat of reason. If they don’t, if they are driven by what Foucault calls “unreason,” they must be dealt with by society (Foucault, 1965). In Oceania, Winston is dealt with, just as we must deal with the unreasonable in our own culture. Thanks to O’Brien, Winston is cured. He again belongs; and ironically, though he now awaits the bullet in the back of his head, he is now able to be a citizen once again, for he loves Big Brother. This looks on the surface like a tale of deviance overcome; so why is this not a happy book? Is a bit of torture enough to change our minds about this? Seen from O’Brien’s point of view, I suppose we can say that Orwell’s story does have a happy ending. But this is not the point of view that Orwell urges us to adopt, and for the most part, this is not the point of view that most readers do adopt. It is, I want to insist, wrong to suppose either that Winston wasn’t really transformed into a reasonable citizen of Oceania or that Winston was simply tortured into a passive acceptance of O’Brien’s insanity. Winston, I also want to insist, was reasoned back to health; his return to the loving breast, as O’Brien emphasizes, really was voluntary. As is typical of successful psychological treatment for unreason, Winston recognized and understood the previous error of his ways and made the appropriate adjustment, abandoning unreason for reason. Yet this is what makes the story all that much more terrible and disturbing, and all that much more paradoxical at the same time. Why should readers rush to take the side of the deviant here? Still, this is not all that disturbs. The ﬁnality of Winston’s defeat deep in the bowels of the Ministry of Love is also a haunting feature of the story.

The Evolution of Oceania

5

The demise of Winston’s personal revolution is accompanied by the realization that no revolution is possible in Oceania. History, in Hegelian terms, has ended. There will be no political transformations in Oceania; political change has ended because Big Brother will not let it happen. In other antiutopian ﬁction, readers are usually treated to a bit of optimism at the end. In Zamyatin’s We, for example, the revolution is on the verge of success at the story’s close, and the One State seems headed for ﬁnal collapse. But there will be no such collapse in Oceania because the inner party won’t allow it to happen and it has the power to prevent it from happening. Things in Oceania are hopeless, and this pessimistic realization is certainly one reason why the book is not a happy one. But this also invites another important question: Why did Orwell elect to write such a depressing and pessimistic book, or a book that seems depressing and pessimistic from our point of view? There is apparently no consoling message here, no hint of optimism, no idealistic identiﬁcation of something enduring in the human breast that protects against evil eternally and promises a happy resolution to the political threats human beings seem constantly to face. The hopelessness of the story makes Orwell’s book scary, and this suggests a not altogether inappropriate answer to the question about why Orwell elected to write this book. He wrote it because he wanted to write a scary story—and he succeeded. Sometimes writers tell stories simply because they want to scare their audience, but of course there are diﬀerent kinds of scary stories. Ghost stories often scare us; that is most certainly their point. But they have little point beyond this, and when viewed in the light of day and the sobriety of reason, they seem rather silly. Other stories scare for a purpose, perhaps to get us to change our ways or to encourage us to avoid situations that are dangerous or unwelcome. Orwell wrote a scary story for a purpose like this. At one point, Orwell, in poor health and apparently depressed over misunderstandings of the work that ﬂourished in the United States shortly after its release there, dictated a few comments about his purpose behind the novel to his English publisher, Warburg, who then wrote them up and oﬀered them in the form of a press release. Among other things, the release said, “The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: Don’t let it happen. It depends on you” (Crick, 1980: 395, italics in original). But what is the “it” that has happened and that we should labor to avoid? If we suppose the “it” is Oceania, we need to get to the genuinely horrifying features of this mythical place that we need to avoid and ask how and why it happened. We must, that is, spend a bit of time analyzing the novel, unpacking its mysteries, and grasping the sordid logic that

6

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

produced this terrible place. We must see why this is a depressing and pessimistic book and not a happy one, discern its really scary side, and think about what lesson Orwell wanted to teach us that might help us prevent its happening. It is perhaps best to understand this statement of Orwell’s purpose as a warning backed by a plea: “Don’t let it happen.” But the plea can matter to us only if we recognize and appreciate the nature of the warning. Orwell felt that socio-political forces were pushing his posterity toward Oceania and that something like this nightmare state could in fact come into being (Ibid.). But it could also be avoided; it was not too late, at least in 1948 (Ibid.: 398). In this sense, the work is not a prediction of the future but a description of political trends and forces that push in a direction Orwell hoped human beings could avoid. He wanted to scare his readers to get their attention, to set them to thinking politically about the direction their political world was heading. It is altogether easy to pick up Nineteen EightyFour today, notice that the year that has come to symbolize the story is now long past, realize that Oceania is not with us, and answer Orwell’s warning triumphantly by saying, “We didn’t!” It is easy, in other words, to suppose that the threat Orwell imagined and the political danger he foresaw have passed. Things have changed in the world and the specter of totalitarianism that loomed on the horizon of the early and middle part of the twentieth century is now little more than a distant memory. The warning is no longer necessary, we might suppose, and if Nineteen Eighty-Four continues to scare modern readers, it does so only in the fashion of a ghost story. Such a judgment, however, remains premature. Before we can adopt such conﬁdence, we should learn a bit more about the “it” that scares. And the “it” that scares involves that traditional and bedeviling problem of political thought: Living with political power. We can’t live without it, but how can we manage to learn to live with it? The “it” that scares, then, is the prospect of losing the struggle to domesticate political power, and once domesticated, to keep it under control. This is not a problem that can pass with time. As long as political power is with us, as it seems it must eternally be, the problem is also with us. Here it is best to let Orwell speak for himself, or rather, to notice him speaking through the apparent villain of Nineteen Eighty-Four, O’Brien. During his torture/cure at O’Brien’s hands, Winston is taught a terrifying lesson about life in Oceania. The logic of Big Brother is nowhere more forcefully described than when O’Brien tells Winston: We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish

The Evolution of Oceania

7

a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to safeguard the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. (Orwell, 1961: 217) And if this is not horrifying enough, O’Brien continues in a fashion that signals Orwell’s fears about the end of history: But always—do not forget this, Winston—always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever. (Ibid.: 220) Such passages are certainly intended to scare, and to scare with a purpose that we can rightly understand to be timeless. Oceania—in fact, all of humankind it would seem—has lost its struggle with political power in the novel. It is no longer domesticated or even able to be domesticated. It now rules without qualiﬁcation or compromise, and it will continue to do so forever. If humankind succumbs to totalitarianism, there is no escaping it—forever.

2 This is surely an end to history that anyone possessing something like a liberal spirit should want to avoid. And if Orwell saw the prospects of Oceania, or something like it, on the political horizon, he did well to warn us against it. But two matters are still a source of trouble. First, if Orwell believed he saw a totalitarian future for humankind, why did he not elect to warn us in a more direct and speciﬁc manner? Why build his warning into a novel rather than an essay or treatise? Why, that is, did he elect to put his warning obscurely and inchoately in a form that could easily be misunderstood or misconceived? Second, if he indeed intended Nineteen Eighty-Four as a warning, he must have thought that totalitarian control was possible and perhaps even probable. His warning, this is to say, must be credible and not merely fanciful. He must have had reasons to think that something like Oceania really could happen, and if his warning was to be credible, he must do something to convince his readers that his reasons for thinking Oceania could happen are valid and pertinent.

8

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

I’m not concerned here with the ﬁrst of these issues. It raises a biographical question that is largely irrelevant to what Orwell did in fact do, viz., write a novel intended as a warning about a political crisis that threatened, and may continue to threaten, the fate of humanity. Perhaps all we really need to know on this score is that Orwell wanted to marry politics with art. He had a message he wished to leave his posterity, and the medium with which he was most comfortable, and to which he was most dedicated, happened to be literature. But this should not stop the political theorist from exploring the more philosophical aspects and implications of his thought. It is the second issue, then, that is the subject of what follows. We know from the story Orwell tells what has happened. The political world has morphed into a totalitarian nightmare. Power has become an end in itself. An all-powerful ruling elite has risen, gained absolute control of a new mega-state, and now exerts totalitarian control over a segment of the population simply because it wants to exercise power for its own sake. The result is a “boot stamping on a human face—forever.” This raises two crucial questions that Orwell rightly elects to emphasize in his novel: How did this happen? And, why did it happen? To serve as an eﬀective warning against a real political possibility, Orwell must answer both these questions, and his answers must be reasonable and compelling. Taken together the answers to these questions establish the possibility of a state like Oceania coming into being. As we shall see, Orwell does put compelling answers to both these questions, and by so doing, makes good on his claim that the novel is intended to serve as a warning. To anticipate somewhat the analysis to follow, I think Orwell answers the how question by detailing in subtle and powerful ways the emergence of what I will call (and with apologies to Foucault who uses the term in a slightly diﬀerent way) new technologies of power that are mastered and reﬁned by inner party tyrants. Old technologies of power were particularly crude. They involved strategies of control that depended upon controlling individual will by threatening the body or the mind. Torture and coercion are perhaps the most familiar examples of these old, and in Orwell’s view, increasingly dated technologies of power. The new technologies of power that Orwell saw coming into being manage a more thorough control of the individual by capturing the mind and thereby controlling the will automatically. His reﬂections on this score foreshadow the eclipse of the individual by detailing the complete dependency of individual mind, and hence individual will, on what might be called social mind. Orwell’s account of these technologies and their use to eclipse the integrity of the independent individual could easily be taken as the most

The Evolution of Oceania

9

unsettling aspect of the entire novel. But his vivid portrayal of the eﬀectiveness of these new technologies actually pales in comparison to what he says about the why question. These technologies of power threaten only when there is reason to believe that someone might actually want and intend to put them to use. It is one thing to persuade readers that new technologies of power exist and that they make possible the eclipse of the individual as we understand him or her, but it is quite another to demonstrate that someone might actually be inclined to put them to the use Orwell imagined in Nineteen Eighty-Four. This is where Orwell is the most interesting, at least from the standpoint of political theory. To understand his answer to the why question, it will be helpful to juxtapose Orwell’s recognition of new technologies of power with his anticipation of changes in what I will call the psychology of power. The change that Orwell imagines taking place here involves a shift away from thinking about power as a means to some desired end and toward thinking about it as an end in itself. Most everyone is familiar with Lord Acton’s famous quip that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. On the standard view, power corrupts because humans are too weak, too morally ﬂawed, to avoid temptation. Power is desirable, this is to say, because with it one can get whatever else one wants. Responsibility typically accompanies political power, at least ideally. But the powerful need not meet their responsibilities if they elect not to, for no one is around with the power to compel them to do so. (If someone like this was around, as Hobbes has famously noticed, they would really be in charge, and then a question about how to keep this someone from abusing his or her power would simply arise again—an insight that takes us back to the paradox of political power.) Rather than rule in the public interest, those in possession of political power can use their power to rule in their own interest and betray those they are presumably in power to serve. Of course, power might corrupt in other ways as well. It might incline its possessors to suppose, for example, that they really are superior beings. Power, this is to say, might go to one’s head and produce ego-maniacal beings with no regard for others whom they deem to be inferior. The result is an insensitivity that can produce a great deal of inhumanity. But power here still serves some further end—in this case the ego—and thus still seems to fall rather short of being an end in itself. This makes Orwell’s claim that power has become an end in itself all the more puzzling. Why would one want to exercise power for its own sake? And how could such a transformation in the psychology of power possibly have happened? These are questions Orwell must answer if his warning is

10

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

to be credible, and we shall discuss the answers he puts to them near the end of the discussion. For now it is important only to appreciate that it is really this transformation that matters most in Orwell’s warning. If Oceania is to be averted, it will only be because we have found a way to avert this change in the psychology of power. The new technologies of power Orwell foresaw are already in place, but they pose no particular danger in themselves. In this they are no diﬀerent from the old technologies of power which have been with human beings almost forever. They become dangerous, like the old technologies of power, only when some group or clique elects to exploit them and use them to achieve the totalitarian control they make possible.

3 By way of prelude to what follows, it might be helpful to say a bit more about the political world Orwell has imagined in Nineteen Eighty-Four. He tells us a good deal about the mythical state of Oceania, and for good reason. We learn about life there, elements of which we have already rehearsed, and we learn about how Oceania has come into being and how it operates. These passages are not just tedious tangents to the story, bereft of any real signiﬁcance; they are crucial aspects of Orwell’s political thought, for here we learn about the political philosophy that has come into prominence in Oceania. Yet Orwell seemed aware that they would be considered tedious by some. In a lovely example of his sense of humor, Julia, Winston’s love interest in the story, falls to sleep when Winston reads them to her. They may similarly have put many a naïve reader to sleep. Perhaps good political theory sometimes makes for bad literature, but the fact that Orwell seemed not to care about this possibility is some indication of the importance he attached to this bit of theorizing. The key passages I refer to are to be found in Emmanuel Goldstein’s book, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism (Orwell, 1961: 152–78). Orwell builds this little book into his story in order to provide a bit of historical background that explains the evolution of Oceania. There is considerable irony in this, of course, since Goldstein’s book is oﬃcially presented as the bible for a revolutionary conspiracy dedicated to putting an end to the reign of Big Brother. There is no such conspiracy, of course, and the book was actually prepared by elements of the inner party. It is, in reality, their bible, detailing their triumph and displaying the logic and political philosophy of Oceania. More importantly, Orwell intended it to be something like possible history. At one point in his persecution/cure,

The Evolution of Oceania

11

Winston asks O’Brien whether the materials in the book are true, and O’Brien assures Winston that as a matter of description they are in fact quite true (Ibid.: 215). Goldstein’s book tells us that political history is a story of conﬂict between three fundamental and apparently ineradicable classes: the high, the middle, and the low, each with its own particular interests. Following a tradition that begins with Aristotle and is developed importantly by Machiavelli, political conﬂict is presented as a form of class struggle. The high wants to retain its position of privilege; the middle struggles to change places with the high; and the low yearn for equality insofar as they have any political consciousness at all. The middle is described as the historical instigator of political change because it works to unseat the high, usually by rallying the lower class to its cause. If those who belong to the low are left to their own devices, they pose no real threat to the high because they “are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives . . . ” (Ibid.: 166). But the middle has historically succeeded in momentarily galvanizing the political allegiance of the low and bringing about revolutionary change, often by trumpeting political ideals like liberty, justice, and fraternity that momentarily stir the low into a shallow political consciousness. Behind Orwell’s account of class conﬂict there lurks a noble, meliorist vision of “an earthly paradise in which men should live together in a state of brotherhood, without laws and without brute labor, . . . ” (Ibid.: 168). The British, French, and American revolutions, for example, are said to have been inspired by this noble vision, but once the middle has replaced the high, class conﬂict continues apace, and readers are told that the jealousies of a new and emergent middle is responsible for all this. But Goldstein’s book explains that this historical class struggle is not an eternal condition. By the middle of the twentieth century the noble vision became discredited, and ironically at just the moment when it seemed potentially realizable. At this apparently pivotal moment in human history all elements of political thought became authoritarian, and “[e]very new political theory, by what ever name it called itself, led back to hierarchy and regimentation” (Ibid.). The reasons for this transformation are rather elusive, but Goldstein’s book suggests the following scenario. The high, seeking to retain their position of privilege, notice that increased wealth and the considerable rate of productivity introduced by capitalism has raised the general educational level, thus making the low more aware of their predicament. This inclined the low to be discontented with its lot in life and to insist more strongly on

12

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

the ideal of equality. In spite of the ideals presented to them by the noble political vision of a just and egalitarian civil order, the high became frightened by this political pressure and strategically worked to defend its position of privilege by reducing overall wealth and throwing the low into a condition of abject poverty. In a curious twist on the Marxist account of the process by which the proletariat presumably comes to consciousness, the greater the impoverishment of the low, the less the high have to fear from them. For reasons that we shall explore shortly, Orwell claims here that poverty paralyzes the low and leaves them incapable of thought— political or otherwise. This leaves only the middle as the political enemy of the high, and thanks to new developments in the technology of power, the high are able to enslave the middle and continually oppress it in a fashion that guarantees the oligarchical structure of Oceania will not be destabilized. Thus history is frozen. The new oligarchy is a motley collection of “bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians” (Ibid.: 169). Orwell does not allow Goldstein to tell us much about this impregnable ruling clique that constitutes the inner party—the new high class. We are told only that, “As compared with their opposite numbers in past ages, they were less avaricious, less tempted by luxury, hungrier for pure power, and above all, more conscious of what they were doing and more intent on crushing opposition” (Ibid.). Their ability to reﬁne the new technologies of power at their disposal allowed them to transcend the half-hearted tyrannies of the past and achieve one of the great goals of political thought: a stable and enduring political order. This is a description of tyranny reﬁned and perfected; to resort once more to Hegelian jargon, the idea of tyranny has now fully manifest itself—the rational has become the horrible, and the horrible has become the real. Goldstein’s tale is as curious as it is upsetting. Viewed from the icy logic of political science, the structure of Oceania should make no sense. Tyranny is bound to be unstable, and to remain so, precisely because it is tyrannical. Tyrannies have enemies within, and the more tyrannical their leadership becomes, the more enemies they make. At some point the people are sure to revolt against the yoke of oppression. They may get only another tyrant for their eﬀorts, but they will still hope for something better. Yet this is the very prospect that Orwell wants to insist will not, and apparently cannot, happen in Oceania. The belief that the people will ﬁnally arise and unseat their oppressors is presented by Orwell as a feature of Winston’s dementia, for Winston insists, even though he knows better, that the future

The Evolution of Oceania

13

lies with the proles. But as O’Brien forcefully illustrates, if the future lies with the proles, there is no future. The people will not awaken politically and throw oﬀ the yoke of oppression, for the people—both the low and the middle—are seemingly unaware of any oppression in anything approaching signiﬁcant numbers. So to make his warning plausible, Orwell needed to make this counter-intuitive description of political development believable, and much of the political success of the story can be attributed to his considerable success in doing so. Orwell’s historical account of Oceania is hardly bereft of logic, but its logic turns Marxist optimism on its head. He oﬀers us an account of history where political ideals serve class interests only, and history, understood as a saga of political change, ends when class interests completely capture and obliterate political ideals. The new high, Orwell’s inner party, fathom’s the logic of history, and the lessons it learns enables it to solidify its position of privilege by isolating and pauperizing the low and completely subjugating the middle. Totalitarian control of the middle means that the middle class will no longer be able to radicalize the lower class, and the lower class is simply incapable of radicalizing itself. Thus Big Brother is eternal. But still there is the obsession with power. Still the object of torture is torture. Still the boot continues to stamp on the human face! This is the chilling condition Orwell invites us to try and understand. And this is the world he urges his posterity to avoid. The history/future described in Goldstein’s book is not Orwell’s history/ future. The particulars are borrowed largely, if not entirely, from James Burnham, whose speculations about the inevitable rise of a managerial class caught Orwell’s attention on more than one occasion.4 Orwell found little merit in Burnham’s predictions, but he both understood and appreciated the historical forces at work that Burnham had noticed. They were, he believed, quite real, though they lacked the determinist rigor Burnham ascribed to them. History, Orwell thought, could go this way if people were not careful and not attuned to the forces pushing in this direction. Thus the crucial political challenge facing Orwell’s world was to not let this future come about.

4 By the end of this book readers should understand why I think Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is a great book, and perhaps something below will persuade readers to agree with me. Its greatness, however, is measured here not by its artistic stature but by the political theory it contains and the

14

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

political problems it explores. Works of political theory endure and reach the stature of greatness because they continue to speak with pertinence to the human condition, because they continue to shed an element of insight into how we might address proﬁtably the political challenges we continue to face. Orwell’s confrontation with the problem of political power belongs to this category of political thought. As students of politics, we can learn from it, but ﬁrst we must decipher its lessons. And that is the purpose of this book. I have said that this is a book about Orwell’s book. By this I mean to signal that this is not a book about George Orwell or Eric Blair—Orwell’s given name. But of course it is hardly possible to separate an artist from his art so completely. We need to know a bit about the artist to fathom the meaning behind the art. In particular, we need to see how Orwell’s story develops out of Orwell’s life and his other works. If we recur to thinking of Nineteen Eighty-Four as a culmination, of sorts, of Orwell’s political thinking, it becomes important to see how this culmination has grown out of his previous reﬂections on politics. One way to do this is to consider his literary oﬀerings in their historical progression. But this is not the way I intend to proceed here. Instead, I want to consider the evolution of Oceania in terms of a set of concerns that emerge as Orwell’s political thinking progresses, concerns that help conﬁgure his literary journey. First of all, we need to become familiar with Orwell’s moral focus and explore the way this focus turned him in the direction of political thinking. Next we need to understand the initial target of his political concern and the way his life experiences helped shape his hatred of imperialism and poverty, the two elements of political dominance that initially troubled him. This will take us to his fears about fascism and totalitarianism, and ﬁnally, to his ultimate political warning. This odyssey is not intended as biography. Rather, it is essential background that should permit us to place Nineteen Eighty-Four in its proper political perspective and make sense out of Orwell’s political claims. Orwell scholars may object that I have ignored certain aspects of Orwell’s life or distorted others, but such objections are of no concern to me because I’m not really concerned with Orwell/Blair the writer. I’m concerned instead with what Orwell wrote, and my aim is to tell a coherent story about the political thought I ﬁnd there. Orwell’s work, especially Nineteen Eighty-Four interests me, as a political theorist, because I’m interested in the political paradox I ﬁnd at the center of Orwell’s political writings and because on my reading of his work, Orwell had something important and provocative to say about this paradox. I write, not to get Orwell right (whatever that

The Evolution of Oceania

15

might mean), but to bring to light what I think he said that is important to understanding and domesticating the problem of political power. By treating Nineteen Eighty-Four as a piece of political theory, my aim is to produce a piece of political theory. Unlike Orwell’s novel, my medium corresponds with its message, and if it happens that I’ve gotten Orwell wrong (whatever that might mean), I make no apologies as long as my political message is relatively clear.

Notes 1. This is hardly the only book that has been written about Orwell’s book (Cf. Lief, 1969; Steinhoﬀ, 1975); nor is it likely to be the last. But unlike previous books, I’m not inclined to explore the literary origins of the story; instead, my aim is to analyze and assess its political signiﬁcance. 2. The book was published in England under the title, “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” but American editions are typically published under the title, “1984.” Orwell, however, wrote the date out rather than putting it in numerical form, and I will follow him in this practice. 3. Orwell published a review of Zamyatin’s work in a Tribune article on January 4, 1946. There he indicates that he had tried for some time to get his hands on a copy. The book, which was written around 1920 (though Orwell puts the date at around 1923) had been censored in the Soviet Union but was published abroad in English (1924), French, and Czech (1927). Orwell ﬁnally managed to procure a French translation—the French title is Nous Autres—and his review is based upon this. Of course, it is also easy to overestimate the inﬂuence Zamyatin’s work had on Orwell, and no doubt several works of ﬁction substantially inﬂuenced the construction of Orwell’s novel. See Steinhoﬀ, 1975: 3–29. 4. See James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution (1941), and The Machiavellians (1943). For Burnham’s inﬂuence on Orwell, see Christopher Hollis, (1956), and Michael Maddison, (1961). Orwell’s most extensive discussion of Burnham is “James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution,” (Orwell, 1968c:160–81).

2 The Moral Imagination Edmund Burke reportedly said of Rousseau that he was a “lover of his kind and a hater of his kindred.” The same might plausibility be said of George Orwell. This, as we shall see, is certainly not the only similarity these thinkers share, but it does introduce the moral disapproval both thinkers directed toward their fellow human beings. Rousseau’s moral disappointment in his fellow man inspired him to think about how humankind might outgrow its corruption and get on a proper moral track. Orwell’s moral disappointment, on the other hand, inclined him to wonder if it was possible for humankind to reclaim its moral soul and escape the hell on earth he believed would be its fate if it failed to do so. Rousseau turned to theory to articulate a game plan for moral development; Orwell stuck with literature and issued a plea that he hoped might inspire a moral awakening. Rousseau’s moral angst, coupled no doubt with his advancing paranoia, sent him toward misanthropy near the end of his life. Orwell’s premature death left his moral critique unﬁnished and his moral quandary unresolved. It may also have spared him Rousseau’s misanthropy, though Orwell retained a fondness throughout his life for the ordinary working stiﬀ, missing in Rousseau, that might have sustained him against the disillusionment that comes with age. He remained, at the time of his death, unwilling to abandon this rather romantic vision of the ordinary worker in spite of his awareness that increased political consciousness was well beyond the abilities of the working class. But be this as it may, to understand Rousseau’s political thought, one must ﬁrst see how his moral imagination directed and informed his thinking about politics. Orwell did not turn to political theory in the overt way Rousseau did, of course, preferring to build his political thought out of his literary ambitions. But here too the place to start an exploration of Orwell’s political thought is with the moral instincts 16

The Moral Imagination

17

that eventually sent him along a path not altogether dissimilar from the one taken by Rousseau before him.

1 Where on earth do moralists come from? Why, that is, are some people—a rare breed it seems—inclined to expect moral decency from their fellow human beings and to suﬀer a form of moral indignation when their expectations are not fulﬁlled? Most people seem to take naturally to a kind of moral realism and never bother with moralism. Realists are happy to take people as they ﬁnd them and do not expect too much in terms of moral decency from others. Moralists, on the other hand, seem to expect, or at least anticipate, decency and to display a form of moral outrage when they notice the indecency that seems invariably to swirl around them. Moralists are disinclined to accept people as they are because their love of their kind requires them to set the bar of moral expectation rather high. When they elect to put pen to paper in order to advertise their outrage, they expect the rest of us to join them and share their disapproval. And as we trip through the pages of an Orwell or a Rousseau, or perhaps even a Thoreau, we might actually do so, at least for a time. But moral disapproval is a heavy burden to carry through life. The moralist, in realist eyes, is right to complain that man is a disappointment to man, but that is the way it is. If the moralist establishes himself as the conscience of the community (or the “wintry conscience of his generation,” as Pritchett described Orwell), we can appreciate him for his integrity, but we might also worry a bit about his mental health, for the world must be dealt with as it is. The realist notices that human beings are neither saints nor devils, but beings capable of exceptional good and extraordinary bad at the same time. We live, to borrow a phrase from Kant, in a kind of unsocial sociability; we should not hope for too much from our fellow man, but we should not expect too little either. The realist is comfortable in his skin because his moral expectations are not great; the moralist is uncomfortable, and discomforting, because he is a lover of humanity, and his expectations are accordingly great. Because of this, his disillusionment is also great. Readers of Orwell ﬁnd this disillusionment throughout the pages of his prose and poetry; it is the mark of his style. Where it came from, why Orwell became a moralist, I do not know, and we had best leave it to his biographers to speculate on this matter. Here I will be concerned only with how this disillusionment helped shape and conﬁgure Orwell’s political thought.

18

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

Morally speaking, the world for Orwell seemed like a reasonably simple place. People should be treated decently and should have the opportunity to live a decent life. This means that people should not be bullied, demeaned, or oppressed by others, and they should have access to those goods required to live reasonably well—enough food, a meaningful job, reasonable housing, proper clothing, decent medical care, and so forth. It took Orwell some time to fashion this moral outlook into a political form, but it did not take him long to notice that the social world did not function at all according to the standards of decency that mattered to him.1 Orwell probably did not take to writing in order to express his moral rage at the world that surrounded him, but it did not take long for this rage to drive his literary eﬀorts. His earliest writings seem driven by a desire to introduce his readers to the indecency characteristic of the social world, and he seems to have supposed, with the naiveté characteristic of the moralist, that his readers should care about all this. As Orwell tells it, he initially encountered indecency at Crossgates, the ﬁctionalized version of his boyhood school St. Cyprians, imagined in the little essay, “Such, Such Were the Joys” (Orwell, 1946a: 1). It seems unlikely that Orwell actually ﬁrst noticed the prevalence of indecency during his school years; more likely, his moral disappointment initially developed during his days as a policeman in Burma. But ﬁnding indecency initially at St. Cyprians served his literary purpose well by allowing him to indicate, in a story about the formative days of his education, just how thoroughly the indecency he had come to loathe soaked into English culture. Orwell describes himself in “Such, Such,” as a bit of an over-achiever. He managed admission to a private school somewhat beyond the socioeconomic class to which his parents belonged. He was taken on, he claims, because he showed promise as a student and not because of his family’s social station. This made all the diﬀerence; he just didn’t ﬁt in. His promise as a student did not prompt the school to take him on, the story goes, because the schoolmasters were interested in promoting the intellectual development of a particularly talented child. Instead, he was taken on because his ability was such that he might just win a scholarship to Eton or Wellington (which he did), and this would become a source of bragging rights and excellent advertising for the school that had turned him out. Orwell claims to have felt something of an outcast once he recognized that he did not really belong at Crossgates (St. Cyprians). He did not possess the proper admission credentials; though bright, he lacked the proper social standing to be accepted at Crossgates. More exactly, he lacked the background and speciﬁc virtues valued not only by the schoolmasters but also by his fellow students. Here Orwell can speak for himself:

The Moral Imagination

19

By the social standards that prevailed about me, I was no good, and could not be any good. But all the diﬀerent kinds of virtue seemed to be mysteriously interconnected and to belong to much the same people. It was not only money that mattered: there were also strength, beauty, charm, athleticism and something called “guts” or “character,” which in reality meant the power to impose your will on others. (Orwell, 1946a: 35–6) In academic terms, Orwell was reasonably successful in school, but he could not shake oﬀ the stigma of class diﬀerence and the embarrassment it caused him. “I had won two scholarships, but I was a failure, because success was measured not by what you did but by who you were. I was ‘not a good type of boy’ and could bring no credit on the school” (Orwell, 1946a: 41, Orwell’s italics). Whether true or not, this perception is indicative of Orwell’s well-known antipathy for class division, but in the story he tells, the point sinks to a deeper level of moral critique. For the young, he supposes, lack the understanding of class as simply a matter of economic division. Seen through youthful eyes, class division amounts to a diﬀerence of status and worth. The wealthy are not just richer than the members of the lower classes, they are, in some seemingly undeﬁned sense, better. It is not a class system Orwell discovered at Crossgates but an invidious caste system; or rather, the reality of class division is learned by the young as a form of caste system. One was what one’s birthright allowed one to be. Because Orwell lacked the proper class status, he supposed he must be deﬁcient in the other virtues that determine who the good boys are. Athleticism, beauty, “guts,” and the like are the virtues of those with the proper standing; they are the inheritances of the upper classes. And Orwell is at his ironic best in insisting that these attributes of class are what mattered at school, not native intelligence and a willingness to work hard—attributes that ride with the individual and stand independent of class standing. So in spite of his achievements, in spite of his scholarships, and consequently in spite of who he was, he was a failure because lower class sorts simply lack the “character” of the upper class. The educational process, Orwell concludes in admitted hindsight, was quite ancillary to what really mattered at Crossgates. The real focus of the school was socialization. It was there in the boarding schools of the upper class that the class/caste system that Orwell took to typify English society reproduced itself. Status, and the inequality it introduces, is taught in England from early youth onward. In boarding school, Orwell seems to insist, one learns one’s place, and with it, one’s role in society. Here one discovers one’s

20

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

future and one’s worth in the social scheme of things. Individual merit and personal achievement don’t matter; all that matters is the product of birthright. The class/caste system sees to this. This introduces the ﬁrst and perhaps primary source of the moral indecency that so outraged Orwell. The social world is divided, and one’s place in that world is determined before one even gets started in life. Children are taught not to question this simple fact of social life, not to sense the indecency plainly evident in all this when measured by the simple standards of moral propriety. Curiously, Orwell does not explain his outrage over the class/caste system he encountered at Crossgates in terms of inequality, though by the time he penned “Such, Such,” the notion of equality had overtly entered his moral and political lexicon. But something like an egalitarian spirit seems always to have powered his moral angst and his distaste for the indecency he came to see as pervasive throughout English society. He could not take the class/caste system at face value, as realists are inclined to do, because his moral conscience was fundamentally egalitarian. People should not be discriminated against because of inconsequential factors like family background or class status. People deserve to be evaluated on their own merits and as equals and not on the arbitrary standards of conventional social division. I don’t know if this is invariably characteristic of the moralist, but it certainly introduces another bond between Orwell and Rousseau.

2 Whether or not Orwell was really sensitive as a youth to the indecency he later associated with his boarding school days is really neither here nor there. Orwell was a strategically autobiographical writer; his homilies about his personal meanderings house the artistic structure through which he vented his moral rage and taught his moral lessons. Perhaps he scattered occasional details about his life and his youth throughout his essays because he wanted readers to understand him all the better. In “Why I Write,” for example, he confesses to a lonely childhood: “I had the lonely child’s habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued” (Orwell, 1946a: 309). But these confessions, like Rousseau’s confessions, also have a more theoretical purpose; they both illustrate and personalize the indecency that haunts a world whose citizens should know better. They oﬀer a moral polemic that masquerades as innocent biography. In an indecent world, success as it is conventionally understood would seem to be possible only if one is willing to pay the requisite moral price.

The Moral Imagination

21

Success in an indecent world would seem to require one to master indecency, to be up to the scheming and treachery that self-serving requires. In a world like this, the moralist will be happier thinking himself a failure. If nobility is to be found in such a world, it would seem to lie in deliberately living a life of failure and intentionally abjuring success because of its moral cost. Orwell insists throughout his life that he has been a failure and that his novels are failures; when it came to displays of moral integrity, he was not above a bit of bragging. To fail in order to live decently is hardly a vice, but by insisting upon his failure, he also shames the world in which he lived. Interestingly, the specter of failure also accompanies his most notable and enduring literary characters, but it is not the same kind of failure that Orwell bragged about. These characters are invariably weaklings with some obvious ﬂaw that becomes a source of self-consciousness and embarrassment: John Flory, in Burmese Days, has a hideous birthmark, Roger Comstock is a would-be poet without talent (not altogether unlike Orwell himself), George Bowling is obese, and Winston Smith suﬀers with his throbbing ulcer. But still, these are not altogether bad people; if they suﬀer a degree of shame, they are hardly wicked. Perhaps one never really likes them—they seem to whine a bit too much—but they also live in worlds worth whining about. And Orwell accordingly builds a bit of his own moral rage into each of them. They carry his message of moral critique, but they lack the courage to be the sort of failure that Orwell aspired to be. On this score, John Flory is surely the most interesting of Orwell’s many creations. Orwell clearly did encounter indecency in the jungles of Burma, and he enlists Flory as his vehicle for expressing and emphasizing his moral hatred for the particular form it took there. He hated British imperialism throughout his life and worked against it until the end. But the indecency he encountered and suﬀered in Burma, the indecency he builds into Burmese Days, is hardly unique to British imperialism; rather, the imperial presence of the British in Burma simply sets the stage for a deeper and more generic indecency that Orwell sensed throughout his life. Flory’s ﬁght, and his ﬁnal failure, are typical of the various battles, and the inevitable defeats, Orwell’s characters invariably experience. Flory is unique among the Englishmen who inhabit the European club in Orwell’s story because he is not a racist. He counts among his friends a Burmese doctor by the name of Veraswami, an upright and honest enough fellow who is curiously tolerant of the English presence in his country. These two characters are the “good guys” in a generally tedious tale of intrigue that involves outside oﬃcial pressure on the members of the European Club to admit a native Burman to their ranks. The overt racism of the other English

22

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

members of the Club presents an obvious barrier to the election of a native, but this is hardly the heart of the story. It is the background intrigue that matters here. While it appears that Dr. Veraswami has the inside track on getting elected to the Club, a cunning and heartless character named U Po Kyin is busy plotting against the doctor in order gain favor with the English and win election to the Club for himself. By novel’s end, U Po Kyin’s treachery proves successful. He manages to embarrass Flory so thoroughly that he can gain admission to the Club over the ashes of both Flory and Dr. Veraswami. No happy ending here. The heartless schemer gains his desired end while the decent players on the stage are both undone. If Burmese Days is read as a tale of good versus evil, evil wins in the end. Treachery defeats decency. Burma is thus merely Orwell’s initial stage for what turns out to be a fairly typical tale about a power struggle between decency and indecency. U Po Kyin is cagey enough to identify the weaknesses of his adversaries and cunning enough to exploit them with virtually complete success.2 He does not play fair, by any means, but this proves to be his strength. Those who do play fair, those who do possess something like a conscience, are accordingly undone by their own virtue. The dehumanizing racist attitude of the English characters in the novel is unsettling enough, but it is not what really unsettles. What really unsettles is the moral depravity of those characters who struggle to promote themselves within the context of an established caste system. Behind the calm of English rule—rule made possible and calm in the end by English arms—is an unending power struggle where anything goes. The pursuit of self-interest knows no barriers or boundaries. With the notable exception of the relationship between Flory and Dr. Veraswami, the characters in the story are little more than self-promoting egoists. This is hardly a story unique to Burma; Burma matters here only because it provides the speciﬁc context that houses an altogether commonplace, even pedestrian, form of indecency. It is the indecency of a world without discernible moral standards. The overt indecency of British imperialism merely houses a more subtle, but perhaps also more commonplace, indecency: getting what one wants by stepping over the broken bodies or spirits of others. Burmese Days might seem to be a story told by a moral cynic. Orwell’s characters do not come close to exhibiting the moral character readers may well expect of them. The racism underlying the caste divisions of Burma merely illustrates one form of human indecency; the self-serving ways of the characters displays another, even more basic form. It pays to wonder if

The Moral Imagination

23

the two are related, if racism is at heart just a special form of self-serving. This is not an indecency Orwell could have found in Burma alone, but it seems to be in Burma that Orwell began to go to war with the indecency of the world around him. We might think of the moral cynic as a moralist who has become laden with disappointment. As moral cynic, we might suppose Orwell took pen in hand to share his cynicism with us and in so doing to illustrate the indecency to which he had become reconciled. But the moral cynic is irredeemable because he has quit the struggle against indecency. Rousseau eventually got there, but Orwell never did. But there is also an impotence about poor Flory worth noticing. He had no particular use for the racism he saw in his English peers. He had the character to cut through the bric-a-brac of caste that comes with imperial rule and appreciate a virtuous character, like Dr. Veraswami, when he met one. But could he have controlled events more eﬀectively? Could he have successfully championed Dr. Veraswami at the Club and secured his election? His failing was that he could not eﬀectively hide the skeletons in his own closet; he could not escape the implications of his aﬀair with a native girl. There was no real reason for his suicide; he gave up just when he should have gotten tough. But he was his own worst enemy in the end. A life of perceived failure and embarrassment weighed him down, and he took the cowardly way out. In this he resembles Comstock, Bowling, and Winston, albeit in importantly diﬀerent ways, but in this he was also very much the antithesis of George Orwell. Orwell undoubtedly built some of his own reactions to life in Burma into Flory’s character. This becomes hauntingly evident when we take a quick look at his notable short story, “Shooting an Elephant.” Here Orwell tells the story of an elephant that has gone “must,” escaped its caretaker, and rampaged through a Burmese village, killing a coolie. The Burmese turn to Orwell, in his capacity as policeman, for help and relief. By the time he catches up with the elephant, however, the attack of must is over and the elephant is now quiet and serene. There stands Orwell with his gun, facing the now calm elephant, and behind him stand the Burmese from the village with their expectation that Orwell will levy a bit of justice on the poor animal. This he does, of course, by killing the elephant, something he had not intended to do when he set out to deal with the situation. Nor was there any real reason for him to kill the now tranquil creature. He did so, he tells his readers in a fairly cathartic moment, simply to “avoid looking a fool” (Orwell, 1946a: 155). Like Flory, Orwell had a strong sympathy for the

24

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

Burmese, or rather for their plight under British rule; yet both allowed the caste division underlying the situation to get to them in a strong moral sense. If Orwell did not want to look the fool in front of the Burmese, Flory could not deal with being made a fool by his Burmese lover, whom he had released once his desire for Elizabeth, his female interest in the story, had overtaken him. The exposure of his aﬀair with the woman cost him any chance he had to marry Elizabeth, and he could not endure the public shame he had suﬀered at the hands, ultimately, of U Po Kyin’s cunning. Flory’s attention to the Burmese, symbolized both by his association with Dr. Veraswami and his aﬀair with Ma Hla May, was the source of his shame, the reason behind what we might call his loss of face. While Flory seems to have cared little about the way his fellow Europeans regarded him, things were diﬀerent when it came to Elizabeth. Orwell provides no indication in the story to suppose that U Po Kyin was privy to Flory’s feelings for Elizabeth. He simply needed to discredit Flory in the eyes of his fellow Europeans, and the fact that his actions reached Elizabeth was just a bit of unintended bad luck for Flory—and good luck for U Po Kyin. Flory would likely have been able to live with the shame of his aﬀair with Ma Hla May being publicized had it not been for Elizabeth, even if it might have weakened his ability to see Dr. Veraswami elected to the Club—U Po Kyin’s intended outcome. Yet, in spite of Flory’s vulnerability with regard to Elizabeth, his loss of face was premised upon his violation of the standards of the caste system that prevailed in Burma. He carried on with the Burmese in a way inconsistent with the demands of his imperial station. He oﬀended the snobbish etiquette of British rule, and was made a laughing stock for the Burmese as a result.3 This Orwell did not do in his confrontation with the elephant. Even though he expressed sympathy for the plight of the Burmese under British rule, he knew they hated him, the street-level representative of British imperial rule in Burma, and he hated being the target of their hatred. Perhaps more than anything else, he admits he hated the idea of being laughed at by the Burmese, a fate Flory was unable to avoid. In a revealing moment of candor, he tells his readers his biggest fear at that moment: A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do deﬁnite things. To come all that way, riﬂe in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing—no that was impossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man’s life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at. (Orwell, 1946a: 153)

The Moral Imagination

25

Flory ultimately suﬀered a loss of face with his fellow Europeans because he put himself in a position where the Burmese could mock him. His embarrassment was a source of amusement to them, and this only worsened his transgression of the imperial code. Orwell would not risk a loss of face with the Burmese, even though he well understood that acting like a sahib meant doing something he believed it unnecessary and wrong to do. Keeping the appearance of knowing his own mind meant actually acting contrary to his own conscience. He was enslaved by protocol; caught in the grip of a social situation that made him behave in a manner he considered improper. Keeping up expectations in an indecent environment demands indecency of one, and Orwell confesses, “[W]hen the white mans turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys” (Orwell, 1946a: 152). Orwell oﬃcially presents the predicament he faced in this situation as something of a moral dilemma: Was shooting the elephant justiﬁed or not? It seems to have been something of a split decision among his peers, “The older men said I was right, the younger men said it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie, because an elephant was worth more than any damn Coringhee coolie” (Orwell, 1946a: 156). But his declared reason for shooting the elephant was to save face, and he cared little whether shooting the animal was right or wrong. He followed his most powerful emotion and remained faithful to the role he found himself playing. This, it seems, is what one does in such situations. But emotion is a reasonable moral guide only if a sense of decency is stronger than other, competing emotions, and only if it points clearly in the proper direction. It doesn’t matter in the end whether Orwell went to Burma a moralist or whether he became one there. Either way, he understood, while in Burma, that decency matters, but he discovered its fragile nature there as well. Something like face—how one is seen by others—matters too, and our moral conscience is accordingly jeopardized by concerns that focus exclusively on the self. It takes a thick hide to be a practicing moralist. Perhaps Orwell left Burma and his position as policeman because his hide thickened. He had the courage not to be laughed at and unlike Flory, to act the sahib. But he also learned that he did not have the taste for it. The whole aﬀair of imperial rule, with its caste divisions and awkward distributions of power, was perfectly illustrative of what he saw as a grotesque indecency. Flory was incapable of controlling the events around him and found himself unable to endure the shame and loss that he experienced as a consequence. As a pawn of British imperial rule, Orwell controlled things somewhat more eﬀectively, not by shooting the elephant, but by walking away from a thoroughly indecent enterprise.

26

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

3 If the moralist merely vents his spleen at the terrible absence of moral integrity in the world, he does little that is constructive. The real challenge is not just to notice how poorly humans treat one another, but to do something about it. The moralist who dwells on how miserable things are and leaves matters at that becomes little more than a righteous bore. Rousseau understood this rather well, and his genius is best displayed not in the moral condemnation of the social world he found himself in—the subject of his early political writings—but in the novelty of his eﬀort to imagine a better tomorrow. Orwell also seemed to understand this rather well, and the most bedeviling challenge linked to grasping his literary legacy is to understand what he wanted to do about it and how he intended to do it. It is tempting, and perhaps not altogether misleading, to dismiss him in this regard as simplistic. He understood that a writer cannot escape politics, though he never tells his readers precisely what he means by politics, other than that he takes the term in the “widest possible sense.” He tells us, in “Why I Write,” that he wrote to expose some lie or draw attention to some fact, and his initial concern was “to get a hearing” (Orwell, 1946a: 315). But of course there is more to what Orwell was up to than this; he wanted not only to expose lies but also to “push the world in a certain direction,” and “to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after” (Ibid.: 312–13). And as his works became more overtly political, he began to think that he knew the kind of society people should strive after. “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it” (Ibid.: 314, Orwell’s italics). If there is simplicity in this—and if there is, it need not be a vice—it is because it makes the moral world into a fairly simple place. Indecency exists, and in Orwell’s later years he thought it to wear the mask of totalitarianism. But decency also exists, and the problem is to ﬁnd where it dwells and bring it to light. One way to discern the home of decency is to suppose that it is embedded permanently in the human breast and waiting only to be called to arms by the perspicacious social critic. The moral world, on this view, resembles a child’s morality play, and to expose things in this light is the ﬁrst and most onerous step in making things right. Orwell probably wanted the moral world to be a simple place, but it is far from clear that he was convinced that it really was. His own literary legacy tends to belie this view, as I shall argue shortly. But the theoretical sophistication he developed

The Moral Imagination

27

in later years should not be allowed to blind the continuous pull that moralism had on him. By 1939, when Orwell wrote his powerful essay, “Charles Dickens,” he was inclined to ponder the question of how to make the world a more decent place. There is little question that he saw in Dickens a kindred spirit, and perhaps this explains why his review of Dickens has more to do with Orwell than it does with Dickens. He chides Dickens for being a moralist without a game plan. Dickens would leave society as it is but make men better. “His whole ‘message,’” he wrote of Dickens, “is one that at ﬁrst glance looks like an enormous platitude: If men would behave decently the world be decent” (Orwell, 1946a: 52). And Orwell’s message in the essay seems to be: “ ‘If men would behave decently the world would be decent’ is not such a platitude as it sounds” (Ibid.: 65). But this is a hard sell, and if Orwell wanted to believe it, as perhaps he did in 1939, he soon became his own staunchest critic on this score. It is far from clear, for example, that he remained wedded to Dickens’s platitude in 1948, when he ﬁnished Nineteen Eighty-Four. But he was clearly onto the problem in 1939 that troubled him in 1948 (and in Nineteen Eighty-Four). The problem I am referring to has to do with what might be called political progress—the political manifestation of making the world a decent place. We should not confuse change with progress here, though Orwell was hardly sensitive to the distinction. Progress—political progress—happens, he thought, but it is a middling sort of progress; old tyrants fade away and their place is taken by new ones. The struggle for justice continues, but tyranny constantly reappears.“The central problem—how to prevent power from being abused—remains unsolved” (Ibid.: 65). By the time we get to Goldstein’s book in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the revolving door of tyrants has ended, and the “central problem” is now unresolvable. But this simply clues us into the fact that the progress Orwell has in mind is something like moral enlightenment. Progress must be made against the powerful trend toward moral decay, a decay that results from the human failure to master and control power itself. This is the viewpoint of a moralist who has developed a political awareness and recognized the problem of indecency as a political and not just a moral one. The barrier to meaningful political progress now takes the form of a paradox in Orwell’s thinking. Two viewpoints, he supposes, are always tenable: “The one, how can you improve human nature until you have changed the system? The other, what is the use of changing the system before you have changed human nature?” (Ibid.: 64). The former question he associates with the revolutionary, while the latter displays the mindset of the

28

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

moralist. So, these two views stand in opposition to one another, but neither seems terribly compelling in its own right. Nonetheless, in “Charles Dickens,” Orwell gives the moralist his due, and he concludes almost triumphantly that, “ ‘If men would behave decently the world would be decent’ is not such a platitude as it sounds” (Ibid.: 65). But the due given does not measure up to the paradox Orwell has discovered. Missing from this homily is the unseen power of power. The moralist does not resolve the problem of power; he merely wishes it away. Nonetheless, Orwell’s attraction to moralism inclined him to pay a powerful tribute to poor Dickens. Why does Dickens endure as a writer of signiﬁcance? Orwell answers this by insisting, “But in his own age and ours he has been popular chieﬂy because he was able to express in a comic, simpliﬁed and therefore memorable form the native decency of the common man” (Ibid.: 103). Dickens strikes a moral chord with us; he reminds us, Orwell supposes, of an unavoidable truth lurking buried in the human breast. He associated this moral chord, this basic sense of decency, vaguely with Christian ethics, though for reasons he never explores; yet he gives it a distinctly political shape: “[T]he Western world has been haunted by the idea of freedom and equality; it is only an idea, but it has penetrated to all ranks of society” (Ibid.: 103, Orwell’s italics). Why “freedom and equality” constitute a single idea he does not say; nor does he explain why he thinks this idea really has penetrated all ranks of society. Given some of his earlier published remarks, as we shall see, this claim suggests a fairly shallow optimism. But he sticks to it, insisting, “Nearly everyone, whatever his actual conduct may be, responds emotionally to the idea of human brotherhood” (Ibid.: 103). Here, it seems, Orwell the moralist rejects the revolutionary posture. There is, he seems to want to say, a bit of decency lurking in nearly everyone that cannot be snuﬀed out by even the most egregious indecency. Such must be the case if the moralist is to have any hope. A basic sense—Orwell supposes it to be an emotion—of human decency is lodged in the human breast, and it constitutes a piece of moral truth that must be kept in plain sight. If it can be kept in sight and made evident enough, political progress may just happen. This is about all the moralist has to hang his hat on. But Orwell’s own work, particularly Nineteen Eighty-Four, is a haunting testimony to the fact that things are hardly as simple as all this. Winston Smith supposes, perhaps in the fashion of the moralist, that they can’t get inside you, but of course we learn at the end of the novel that in fact they can. Individual integrity is uprooted to its core; neither Winston’s thoughts, nor his emotions, remain solely his own. He is remade into a proper supplicant; he is transformed into a dutiful cog in the machinery of Oceania.

The Moral Imagination

29

There is no longer any place for the idea of freedom and equality in his emotional make-up. The only remaining emotion is what O’Brien has put there: his love for Big Brother. In a world where power remains untamed, the moralist is doomed. Big Brother controls both ideas and emotions, and there is no sanctuary, either in the human breast or anywhere else, for decency to endure. Perhaps, however, we can keep Orwell the naïve moralist alive by arguing that this view of the matter makes sense only if he really believed the nightmare of Oceania was in fact possible. But, the argument continues, this is overly fanciful; in fact, Orwell was doing exactly what Dickens did: illustrating that the world would be a decent place only if people would behave decently. On this view, Orwell’s Oceania is really not possible, and for reasons that Orwell, the moralist, was clearly onto. But he wanted to make it seem possible in order to illustrate what it is that we must avoid. He tweaks our sense of humanity, our idea of brotherhood, by imagining an impossible world where this moral sense has been eliminated altogether. The novel is an exercise in hyperbole, but hyperbole with a moral purpose. The problem with this response, however, is that it might simply underestimate those technologies of power, and more fearfully the psychological transformation of power into its own end, that Orwell himself notices and explores with relentless prescience. Supposing we feel the force of this response, we might then entertain the thought that Orwell imagined a real political possibility in order to inspire our sense of brotherhood, and in so doing to put us on guard against the realization of this possibility. Good is put on proper guard when we sense just how clever evil can be. This is what we must not let happen, and when we see it in all its naked ugliness, our sense of decency can be enlisted against its happening. This is probably a fairly faithful rendering of what Orwell was really up to, but it also seems a fairly weak reply to the evil Orwell has imagined. We should ask, for example, whether Orwell is really on ﬁrm ground with his rather naïve conviction that some basic emotional attachment to human brotherhood actually lurks in the human breast. And even if it does, we might also want to ask if evil can be so readily exposed, and our sense of brotherhood—our sense of decency—triggered by occasional artistic renditions of grotesque injustice of the sort on display in Dickens, perhaps, or in Orwell’s later ﬁction. As Orwell himself noticed in Wigan Pier, when fascism arrives in England it will be of a “sedate and subtle kind” (Orwell, 1958: 212). It will be “a slimy Anglicised form of Fascism, with cultured policeman instead of Nazi gorillas and the lion and the unicorn instead of the swastika” (Ibid.: 231). Evil is going to be much harder to realize when it wears much friendlier garb. How then can tales of

30

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

torture in the Ministry of Love and stories about the thought police trigger our sense of decency to stand guard against this sort of thing? Given the theoretical sophistication of Nineteen Eighty-Four, it seems somewhat foolish to think that Orwell thought it suﬃcient merely to expose and illustrate the lie. It seems foolish, this is to say, to think that if the artist shouts loud enough and long enough, others will take stock, wise up, and live happily ever after. The moralist might have an element of success at pointing out what we should avoid, but this still makes him just a crashing bore. What the moralist must do to be eﬀective is to turn to theory and oﬀer some indication of precisely how a perceived threat or evil can be avoided. It may seem comforting to think that decency lurks somewhere in the human breast, but there is perhaps enough indecency around to notice that this sort of lurking isn’t very eﬀective. In Nineteen Eighty-Four we learn that Orwell ﬁgured out that there wasn’t much lurking in the human breast after all, and we must look elsewhere if we are to defend against indecency and resolve the problem of power. Orwell never abandoned moralism, but he did manage to become a moralist with a game plan.

4 Rousseau’s moralism, at least on this score, is vastly more penetrating, vastly more sagacious, than the sort of moralism Orwell attributes to Dickens. Dickens, the moralist, supposed that our moral emotions are there and in place, and that we must simply surrender to them for life to go better. Rousseau knew better and no doubt because he was sensitive to the underlying philosophical diﬃculties surrounding the matter, diﬃculties that Orwell only slowly came to notice. Orwell’s reading of the moral situation of his day was not unlike Rousseau’s. Rousseau supposed, perhaps with a bit of justiﬁcation, that he lived in a time of moral, and thus political, decay. He thought he knew a bit about how this decay had come about, but his real concern involved how to reverse the trend. The problem, as he saw it, was educational as well as political. Human beings, Rousseau insisted, do have a moral sense, but it competes for control of the self with a diﬀerent and selﬁsh sense. Humankind has been corrupted by society; selﬁshness, he supposed, had come to dominate human behavior. Social power, we might say with deliberate obscurity, has had a corrupting aﬀect on human beings. While he preceded Dickens in thinking that a sense of decency can be found in the human breast, Rousseau believed that it requires cultivation if it is to have any inﬂuence on human action; for this decency is juxtaposed

The Moral Imagination

31

by a diﬀerent sort of emotion, an unseemly sense of self-love Rousseau calls amour propré (Rousseau, 1979: 4–18 and passim). Absent the proper moral education, amour propré is likely to dominate the self and incline people to become selﬁsh egoists who proﬁt themselves at the expense of others. With the proper moral psyche in place, Rousseau thought it possible to turn to politics and craft a republican form of civil association that could, in turn, provide the socio-political context that would enable moral character to thrive and hopefully sustain itself.4 So, Orwell’s paradox was both anticipated and resolved, at least in theory, by Rousseau. For Rousseau, the moralist and the revolutionary do not stand in such stark opposition as Orwell supposed; instead, they need to work together, for working alone neither can hope to push humankind in the direction of social justice. Equality and freedom—ideals championed by Rousseau as well as Orwell—are possible only with the proper moral education, but they are sustainable, if they are sustainable at all, only through a properly constructed form of civil association. But before one can be a revolutionary, according to Rousseau, one must ﬁrst be a moralist. Consequently, the moralist of Rousseau’s stamp well understands the need for and value of moral education. The spirit of brotherhood immanent in the breast needs to be transformed into a moral vision, and this is possible only with proper moral training. Absent this training, the claim, “If men would behave decently the world would be decent,” really is just an unhelpful platitude. What seemed for Orwell, early in his writing, to be simple and straightforward moral insights— the value of freedom and equality—were recognized as complex moral concerns by Rousseau, concerns that demanded considerable reﬂection to be properly understood and eﬀectively appreciated. If decency is present in the human breast, it is, according to Rousseau, there along with other, far less noble, inclinations and emotions, and if people are to learn to behave decently, they must work at it. What is required is a form of social cultivation and not just artistic articulation. Perhaps artistic articulation has a place to play in the process of social cultivation, I should certainly like to think that it does (though Rousseau was rather ambivalent on the matter), but more than this is also required. Central to the usual moralist complaint is the belief that the world can, and should, be a better place. What is needed is a dose of real moral integrity, though how this is to be achieved is rarely explained. There is reason, then, to hold the moralist’s feet to the ﬁre and ask for some details regarding what this better world would look like in practice. Though hardly a utopian, Rousseau comes through for us on this score. The Social Contract provides a glimpse, albeit a rather romanticized one, of what equality and

32

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

fraternity might look like in practice. In his more lyrical moments, he asks us to imagine a sylvan environment where individuals, regarding one another as friends, meet together for the purpose of deciding what they shall do. Forthright discussion shapes the general will (Rousseau, 1986a: 30–4). These are not individuals with their own independent agendas trying to work others into embracing their desires; nor are they ideological opponents already convinced they know what is best for the group and working to have their favored vision adopted. They are friends, not antagonists, working faithfully and harmoniously to reach a common decision. Their personal interests are put aside, for the will of the community can only be reached by open and honest discussion, and cannot be achieved through scheming and treachery. It is an idyllic vision, but Rousseau seems to insist that it is not an impossible one. Still, he well understood that it is an improbable one. Size and social complexity are the great enemies of simple community; they demand political concessions to existential reality that erode the idyllic vision and introduce contestation that becomes a political challenge in its own right. Rousseau was full of ways to accommodate all this diversity and to get along politically in spite of it all (Cf. Ibid.: 165). But his moral vision still had little place for orthodoxy of any sort, and it was eventually his personal war with religious orthodoxies that encouraged his misanthropy. Once again we can see something of Orwell in all this. Orwell’s sense of what a decent world looks like in practice is hardly as reﬁned as Rousseau’s. In his later years, and particularly in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eightyfour, he seemed more intent upon detailing the inevitable outcome of indecency than exploring the triumph of decency. Yet he was not altogether silent on what a decent world might look like. As with Rousseau, his decent world would take a distinctly political shape. It would involve the triumph of something he called “democratic socialism”—a poor choice of terms, perhaps, for here his imagination failed him. By invoking the word “socialism” he borrowed from one of the popular orthodoxies of his day and found himself a strange bedfellow with thinkers and activists consumed with their own internal political squabbles. He would not let go of this word, but he would not make much of a socialist either. Had his imagination not failed him, he might have found a better word, one that reﬂected more accurately his fundamental focus on human equality. It seems to have taken Orwell a bit of time to recognize that decency involves equality and that socialism, as he understood it, should be understood as a real commitment to equality. It wasn’t until Homage to Catalonia that he ﬁnally identiﬁes socialism with equality. “The thing that attracts

The Moral Imagination

33

ordinary men to Socialism and makes them willing to risk their skins for it, the ‘mystique’ of Socialism, is the idea of equality; to the vast majority of people Socialism means a classless society, or it means nothing at all” (Orwell, 1952: 104). And by “classless society,” it is best to understand Orwell to mean a “casteless society.” It seems Orwell had to actually experience equality in order to recognize it, and he thought he experienced it in his early days in Spain. Here, he supposed, was true equality, or what he called “equality in fact.” The notion is relatively complex, and it gives rise to a fairly complicated political vision—to a vision not altogether unlike Rousseau’s. Orwell’s sense of equality involves, ﬁrst of all, a social condition in which people see one another as independent human beings and recognize that a dignity adheres to this status. There are no class/caste divisions that choreograph interpersonal relations between people who recognize and approach one another as equals; such divisions lie at the heart of Orwell’s sense of indecency. There is no social baggage that stands between persons as equals, no hierarchies, presumptuousness, posturing, or arrogance. Human interaction, in turn, is characterized by honesty and forthrightness. Individuals simply see and respect one another as equals. Had Orwell had any familiarity with Rousseau, he might have thought to think of his egalitarian condition in terms of civil community rather than in terms of socialism. To see others as equals in the sense that mattered to Orwell (and Rousseau) takes one naturally to democracy, where democracy is best understood to involve a form of political equality. No person should be subject to the will of another, and everyone should have at least some input into the process by which decisions aﬀecting them are made. Democracy, in this sense, is the clear opposite of tyranny, if by tyranny we mean one lot of people imposing their will on another lot of people. Orwell’s love of democracy inclined him to hate tyranny, and his later writings suggest that his hate drove his literary career more than his love. Viewed politically, the notion of “democratic socialism” is something of a redundancy; socialism as Orwell envisioned it is fundamentally and essentially democratic. But the notion also, and appropriately, has an economic component. Respecting others as equals and treating them accordingly also means not hogging all the stuﬀ necessary for a person to live reasonably well. Orwell lived among the poor—more on this later— and grew to appreciate the fact that poverty is as debasing as it is debilitating. Living a decent life requires access to suﬃcient material goods to allow everyone to enjoy the physical comfort Orwell naturally associated with a digniﬁed human condition. Equality would eliminate caste (and its ugly political ramiﬁcations) and with the elimination of caste, the class system

34

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

would go too. What seems to have troubled Orwell on this score is that poverty to him seemed so damned unnecessary. “The world is a raft sailing through space with, potentially, plenty of provisions for everybody; the idea that we must all co-operate and see to it that everyone does his fair share of the work and gets his fair share of the provisions, seems so blatantly obvious that one would say that no one could possible fail to accept it unless he had some corrupt motive for clinging to the present system” (Orwell, 1958: 171). In economic terms, Orwell is anything but a Marxist. He has no sense of a future in which human beings have outgrown Marx’s fetishism of commodities and live quietly amid some imagined cornucopia of wealth. Living comfortably, albeit simply, mattered to him, and he seemed to suppose that a civil (i.e., decent) life involved a degree of material well-being. The full ﬂowering of the individual is not possible in conditions of squalor. But for reasons it is important to try and understand, the economic side of his “democratic socialism” receded into the background of his thought as his concern with tyranny increased. In this regard, Orwell again approximates Rousseau, who, like Orwell, was no stranger to poverty, but whose egalitarianism does not receive a distinctive economic expression. Interestingly, at about the point at which Orwell began to understand the egalitarian foundations of his sense of decency, his focus on economic injustice began to subside and his moral rage to shift toward more overtly political themes. This introduces some inkling of what Orwell’s decent world might look like and suggests why he could think that Dickens’s view that “[if] men would behave decently the world would be decent” is rather more than a platitude. For the only hope for democratic socialism (or genuine community) is the triumph of decency. But saying this still will not make it so; without some strategy for getting people to behave decently, we are again left with only a platitude. Revolutionaries, as Orwell understood this term, are not moralists; they do not regard socio-political problems as illustrations of humankind’s moral failure—as the result of humankind’s fallen condition, if one must put it in more Christian terms. Revolutionaries are structuralists who think that human character is a product of socio-economic forces and that by revising our institutions we can remake our moral psyches. The moralist is not like this; the moralist puts moral failing ﬁrst and demands moral awakening as the sine qua non of human improvement. Rousseau was no revolutionary in this sense; he was a moralist. But he inspired a great revolution. The revolution he inspired changed the social institutions of France, but it did not, it seems, change the French.

The Moral Imagination

35

Orwell, the moralist, hoped to resuscitate something like Rousseau’s revolution and to direct it to a happier destination; this is what I mean when I say Orwell was a moralist with a game plan. But he did not allow his moralism to control his art, as it did with Dickens. Like Rousseau, his moralism set him to thinking, and not just to writing. His thinking led him in the direction of political thought, for again like Rousseau, Orwell eventually learned that ideals like freedom and equality—political manifestations of a sense of decency—require understanding and cultivation if they are to endure. Unlike Rousseau, however, Orwell did not turn to education and moral psychology in order to ﬂesh out some mysterious empathy built into the human breast. When Orwell ﬁnally looked carefully into the human breast, he concluded that nothing has been put there by nature, and his fondness for the ordinary worker should not be allowed to mislead here. He never doubted the basic goodness of the worker, but these characters begin to resemble Rousseau’s noble savage in his thinking. They are innocent enough, and there is an element of nobility about this innocence. But innocence should not be confused with moral insight. Understanding must eclipse innocence before the desired insight can be achieved. Dickens’s platitude, it turns out, is best read as an invitation to pursue political thinking and not as a recipe, in itself, for a better world.

5 Though they are in so many ways strange bedfellows, George Orwell and Jean-Jacques Rousseau share oddly similar biographies. Both lived lonely childhoods; both became dreamers of a better world. Both knew poverty; both identiﬁed strongly with their native lands. Both traveled through their own memories; both looked into their own souls in search of an understanding of humanity. Both have stood accused of misogyny. Both ventured to Paris in search of a future. Both went to war with the world that housed them. And both left powerful political legacies. Of course, they also had their diﬀerences. Orwell got along better with others than did Rousseau. Rousseau died an unwanted exile; Orwell died a successful writer. But in spite of it all, both were moralists with the strength of imagination to conceive of a better world and a better political condition. For Rousseau, political improvement was possible only through proper moral education. Orwell says little about education, but his readers may plausibly suppose that he wrote not just with a political purpose but with a moral one as well. To read his most haunting and enduring novels, Animal farm and Nineteen Eighty-four, as political satire should not cloud our view of them as primers on moral and political education.

36

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

Orwell wrote, in eﬀect, not really to change the world but to save it. His writing displays the very egalitarianism he eventually came to recognize and treasure as the core of decency. He is properly famous for his clear, honest prose. He remained an independent thinker who valued independent thinking. Appropriately enough, he penned his own most enduring portrait. It is to be found in the closing remarks of his essay on Dickens, and while writing about Dickens, one can’t help but think that he was thinking of himself: He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always ﬁghting against something, but who ﬁghts in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry—in other words, of an nineteenth century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls. (Orwell, 1946a: 104, Orwell’s italics) The purveyors of little orthodoxies continue to hate Orwell, and his work remains of value well into the twenty-ﬁrst century because moralists still have work to do, still have these little orthodoxies to contend with.

Notes 1. George Woodcock says that, “Orwell was always a moralist, even at Eton if one is to accept Cyril Connolly’s account of him in Enemies of Promise, and when he acquired political opinions they merely channeled his moralism, but by no means tamed it” (Woodcock, 1966: 132). 2. Orwell, however, could not allow U Po Kyin to enjoy complete success. U Po Kyin’s religion required him to make some atonement for his many sins, but before he could make good on his ﬁnal plan of atonement, he died suddenly. Indecency may triumph over decency is the workings of man in the story, but Orwell builds a bit of solace into the story by allowing for a bit of cosmic justice in the end. 3. Orwell foreshadows the humiliation that would become Flory’s fate in sketches he made for the novel. “Now this girl you’ve made friends with,—very respectable girl, I don’t doubt, perfectly respectable—but you’ve got to realize, my boy, that it won’t do. Get entangled with a woman like that,—and where are you? Ruined. Ruined!” (Quoted in Bowker, 2003: 83). 4. Rousseau’s own misanthropy eventually prevented him from being overly optimistic on this score. Cf. Rousseau, 1981.

3 The Price of Poverty It’s a long way from the jungles of Burma to the spikes of London and slums of Paris. But it wasn’t much of a journey for Orwell. The places changed. The faces changed. But the indecency was all too familiar. His experiences in Burma always hover in the background as he explores the life of the down and out in Paris and London. The similarities of experience the inhabitants of these sub-worlds share outweigh any diﬀerence of place or face. It is not surprising that Orwell should have found something indecent about a life of poverty. Nor is it surprising to ﬁnd a down at heel but aspiring writer taking on poverty as a subject. What surprises is the eclectic yet penetrating collection of thoughts and insights that typify his musings on poverty. Readers ﬁnd awaiting them a tangle of innocent observation, sociological speculation, amateur psychoanalysis, moral outrage, and political analysis. The issue that concerns me at present, however, involves recognizing how Orwell’s encounter with poverty shaped his political thought. One rather obvious response quickly presents itself: Poverty drove Orwell toward socialism and thus eﬀectively shaped his politics. This is true enough, but also rather unhelpful. Always the friend and ally of the underdog, and dedicated foe of the overdog, Orwell took the side of the poor in what he considered a class struggle with an uncertain outcome. Socialism, as he understood it, involved the empowerment of the poor and the corresponding pursuit of an economic condition in which people did their fair share in contributing to social wealth and received their fair share in return (Orwell, 1958: 171). But he embraced socialism as an ideal and not as a doctrine, and much of his literary venom was directed at socialist thinking that moved in the direction of orthodoxy and away from the simple ideal he found at the heart of the notion. 37

38

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

Yet Orwell’s politics should be kept distinct from his political thought. His personal revulsion toward the plight of the poor—the revulsion that shaped his politics and sent him toward socialism— is best separated from his critique of the way poverty aﬀects those sad characters who suﬀer from its ravages. Orwell is always up front about his politics; his political thought is another matter. Orwell the moralist had no choice other than to side with the poor in defense of decency. What matters here, however, is Orwell’s sense of the political price of poverty. Marx identiﬁed the proletariat—that class of exploited and increasingly impoverished workers created by capitalism largely to service the machines of capitalist production—as a universal class. In Marxist jargon, the interests of the proletariat correspond with the interests of humanity in general, and the political challenge linked to revolutionary transformation involves getting the proletariat to recognize the evils of capitalism and use its superior numbers to initiate transformative change. Regardless of whether Orwell had studied Marx, he knew all this. But did he also share Marx’s optimism about the political empowerment of the poor? Orwell’s reply to this is at times contradictory and his thoughts on the radicalization of the poor seem to shift with changes in his political mood. Nonetheless, the standard view seems to be that Orwell did regard the working poor in largely Marxist terms and remained conﬁdent until the end that “the future lies with the proles.” There is some textual support for the standard view. In his essay, “Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War,” for example, Orwell says, “The struggle of the working class is like the growth of a plant. The plant is blind and stupid, but it knows enough to keep pushing upwards towards the light, and it will do this in the face of endless discouragements” (Orwell, 1946a.: 202). This seems to be the inspiration for the often quoted last stanza of the poem he appended to this essay, “No bomb that ever burst/Shatters the crystal spirit” (Ibid.: 210). Yet this optimism in the strength of the crystal spirit is belied by the text of Nineteen Eighty-four.1 There Winston expresses an apparent optimism in the revolutionary future of the proles only to eventually doubt this possibility. Winston writes in his diary that if there is hope it lies with the proles; they have numbers on their side. But he also acknowledges the problem linked to such optimism. In a passage reminiscent of his reﬂections in his essay on Dickens, Orwell has Winston write, “Until they [the proles] become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious” (Orwell, 1961: 61, Orwell’s italics). Later in the text of Nineteen Eighty-Four, O’Brien puts the matter to rest. Noting that Winston knew better than to put his faith in the proles, he says,

The Price of Poverty

39

“The proletarians will never revolt, not in a thousand years or a million. They cannot. I do not have to tell you the reason; you know it already” (Ibid.: 216). The confrontation between Winston and O’Brien in the Ministry of Love can proﬁtably be read as a discussion Orwell was having with himself, a discussion between his more reﬂective self and his more emotional side, with Winston representing the latter and O’Brien the former. The discussion has a clear winner, as is symbolized by O’Brien’s victory over Winston. Orwell seems, at this point, to scold himself for previously placing a degree of faith in the proles; he knows he should have known better. This depressing conclusion is foreshadowed in Orwell’s earlier writings on poverty, and an examination of Orwell’s critique of the eﬀects of poverty on those who suﬀer from it should help make this clear.

1 Orwell set out to learn about poverty upon his return from Burma and soon found himself walking with the tramps of London. Next he headed for Paris, presumably with the intention of launching upon a literary career. Whether or not he intended to ﬁnd a subject to write about by going down and out in Paris and London is neither here nor there, but in the fashion typical of the moralist, his outrage at the plight of the poor quickly provided him with a literary purpose (Cf. Crick, 1980: 109–13). The result was a moving tale about his various experiences with poverty: Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). This was followed shortly thereafter by a loosely biographical novel about the troubles faced by an aspiring writer who struggles because of his impoverished way of life, entitled Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936). Just as the novel was ﬁnished, Orwell got another opportunity to study poverty, this time from a bit of a distance. His leftleaning publisher, Victor Gollancz, commissioned him to go to Wigan to report on the working conditions of the coal miners of the region. The trip resulted in one of his most powerful and disturbing works: The Road to Wigan Pier (1958). Orwell’s writings on poverty display a fur-ball of tangled concerns. Chief among these is his desire to introduce the poor to the upper classes and by doing so to dispel some apparently evident misconceptions. He invites his readers to adopt a bit of sympathy for the poor and by so doing to recognize poverty as both a social and a political problem. The poor, he repeatedly insists, are not subhuman or a subspecies of humankind. A tramp, we are told, is simply an Englishman down on his luck. It is easy for the upper classes to ignore the problem of poverty if these people suppose that the poor really are subhuman or if they think the poor have brought their

40

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

predicament upon themselves. But this, Orwell labors to emphasize, is not the case. “I am only saying,” he writes of the tramps of London, “that they are ordinary human beings, and if they are worse than other people it is the result and not the cause of their way of life” (Orwell, 1933: 202). But Orwell’s moralism also demanded that he do more than just provide the better oﬀ with an introduction to poverty. He also encourages his readers to ﬁnd a degree of nobility in the predicament of the poor, and particularly in the eﬀorts of the working poor who do dirty, hard, demanding, but terribly important work. The hearty miners of Wigan are powerful ﬁgures who do extraordinarily demanding work, and Orwell concedes that he could never hope to endure the exhausting manual labor that these stoic fellows experience daily. “The miner’s job would be as much beyond my power as it would be to perform on the ﬂying trapeze or to win the Grand National” (Orwell, 1958: 32). These characters reappear, of course, in the form of Boxer the great horse of Animal Farm, who willingly undertakes the most challenging work on the farm. With this sense of nobility in place, it is not diﬃcult for Orwell to express considerable sympathy for both the miners of Wigan and the dishwashers of Paris. The plight of the miners seems especially tragic because their work is so crucial to the well-being of English society. “It is so with all types of manual work; it keeps us alive, and we are oblivious of its existence” (Ibid.: 34). This makes the numerous petty indignities that the miners continuously suﬀer all the more objectionable. They support the wealthy society above them, and yet, “A thousand inﬂuences constantly press a working man down into a passive role. He does not act, he is acted upon” (Ibid.: 49, Orwell’s italics). Although inspired by the miners of Wigan, this description of the working poor ﬁts well with Orwell’s general account of poverty. The passivity of the poor, and their corresponding powerlessness and timidity, recurs as a basic leitmotiv in his account of poverty. Yet nowhere does Orwell press the point with greater poignancy and fervor than he does in his account of the genuine pathos and helplessness associated with the predicament of the tramp. It is the political implication of this insight that really matters, but its political importance is also shrouded by Orwell’s sociological critique. A life of poverty is demeaning and degrading, to be sure, but the tragedy of a life of poverty can be grasped only when one recognizes that the poor are also terribly powerless. This is hardly the source of the indignity and inhumanity that accompanies poverty, but it does account for the political

The Price of Poverty

41

predicament that the poor must face. The poor are impoverished, but the really sad aspect of this is that they are also utterly incapable of doing anything about it. They are the prisoners of a fate that is hardly of their own doing. Orwell emphasizes this by insisting that a tramp is just an Englishman down on his luck. But the tramp is so far down on his luck that there is no way out of his situation. Orwell provides his readers with a varied and fairly sophisticated sociological account of the impotence of the poor. Yet he had some diﬃculty appreciating the full force of his own sociological critique. He seemed to resist believing in the political impotence of the poor even as he explained it. There must be something in the human spirit, he seems at times to suppose, that inclines the poor to dislike and resist their condition, and this something, if suitably inspired, may become a source of exceptional empowerment. With something like Marxist optimism, he imagined for some time that the poor could recognize their plight. With recognition (as the radical slogan goes) comes enlightenment, and enlightenment leads naturally to political empowerment. Once inspired by the proper sociological insight, the poor could, and certainly would, exploit their tremendous numbers to generate much needed political change. Orwell undoubtedly found a degree of solace in this familiar political theme, but it was not a solace he could sustain given his own appreciation for the debilitating aspects of poverty. Political organization and the mobilization of labor might do much to turn around the plight of the poor and to put civil association on a more egalitarian path. This, in any event, seems to be the eternal hope of the democratic socialist; yet Orwell tempered this hope with an appreciation that anyone who seeks to empower the poor by encouraging their enlightenment must understand the limitations of the folks they are working with. And on Orwell’s account, these limitations are considerable. It is perhaps best to consider the powerlessness of the tramps ﬁrst because, for the most part, they are the most pathetic and most crippled element of the poor that Orwell tells us about. Orwell’s tramps are mere shells of what were once human beings. Weakened by malnutrition and defeated by lack of employment, there is not much left of the tramp; the focus of his consciousness seems restricted well beyond even the modest range of the dishwasher.2 Orwell personiﬁes the life of the tramp by telling readers about a single character he elected to name Paddy, apparently to emphasize his Irishness. “I believe he was a typical tramp,” Orwell says, “and there are tens of thousands in England like him” (Orwell, 1933: 149).

42

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

Whether hyperbole or not—and how Orwell could have known this I cannot say—the number resonates for its political potential. Why does this crowd not constitute a revolutionary mass? The reason is not hard to notice once one reads Orwell’s account of the man. Orwell describes Paddy as a “good character” and “generous by nature,” but also as self-pitying, envious, whimpering, and illiterate. In spite of those few more positive attributes he identiﬁes, Orwell leaves little doubt that this was an unsavory individual. “He had the regular character of a tramp— abject, envious, a jackal’s character” (Ibid.: 153). But perhaps the most interesting comment Orwell makes about the man is that “[H]e had a low, worm-like envy of anyone who was better oﬀ—not the rich, for they were beyond his social horizon, but of men in work” (Ibid.: 152). The remark contains an important insight, not because of the envy Orwell notices, but because of its target. Why are the rich beyond the “social horizon” of the tramp? It is perhaps easy enough to understand why the wealthy do not really see tramps and pass them by in apparent oblivion. It is far more curious to think that tramps do not also see the rich. Orwell suggests here that there is such a social gulf between the life of the tramp and a life of wealth and luxury that the poor tramp doesn’t have any real sense of what the life of the wealthy is like. This life is beyond his experience and therefore beyond his consciousness. Envy needs a recognizable target. It must be able to identify others more fortunate within the parameters of its social horizon. This is not the only place where Orwell refers to the notion of a “social horizon” or a “horizon of consciousness.” The notion recurs in Orwell’s account of the proles in Nineteen Eighty-four (Orwell, 1961: 62). It speaks to an individual’s sphere of awareness and captures not just what a person thinks about but what a person can think about. Things outside one’s experience, beyond one’s way of life, are simply incomprehensible; one can’t worry or even think about such things because they are simply not part of one’s world. And because they are not part of one’s world, they are beyond notice, even if they are right in front of one’s eyes. The limitation, so to speak, is ontological. Paddy couldn’t be envious of the rich because he couldn’t even imagine them or what such a life is like. He could no more envy the rich than he could envy the gods. Paddy’s social horizon, the “horizon of his mind,” seems to have been unusually limited and cramped. But whether intended as hyperbole or not, Orwell’s general description of Paddy is designed to personify a general characteristic of poverty. Orwell leaves little doubt that the mental horizons of the poor are desperately narrow. If they have some faint grasp of

The Price of Poverty

43

a larger world around them, their focus of concern is deﬁned exclusively with the daily features of their lives and its momentary challenges. Their minds are ﬁlled with the trivial and modest aﬀairs that press upon them in the course of making it from one day to the next. They live in small, egocentric worlds, and their thoughts almost never range beyond themselves and their immediate needs. Their political powerlessness is largely a product of this limitation of consciousness. In Paddy’s case, in the case of the tramp, this limitation is particularly stultifying. The great enemy of the tramp, Orwell emphasizes, is leisure; the tramp has far too much of it. The poverty of the tramp may not be life threatening, but it is terribly boring. The tramps Orwell encountered are literally forced to tramp, pushed along by legal decree to move daily from one inhospitable spike to the next. Beyond this, however, there is nothing for them to do. Paddy has a mind with nothing in it, and consequently he lacks the ability even to ﬁnd a bit of entertainment for himself and ﬁll the long hours of tedium. Part of the problem, Orwell suggests, is the result of a lack of education, and here we can again let Orwell speak for himself: An educated man can put up with enforced idleness, which is one of the worst evils of poverty. But a man like Paddy, with no means of ﬁlling up time, is as miserable out of work as a dog on the chain. That is why it is so much nonsense to pretend that those who have “come down in the world” are to be pitied above all others. The man who really merits pity is the man who has been down from the start, and faces poverty with a blank, resourceless mind. (Orwell, 1933: 180) Together malnutrition and leisure spell doom for the tramp. They lack any work from which they might derive a degree of self-respect. This is a crushing, demoralizing way of life that leaves the tramp not much good for anything at all. If there really were tens of thousands of Paddys tramping around London in Orwell’s day, he could well understand why the wealthy had nothing to fear from them; there was nothing that could ever manage to reach the level of a revolutionary proletariat among the ranks of this lumpen crowd. Orwell’s tramps are simply incapable of political consciousness. But Paddy does not personify all the characters Orwell discovered while tramping around London. He also introduces readers to a second street person who is noticeably and importantly diﬀerent from Paddy—and all the more disconcerting to Orwell for this. Orwell elected to call this character Bozo and to present him as the antithesis of the ordinary tramp.

44

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

Bozo had been a craftsman and able to earn a decent living before an unfortunate accident left him incapacitated. When Orwell found him he was living on the street earning a shilling here and there as a pavement artist. Bozo had an uncanny intelligence about him, and no doubt Orwell took to him because he was a fellow with whom he could discuss matters and have a reasonably intelligent conversation. But Bozo troubled Orwell, and in the same way that many of the successful literary ﬁgures of his day troubled him. Bozo was, in most respects, a classic cynic. Like most cynics, he was well aware of the tragic state of the political world but also inclined to think that there was little anyone could do about it. Still, Bozo was at peace with himself and not terribly bitter about either his tragic condition or the sad fate to which his accident had consigned him. At one point in Orwell’s association with Bozo, the subject of the stars came up, and a rather remarkable conversation followed. It is hard to imagine that Orwell either imagined or embellished this exchange because Bozo held views with which Orwell disagreed, but this discussion impressed Orwell suﬃciently for him to recall the conversation in reasonable detail. The exchange begins with Orwell displaying a bit of surprise over Bozo’s extraordinary knowledge of the stars, and goes as follows: Bozo:

[Referring to his knowledge of the stars] Not a great lot. I know a bit though. I got two letters from the Astronomer Royal thanking me for writing about meteors. The stars are a free show; it don’t cost anything to use your eyes. Orwell: What a good idea! I should never have thought of it. Bozo: Well, you got to take an interest in something. It don’t follow that because a man’s on the road he can’t think of anything but tea-and-two-slices. [A cup of tea and two slices of bread with margarine.] Orwell: But isn’t it very hard to take an interest in things—things like stars—living this life? Bozo: Screeving [pavement art] you mean? Not necessarily. It don’t need to turn you into a bloody rabbit—that is, not if you set your mind to it. Orwell: It seems to have that eﬀect on most people. Bozo: Of course. Look at Paddy—a tea-swilling moocher, only ﬁt to scrounge for fag-ends. That’s the way most of them go. I despise them. But you don’t need to get like that. If you’ve got any education, it don’t matter if you’re on the road for the rest of your life.

The Price of Poverty

45

Orwell: Well, I’ve found just the contrary. . . . It seems to me that when you take a man’s money away he’s ﬁt for nothing from that moment. Bozo: No, not necessarily. If you set yourself to it, you can live the same life rich or poor. You can still keep on with your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, “I’m a free man in here—he tapped his forehead—and you’re all right. (Ibid.: 164–5, Orwell’s italics) Bozo’s curious and, one wants to say, stoic view of his world and his freedom left a powerful impression on Orwell. I’m inclined to think he may have been the fellow who inspired Orwell’s notorious character Benjamin the mule in Animal Farm; if not, he was certainly the type of character Orwell had in mind when he fashioned Benjamin. Orwell had a measure of respect for Bozo even though he was a clear anomaly in Orwell’s world. Though impoverished, he was still a thinking being, and he thought, quite simply, that any sort of improvement in the human condition was beyond human design. It is tempting to think of Bozo as a pre-Enlightenment thinker, as someone who is resigned to his condition because things are simply beyond human control. He understood that people could be brought to ruin through no fault of their own (as he had been), but this was not cause for concern because the problems that befall people are not necessarily the result of some character ﬂaw. Things just happened to people, and sometimes these things were bad. But one must live through them because that’s life. Bozo would certainly subscribe to the motto that Orwell puts into the mouth of Benjamin in Animal Farm, “[L]ife would go on as it had always gone on—that is, badly” (Orwell, 1946b: 56). This is not a motto Orwell could embrace, however, for he thought things could be made better and because of this it was worth trying to make them better. To fail to do so would assure that the motto was a truism. It is not a motto that the moralist can endorse. And anyone who embraces it, like Bozo, is bound to be an apolitical thinker who will leave the world as it is. Orwell would later rage against this sort of apolitical and pre-Enlightenment fatalism where and when he saw it displayed in the literary community of his day, for he believed such an attitude presages ongoing political disaster.3 But in Bozo’s case Orwell seemed to ﬁnd things a bit diﬀerent, and Orwell warmed to him in spite of his cynicism. Nonetheless, Bozo displays a diﬀerent sense in which the poor are apolitical and also illustrates another reason why we ought not think that the poor can become a source of

46

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

revolutionary transformation. In Bozo’s case the problem was not a horribly limited and truncated horizon of the mind, for the opposite was very much true of him. But he had found a way to get along and to sustain himself in the grip of his poverty. “He might be ragged and cold, or even starving,” Orwell wrote, “but so long as he could read, think and watch for meteors, he was, as he said, free in his own mind” (Orwell, 1933: 167). If Orwell could not condone such an apolitical philosophy, he could not deny that, under the circumstances, there is a bit of dignity in Bozo’s outlook. The irony of this is evident enough in Animal Farm. While Benjamin the mule can read, a fact that separates him from the “lower animals” with whom he associated, he does nothing to protest or expose to his friends the transition of political control into the hands (or hooves) of the pigs. He looked out for himself instead, and speaks out only once when his friend Boxer is taken away to the knackers, though the other animals cannot understand his concern. His inaction would seem to make him blameworthy; his failure to speak up politically displays a passivity that works to the beneﬁt of the pigs. Yet he is rarely demonized for his passivism and remains one of the novel’s more endearing characters. Nonetheless, if there is dignity in the eﬀorts of thinking beings to cope with a condition of poverty by retreating to cynicism, there is also a political cost.

2 The circumstances that render both the working poor of Paris and the miners of Wigan politically impotent are substantially diﬀerent from those of the tramps of London. Leisure remains a problem for these hard working characters as well, but for an entirely diﬀerent reason. While the tramps have far too much leisure time, neither the workers in Paris nor the miners in Wigan have much leisure at all. They are kept busy to the point of exhaustion. Like the tramps, the horizon of their minds again dooms them to political powerlessness, but the reasons for this limitation are entirely diﬀerent. While the powerlessness of the working poor of Paris and the miners of Wigan has similar roots, there is nonetheless a distinction of some importance between the two. Both are slaves to their jobs; yet their jobs diﬀer importantly. The dishwashers of Paris are condemned to “stupid and largely unnecessary work,” while the underworld of the miner is crucial to the operation of English society. It was the amount of work and the repetition it involved that Orwell noticed in the kitchens of Parisian hotels. The dishwasher is caught on a treadmill from which there is no apparent escape.

The Price of Poverty

47

The dishwasher must eat to live, and to eat he must work—and work endlessly. Perhaps predictably, Orwell found a bit of dignity in this life. He noticed a pride in the dishwashers, “the pride of the drudge—the man who is equal to no matter what quantity of work” (Orwell, 1933: 78). But this unending work, and the modest life it supported, came with a terrible price. It numbs the worker to the world around him and erodes his moral sensitivity. The steady repetition of life, coupled with the dreary conditions in which the dishwasher is forced to live, pushes one’s consciousness entirely into oneself. The external world becomes a mirage about which the dishwasher is only dimly aware, if he is aware of it at all. The dishwasher’s social horizon orbits around himself and little else because he has neither the time nor the energy to think about things beyond his own well-being and survival. As Orwell puts it, “Nothing is quite real to him but the boulet, drinks and sleep; and of these sleep is the most important” (Ibid.: 91). The intellectual cost of such a life should be readily apparent. Constant work and the perpetual exhaustion it creates leave the working poor “trapped by a routine which makes thought impossible” (Ibid.: 116). These workers do not think, and thus they do not think politically, because “they have no leisure for it.” Orwell makes it apparent, however, that he does not mean by this that the poor are just walking zombies with empty minds. The mind is never empty; people are always conscious of something. And in this sense the poor do a lot of thinking. They think about their jobs and their future; they think about their lot in life and their prospects for realizing something a bit better. But these thoughts always remain close to home; the focus of their mental gaze is always on their own life, their own predicament, and their own respective and immediate futures. Here, of course, they resemble Orwell’s tramps. They do not, seemingly because they cannot, wander to deeper, more reﬂective thoughts that focus upon the socio-economic causes of their poverty and their wage enslavement. We encounter this account of poverty again in the character of Gordon Comstock, the ambivalent protagonist of Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Comstock’s biography is rather diﬀerent from what we learn of the working poor of Paris. He has fallen into poverty from middle-class origins largely because he refuses to compromise with the “money God.” He aspires to be an artist, a poet, but his poverty is a constant barrier to his more noble pursuits. He is reduced to the condition of a grumbling malcontent at war with the socio-economic realities that punish those, like Comstock, unwilling to do what they can in order to feed themselves, even if this involves abandoning their more lofty ideals and ambitions.

48

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

What matters about Comstock for present purposes is the curiously apolitical character Orwell gives to the fellow. His parlor socialist friend, Ravelston, encourages Comstock to read Marx and by doing so to put his rant against the money God in a more systematic political perspective. But this Comstock refuses to do. He even chides Ravelston for understanding poverty only through the lens provided by Marx, which isn’t much of a lens at all—though there is room to wonder if Orwell was really aware of this.4 Comstock is conﬁdent he knows poverty because he knows its indignity and indecency; this is enough to inspire his anger. But he lacks any inclination whatsoever to give his anger a political shape. Like the poor of Paris, his thoughts always hover around his own personal problems; he dwells continuously upon the indignities he is forced to suﬀer and the deprivations he is forced to endure. Poverty, at least in the character of Comstock, does not inspire political consciousness; instead it generates self-pity and poor judgment. There is irony in this. The political thinker in the story is Ravelston, the well-oﬀ parlor socialist, and not poor Comstock, the one character readers might expect to have sympathy for the working poor—the one character whose poverty might incline him toward political activism. But Comstock is oblivious to the social injustice that surrounds him, the injustice that he is forced to endure; his thoughts remain too self-centered for this. I’m inclined to see this not as a character ﬂaw in Comstock but as an Orwellian comment on the disabling condition of poverty. When one is hungry, one thinks about food; one does not think about Marx. When a member of the fallen middle class feels demeaned by his poverty, he thinks about the shame of it all; he does not think about Marx. Orwell further suggests that the disinclination to think politically in a condition of poverty is driven at least partly by the moral debasement the poor suﬀer. When one’s focus is upon the drudgery one must endure, there is little time or temptation to care much about the condition of others. Orwell describes his Parisian comrades as reasonably generous and considerate fellows; they retain a degree of humanity in spite of their predicament—rather unlike the tramps of London. But the poor are also hardened against human tragedy; it does not reach them because the routine of their life leaves no time or place for it. Orwell illustrates the point by telling of a murder he claims to have witnessed while working in Paris: One night, in the small hours, there was a murder just beneath my window. I was awoken by a fearful uproar, and, going to the window, saw a man lying ﬂat on the stones below; I could see the murderers,

The Price of Poverty

49

three of them, ﬂitting away at the end of the street. Some of us went down and found that the man was quite dead, his skull cracked with a piece of lead piping. I remember the colour of his blood, curiously purple, like wine; it was still on the cobbles when I came home that evening, . . . But the thing that strikes me looking back is that I was in bed and asleep within three minutes of the murder. So were most of the people in the street; we just made sure the man was done for, and went straight back to bed. We were working people, and where was the sense of wasting sleep over a murder? (Ibid.: 91) Perhaps the most striking feature of this passage is Orwell’s confession that he did not think much about his actions until he had the time to look back on the event in question. Not a moment is taken to ponder the tragedy associated with the loss of a human life; it was sleep that really mattered. People whose focus of concern is so blind to the plight of others are not likely to ﬁnd injustice in the lives they live; they are too busy living them for any of this. The common decency that invites a moral concern for others is not just a casualty of imperial rule, it seems; it is also a casualty of poverty. But without this sense of decency, what inclination could one have to think about politics, to engage politics, to become politically empowered? A concern for justice, Orwell tells us, is a luxury that belongs only to those with the time and training for it—a luxury for the likes of Ravelston, but not for Gordon Comstock.

3 The life of the Parisian dishwasher troubled Orwell. What purpose could such a life serve? What, Orwell had to ask, was its “social signiﬁcance” (Ibid.: 116)? There is irony in Orwell’s desire to grasp the social signiﬁcance of the dishwasher because he well knew that there really was none. Such work, he says, is “more or less useless,” and merely aﬀords “a small amount of convenience” to hotels and the well-heeled (Ibid.: 118). But what Orwell was really after was a grasp of the socio-political condition that requires some people to endure such hardship so that others can eat in fancy restaurants. He wanted to understand the power relationships in play that bring this condition about. And it seems that at this point he needed to blame someone for consigning a segment of the human population to such drudgery. Orwell had now made the initial turn to political thinking (even if he did not oﬃcially acknowledge it at this point), and he had done so with a chip on his shoulder.

50

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

To illustrate, consider a possible explanation of the social signiﬁcance of the dishwasher that he introduces and explores. “Some people must feed in restaurants,” he hypothesizes, “and so other people must swab dishes for eighty hours a week. It is the work of civilization, and therefore unquestionable” (Ibid.: 116). But this will hardly do as an explanation of the work of the dishwasher, for it is the very idea of the “work of civilization” that he felt the need to question. The prospect that civilization has a momentum and a logic all its own that legitimates and justiﬁes the features that develop within it seemed outrageous to him at this point in his life. Human beings, in Orwell’s judgment, are reﬂective creatures who are fully capable of examining, understanding, and directing the ﬂow and direction of their shared lives. If things have gone badly for some, it must be because others want it that way. Indecency is not an inevitable condition of history but a consequence of a moral failing in some people. So, some unmasking needs to be done to get to the bottom of things and understand why some people must labor eighty hours a week doing menial and largely useless work. He concludes, in the fashion of a sociologist, that the perpetuation of useless and dirty work is little more than a mechanism of social control, a means by which the rich dominate and oppress the impoverished masses that apparently threaten their condition of privilege. “I believe,” he says, “that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think” (Ibid.: 119). Nor does he leave matters at this; he looks beneath the fact of economic diﬀerence to expose a “deeper lie.” “Fear of the mob,” he says, “is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental diﬀerence between rich and poor, as though they were two diﬀerent races, like negroes and white men” (Ibid.: 120). So the class system that Orwell noticed has a deeper and darker side; it is “at bottom” a caste system—and one that subtly rejects or denies the liberal ideal of the basic equality of persons. The poor are properly left to labor to the advantage of the rich because in the end they are really a subhuman mob. Interestingly, those wealthy snobs Orwell imagines to be endowed with a powerful sense of basic human superiority are not just wealthy; they are also, he is quick to insist, educated. But their education has not eliminated their moral stupidity: The educated man pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day’s liberty to loot his house, burn his books, and set him to work minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory. “Anything,” he thinks, any injustice, sooner than let that mob loose.” He does not see that since there

The Price of Poverty

51

is no diﬀerence between the mass of rich and poor, there is no question of setting the mob loose. The mob is in fact loose now, and—in the shape of rich men—is using its power to set up enormous treadmills of boredom, such as “smart” hotels. (Ibid.: 120–1) So the work of the drudge is the grand scheme of the wealthy and educated who believe, mistakenly in Orwell’s judgment, that they must ﬁnd some way to control the great number of submen who live among them. This thought will be echoed once again in the closing pages of Animal Farm when Orwell has Mr. Pilkington say to the pigs, “If you have your lower animals to contend with, . . . we have our lower classes!” (Orwell, 1946b: 126). Pilkington goes on, of course, to congratulate the pigs on the “low rations, the long hours of work, and the general absence of pampering” he has noticed at Animal Farm. This he recognizes as a strategy of control aimed at keeping the animals too busy and impoverished to reﬂect upon the injustice of their predicament. In Animal Farm, however, this all seems a bit silly, for the “lower animals” don’t seem to require such elaborate strategies of control. In the absence of the inspiration from Old Major and the other pigs, there would never have been an animal revolution in the ﬁrst place, and the pigs have since then co-opted the other animals’ catalyst for revolutionary thought. As Orwell explains in Goldstein’s book in Nineteen Eighty-four, the lower class is a threat to the upper class only when members of the middle class inspire them to revolution. But in Down and Out and to a lesser extent in Animal Farm, Orwell elects to think in conspiratorial terms. The educated know that poverty and unending work dull the abilities of the poor, rendering them unable to think. And people who cannot think are left politically powerless.

4 Orwell’s conspiratorial inclinations did not last long. By the time he left Wigan, conspiracy had given way to an appreciation for the vicissitudes of circumstance. Perhaps predictably, Orwell’s experience in Wigan served to conﬁrm his suspicions about the price of poverty. The biting poverty the miners of Wigan were forced to endure again wrecked their lives in ways reminiscent of the dishwashers of Paris. And again he found the poor to be a dull and politically impotent lot. But the work of the miners was not useless work; it was work of vital importance for English life. Minors were not sent into the mines to keep them busy and make sure they did not become a rebellious rabble.

52

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

They were sent into the mines because coal at the time was the lifeblood of England, and it was up to the miners to get it—and thus to keep England alive. Yet the miners remained the unseen and unrecognized victims of the very society they labored to sustain. “Watching coal-miners at work, you realize momentarily what diﬀerent universes diﬀerent people inhabit. Down there where coal is dug it is a sort of world apart which one can quite easily go through life without ever hearing about” (Orwell, 1958: 33). Orwell found the work of the miners of the day to be diﬃcult, demanding, and dangerous. They labored for little reward at a challenging job with little future, and they did it without criticism or complaint. There was, to be sure, an element of nobility in all this that Orwell is quick to identify and document. But Orwell’s account of the dignity of the miner is packaged alongside an altogether understandable disbelief. Why do these people put up with their diﬃcult lives and the indecent treatment to which they are subjected on a near daily basis? That they do so is evident testament to their political powerlessness. But then, how should we account for this powerlessness? In Wigan Pier, Orwell puts an answer to this question that is crucial for an understanding of his political thought. Early in the text Orwell creates the impression that the wretched lives these people lead is really clear to them and that they understand and detest their plight at least to some degree. To illustrate this point, he tells the story of a woman he noticed out the window of his train as he rode “through the monstrous scenery” of the northern slums. The woman was poking at what Orwell supposed was a clogged waste-pipe running from a sink in her house, and he described her expression as the “most desolate, hopeless” one he had ever seen. As he tells it: It struck me then that we are mistaken when we say that “It isn’t the same for them as it would be for us,” and that people bred in the slums can imagine nothing but the slums. For what I saw in her face was not the ignorant suﬀering of an animal. She knew well enough what was happening to her—understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drain-pipe. (Ibid.: 18) This woman, Orwell supposes, did not need to be told that her life was one of misery and drudgery or that people should not have to live like this if it was humanly possible to prevent it. Yet the impression this passage leaves sits awkwardly beside another impression Orwell cultivates later in the text. Here Orwell is exploring the

The Price of Poverty

53

housing shortage, and he tells a little story about a conversation he had with a miner. The salient passage goes as follows: Talking once with a miner I asked him when the housing shortage ﬁrst became acute in his district; he answered, “When we were told about it,” meaning that till recently people’s standards were so low that they took almost any degree of overcrowding for granted. . . . This, he said, was the kind of thing people would put up with “till they were told about it.” (Ibid.: 64–5) Orwell hastens to add that he does not know whether this is true, though it has a degree of plausibility about it. Perhaps he would have liked it to be untrue because he wanted to think that the poor are aware of and sensitive to their misery. People forced to live eleven in a room should surely know that this is an indecent hardship, and Orwell wanted to impress his readers with the idea that the people forced to endure such deplorable conditions are not blind to their fate. Unlike, say, Down and Out, this was part of his literary agenda in Wigan Pier. His better-oﬀ readers must now give up the belief that the deplorable conditions that accompany poverty are not “the same for them as it would be for us” (Ibid.: 18). It is just the same, and the poor know it. Yet this view of the matter merely makes the question of the political powerlessness of these people all the more urgent. If the miners of Wigan are aware of their sorry predicament, they are still not disposed to do much of anything about it. The reason, moreover, seems built into Orwell’s account of poverty in Down and Out and Aspidistra. Poverty numbs the mind to such an extent that those who suﬀer, and perhaps knowingly suﬀer, from it are incapable of thinking suﬃciently to become angry over their situation. The poor are caught in the grip of a power vice, and they have no idea how to break loose, even if they seriously entertained the desire to break loose. They are the prisoners of circumstance and unable to control or even inﬂuence the forces that impose upon them a condition that they detest. The fatalism Orwell encounters in Wigan is again underscored by the limited “horizons of the mind” of the people condemned to live lives of drudgery and poverty. Even if they are aware of their plight, they endure it because it is all they have, all they know. Their consciousness does not extend to the realm of politics or to more theoretical reﬂections on what is and what, with a little political eﬀort, might be. But in Wigan Orwell also noticed how these horizons of the mind are constrained by silly diversions and the bric-a-brac of modernity. He documents

54

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

with derision the way the poor of the north were occupied by transient pleasures and mindless activities. Unlike the dishwashers of Paris, they have enough spare time to entertain themselves with simple palliatives. With apparent amazement he tells of a moment that made a lasting impression on him. I happened to be in Yorkshire when Hitler re-occupied the Rhineland. Hitler, Locarno, Fascism and the threat of war aroused hardly a ﬂicker of interest locally, but the decision of the Football Association to stop publishing their ﬁxtures in advance (this was an attempt to quell the Football Pools) ﬂung all of Yorkshire into a fury. (Ibid.: 89)5 This marks the demise of Orwell as a conspiracy theorist, though he continued to attribute an obsession with the need for control of the lower classes to the upper class. But the rich and powerful need not work overtly to protect themselves from the mob. The circumstances of modernity have taken care of this. He develops this thought in a manner worth noting at length: Of course the post-war development of cheap luxuries has been a very fortunate thing for our rulers. It is quite likely that ﬁsh and chips, art-silk stockings, tinned salmon, cut-price chocolate (ﬁve two-ounce bars for sixpence), the movies, the radio, strong tea and the Football pools have between them averted revolution. Therefore we are sometimes told that the whole thing is an astute manoeuvre by the governing class—a sort of “bread and circuses” business—to hold the unemployed down. What I have seen of our governing class does not convince me that they have that much intelligence. The thing has happened, but by an unconscious process—the quite natural interaction between the manufacturer’s need for a market and the need of half-starving people for cheap palliatives. (Ibid.: 90) There is a thin line, it would seem, between complacency and contentment. The working poor, with no background to help them think otherwise, ﬁnd a bit of contentment in their lives. They have things that matter to them; they ﬁnd solace in the diversions that blind them to the reality of their situation. Granted, these things are rather close to home, but they still matter. Orwell found a bit of nobility in the simplicity and dedication of the working folk he encountered in Wigan, but he also found them dreadfully stupid. They have no inclination to rebel because they have no political

The Price of Poverty

55

consciousness. As they see it, they have tinned salmon, the football pools, gambling, and alcohol to meet their needs and ﬁll up their few moments of leisure. They are the victims of an indecency they cannot begin to recognize. They are powerless because they are oblivious. And their powerlessness is not the product of deliberate oppression by a tyrannical upper class but the consequence of an “unconscious process.” Their entrapment is the result of the power grid of events—the kind of uncontrolled and unmanaged power that was of concern to Foucault.

5 All this will seem familiar enough to students of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell’s account of the proles parrots almost exactly the view of the working poor he develops in Wigan Pier. But we move too quickly if we conclude that the lower classes simply factor out of Orwell’s political theory at this point. For there remains the inspiring moments he experienced in Spain. In Spain, Orwell tells us, he fought against fascism and for common decency (Orwell, 1952: 47). But there is little surprise in this; he fought for common decency his entire life and against fascism once he recognized its political presence. And it was also in Spain that he experienced what he called “equality in fact.” The political ideals he had formed in response to his battle for decency took concrete shape, perhaps as exactly as they possibly could, in the Spanish struggle against fascism. It is tempting to think that in Spain Orwell’s romance with the lower class ran away with him. It was there, of course, that he encounters the “crystal spirit;” the indomitable spirit of the ordinary man to struggle for a more just and egalitarian social order. In his traditional literary fashion, Orwell personiﬁes this spirit by writing it into the face of an Italian militiaman he encountered early in his Spanish adventure. Orwell twice described the face as ﬁerce and pathetic, though in his second account of the man he adds innocence to the description (Ibid.: 4; Orwell, 1946a: 206). It was the face of an ordinary fellow, strong and deﬁant, ready to insist upon respect, equality, and a basic human dignity. But Orwell also describes him as rather stupid and admits that if he was to retain his romantic ﬁrst impression of the man he had best not see him again. Nonetheless, this fellow personiﬁes Orwell’s Spanish experience, where common folk were ﬁghting for equality and dignity. This romanticism inclined him toward a degree of optimism, for he supposed the crystal spirit really is indomitable. “The struggle of the working class,” he tells us in “Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War,” “is like the growth of a plant.

56

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

The plant is blind and stupid, but it knows enough to keep pushing upwards towards the light, and it will do this in the face of endless discouragements” (Orwell, 1946a: 202). This proletarian ﬁght for common decency will ebb and ﬂow, Orwell supposes, but it will continue, waiting perhaps for some catalyst to set it blossoming again. Orwell’s many biographers and commentators make it clear that he remained the champion of the working poor throughout his life, a point that there is little reason to doubt. But the point should not shroud from view the ambivalence Orwell had regarding the political clout of these people. If properly inspired, their sheer numbers provided grounds for optimism. But Orwell also recognized, at least in his later works, and after the romanticism he took from Spain began to wear oﬀ, that such optimism was at best naïve. Evidence of this is quite up front in Animal Farm. The “lower animals” lacked the consciousness and insight to fully understand the meaning of Animalism. The revolution inspired by Old Major fails, not chieﬂy because of the oligarchical character of the pigs, but because of the stupidity of the lower animals. Benjamin the mule’s fatalism is perhaps understandable in this light. What good would have come from any attempt on his part to challenge the manipulation of the pigs? Orwell ﬁnally exorcises his romantic idealism regarding the political power of the proles in the struggle between Winston and O’Brien in Nineteen Eighty-Four.Winston’s faith in the proles, once again, was misplaced—an element of his dementia—and O’Brien had little problem pointing this out to him. Winston himself had put the point clearly in the early passages of the text: But if there was hope, it lay in the proles. You had to cling on to that. When you put it in words it sounded reasonable; it was when you looked at the human beings passing you on the pavement that it became an act of faith. (Orwell, 1961: 73) Orwell’s romantic attachment to the lower class aside, his inclination to see them as a political force in their own right was just that—an act of faith, and one that Orwell’s own familiarity with these people could not support. There could be no spontaneous revolutionary combustion emerging from the ranks of the “blind and stupid,” whose nobility, for Orwell, was lodged in the ability to endure a condition they should have recognized as unendurable. The proles could participate in a revolution, of course, but ﬁrst they had to be told about their plight. They were, and would remain, a bundle of

The Price of Poverty

57

revolutionary potential thanks to their considerable numbers, but the spark of revolutionary transformation necessary to set them oﬀ must come from without. It is with this in mind that readers should approach Goldstein’s book and Orwell’s brief historical narrative in Nineteen Eighty-Four. If the proles are politically empowered, as they were, say, in the French revolution, it will be because some middle-class sorts have managed to reach them politically to inspire their support. History ends in Nineteen Eighty-Four because the inner party has noticed this and taken steps to control the outer party so thoroughly that no revolutionary fervor will come from this quarter. Failing this revolutionary spark, Orwell leaves little doubt, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, about the political impotence of the working class proles. There lives go on as they always have, to paraphrase a line from Benjamin the mule, that is to say badly. The point is foreshadowed in Coming Up for Air, when George Bowling notices that for chaps like him, when fascism comes to England “it probably won’t make the slightest diﬀerence” (Orwell, 1950: 177). The inner party makes no real eﬀort to control the proles; there is no need for this. The minions of the inner party have fathomed the political powerlessness of these people. They are not the target of state oppression and control beyond the modest measures required to provide them with the “cheap palliatives” that satisfy their modest concerns—the “ﬁlms, football, beer, and, above all, gambling [that] ﬁlled up the horizons of their minds” (Orwell, 1961: 61–2). They are the prisoners of a power grid far more eﬀective than any petty tyrant could hope to be. Orwell may have elected to dress in the fashion of the ordinary worker and to champion their cause—a cause, ironically, about which they remained largely oblivious, but he was not one of them. There was much about these people Orwell elected to admire, but he did not turn a blind eye to their political insigniﬁcance. He knew them well enough to realize that one could not turn to them in hopes of halting the drift toward totalitarianism.

Notes 1. Orwell appears to symbolize this shattering in the novel when the crystal paperweight Winston treasured is shattered upon his capture by the thought police. See Orwell, 1961: 183. 2. Use of the masculine pronoun seems justiﬁed here because Orwell found that the vast majority of the tramps he encountered were men. He believed, no doubt with some justiﬁcation, that this contributed to the sadness of their predicament. The life of the tramp is not just a life without the things money can buy; it is also a life without either love or sex.

58

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

3. Cf. Orwell, “Inside the Whale,” 1946a: 210–51. Orwell chided more than one writer for his/her apparent disinterest in politics. To fail to integrate political themes into one’s writing, Orwell supposed, has unfortunate political consequences. There will be reason to explore this theme more thoroughly in later chapters. 4. From what I have been able to determine, the question of whether Orwell read Marx remains open. Crick does not think he read much Marx, if any at all (Crick, 1980: 201). Bowker, on the other hand, thinks Orwell had read at least some Marx. He is conﬁdent that Orwell had read the Communist Manifesto and rather supposes that he had read other materials as well Bowker, 2003: 192). 5. Worry over the football pools accompanies Orwell’s notice that the poor of the north found considerable delight in gambling with what little money they had.

4 Revolting Pigs Orwell may have been a conﬁrmed socialist in his own mind, but he wasn’t much of a fellow-traveler. He devoted considerable literary energy to attacks on the socialist movement of his day. Wigan Pier ends with Orwell brazenly lecturing his socialist colleagues on the proper fundamentals of socialism, and Keep the Aspidistra Flying shows him tweaking the parlor socialists that he worried would abandon socialism when they learned the truth about the lower classes. So, what kind of a socialist was Orwell? If we can learn something of his politics by thinking of him as a socialist, I doubt that we can make much progress toward understanding his political thought if we persist in thinking of him in these terms. He cared about the plight of the poor, and he wanted to do something about it. But he remained ambivalent about what this might mean in practice, supposing at times that socialism implied greater political centralization and apparently hoping at times that it might involve worker control and greater political decentralization of the sort favored by anarchists (Cf. Woodcock, 1966: 159–62). These structural concerns were of little interest to him, however, and they play little or no role in his literary endeavors. What mattered to him was the morality associated with socialism, and the promise of a more decent world it advertised. Yet this moral concern was hardly suﬃcient to make him a good socialist, and in fact there is reason to suppose that what it did was to make him a good liberal with a revisionist twist. It is not altogether inappropriate to think of Orwell as a simple man in an increasingly complicated world. He valued a simple life, a life close to the earth, and he valued simple thinking, thinking bereft of unnecessarily turgid and convoluted notions and slogans. But the modern world Orwell saw on the socio-political horizon was hardly simple. He builds his own sense of anachronism into George Bowling in Coming Up for Air, and oﬀers 59

60

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

readers a character facing a reality characterized by increased mechanical sophistication and a terribly accelerated pace of life. Population explosion, greater social complexity, the world of the machine, and impending war come to symbolize modernity for Orwell. It is not a world for lovers of simplicity, and Coming Up for Air is a quiet complaint against a future that seems both overly complex and completely unavoidable. Modernity, Orwell believed, would thoroughly reshape our lives, and he had little use for any of the reshaping that he imagined would take place. Modernity would leave nothing alone, including politics. Orwell already saw political changes on the horizon, changes best understood in terms of political centralization. He had noticed, by the time he went north to Wigan, that central governments were growing in power and that the process of governing was moving in the direction of social management by a centralized political authority. He held, in Wigan Pier, that the world was teetering between socialism and fascism and that it was bound to go in one direction or the other. Both implied centralization, for Orwell, and centralization raised the specter of tyranny. Socialism in this sense was not overly attractive to Orwell, but it was more attractive than fascism, which he thought was at best little more than “Socialism with the virtues left out” (Orwell, 1958: 219). He worried that, “The Socialist world is to be above all things an ordered world, an eﬃcient world,” and believed that this is the sort of thing that made “sensitive minds recoil” (Ibid.: 189–90, Orwell’s italics). Orwell shared his concerns about the rise of a “beehive state” with classical liberals who naturally fear the emergence of a powerful centralized government, but he also understood that such a state might be unavoidable if economic injustice was to be averted. In this sense, his nineteenth century liberal sympathies sit awkwardly beside his twentieth century desire for the elimination of economic inequality.1 In a complex world, the need for government grows along with its responsibilities. But the more power government amasses in order to provide the required social management, the greater the likelihood of total government control becomes. Modest and limited government is a good check against the abuse of political power, but it cannot correct for market injustices. Yet political empowerment of government to permit the required correction expands the potential for the abuse of political power. Given the nature of this dilemma, Orwell’s sympathy for some idealized vision of democratic socialism seems sensible enough. The proper antidote for this problem is to instill in the people an appreciation for those ideals necessary for the domestication of political power—the very ideals that deﬁne politically what it means to live decently. These political ideals should inspire and animate the state regardless of the degree of

Revolting Pigs

61

centralization it displays. In Wigan Pier, he explains what he means by socialism in normative terms; the real socialist, he tells us, is someone who wishes “to see tyranny overthrown” (Ibid.: 221). Underlying this view of the matter we ﬁnd the twin ideals of justice and liberty. “Those are the words that have got to ring like a bugle across the world” (Ibid.: 216, Orwell’s italics). In Spain, Orwell’s political lexicon took on an added sophistication, and the singular value that seems always to have hovered in the background of his political consciousness ﬁnally received an exact expression. It was in Spain that Orwell thought he found a condition of “equality in fact,” and he quickly added the ideal of equality to his account of socialism. Liberty and equality thus became for him the conditions of justice and the ends for which genuine socialists are presumed to struggle. Orwell never explores in much detail whether liberty and equality are reconcilable with political centralization, but it seems safe to conclude that he could at least live with centralization if centralized government displayed a commitment to making liberty and equality realities in the political world. Totalitarianism could be abated only if liberty and equality prevailed across the land. But he also understood that centralization tends toward totalitarianism because of the hazards associated with locating political power in the hands of an elite few. It is worth emphasizing, however, that the twin ideals of liberty and equality are hardly the sole province of socialism, or even anarchism (another ism with which Orwell ﬂirted). If they have an obvious historical political home, it is within the liberal tradition of political discourse. Unlike most liberal spirits, Orwell does not make much of the notion of individual rights, but in the grand tradition of liberalism, he does derive his political ideals from an underlying moral philosophy that places great importance on the dignity and integrity of the independent human being. His dedicated defense of basic human decency is testimony to this liberal inclination. If we suppose that liberty and equality are what really mattered to him, we can characterize his political thought as an eﬀort to revitalize the ﬂoundering liberal tradition. So he faced a question that has become the focus of much contemporary theorizing on political life: how might one keep liberalism alive and enable it, at the same time, to address the problem of profound economic inequality? To answer this, he appealed rather idealistically to a fairly vague notion of democratic socialism.

1 The portrait of Orwell as a liberal thinker requires considerable defense, to be sure, for he never overtly embraced the idea of liberalism and apparently

62

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

had little sympathy for the self-proclaimed liberals of his day. His disinclination to move too close to liberalism was perhaps a result of the belief that it oﬀered little solace for the working poor, since classical liberals often seem comfortable with economic inequality. Nonetheless, it is hardly fanciful, though perhaps rather anachronistic, to classify Orwell as a liberal apologist, at least in more contemporary terms. In one of his few speciﬁc comments about liberalism, he oﬀered some evidence to suggest that he understood that the future of liberty and equality are tied to the liberal tradition.2 The passage I have in mind appears in “Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War,” and goes as follows: Against that shifting phantasmagoric in which black may be white tomorrow and yesterday’s weather can be changed by decree, there are in reality only two safeguards. One is that however much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back, and you consequently can’t violate it in ways that impair military eﬃciency. The other is that so long as some parts of the earth remain unconquered, the liberal tradition can be kept alive. (Orwell, 1946a: 200) There will be occasion shortly to explore the meaning behind Orwell’s odd reference to military eﬃciency, a reference he recants, speaking through O’Brien, in Nineteen Eighty-Four. In any event, the second defense of truth he introduces is what matters for present purposes. As long as those parts of the earth presently under the spell of liberalism remain unconquered, presumably by the spirit of totalitarianism, there is some hope for truth. Truth, in short, is understood by Orwell to be something that matters to both the defense of decency and the liberal tradition, a claim that echoes the spirit of John Stuart Mill. When viewed against the background provided by liberal morality, Orwell’s political thought begins to take a reasonably precise shape. His concern for the plight of the poor remains constant as his political thought develops, but it also goes on the back burner, for the emergence of political centralization presses in the direction of totalitarianism, and totalitarianism is inconsistent with liberalism. Orwell bemoans increased political centralization, but he also recognizes it to be a feature of the modern world—a world Orwell considered distasteful in so many ways. Speaking through the voice of George Bowling in Coming Up for Air, he recognizes that the forces driving human development are taking us toward centralization.

Revolting Pigs

63

“There’s no way back to Lower Binﬁeld,” Bowling says, “you can’t put Jonah back into the whale” (Orwell, 1950: 267). Modernity comes with a pace and a complexity that makes centralization inevitable, and this threatens liberal society with a turn toward totalitarianism—not from without, not from Nazi Germany or even the Stalinist Soviet Union, but from within. How, then, can the liberal tradition survive as centralized states grow and governments become more powerful? The only alternative to totalitarianism, in Orwell’s view, is of course democratic socialism, but Orwell remained irritatingly vague on what this involves. We know what he thought about socialism; it involves a commitment to the twin liberal virtues of equality and liberty. But why is it democratic socialism that matters? While Orwell is generally rather quiet on the subject of democracy, he does undertake its defense in his wartime essay, “Culture and Democracy” (Orwell, 1942). There he tells us that democracy admits of two common meanings, and it is worth quoting him at length on this issue in order to understand the meanings he has in mind: One is the primary sense of the word—a form of society in which power is in the hands of the common people. The other is much vaguer but is more nearly what we mean when we speak of democracy in such a context as this. It means a form of society in which there is considerable respect for the individual, a reasonable amount of freedom of thought, speech, and political organization, and what one might call a certain decency in the conduct of the government. It is this rather than any deﬁnite political system that we mean by democracy when we contrast it with totalitarianism. (Ibid.: 77) The ﬁrst account of democracy is curiously classical in character; it is worth noticing, for example, that he understands democracy in this sense to place political power in the hands of the common people, not just the people. Orwell’s sympathies for the common people naturally inclined him to look with some favor on this ﬁrst account of democracy, but that does not lead him to look with disdain on the second, and more clearly liberal, account. In a better world, Orwell would have surely found reason to stump for the ﬁrst form of democracy against the second, though he would also have to concede the need for some consciousness raising among the “common people” before such a democracy could hope to endure. But he did not live in this better world; he lived in a world threatened by a totalitarian menace growing like a cancer in the land. The best defense against this is to cultivate democracy in the second sense, the democracy that values “freedom

64

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

of speech, respect for the individual and all the rest of it.” Put in more distinctly doctrinal form, this means that the best defense against totalitarianism is to cultivate liberalism. Seeing Orwell as a liberal helps clarify a good deal of confusion that often surrounds his work. The expropriation of his work by more conservative thinkers in order to enlist him as an opponent of Soviet communism has always rankled those who recognize his more leftist inclinations. But the socialist and anarchist thinkers who would expropriate his work for their own purposes also fail to appreciate the nuanced aspect of his political thought. Orwell was, to be sure, a champion of the poor, even as he recognized their political impotence. But he also detested the totalitarian tendencies of his day. If he could condemn those elements of liberalism that supported a desperately inequitable distribution of social goods, and on the grounds that such a distribution was inconsistent with liberal ideals, he could also recognize in liberalism the grounds for a suspicion of state power, and a consequent commitment to individual liberty, that is the hallmark of classical liberalism. Part of liberalism needed revision, and in this Orwell belonged to a new and emerging liberal tradition—one that separates modern liberals from classical libertarians. But part of liberalism also needed support and cultivation, for if keeping totalitarianism at bay was possible, it would have to be because the liberal spirit of suspicion of governmental power and the corresponding defense of individual liberties was kept alive. This is far from contradictory. Orwell was hardly alone in noticing the need for revisions in liberal thinking; nor was he alone in noticing those values of the liberal tradition that need nurture and cultivation. But his voice most certainly lent a certain support to both movements. Nothing in all this indicates how the valuable side of liberalism might be kept alive, however, and Orwell never really confronts this problem directly. Instead, he draws in words a portrait of the socio-political forces at work to erode liberal ideals and send the western world toward totalitarianism. These are the socio-political forces that we need to understand, for they demonstrate the (very real) possibility of the erosion of liberalism and the ﬁnal triumph of totalitarianism. These forces work, I want to say, independently of individual will. The diabolical sage does not create totalitarianism, on Orwell’s accounting of things, the forces of socio-political life do. If bad people make totalitarianism a reality, socio-political forces are at work to make people bad. These forces are responsible for the “hate world” that George Bowling recognizes to be on the horizon. But Orwell was aware that there are other socio-political forces at work in the world as well, and these push in a diﬀerent direction, away from

Revolting Pigs

65

totalitarianism and toward liberalism, or democratic socialism if one prefers. So, Orwell’s political world is a clash of forces, and victory for either side is indeterminate. He believed that he lived and worked in a pivotal historical moment, and the political fate of much of the world hung in the balance. The political world would go in one of two possible directions— either to fascism (totalitarianism) or to democratic socialism (liberalism). He wanted to marshal the forces pushing toward liberalism and contribute to their ﬁnal victory; this was the political purpose that drove his political writing. He could not stand above the battle and retain any degree of artistic neutrality. The artistic savant might be up to this, but this is hardly a position that a moralist would want to embrace.

2 More needs to be said, however, to complete the picture of Orwell as a political liberal, and the best way to begin is by taking a close look at what is perhaps his most famous and most successful novel, Animal Farm. I will consider ﬁrst the traditional and altogether familiar reading of the story. On this view, the book was written as, and was intended to be, a satire on the Russian revolution and the emergence of Stalin. Orwell himself mentioned that the book was intended as a satire of this sort, but he also claimed that he intended it to be something more than this and hoped that it would also serve as a comment on revolution in general and on the perils that inevitably accompany revolutionary struggle.3 But this account of Orwell’s intentions underestimates the political power of the story, for Animal Farm is a decidedly political novel with a plot that unravels around the complex and sensitive themes of power, control, and revolutionary hope. The best way to approach and read the book is to pare the story down, peeling away its layers like the skin of an onion until one reaches its political heart (Cf. Bowker, 2003: 311). Once its depths as a political novel are exposed, readers will ﬁnd a work that identiﬁes and highlights extraordinary political challenges confronting modern liberal states. The story Orwell tells in Animal Farm is well known, and the book continues to command a heavy readership even following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the eclipse of the cold war. Nonetheless, it seems appropriate to approach the story by oﬀering a brief rehearsal of the ﬂow of events portrayed in the novel. Readers familiar with the story will recall that the novel begins with a focus upon a group of animals that labor away on something called “Manor Farm” in the service of a human named Jones

66

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

who owns the farm. Jones does little work himself, spending his time commanding and directing the animals who do the work of the farm. While Jones lives well on the proﬁts produced by the animals, the animals do not live all that well. They are sadly abused and exploited by Jones, and the farm quickly takes the status of a metaphor for the economic exploitation and indecency that aﬄicts the life of the working poor under capitalist systems. As the book begins, readers are introduced to an aging boar named Old Major who is moved to entertain the other animals with a story about a strange dream he has had. Old Major tells his audience that he foresaw a world where man had vanished, provision for the animals had become abundant, and life went well for the animals in the absence of the tyrant man. This vision of a more just social order quickly becomes a source of rapture and solace for the animals, and inspired by Old Major’s story, they vow to do all they can to bring this idyllic utopia to life on the farm. The spirit behind Old Major’s musings on animal equality is subtly and carefully woven into a distinctive political doctrine called “Animalism” by its primary architects, three pigs named Snowball, Napoleon, and Squealer. Central to animalism is the idea that all animals should embrace each other as brothers and sisters and respect each other’s freedom. They should stop their petty internal squabbles, acknowledge one another as fellow animals, and recognize man as the common enemy. Soon an opportunity for rebellion presents itself and the animals swing into action, driving Jones and his fellow humans from the farm. With Jones gone, Snowball and Napoleon begin to seize leadership of the farm, and the principles of animalism are quickly adopted as the new governing ideals of the now renamed Animal Farm. To display their commitment to animalism, a constitution of sorts is written to give full legal expression to the principles of animalism. Among the seven commandments that form the constitution and express the convictions behind animalism is the primary stipulation that “All animals are equal!” Orwell’s masterful description of the animals permits the reader to identify the all too human attributes of the various animals populating the farm. Mollie, “the pretty foolish white mare,” is vain, egotistical, and stupid. The sheep are, quite simply, sheep—mindless followers seemingly incapable of independent thought. The cat is duplicitous and self-serving.4 The pigs are clever but unscrupulous, with the arguable exception of Old Major, who never lives to see the revolution he inspired take place. Two horses, Clover the mare and Boxer, are genuine, hardworking, and dedicated to the principles of animalism. Boxer in particular is a sympathetic character,

Revolting Pigs

67

a powerful but stupid beast of burden who seems to have stepped directly out of the coal mines of Wigan and who recalls the Italian militiaman Orwell notices during his time in Spain. Boxer is a devoted citizen of Animal Farm willing to do all he can to support the farm, though he is, it turns out, rather opposed to killing. There is also Benjamin, of course; another sympathetic character who calls to mind, as we have seen, Bozo the street artist from London. Benjamin is bright but cynical. Unlike the other animals he can read, an attribute that enables him to grasp the treachery of the pigs, but he does not make any eﬀort to expose this treachery (with the clear exception of his horror at seeing Boxer taken away to the knackers), preferring a complicit fatalism, and content to notice that none of the animals “has ever seen a dead donkey.” The euphoria that accompanied the revolution and the banishment of farmer Jones inclined the animals to a life of leisure and indolence, and little work on the farm was done as a result. Snowball and Napoleon step into the power void and begin to organize the animals and get them back to work, but with the support and help of Squealer, Napoleon manages to scapegoat Snowball, seize control of the farm, and establish a little dictatorship with the pigs exercising what begins to look like totalitarian control. The other animals soon ﬁnd themselves in a condition worse than what they had experienced under farmer Jones. Hard work, exploitation, and diminished rations again become their plight, and the pigs slowly and cleverly transform the principles of animalism to suit and support their own totalitarian needs. From time to time the pigs claim privileges seemingly inconsistent with the principles of animalism, but a quick check of the constitution reveals that in fact it does say precisely what the pigs claim that it says and that their claimed privileges are really entitlements under the tenets of animalism. As the transformation from an egalitarian order to an oppressive totalitarian condition is completed, the animals discover that the seven commandments of animalism have disappeared from the side of the barn where the constitution had been written. Now only one principle was to be found there, and it said, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” (Orwell, 1946b: 123). The novel concludes with a chilling scene. The pigs reestablish commercial relations with the humans from neighboring farms, and soon pigs and humans recognize that they share a common predicament—the control of their workers. The humans notice the success the pigs have had on this score, and the new tyrants, now walking on two legs and upright, begin to blend in with the old tyrants. Peering through the farmhouse window and

68

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

watching the revelry joined by human and pig alike, the animals notice all diﬀerence between pig and human begin to vanish. It now became “impossible to say which was which.” The name of their farm, the pigs declared, would be returned to Manor Farm, its rightful name. The cycle of revolution to tyranny was complete and the animals had returned to the condition they had hoped to escape. From the euphoria of revolutionary hope there emerged the horror of totalitarian control. Change had not made things even slightly better, as Orwell imagined it could in his essay on Dickens (Orwell, 1946a: 64). Instead, things had become worse and the control of the pigs even more total than the control farmer Jones had exercised— thanks by and large to the new technologies of power derived by the pigs.

3 So then, what political lesson does Orwell expect his readers to take from his fairy tale? The traditional response to these questions, once again, is to suppose that Orwell was satirizing the Russian revolution and in the process demonstrating that genuine socialists should not look to the Soviet Union for political guidance. The parallels between the events on Animal Farm and the Russian revolution are obvious enough, and there is no reason to rehearse them here; this has been done to good eﬀect already (Cf. Rai, 1988: 81–112). But to leave matters at this and suppose that this exhausts the political message Orwell built into the story would leave the novel as little more than an important period piece. The work would have an enduring political message only insofar as it displays an evil that future socialist movements should want to avoid. I think this would do the work an injustice, for while the traditional reading is certainly accurate as far as it goes, it remains a fairly superﬁcial and unsatisfying account of Orwell’s story as a distinctively political novel. Things get more interesting when we turn to a second and some may think rather cynical way to interpret the text that moves us some distance from Orwell’s own declared account of the work. While I do not want to suggest that Orwell had this reading in mind when he wrote the piece, there is nonetheless considerable textual support for this interpretation. Thanks to his familiarity with James Burnham’s reﬂections on what Burnham termed a managerial revolution, there is little doubt that Orwell understood and anticipated the political dynamic at work in this reading; it takes seriously a political dynamic he hoped to satirize, and thereby to discredit, in Animal Farm. Suppose, then, we approach the novel in a fashion suggested by traditional elitist theory and explore it as a work that considers the evolutionary

Revolting Pigs

69

political trend toward the need for central management in any society able to endure through time.5 On this account, civil society requires a division of labor, and the nature of this division is ﬁxed by the need to organize and coordinate the socio-economic activities required to sustain the state. Not everyone can be king, to put the point crudely, because society also requires laborers, medical doctors, engineers, technicians—perhaps even dishwashers—and so forth. If social life is to go well, it is important to make sure that the more demanding social roles are ﬁlled by those individuals whose talents and abilities are best suited to manage them. Liberal sympathies for human equality and the like cannot override, and should not shroud from view, the modicum of truth in the Platonic insight that social roles should be ﬁlled by those individuals most able to perform them well. On Animal Farm, the pigs are the thinkers—the Platonic rulers, so to speak—and thus best suited to meet the intellectual demands faced by those who are asked to plan and manage social life. If the pigs had not stepped into the authority vacuum created by the revolution, things on the farm would have collapsed quickly, no work would have gotten done, and the lives of the animals would have decayed rapidly. Happily, the pigs stepped into the void and got things working again, and the animals might consider themselves lucky that the pigs were around and willing to undertake the burden of leadership on the farm. Of course, other roles must be ﬁlled as well; someone, or some animal, must assume the responsibility to do the hard and demanding work modern societies require. Part of the responsibility of leadership is to see that the work gets done, and this means ﬁnding some animal to do it and making sure that the chosen animal does it. Boxer is a particularly important character in this regard because he does not shirk his duty. Orwell has George Bowling recognize that war is coming, and he goes to pains to explain why Bowling is worried less about the war and more about the “after-war.” In Animal Farm, we might say that Orwell was worried about the “after-revolution.” Can noble ideas like equality be sustained once the tyrants are run oﬀ? How might political necessity naturally erode those inspiring ideals that initially triggered the revolution by allowing the subjects of oppression to conceptualize their oppression as oppression? The return to normalcy requires a return to political organization and social management; the return to normalcy, this is to say, reintroduces the need for political power, and with it the inevitable inequalities that arise from the existence of such power. According to elitist theory, this reintroduces the Platonic realization that social order runs eﬀectively only when everyone assumes a social role for which she or he is suited. Ironically, and perhaps rather sadly, naïve musings

70

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

about equality and the like may well prove to be counterproductive to the realization of all this. This sort of equality is an early casualty of swine rule on Animal Farm. Because the demands of diﬀering roles in society may vary, the resources necessary to make sure that those who occupy important roles can do their jobs well may need to be distributed in a manner that fails to meet some idealized egalitarian standard. Orwell’s pigs, for example, justify their enlarged, and hence unequal, ration of milk by arguing that milk is necessary for good thinking and their contribution to society requires them to be good thinkers (Orwell, 1946b: 42). From a Marxist viewpoint, unequal distributions of this sort are hardly problematic. People (and presumably animals) must have what they need to perform their social function eﬀectively. The Marxist maxim, “To each according to his needs,” would seem both to legitimate and even require distributions of this sort. But in a social condition where Marx’s “fetishism of commodities” (a Marxian jawbreaker Orwell never mentions) has been dialectically transcended, such inequalities are not going to raise eyebrows. Unequal distributions of social goods become problematic only where (1) these goods are relatively scarce, and (2) the amount of some such good possessed by A doesn’t leave enough for B to satisfy B’s needs. Since there is no textual evidence to think this is the case with regard to the animals’ milk ration, the unequal division of milk should not have caused problems on a properly communal Animal Farm. Concerns for a rigid equality of distribution under such circumstances may actually hinder the well-being of the community by denying to some members the full amount of some resource needed for them to do their job satisfactorily. The Elitist reading of Animal Farm suggests that Orwell was playing with an intriguing problem in the novel. The animals on the farm are incited to rebellion because they are persuaded to embrace (albeit superﬁcially) a value scheme that enables them to regard their current socio-political condition as oppressive. The rebellion/revolution has as its end the instantiation of a political order that brings these values to life in practice. But with these values in place, nothing gets done on the farm; equality yields little more than indolence and torpor in the animals. Recognizing the problem, the pigs seize power and provide the centralized authority required to get things moving again. But the values of the rebellion/revolution now become impediments to their eﬀorts. To make social life function properly, the pigs must transform the very values that led to their political ascendance, because the ideals of the revolution are counterproductive to the afterrevolution. The pigs must now subvert the revolutionary spirit in the name of good social order.

Revolting Pigs

71

On this view, egalitarian ideals are diﬃcult to sustain, and perhaps simply out of place, once one confronts the ongoing realities of socio-economic life. Of course, the elitist reading takes the side of the pigs, whose rule is the inevitable consequence of the need to get society going again, establish order, and meet social needs. These are the processes that erode the revolutionary ideals, but then, on the elitist view, so much the worse for revolutionary ideals. Orwell, of course, favored these ideals and wanted to see them survive the after-revolution. The predicament posed by the story, a predicament that matters to anyone who favors the revolutionary ideals of animalism, is to determine how one can have one’s revolutionary ideals and eﬀective and stable social order at the same time. This is the dilemma of revolutionary hope, a dilemma Orwell poses with admirable sophistication in the novel. But of course the animals are unable to understand any of this. If they are not suﬃciently astute to grasp the challenges posed by the afterrevolution, the “lower animals” are at least reﬂective enough to notice when the pigs are tinkering with their revolutionary ideals. And this creates a tension between rulers and ruled. How can the rulers make the necessary adjustments in political ideals to satisfy the requirements of political necessity without generating a second revolution? This, of course, introduces the problem of control that Orwell has Mr. Pilkington recognize at the end of the story. Control of the population now becomes a problem for postrevolutionary elites that must be resolved if social well-being is to be realized. If elites cannot manage the control problem, Animal Farm likely will have another revolution in its future, and the sorry cycle will begin all over again. This parodies Burnham’s cyclical theory of political change that Orwell reproduces, straight-faced I think, in Goldstein’s book in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The elitist reading thus suggests the logic that inclines the pigs to chisel away at the revolutionary ideals of animalism, and this is the logic Orwell found troubling. Needless to say, the “lower animals” are worse oﬀ under the pigs than they were under farmer Jones. They work harder, get less in return, and are badly exploited in order to allow the pigs to ﬂourish. This is hardly a condition that realizes the well-being of the community as a whole. Instead, we are back to a familiar problem—many are exploited so that a few can enjoy a good life. But the economic impoverishment and exploitation of the “lower animals” is only the most superﬁcial of the concerns that seem to animate Orwell. The inequality that bothered him, after all, was only tangentially related to the maldistribution of social goods. Orwell was hardly a strict economic egalitarian. He supposed it important

72

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

for everyone to have enough stuﬀ to live decently. He never says much about the level of economic well-being required for a decent life, but from his few comments on the subject, we can suppose he did not set the economic bar terribly high. His most developed comments in this regard seem to come from “Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War,” where he says: All that the working man demands is what these others would consider the indispensable minimum without which human life cannot be lived at all. Enough to eat, freedom from the haunting terror of unemployment, the knowledge that your children will get a fair chance, a bath once a day, clean linen reasonably often, a roof that doesn’t leak, and short enough working hours to leave you with a little energy when the day is done. (Orwell, 1946a: 207–8) Satisfying these needs hardly demands much in the way of economic resources, and it seems reasonable to think this condition could be satisﬁed within the context of elite rule. It even seems reasonable for elite rulers to make sure the workers live such economically decent lives, since if it brings them a measure of happiness and security, they are likely to be more accepting of elite rule (or more likely, simply to not notice elite rule). But Orwell would still object, on egalitarian grounds, to the social condition created by the pigs even if this modest condition of economic decency was realized. It was, after all, social inequality rather than strictly economic inequality that mattered most to him. The class/caste division that so bothered him was signiﬁcantly indecent because of the presumed superiority of the upper caste. And the pigs quickly become an upper caste, as Orwell illustrates by having them turn into human-like creatures, leaving the animal world behind and adopting a new and presumably improved species status. Given the resultant inequality of social status, Orwell, along with all other genuine egalitarians, would have grounds to complain even if the lower castes were allowed to live reasonably decent lives in terms of economic well-being. The indecency associated with economic inequality mattered to Orwell chieﬂy because it was little more than a manifestation of the indecency linked to social inequality. What troubles about Animal Farm, and what constitutes the heart of the indecency that ﬂows through the story, is the transformation of the pigs into social elites, or into animals more equal (i.e., worthier) than the others. So, it is necessary to dwell a bit longer on the way elite rule generates the caste system so abhorrent to Orwell. Why should ruling elites—understood in the sense of rule by those most able to rule wisely and eﬀectively (think of Plato’s philosophical rulers here)—transform themselves, in their own

Revolting Pigs

73

minds, into superior persons/animals—elites in the social sense? The question invites a comparison with Plato’s analysis of political decay near the end of the Republic. Timocracy (rule by able elites), Plato argued, will decay into oligarchy because the elite class will attempt to solidify its political control and perpetuate itself, and it will do so because it will come to want to institutionalize its position of privilege. In the process the ruling elites confuse its class well-being with the well-being of the polity as a whole (Plato, 1961: 780–5). The problem, as Plato saw it, is a product of the lack of moral knowledge in the ruling elite, because they are not philosophers they do not know the good, and therefore cannot act upon it. Was Orwell making a similar point? The traditional reading would seem to invite this conclusion. If Orwell was just parodying the Russian revolution, he might be understood to be warning against allowing the revolutionary agenda to fall into the hands of morally ﬂawed characters like Stalin. Tyranny, on this reading, requires a tyrant, and a tyrant is understood as a ﬂawed moral character. Accordingly, we might conclude that troubles emerged on Animal Farm because Napoleon and Squealer were morally ﬂawed pigs. If these pigs grasped the moral message of Old Major, they still put it aside because they were inspired by baser motives—selﬁshness perhaps, or egoism, or sheer arrogance—to pursue power for itself and gain control of the farm. But there are other ways to think about the events that took place on Animal Farm. We might say something stronger, for example, by retreating to Lord Acton and arguing that Orwell wanted to emphasize that power corrupts. Even if the pigs had the best of intentions and were reasonably solid moral characters, they could still not overcome the mesmerizing power of power. While not morally bad, Napoleon was morally weak and succumbed to the power of power. We might even put Lord Acton’s concern in larger philosophical dress by supposing that the corrupting power of power is simply something beyond the abilities of human beings, and pigs, to avoid. Perhaps, for example, Orwell wanted to say, with Kant, that “Nothing straight can be constructed from such warped wood as that which man is made of ” (Kant, 1970: 46). The elite reading need not take us all the way to Kant, but it does suggest that there is more to the emergence of social elites, and the corresponding eclipse of egalitarianism, than moral failing. Perhaps power really does corrupt, but what one wants to know is why this must be the case. The explanation suggested by the elite reading involves the need to control lower animals who are inspired by revolutionary ideals that become counterproductive in the after-revolution. The need to get society going again gives rise to a social distinction between the controllers and the controlled,

74

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

a distinction that builds an adversarial element into the social fabric. The sense of superiority that generates the caste system is the natural product of this adversarial relationship. Society must be managed if things are to go well, and so the managers come to look with disdain on those who must be managed. The lower animals, unable to understand any of this, are accordingly considered by the managers as part of the problem that must be dealt with if things are to go well on the farm. So the pigs no longer belong to the class of animals; they are a caste unto themselves and eventually morph into a group of controllers with the characteristics typical of the controlling class—in this case, the humans. The elite reading leaves us with a rather sad interpretation of the novel. While the ideals of equality and justice might inspire the lower classes to rebel against their oppressors, if suitably inspired by some catalytic force, the ability to sustain these ideals in the after-revolution is rendered problematic by existent socio-political forces. The rise of an elite class erodes the ideal of equality by introducing social divisions that seem inevitably to harden into a caste system. The elite class must now exercise the control necessary to counter the lingering eﬀects of the revolutionary morality responsible for their emergence in the ﬁrst place. To sustain their control, the elite class must muster the political power required for eﬀective control of the lower classes. (In Platonic terms, the despot must commit patricide by killing the polity that spawned him.) The evolutionary trend of society, in other words, is invariably toward totalitarianism. The problem has become acute in complex modern society because here the need and demand for social management has become far greater than it was in simpler times. Modernity drives society toward totalitarianism. The elitist reading of Animal Farm described here is not entirely faithful to Burnham’s position in The Managerial Revolution (1941) and The Machiavellians (1943). It does not, contra Burnham, describe the pigs as creatures driven by some inexplicable desire to amass and sustain power. Instead, it indicates how the need to solidify their political control pushed the pigs toward the cultivation of power. The diﬀerence here is of great importance, and it introduces a point to which we shall return shortly.

4 The problem that emerges from the elitist reading can be given a typically Orwellian formulation; that is, a formulation that takes on the character of a paradox. If people are to avoid the collapse of revolutionary hope in the after-revolution, they must be made aware of the social forces that push in the direction of totalitarianism. In particular, they must become more

Revolting Pigs

75

attuned to the political morality lying behind revolutionary hope in order to appreciate the threat modernity poses to it. People, this is to say, need to become morally stronger. Perhaps the best way to make people morally stronger is to bring the ideals of revolutionary hope to life in society. This would seem to require systemic political change. But how is such political change going to come about until people have been made morally stronger. The paradox of the moralist and the revolutionary Orwell explored in his essay on Dickens is back before us (Cf. Orwell, 1946a: 65). We can make some headway on meeting the challenge posed by this paradox by exploring another possible interpretation of Animal Farm. This returns us to my earlier claim that Orwell is best regarded as a fairly typical liberal thinker, even if his self-proclaimed description of himself as a democratic socialist rather hides this from view. I want now to defend this characterization of Orwell’s political thought by exploring what might be called a liberal reading of Animal Farm. In the process, I intend to suggest that what we might take to be Orwell’s modest theoretical response to his paradox is really a warning that the paradox is not capable of receiving a theoretical remedy. What is required, rather, is a practical remedy—a political remedy, in eﬀect—that places primary emphasis upon the challenges, real and signiﬁcant, that human beings face in their political lives. In both Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell elected to dramatize these challenges and by doing so to illustrate and emphasize what was at stake in the political choices that human beings must face, choices that will ultimately determine whether humankind moves toward totalitarianism or sustains and further instantiates the ideals of liberalism. While the Russian revolution supplied the practical details for Orwell’s story, it doesn’t follow that this is the revolutionary moment that really mattered to him, or even that this is the revolution actually illustrated by the text. The principles of animalism that lurk in Old Major’s musings resemble the liberal ideals of Locke more than the socialist bric-a-brac of Marx, for the underlying spirit of animalism is quite simply that, “All animals are equal.” The revolution was intended, at least in principle, to give practical expression to this ideal and to eliminate the embellishments of privilege associated with the animal’s domination by humans. Of course one way to understand Orwell’s political agenda in Animal Farm is to suppose that Orwell elected to purge his socialist revolution of Marxist trappings and to make it truly socialist as he understood this notion—or to bring equality to the forefront of the revolution and remove Marxist rhetoric from view. But this move means that Orwell’s revolution hardly resembles the one Marx had in mind, or even the one that the Bolsheviks had in mind. Instead, this merely makes Orwell’s revolution

76

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

resemble another and entirely diﬀerent revolutionary moment, one explicitly inspired by an egalitarian ideal and a corresponding attack upon feudal privilege. Orwell’s imagined revolution, this is to say, appears on this view to mimic the socio-political revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that brought into being the liberal tradition of political discourse. I do not wish to suggest by this that Orwell actually had the revolutions associated with the liberal tradition in mind as he wrote Animal Farm. The obvious template for the revolution in Animal Farm is the Russian revolution. As a biographical matter, his story is not intended as a matter of artistic design to be a satire on liberal revolutions. The satirical side of the story targets the Russian revolution. But Orwell did want to explore in the story a challenge to the phenomenon of revolution, and he understood the sense of revolution that mattered to him to champion ideals that are at home in the liberal tradition, ideals that get lost in the after-revolution. This concern exposes Orwell’s liberal sympathies, and these sympathies come into plain view when we acknowledge the credibility of the liberal reading of the text. That Orwell understood the political events associated with the emergence of liberalism as a revolutionary moment is made clear in the text of Nineteen Eighty-Four. In Goldstein’s book, Orwell makes a straightforward reference to this revolutionary moment, “The heirs of the French, English, and American revolutions had partly believed in their own phrases about the rights of man, freedom of speech, equality before the law, and the like, and had even allowed their conduct to be inﬂuenced by them to some extent” (Orwell, 1961: 168). If Locke put in place a spirit of equality premised upon a claim of natural human rights in order to justify the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the American rebellion of 1776 against the Crown, and of course the French Revolution of 1789, soon followed suit as their instigators took up arms in the name of liberty and equality to oppose the oppression of their ruling elites and assert their own right of selfdetermination. The eﬀorts of the animals on Manor Farm simply follow this revolutionary trend and seem, therefore, to belong to this genre of revolutionary spirit. Even a casual reading of the text is suﬃcient to notice that Old Major resembles Marx, but his hortatory rhetoric more closely approximates the inspiring prose of Thomas Paine than the dreary intellectual meanderings of Marx and Engels. Moreover, the excesses of the French Revolution in particular come to mind when reading through Animal Farm, not because the animals took to lopping oﬀ human heads, but because the French

Revolting Pigs

77

peasantry rather resembles the animals in their fervent embrace of ideals they could not fully comprehend. This failure eventually underscored a leadership crisis which led, once the revolutionary euphoria had abated, to a struggle for political power that eventually resulted in the triumphal emergence of Napoleon—the man, not the pig. Even more to the point, it is curious that Orwell elected to name his pre-revolutionary farm “Manor Farm.” The manor, of course, is associated with a feudal lifestyle and with a caste system antithetical to liberal egalitarianism. Since equality is the only fundamental value of animalism, the shift in name from “Manor Farm” to “Animal Farm” suggests a shift from a feudal caste system (literally a species diﬀerentiation in the text) to an egalitarian socio-political arrangement.6 At novel’s end, of course, the pigs morph into a kind of human form, and the name of the farm is returned to “Manor Farm.” The revolution is now dead, and the liberal ideals associated with it have been perverted and distorted, though they still receive lip service. The change of name back to “Manor Farm” is now entirely appropriate, for a new elite—a new oligarchy/aristocracy—has emerged that simply replaces the old. But there is little diﬀerence between the old and the new elites; oppressors resemble one another regardless of time or place. The caste system is back in place; oppression is back in place. And the liberal spirit—the crystal spirit—has been all but eclipsed. So, according to the liberal reading of the text, Animal Farm parodies the eclipse of the liberal tradition, the very tradition, Orwell mused in “Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War,” that must be kept alive if totalitarianism is to be avoided. The elitist reading oﬀers an external account of why this has happened, but it does not provide much of an account of how this has come about. The novel itself, however, oﬀers a response to the how question, but is not overly concerned with the why question. On the liberal reading, however, we need not concern ourselves with the why of it; on this reading it is the how that matters. If Orwell’s political purpose in the novel is to inspire a liberal revival—to help keep the liberal tradition alive—then the text should oﬀer some clue about how this unhappy ending to the liberal revolution might be avoided. If we understand how it could happen, we will also understand how it might be avoided, and this would be suﬃcient to meet Orwell’s political agenda. So, careful attention to the text should enable us to understand where things went wrong on Animal Farm. As with the traditional and elitist readings, the ﬁrst and most obvious place to look for an explanation for the failure of the revolution is to explore the character of the revolting pigs. Napoleon’s shrewd maneuvering and lust for power seems to have spelled the doom of the revolution. But this

78

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

view of the matter should begin to seem much too simple. Granted, the dogs proved an intimidating force, but they alone were insuﬃcient to overcome the power of the other animals. With eﬀective leadership, after all, the animals had defeated Jones and his cronies, and surely they had greater power at their disposal than what the dogs provided Napoleon and Squealer. Boxer, for example, demonstrated his ability to make short work of the dogs. But in the absence of eﬀective leadership, the dogs proved an intimidating presence, and no doubt more to the point, the other animals, with the possible exception of Benjamin (who didn’t seem to care), never believed that the revolutionary ideals were threatened by Napoleon—the pig, not the man. A diﬀerent and perhaps more compelling explanation for the revolution’s eventual failure comes to light if we think about the lessons Orwell learned in Spain and Wigan. In Spain he learned that it is possible to dominate and oppress without a monopoly of sheer force. What Orwell took to be the emergent technologies of power make total domination possible by allowing oppressors to control the mind of the oppressed. While Napoleon may not have been much at running things on the farm, he was a shrewd manipulator of consciousness. This, and not the dogs, was the source of his power. Ironically, the principles of animalism worked strikingly to his advantage. Farmer Jones was a crude oppressor with little other than physical threats to work with. Much like the British in India, Jones was a diﬀerent animal—literally a diﬀerent species—and not at all like the other animals on the farm. The distance engendered by this diﬀerence made it diﬃcult if not impossible for the animals to identify with him and place their trust in him. What Jones lacked, and what seems to have simply been unavailable to him, was a legitimating ideology that oppressors and oppressed alike could profess to share. Such an ideology enables the oppressor to put a positive and justifying spin on his control and to persuade the oppressed of the necessity and legitimacy of his actions. The principles of animalism provided the pigs with the necessary legitimating function. The irony and sobering warning inherent in Orwell’s story is to be found here. By writing down the principles of animalism, the animals supposed these governing ideals would endure through time and serve as the animating spirit of a better political life well into the future. Animal Farm was to be governed by a rule of principle and the basic norms of justice were to be in plain view for all to see and follow. Since all animals were equal, no animal could be above the law, and the practical meaning of this ideal was cemented in paint on the side of the barn.

Revolting Pigs

79

Needless to say, all this has a liberal ring to it and conjures up the image of the American Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution complete with Bill of Rights. But Orwell had noticed in Spain, and throughout the Second World War, how political elites could use political symbols as mechanisms of propaganda, and this is precisely what happens on Animal Farm. The written expression of revolutionary ideals actually played into the crafty hands, err hooves, of Napoleon and Squealer. Their assumption of privilege was easily justiﬁed simply by amending their little constitution. When a claim of privilege was made, the animals would run to the barn to see if their constitution allowed such a thing, and when they did, they found an altered constitution and Squealer waiting to assure them that this is what the constitution says and what it has always said. Faced with this law-like justiﬁcation, the animals could do little but accept the situation as legitimate under their governing ideals.7 Orwell discovered the political gullibility and naïveté that he built into the animals in the dreadful conditions of Wigan, on the streets of London, and in the kitchens of Paris. The animals were vulnerable to this sort of manipulation because they could not read. Their illiteracy, moreover, is simply a mark of their political stupidity. It is doubtful, of course, that the animals ever really understood or grasped the signiﬁcance of the principles of animalism; they grasped them only as hortatory ideals rather than as practical maxims to be brought to life in the operation of Animal Farm. In this sense, the events that transpired on Manor Farm that brought down Jones are best classiﬁed as a rebellion rather than as a revolution. There was no great change in the consciousness of the animals; they were not “brought to consciousness” by the overthrow of Jones. Their grasp of the ideal of equality remained superﬁcial and uncertain. Like the miners of Wigan, for example, Boxer was a powerful, noble, and industrious ﬁgure, but again like the miners, he did not really comprehend the political world around him. The horizon of his mind remained close to home; he took the political world at face value, believed what he was told, and trusted the leadership of his new government without really grasping the teachings of Old Major.

5 According to the liberal reading, then, the failure of the revolution is attributable not chieﬂy to the treachery of Napoleon, but to the inability of the animals to really comprehend what the revolution meant. This theme also reverberates through the pages of Nineteen Eighty-Four and calls to mind Winston’s misplaced faith in the proles. But when put in these terms,

80

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

Orwell’s story in Animal Farm again takes on a hint of fatalism and determinism. Revolutions, we might suppose, are bound to fail if the masses cannot understand and sustain their animating ideals. And the masses are simply incapable of this. We are returned to the paradox of the moralist and the revolutionary. Logically the moralist really must come ﬁrst, but the masses will likely remain tragically oblivious to their brand of moralizing. We can draw out the fatalistic element of the novel a bit further if we suppose that Orwell compressed the story of the liberal revolution both in space and time. The failure of the Russian revolution happened rapidly, and from a strictly Marxist point of view, expectedly. In the Marxist terms that Orwell so abhorred, Russia (despite Lenin’s pleadings to the contrary) was not ready for communist transformation because the peasantry had not yet been proletariatized. But something of an egalitarian spirit did infuse the public consciousness in those political settings where liberal ideals received political manifestation and took concrete form in the type of democratic system that Orwell valued (Orwell, 1942: 77–9). Yet with time and mounting internal and external pressures on government (of the sort chronicled in the elitist reading), the need for centralized management of social life increased, and with this, the need to revise and rearticulate the basic ideals of the liberal system became necessary as well. An economic system that legitimates material inequality remained in place and the inequalities it supported led, from Orwell’s point of view, to the emergence of a new caste system just as elitist and oppressive as the old feudal system that was undone by the revolution. Again from Orwell’s point of view, it seems that no one has really noticed the resultant inequality and consequent betrayal of the egalitarian ideal; the ideals of liberal egalitarianism have been rendered consistent with the privilege and superior position of the upper class. The elitist reading of Animal Farm displays some of the pressures that have pushed things in this direction. The new elite will work to control the government and sustain its position of privilege because it thinks its interests are coterminous with the interests of society as a whole, and a dominant ideology will emerge that allows this elite to legitimate its position of privilege by hammering out an account of equality that supports its interests. The symbols and ideals of political legitimacy are thus subtly distorted or transformed to support totalitarian control, and none of those whose daily lives are removed from political thinking will notice the transformation. The liberal world thus decays toward totalitarianism even while it continues, as it does on Animal Farm, to worship those very liberal ideals that are fading out of existence.

Revolting Pigs

81

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell would describe the mental process by which an idea was transformed into its opposite while still retaining its evocative meaning as something he called “doublethink.” And he understood as early as Wigan Pier that if and when fascism (read totalitarianism) came to England it would come in “a slimy Anglicised form” (Orwell, 1958: 231). External pressure from fascist (totalitarian) governments may hasten the process, but it was not the prospects of external military defeat that would undo liberalism. It would be the internal erosion of liberal ideals that would signal the end of the liberal tradition (and concurrently the liberal revolution), just as it did on Animal Farm. Accordingly, it was not really the power that Napoleon exercised that poses the central problem in Animal Farm. Rather, it is the power of events that push liberal cultures toward something illiberal that is at the heart of the matter. Animal Farm could not be preserved by producing better pigs, for the pigs are just players on the political stage driven by socio-political forces that push inexorably toward totalitarianism. This places Orwell’s paradox in historical context. His beloved England had already had its revolution; the challenge now is to manage the after-revolution. To keep the revolution alive, it is necessary to cultivate revolutionary ideals in the after-revolution. It isn’t possible to make people morally strong once and for all; this is a continuous challenge that must be met by each succeeding generation. And some group must undertake the challenge and serve as the moral conscience of the community. Perhaps this has always been necessary, but for Orwell it had become more urgent with the rise of modernity. Neither the elitist reading nor the liberal reading is intended to exonerate the pigs for the failure of the revolution, but taken together they do help readers understand the pigs a bit better. Nor is there much reason to blame the collapse of Animal Farm on the other animals, and I doubt that Orwell wanted to do this. But if the story is to be read as a warning that will help us avoid the collapse of the liberal tradition, there must be a heavy someplace. If we are not to make Orwell into a political fatalist—something entirely foreign to a moralist of his stripe, we need to aﬃx some responsibility for the moral collapse on Animal Farm. Here I’m inclined to point a ﬁnger at Benjamin the donkey, and I think this is where Orwell would want us to point our ﬁngers. I’ve noticed already that Benjamin resembles in important ways Bozo the screever. But there are others Benjamin resembles as well; in fact, we might take Benjamin to represent an entire class of characters that Orwell worried about. Like the pigs, Benjamin was literate, and if illiteracy is an

82

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

indicator of stupidity in Orwell’s story, literacy is an indicator of education and intelligence. Benjamin was certainly intelligent enough to understand what was happening around him, but he was also largely detached from political events. Such things, he supposed, would not aﬀect him—no one had ever seen a dead donkey. In an “As I Please” column Orwell wrote in 1944, he said, speaking of a young artist he had encountered, “The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside” (Orwell, 1968b: 132, Orwell’s italics). The comment conjures up thoughts of Bozo, but it also reaches beyond Bozo to include those thinkers and literati who continue to pursue their muse thinking that political circumstances and events will not aﬀect them. They suppose that they will remain free to pursue their art, their thinking, and their writing, and in this Orwell thought them quite mistaken. They simply don’t understand or appreciate the implications of totalitarian control. And the great tragedy, of course, is that these individuals are the very ones who can recognize what is happening and do something about it. The power of the pen, Orwell might be heard to say, is greater than the power of propaganda, but only if the pen is put to use in the service of the very truth it must defend and the freedom it needs to survive. Benjamin is an enigmatic and oddly likable character, but his silence on the plight of Animal Farm is deafening and cowardly. In a world that trends toward indecency, someone must ﬁght for decency, or decency doesn’t have a chance. Orwell, of course, fought for decency with all his might. He struggled in both Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four to ﬁre a warning shot about totalitarian doom for all to hear. This makes Orwell into a revolutionary spirit in the fashion of Thomas Paine; it describes him as a liberal still ﬁghting the revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the after-revolution. It puts his moralism in context and makes him, one might say, the Rousseau of the after-revolution. The future of the liberal revolution lies not with the proles, but with the moralists.

Notes 1. George Woodcock has described this tension in Orwell’s thought with admirable clarity, “[T]here were occasions when he would speak, in tones that might have seemed appropriate to a converted Blimp, of extensive and disciplined nationalization of industries, of state control over wide sectors of social life. But at other times—and here I felt his real inclinations were emerging—he seemed to envisage a decentralized society and workers’ control of industry—something rather like the Guild Socialist vision, with a great deal of room for worker initiative” (Woodcock, 1966: 21).

Revolting Pigs

83

2. Had Orwell been more comfortable with Marx, he might have noticed that Marx was no proponent of economic equality—a decidedly modern liberal notion. For Marx, the concerns associated with the ideals of justice, liberty, and equality are simply the moral norms of bourgeois capitalism that would not live beyond the communist transformation. While Marx could not speculate on the moral order that would replace bourgeois morality, he was conﬁdent that it would not be the morality of capitalism. There is something ironic, then, about Orwell’s insistence in Wigan Pier that socialists abandon Marxist jawbreakers like dialectical materialism and endorse liberal ideals like liberty and justice. This is precisely what socialists working in the shadow of Marx could not do, as the logic of dialectical materialism makes plain. However, we can and perhaps should note that Orwell was one of the ﬁrst liberals to notice that liberal morality has room to challenge the justness of the distribution of social goods controlled by the vicissitudes of the capitalist market alone. For modern liberals working in the shadow of John Rawls, this view is now rather commonplace (Cf. Rawls, 1971). 3. Orwell is quoted to this eﬀect by John Newsinger. See Newsinger, 1999: 117–8. 4. George Woodcock has masterfully detailed Orwell’s provocative use of animals throughout his ﬁction and notes that Orwell apparently rather disliked cats (Woodcock, 1966: 72–5). But Orwell disliked rats more than this, and this particular animal, missing in Animal Farm, follows him throughout his ﬁction, ending in his strategic use of the animal in Nineteen Eighty-Four. 5. For the classic contributions to elite theory, see Mosca, 1939; Pareto, 1968; and Michels, 1959. See also Mills, 1956. 6. Bowker has noticed that Orwell lived in close proximity to a farm in England actually named “Manor Farm” when he was working on the novel, and the obvious presumption is that this is the source of the name (Bowker, 2003: 308). But this hardly justiﬁes the conclusion of a happy coincidence, for there were other farms with diﬀerent names in the region as well and Orwell speciﬁcally chose to take this particular name. No doubt the happy presence of this particular farm helped Orwell work a degree of consistency into his literary enterprise. 7. It is not clear, from the standpoint of political science, that all constitutional regimes need an institution to play this legitimating role, but political stability is certainly enhanced if they do in fact have an institution that fulﬁlls this political purpose. Though as a consequence of political practice rather than constitutional design, the Supreme Court has come to provide this service in the United States, for example.

5 Technologies of Power The focus of Orwell’s political thought does not change substantially from Animal Farm to Nineteen Eighty-Four. The theme of failed political ideals remains constant in the second and far more elaborate work. The scourge of political power continues to loom as the center piece of his concern, and the threat it increasingly poses to simple decency drives his obsession about signaling the need to keep the liberal tradition alive. But Nineteen EightyFour delves more deeply into two key elements of the political decay Orwell feared. The ﬁrst of these involves a more thorough exploration of how totalitarian control might actually emerge in liberal political cultures than anything that can be found in Animal Farm. Orwell believed he lived at a pivotal political moment in the history of the west because the techniques of control—what I want to call the technologies of power—developed by the upper class have achieved such a heightened sophistication that now, for the ﬁrst time in history, the upper class can manage the thorough and eﬀective domination of the middle class. Prior to the reﬁnement of these technologies of power, the control exercised by the upper class was invariably limited. But this, Orwell supposed, had changed with the coming of modernity, and he believed totalitarian control now to be a real possibility for the ﬁrst time in human history. The second aspect of political decay that Orwell explores in Nineteen Eighty-Four involves something that I want to call the psychology of power. The existence of sophisticated technologies of power that make totalitarian control possible is hardly enough, in its own right, to bring about the political decay Orwell feared. Before any of this becomes worrisome, there must be an inclination or desire on the part of the upper class to want to exercise such power and to seize totalitarian control of society in order to cement 84

Technologies of Power

85

its position. O’Brien, Winston Smith’s tormentor/savior, may seem, at least on a superﬁcial reading, like an immoral beast. But he explains with shocking clarity the deﬁning feature of Oceania, namely that power in Oceania has become its own end—not a means to some desired end, but an end in itself (Orwell, 1961: 217–21). This seems not only desperately immoral, but also terribly silly. Nonetheless, Orwell supposed that this psychological transformation is the real threat to a decent society and the real source of totalitarianism. So, to make the horrors of Nineteen Eighty-Four a real possibility, and consequently to oﬀer his posterity a real political warning and not just a scary story, Orwell had to explain how such a psychological transformation is both realistic and possible. Orwell thought he saw both these conditions looming on the political horizon. Together they make totalitarianism a real possibility and presage the ﬁnal collapse of the liberal revolution. His political theory is ﬁrst of all a call to arms to defend against this possibility. But his political writings are of theoretical interest only if this call to arms is well founded. They are well founded, in turn, only if his understanding of the technologies of power is accurate and his concerns about the psychology of power are sensible and believable. Orwell’s importance as a political thinker hangs on these two points, and it is time now to see if his fear of totalitarianism, and his political theory more generally, can be vindicated. His portraiture of the technologies of power will concern me here, and I will turn to his review of the psychology of power in Chapter 6.

1 In his traditional literary fashion, Orwell explores the emergent technologies of power in the little drama that details Winston’s cure at the able hands of O’Brien. O’Brien’s defeat of Winston takes place on three separate levels: the physical, the intellectual, and the emotional. Critics have sometimes complained that the confrontation between Winston and O’Brien is just so much silly nonsense and constitutes the weakest part of Nineteen EightyFour. John Newsinger claims, for example, that the arguments O’Brien makes in the drama are “clearly insane,” but I think this is well oﬀ target (Cf. Newsinger, 1999: 129–39; see also, Woodcock, 1966: 151). O’Brien beats Winston up physically, intellectually, and emotionally, but it is Winston’s intellectual defeat that is the most frightening and the most compelling at the same time. It is possible to interpret this drama in several ways. We might read Winston’s predicament in the Ministry of Love, for example, as an exploration

86

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

of the fragility of decency. The spirit of decency is juxtaposed against the power of indecency, and indecency wins. On this reading, decency spins around the integrity of the individual, and O’Brien describes the sordid logic by which the individual is eclipsed. The result is a perfectly indecent world when viewed from the vantage point supplied by the individualist morality at home in liberal thinking. If Animal Farm is the story of a revolution gone wrong, Nineteen Eighty-Four is the story of a world gone wrong. This judgment is made, of course, against the background of a world—or better, of a cultural context—that champions the independent individual. This is a liberal world—the world shaped by the likes of Locke, Constant, and Mill, and it ﬁnds abhorrent the kind of assault on the integrity and dignity of the independent individual that Orwell describes in Winston’s confrontation with O’Brien. Here Orwell is at his best in shaking the conscience and exciting the moral angst of liberal spirits everywhere. But we might also understand the drama in terms of an inner tension that troubled Orwell. If we emphasize that side of Orwell that makes him akin to a nineteenth century liberal (ala his account of Dickens), we can appreciate his belief that truth is something independent of individual inclination, something to be discovered independent of individual will. Truth, be it historical or scientiﬁc, exists independently of the individual and consequently has an incorrigibility that puts it beyond the control and manipulation of human beings. But Orwell, the nineteenth century liberal, lived in a twentieth century world, and events in the early part of this century began to illustrate that the nineteenth century belief in truth is becoming anachronistic. If Orwell had an emotional attachment to his nineteenth century vision of truth, he also appreciated the sense in which it was under attack by events in the twentieth century, and by the time he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four there is reason to suppose that had begun to think that an intellectual defense of this sense of truth was impossible. Logic (in the form of O’Brien) undermined his emotional attachment (in the person of Winston), and he had to concede that truth was itself subject to power, that truth was a dimension or aspect of power—and nothing more. This, as we shall see, is why O’Brien could defeat Winston intellectually. So, the drama may also be read as an internal conversation that Orwell was having with himself. Before turning to a consideration of the speciﬁc moves O’Brien makes in his defeat of Winston, we should pay some attention to the structure that Orwell gives the confrontation. Winston, of course, was a thought criminal, and his crime was thought crime. Criminals are ordinarily punished for their wrongdoing, where punishment is understood as a form of moral atonement. But Orwell does not put Winston’s predicament in these terms.

Technologies of Power

87

Big Brother is not intent upon punishing Winston, and O’Brien does not approach Winston as a moral agent who has done something wrong and for which he must take responsibility. This would be a decidedly liberal approach to the problem, and is accordingly out of place in a thoroughly illiberal society. Instead, Orwell describes Winston’s ordeal in terms of a rehabilitation. Winston was a deviant; he suﬀered from a form of dementia. And it is pointless to punish deviants, for they haven’t done anything wrong deliberately; instead their illness has gotten the better of them. They need, therefore, to be cured, to be brought back to the norm. Accordingly, O’Brien proceeds in the manner of the psychologist. The cure requires him to make Winston recognize and understand the error of his ways. Dementia can be cured only by getting the deviant to recognize his insanity, and to do this, the deviant must be exposed to himself so he can see and appreciate the foolishness that stands in front of him. If Winston is seen as a latter day Don Quixote jousting at Oceania’s windmills, O’Brien plays the role of the Knight of Mirrors. Winston must be brought to see the truth of the matter, and the truth, it turns out, is whatever Big Brother says it is. And we can understand this to be true because Big Brother says so! If this sounds question begging, it also has an inscrutable logic behind it. To push a bit on the paradox lurking beneath all this, O’Brien is straightforwardly clear on the matter. He tells Winston,“When ﬁnally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will” (Orwell, 1961: 210). It seems, to be sure, that the inner party will ﬁnally kill poor Winston, but ﬁrst it will cure him. “But we make the brain perfect,” O’Brien says, “before we blow it out” (Ibid.: 210). We know at novel’s end, that O’Brien has been good to his word; Winston has returned to the “loving breast” of Big Brother. And he has done so of his own free will. He has recognized his own insigniﬁcance in comparison with the collective, and he has admitted as much. This, of course, is an indication of the complete and total power of Big Brother. O’Brien does not beat on Winston’s body so long and so hard that Winston would say or do anything to make the pain stop. This was the strategy, say, of the Spanish Inquisition. But pain, as we well know, does not really change the will. If someone capitulates to torture to make the pain stop and says he no longer believes X, he will return to his belief in X as soon as the pain is gone. He may hide the fact of this belief into the future if he thinks acting on it will bring about more pain, but he will also remain a quiet rebel and look for the opportunity to rip power away from his oppressors. Winston’s cure was not like this. In the end, Winston really did believe what Big Brother told him to believe. His own free will brought him to embrace the tyranny of Big Brother. It was Julia who says in the novel,

88

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

“They can’t get inside you.” But Winston learns the lesson of totalitarian control; “they could get inside you” (Ibid.: 239). This is the point that must be made believable in order to vindicate Orwell’s political fears about totalitarianism. And the point can be made believable by exploring the logic underlying the technologies of power that have emerged with modernity. These technologies make it possible to reduce the individual in her/his own mind to an insigniﬁcant moment in a much larger narrative over which the solitary person has no eﬀective control. They provide the means by which a liberal understanding of things can be eliminated and society transformed into the antithesis of the liberal ideal. The construction Orwell gives to the confrontation between O’Brien and Winston will seem silly (albeit ghastly as well) to most readers. He undoubtedly supposed that most people would think that Winston is really the only sane person in the story, though one might ﬁnd a bit of sanity about Julia as well. It seems that Syme, O’Brien, Parsons, and the rest of the lot are the ones who are really insane. This is what happens, one might conclude, if the inmates are allowed to gain power and run the asylum. But it is overly simplistic to suppose that Orwell’s warning to us is that we should make sure that the inmates are securely locked away. Orwell makes his case by turning his (and our) world on its head and illustrating that in such a world Winston is the one who is insane. The basis for Winston’s dementia is to be found in his delusional misunderstanding of the relation of the independent individual to his or her world. Winston thought his memory to be inviolable and that it provided insight into the way the world is that is more accurate than the stories and propaganda spread by the inner party. He believed himself rather than the party line. This for many readers will be an indication of Winston’s sanity, but Orwell tells us that it is really the source of his insanity. “You preferred to be a lunatic,” O’Brien tells Winston accusingly, “a minority of one.” “You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident . . . . But I tell you Winston that reality is not external” (Ibid.: 205). Winston’s dementia, in eﬀect, is the product of a confused and indefensible epistemology. O’Brien beats Winston into submission because he really is a better metaphysician than Winston. If this was not the case, Orwell’s problem would not arise, and his novel would be just another scary story. But the proof of this becomes clear only when we appreciate the various steps O’Brien makes in bringing about Winston’s cure.

Technologies of Power

89

2 The physical torture Winston is forced to endure is perhaps the most disturbing feature of O’Brien’s cure. Why did Orwell dwell so meticulously on Winston’s physical suﬀering? Why did he have O’Brien put poor Winston through this excruciating pain? Some commentators have supposed that the torture passages are simply a reﬂection of Orwell’s own tortured physical state. His poor health and apparent pain inclined him, the argument goes, to explore the ravages of physical suﬀering. Perhaps this is so, but Winston’s torture also ﬁgures importantly into the logic of the story in two distinct ways. First of all, torture for O’Brien is an important aspect of the exercise of power. O’Brien tortures because he can. “The object of torture,” we are told, “is torture” (Ibid.: 217). Torture exempliﬁes the intoxication with power that gives purpose to the life of characters like O’Brien. What the inner party wants to do is to exercise power; this, in fact, is all that it has to do. Nothing else matters to its members, a point that illustrates what it means for power to become an end in itself. Since torture is a feature of the exercise of power, it too is an end in itself. This helps illustrate the complete indecency that pervades Oceania. The inner party does nothing else, and wants to do nothing else, than dominate those who might threaten its position of privilege. The tragic irony, of course, is that Winston poses no real threat to O’Brien or the inner party. To make matters worse, Winston’s thought crime is hardly of his own doing. O’Brien has been watching Winston for seven years, and planting clues and creating anomalies that Winston might notice in the hopes of getting him to think for himself a bit. Where control is so total, the inner party must actually manufacture deviance in order to exercise the power necessary to correct it. O’Brien has choreographed the whole sordid aﬀair just so that he can terrorize and reform Winston. “Power,” O’Brien says frighteningly, “is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing” (Ibid.: 220). Ironically, O’Brien shapes Winston’s mind in two ways, ﬁrst by generating his dementia and then by curing it. Moreover, torture also ﬁgures importantly into the mechanics of Winston’s reprogramming. It is helpful here to keep in mind the nature of the mental transformation O’Brien brings about. Winston’s dementia looks a lot like liberal sanity. Winston has become liberal in the classically Millian sense. He thinks for himself, or rather, he has been enticed by

90

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

O’Brien into thinking for himself.“Thinking for himself,” in this case, means thinking thoughts inconsistent with the edicts of Big Brother. This is all Orwell means by thought crime. Winston’s most explicit example of thought crime is not to be found in his realization that history is being manipulated by the inner party; instead, his true and most important thought crime is that he thinks he can think independently of Big Brother. He has managed to develop a sense of himself as an independent, self-determining, self-reﬂecting being—the sort of autonomous agent so valorized in much liberal thinking. Few have expressed the point more eloquently than John Stuart Mill, “It is not by wearing down into uniformity all that is individual in themselves, but by cultivating it, and calling it forth . . . that human beings become a noble and beautiful object of contemplation . . . ” (Mill, 1951: 161). Winston’s thought crime is that he thinks he is an independent thinking being. But in O’Brien’s Oceania, this “noble and beautiful object of contemplation” has become little more than a self-obsessed lunatic. The individual standing alone, O’Brien argues, is hardly noble or beautiful; instead, the individual is just a dependent and pathetic moment in a larger historical drama. The individual takes on signiﬁcance only when he sees himself as a part of a larger and eternal whole. Persons die; the party lives forever. Personal signiﬁcance is possible only once the individual links himself to the party and admits that it is the party that is eternal. It is the party, not the solitary individual, that is the locus of power. The individual, properly understood, is but a cell belonging to a larger and greater organism, and in this case, the organism is the party. O’Brien verbalizes all this, to be sure, but he goes one step further. He illustrates it by means of Winston’s physical torture. The parallels between Nineteen Eighty-Four and Don Quixote, on this score, are provocative. Quixote, of course, is as foolish a character as he is noble. He adopts a moral code and assumes a persona that simply has no place in his world, but his dedication to chivalry remains inspiring nonetheless. Yet his behavior is regarded by those around him quite simply as a form of madness that calls for a cure, and he meets his match in the Knight of Mirrors. When he sees himself as he really is—a silly old fool wearing a shaving basin on his head—he is shocked out of his dementia. His glorious dream is punctured by the stark reality of his physical appearance. O’Brien, of course, acts the part of Winston’s Knight of Mirrors. After the physical erosion of Winston is complete, he has Winston “stand between the wings of the mirror.” The sight is appalling, and Orwell tells us that Winston would have thought the sight was of “a man of sixty, suﬀering

Technologies of Power

91

from some malignant disease.” O’Brien sums the image up for Winston rather well, “You are rotting away,” he said; “you are falling to pieces. What are you? A bag of ﬁlth” (Orwell, 1961: 224). Winston can hardly deny the decay and destruction of his body, and O’Brien assures him that his mind is in a similar state of erosion. “I do not think,” O’Brien concludes, “there can be much pride left in you” (Ibid.: 225). The degraded creature Winston saw in the mirror hardly resembled a “noble and beautiful object of contemplation.” Like Quixote before him, he is crushed by the sight in the mirror. It is not, however, a silly old fool he sees in the mirror, but a pathetic and insigniﬁcant decaying animal. O’Brien robs Winston of his dignity by exposing his mortality to him and illustrating the ease with which Big Brother can reduce an alleged “noble and beautiful object of contemplation” to a bag of ﬁlth. By locating nobility in the independent individual, liberal sentimentality has simply made something of a category mistake. It has ascribed great value to a highly dependent and vulnerable creature. “Alone—free—the individual is always defeated,” O’Brien tells Winston.“It must be so, because every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures. But if he can make complete, utter submission; if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Party so that he is the Party, then he is allpowerful and immortal (Ibid.: 218, Orwell’s italics). So, it is not just the individual, but individualism that the party eradicates. Inner party members achieve immortality by sublimating themselves to the collective, and anyone who fails to notice the immortality of the collective—who persists in valuing the part over the whole—suﬀers from an arrogant dementia. This is the lesson Winston must learn to aﬀect his cure, and torture is a necessary component of the lesson. But O’Brien still tortures because he can; he tortures because he is one with the party and therefore all-powerful and immortal. He cures Winston of his dementia because he can, because the point of power lies in exercising it. But the cure—the complete and devastating exercise of power for its own sake—is hardly complete with Winston’s physical destruction. Emphasizing the frailty and dependence of the body is only a small step in the reconstruction of the mind. It establishes only Winston’s physical dependency and the fragility of his existence.

3 While torture matters to the process of making Winston sane, the really crucial element of the process involves Winston’s intellectual defeat. And Orwell must make this convincing if he is to persuade readers that the

92

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

horrors of Oceania are a real possibility and not just the mental meanderings of a terribly ill, and physically rather tortured, writer. This is no small challenge, for Orwell must say something that will convince thoughtful readers that their basic assumptions about reality are misguided, that 2 + 2 really could come to equal 5. To realize this end, Orwell must make good on a claim he puts in O’Brien’s mouth, “Reality exists in the human mind and nowhere else,” O’Brien says. “Not in the individual mind which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes; only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth” (Ibid.: 205, Orwell’s italics). O’Brien works to persuade Winston of this on two separate fronts, both of which mattered greatly to Orwell. The ﬁrst front involves the status of historical truth, while the second has to do with more epistemological matters. By way of prelude to the evaluation of O’Brien’s eﬀorts to explain what one might call the intersubjectivity of truth, a few quick philosophical comments are in order. First, it is important to notice a simple point that Orwell was only dimly aware of, if at all: Truth is a feature of sentences, not of the world. The world itself, this is to say, is neither true nor false; it just is. It is only what we say about it that is true or false. Second, we should also understand that truth, thus understood, raises a problem of validation. How do we know if a particular proposition (or sentence) is either true or false? To what should we appeal, the question asks, in order to conclude with conﬁdence that what we say about the world should be accepted as true? To accept something as true, we must have what we take to be adequate reason to believe it. But of course this just pushes the problem back one step, for now we need to think about what should count as an adequate reason. Orwell bequeaths a kind of naïve realism to Winston, a view for which Orwell himself seems to have had some sympathy, though the text of Nineteen Eighty-Four suggests that he reluctantly abandoned this epistemological outlook during the construction of the manuscript. According to naïve realism, the external world is directly accessible through independent individual observation. The world is as it is, and we are able to perceive it as it is. Because of this, we can gain a truthful understanding of the world. Our statements of the world correspond to the way the world is because observation provides us with adequate reason to think we have gotten it right. But this empiricism is rejected, and powerfully, by O’Brien, and in a manner characteristic of trends in contemporary philosophy that were just getting under way when Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Technologies of Power

93

The truth that initially mattered to Orwell, however, had more to do with history than with epistemology. Orwell came to doubt his belief in this sort of truth—and here I want to focus on historical truth—during his time ﬁghting in the Spanish civil war. It was one of two casualties of war that Orwell noticed in Spain; the other, as we shall see, was trust. Truth became a casualty, we are told, because some people suddenly developed an interest in having the truth work in support of their political interests. In a 1944 “As I Please” column, Orwell dwelt on the point in a manner that anticipates his reﬂections in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Here he links historical truth, or something like it, to the liberal tradition. “Up to a fairly recent date,” he says, “the major events recorded in the history books probably happened” (Orwell, 1968b: 87). This was because, “A certain degree of truthfulness was possible as long as it was admitted that a fact may be true even if you don’t like it” (Ibid.). Now, however, facts have come to serve the political interests of contesting parties, and the line between truth and propaganda has been blurred. “A Nazi and a non-Nazi version of the present war would have no resemblance to one another, and which of them ﬁnally gets into the history books will be decided not by evidential methods but on the battleﬁeld” (Ibid.). And he concludes, rather unremarkably, that “History is written by the winners” (Ibid., 88). It is tempting to ﬁnd this a bit naïve; history, it would seem, has always been written by the winners. Similarly, evidential methods have never been terribly reliable when it comes to the interpretation of history. Orwell tells us, for example, that, “It is probably true that the battle of Hastings was fought in 1066, that Columbus discovered America, that Henry VIII had six wives, and so on” (Ibid., 87). Had William the Conqueror lost at Hastings, the date would not change, but the historical signiﬁcance of the battle certainly would, for this too would be told by the winners. And if we mean by “Columbus discovered America” that Columbus was the ﬁrst European explorer to bump into the western hemisphere, the truth of this one has been placed in considerable doubt in more recent times. Historical “facts” are always fungible, even without winners. Orwell’s mistake, however, is not just his failure to appreciate the fact that historical inquiry continues in a way that often brings recorded events into question in some way; the heart of his confusion results from his inclination to put historical facts on the same playing ﬁeld with the interpretation of historical events. While even historical facts are hardly incorrigible, the interpretation of historical events always involves the telling of a story of some sort, and such matters always reﬂect the vantage point of the storyteller.

94

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

But Orwell can be made to seem less naïve if we think that some storytellers try as best they can to remain somewhat neutral. Telling the story of history might remain somewhat neutral if the story is told to record actual events rather than to create in the audience the viewpoint that serves the particular interests of the storytellers. It is interesting, for example, that Orwell does not suppose that the British would not tell lies about the Second World War in the event they are on the winning side. Instead, he says, “In the last analysis our only claim to victory is that if we win the war we shall tell less lies about it than our adversaries” (Ibid.: 88). British culture, he seems to imply, will incline British storytellers to oﬀer something closer to an objective record of historical events regarding the war than their adversaries would want to tell. And with this, Orwell links an increased inclination to eliminate historical objectivity to the totalitarian spirit. “The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits ‘atrocities’ but that it attacks the concept of objective truth; it claims to control the past as well as the future” (Ibid.).We know from Nineteen Eighty-Four that control of the future requires control of the present, and control of the present is made possible by controlling the past. There are two aspects of this point that could use a bit more consideration. For one thing, history now matters more than it once did, from a political point of view, because of developments in technology that allow for the expanded dissemination of information. For another thing, political elites have now come to recognize how the careful structuring and presentation of information (some call it spin control) can serve their political interests. These two points establish a nexus between historical record and individual consciousness. The animals on Animal Farm were made alert to historical events after the pigs took control; yet there is little reason given in the text to think they cared much about this sort of thing under Jones. The pigs politicized historical events (e.g., the Battle of the Cowshed) in a way that served their particular interests. They got the animals to see things the way they wished them to be seen, and this legitimized Napoleon’s reign by sanctifying Napoleon as a heroic ﬁgure. Once again we might complain that Orwell is being politically naïve to think that history has not been used by political elites in the past for legitimizing purposes. The past, for example, has for some time served political ends by facilitating a spirit of nationalism. The stories we tell of our political histories are a source of national pride and encourage identiﬁcation with the state to which we belong (Cf. Miller, 1997: 34–40). These stories, moreover, are invariably massaged to serve this desired end. If totalitarian regimes practice strategies of this sort, it might seem that the diﬀerence

Technologies of Power

95

between “them” and “us” is largely a matter of degree, something Orwell might have been onto when he quips that the British “shall tell less lies” about the war than the Nazis, should they win. Nonetheless, I want to exonerate Orwell on the charge of naïveté here, and to do so, I want to put his point in largely cultural terms. History really is told by the winners, and the way history is recorded really does matter in terms of fostering a spirit of nationalism necessary to sustain a uniﬁed polity. But the transformation Orwell witnessed and feared has to do not with these pleonasms, but with the cultural context in which these things happen. While history is told by winners, at least in liberal cultures there is an important sense in which history is never closed. It is always left open to review and reconsideration. A particular story is never promulgated as the “oﬃcial story” by political elites; people remain free to re-examine the evidentiary record and reach diﬀerent conclusions. Historians, this is to say, work for themselves, not for the government. And this is what Orwell saw changing under totalitarian regimes. Recall that Winston Smith’s job was to re-write history to make it square with the needs and desires of the inner party. Sadly and somewhat atypically, Orwell puts his point rather poorly. Historical truth was not fading out of the world as Orwell saw it but coming into the world. The telling of history in liberal cultures is always an uncertain aﬀair; it is always concerned with making things more accurate or clearer, but never with getting it right—whatever this might mean. For when it comes to historical interpretation, there simply is no such thing as objectivity. One is always telling a story and using the evidence on hand to make as compelling a case as possible, and someone else may well come along and tell the story from an entirely diﬀerent angle. We think George Washington crossed the Delaware to attack Trenton, because more than one historian has noticed the event and attached historical signiﬁcance to it, though the actual signiﬁcance of the event is left up in the air. It is possible, of course, that Washington never made the trip, but what matters is that there is no oﬃcial (i.e., government endorsed) account of the supposed event, no governmental stand on the matter. If it has the status of truth, this is because so many historians are agreed on the story and continue to tell it. But things are diﬀerent in Orwell’s vision of totalitarianism. Here we encounter oﬃcial governmental claims about what is true, and no one is around, or able, to question or challenge these claims. The totalitarian regime brings historical truth into existence, in a way not possible under liberal regimes. No opposition or questioning of the oﬃcial state line is permitted.

96

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

History, the past, has been captured by the state because the state has become the oﬃcial historian of the past and permits no independent inquiry. Objectivity is possible only when historians, with no personal stake in the story they tell, are allowed to do their studies and publish their ﬁndings. Objectivity in this sense has nothing to do with historical truth and everything to do with the political neutrality of the historian. In Oceania this is not possible; one hears only what the inner party wants one to hear. This brings historical truth into being, albeit not through historical accuracy (whatever this means) but through political stipulation. Truth has not faded out of Orwell’s world, but the study of history, as it is understood in liberal cultures, certainly has, and Orwell readily saw the political implications of this. Orwell concludes from his experiences in Spain that the political implications of capturing history have already occurred to political elites in totalitarian regimes. Capturing history permits greater control of individual consciousness, and this enables political elites to diminish the signiﬁcance of the individual in favor of an emphasis on the collective. And for Orwell, the eclipse of the individual and the corresponding triumph of the welfare of the collective are at the heart of the totalitarianism he saw emerging in the west. To understand this, it is important to appreciate that it is not historical truth as such that mattered to Orwell but the practice of doubting and questioning in the fashion championed by John Stuart Mill. Truth, this is to say, is not the issue; what matters is the inclination and ability to pursue the truth, to reconsider, rethink, and reexamine accepted belief. Without this, truth is reduced to dogma. This does not mean that truth will fade out of the world; it means instead that it is the pursuit of truth that will fade out. If what Big Brother says is accepted as truth, then it really is the truth because there is no independent standard of measure by which one might question the veracity or validity of Big Brother’s claims. What we learn in Nineteen Eighty-Four is that the independent individual cannot stand against accepted dogma even if he has the inclination to question and think. The individual mind is helpless against the “despotism of custom” as Mill famously put it (Mill, 1951: 171). Put diﬀerently, individual mind cannot stand against collective mind; if the accepted belief is that Washington crossed the Delaware to attack Trenton, then this is precisely what happened. If perchance Big Brother comes along and says this never happened, and if this is accepted as true by collective mind, it would be true that this never really did happen. An individual who failed to let go of his previous belief would be quite deranged. Once people believed that

Technologies of Power

97

Columbus discovered America, but now people tend to believe that Leif Erickson beat Columbus to it. What sense would it make to keep on thinking that it was Columbus if everyone else settles on Leif Erickson? This might seem like a fairly trivial point, to be sure. We all know that history changes in this sense because we have seen it. It may be objected, however, that history changes only when credible authorities advance solid evidence that people have gotten things wrong in the past and provide reasons for their revisions. But Orwell tells us that the only credible authority in Oceania is Big Brother, and nobody really thinks that anything is being revised. The reason for this is that the totalitarian assault on historical truth is really designed to subvert the individual’s reliance upon her or his memory. Further, the assault on memory is really an assault on independent thinking, which in Oceania is understood as a form of egoism. The control of individual consciousness is achieved only when individuals believe what they are told, even when they are in possession of evidence to the contrary. This occurs when individuals are conditioned to trust neither their memories nor their senses, and when they concede their fallibility when confronted with the claims of collective mind. Memory is frail and uncertain, and people have no way to check on the validity of their memories. Such checks require external evidence, and if this evidence conﬂicts with memory, it is memory that must be mistaken. To stick with one’s memories in the face of evidence to the contrary really does constitute a form of egoism that borders on madness. This explains Winston’s predicament. He trusted his memory, and he believed he had evidence that contradicted an oﬃcial edict of Big Brother. He failed to defer automatically to collective mind. And since Big Brother choreographed collective mind, he failed to defer to Big Brother. This would hardly be problematic in itself of course; it becomes so only when everyone else (or nearly everyone else) does defer to Big Brother. Big Brother has managed to alter history so frequently that everyone (or most everyone) in Oceania’s outer party defers to Him. In fact, they no longer bother to doubt their memories; they are accustomed to discovering a new reality each day. Questioning and thinking has been abandoned, quite literally, in favor of blind adherence to the party line. And why not? What good would thinking about whether Washington really crossed the Delaware do in an environment where everyone believed that he did. To stand alone with one’s own memories and beliefs is madness, the very madness that plagues poor Winston. The lone individual is lost amidst a sea of conformity. Thus, by shaping collective mind Big Brother eliminates what would now be considered the myth of individual mind. And by eliminating

98

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

individual mind, Big Brother also undermines any ability an individual might have to question and challenge His authority. His control is total once he has eclipsed the individual.

4 Of course, Big Brother’s assault on truth does not end with the capture of history; it extends even more deeply into epistemological matters. This introduces the second phase of O’Brien’s intellectual victory over Winston. Orwell thought to defend the integrity of the individual by resorting ﬁnally to what we might call (with apologies to Isaiah Berlin) the inner citadel— the sanctuary of the mind where personal understanding holds court free from societal meddling (Cf. Berlin, 1969: 135–9). This defense rests upon the belief that individual mind can directly apprehend at least some truths, and thus can have knowledge of at least some things that cannot be manipulated or overridden by outside forces. Some truths, we are asked to suppose, are directly accessible. This returns us to Winston’s naïve realism, and to his conviction that individual mind has a status independent of social mind. It also introduces Orwell’s growing understanding that this bit of philosophical fantasy could no longer be sustained in a manner that preserved individual integrity from emergent forces of intellectual control. The force of O’Brien’s arguments against Winston on this score depends on two separate insights, one fairly pedestrian and the other subtly philosophical. Suppose we begin with the pedestrian insight and ask how it is that O’Brien got Winston to admit that 2 + 2 could equal 5, or 3, or whatever Big Brother said it equaled. This will sound particularly crazy to many who think that mathematical truths are simply impervious to political tinkering. However, it is also commonly understood that such things are not impervious to mathematical tinkering. 2 + 2 equals 4 in base 10, for example, or even base 6, but what if we switch to base 3? We take it as given that Orwell was working with base ten, but if Big Brother continuously changes base, He can also change the sum of 2 + 2. And since digits are arbitrary signiﬁers, Big Brother could also control the sum of 2 + 2 by continuously changing the digit used to designate the sum. If individuals cannot trust their memories, and for reasons already discussed with regard to the matter of historical truth, why should they not simply believe the oﬃcial pronouncements of Big Brother? If everyone says 2 + 2 equals 5, then that is the sum of 2 + 2. Once again, individual memory cannot stand against social convention. But this isn’t the kind of tinkering O’Brien employs, though he certainly could have. Instead, he tortures Winston to the point that the pain interferes

Technologies of Power

99

with his senses, and Winston can no longer accurately count the ﬁngers he holds up. The example is crude, but it makes an important point. How do we learn to recognize things within our ﬁeld of vision as things of a certain sort? How, that is, do we learn to conceptualize what it is that we see—to make sense of William James’s “blooming, buzzing Confusion”? As philosophers from Wittgenstein forward have noticed, this is the job of language. To learn a language is to learn to make sense of the world in a certain way, viz., the way made possible by the language we learn. Seeing, as Wittgenstein put it, is always seeing as (Wittgenstein, 1958: 202–4). And as our language changes, what we see changes right along with it. To put the point obscurely, when our language changes, our world changes also (Cf. Kuhn, 1962: 110–20). O’Brien defeats Winston’s realism, then, by making Winston uncertain of what his senses are reporting to him. Moreover, this sort of thing is more commonplace than we might ordinarily notice. At one point not too long ago, Pluto was a planet; now it apparently has become an asteroid. While the object out in space has not changed (as far as we know), it is no longer the same thing that it once was! I was hardly aware that when I looked at a ﬁre I was watching rapid oxidation until I was told this was what I was watching. Before I was told this, one could say, I had no idea what a ﬁre was, even though I could use the word reasonably eﬃciently. But I still had no idea of what my senses were really reporting to me; that is, until I was told about it. Another culture may look at a ﬁre and see a god dancing, and if this is how this form of life understands ﬁre, this is in fact what ﬁre is—and not just “for them” because the “for them” is not part of their meaning of ﬁre. This, of course, is where the empiricist wants to object and insist that our scientiﬁcally informed way of seeing and understanding is more accurate than this other, perhaps primitive, culture. But this is where the simple point about the inability to trust our senses bleeds into the more philosophical point, because insisting that our way of seeing is the correct way of seeing is precisely what we cannot do. We can’t do this because we can’t get outside our own conceptualization to see the world as it really is. Our conceptualizations precede our observations; our theories empower our understandings. So much then for the naïve realism that mattered initially to Winston, and apparently to Orwell at one point. We learn to see (as) only by learning language, for it is our language that presents our world to us, and when linguistic usage changes, what we see (literally what there is to be seen) changes along with it. Consequently, if one can control language/reality, one can control individual thought. Orwell’s astute awareness of this is best displayed in his subtle and creative use of newspeak. By changing language,

100

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

Big Brother is able to alter what can be thought; the possibility of revolution can be eliminated by erasing the salient concepts from the language. “If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality” (Orwell, 1961: 177). The required dislocation is achieved by continually revising language. Winston, of course, warred against the revisions, both historical and linguistic, of Big Brother. He supposed his own understanding of things to be more valid, more accurate, than the pronouncements and manipulations of the inner party. He failed to grasp the underlying philosophical insight, an insight only beginning to emerge (or reemerge) during Orwell’s day, that individuals are instances of the culture to which they belong and the language they happen to speak. Winston supposed he was his own authority on both history and reality; he trusted himself—his memory and his senses—against the onslaught of Big Brother. This is the source of his madness and the evidence of his egoism. It was also the heart of his individualism, and his cure required him to surrender this individualism, to recognize that individual mind could not stand independent of group mind. Once one accepts this, one can master the subtleties of doublethink, for doublethink is nothing more than admitting that one’s own thoughts don’t matter if and when they stand in conﬂict with the oﬃcial and authoritative pronouncements of Big Brother. There is nothing terribly insidious about the philosophy that O’Brien espouses; in fact, just the opposite is the case. O’Brien defeats Winston because he is a good metaphysician and Winston is not. But this does not make O’Brien into a diabolical beast, and if we want to think of him this way it is because of the way he puts his philosophical understanding to work and not because of the understanding itself. Recognizing the sense in which human beings are socially conﬁgured creatures hardly poses any threat to individualism in itself, but it does introduce a strategy for control of the independent individual. It provides a mechanism for the exercise of power only, a way of controlling others by capturing their thoughts. This enables Big Brother to direct and manipulate the minds of those He wishes to control in order to realize whatever ulterior purposes He may have. There is, of course, reason to quibble with the practicality of the control that Orwell attributes to Big Brother. Language is a terribly textured and complex compilation of thought possibilities and options, and as Wittgenstein understood it, it is tightly linked to the way people live, to their “form of life” as Wittgenstein put it, that is both constituted by and reﬂected in language (Wittgenstein, 1958: 88). To control this would require a complete reconstruction of what people do, how they live, and the way they go on

Technologies of Power

101

with life. It seems like a practical impossibility to revise social life, and hence social mind, so completely. But this is not the challenge that the inner party has set for itself. The inner party need not attempt such a magniﬁcent challenge because the proles are no real threat to them. The proles do not need to have their thoughts altered because they do not think. Because they are no threat to the inner party they are allowed to be free and remain largely oblivious to inner party manipulations. The continual reconstruction of reality the inner party pursues through its tinkering with newspeak is aimed at the outer party members who already seem quite taken with party ideology. The outer party, this is to say, is the willing victim of its own oppression and remains oblivious to the nature of this oppression because its members tend to link their own importance to their membership in the party. Because they have already bought into the party line, it is not hard to get them to submit to the dictates of social mind. They understand that struggling against the dictates of Big Brother is a form of thought crime. Once again, then, the individual is lost amidst social mind. The individual does not matter, on this score, because he is fallible, frail, and ﬁnite. “Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else,” O’Brien tells Winston (Orwell, 1961: 205). But this reasonably tolerable point is quickly transformed into a defense of collectivism. “Can you not understand, Winston, that the individual is only a cell? The weariness of the cell is the vigor of the organism” (Ibid.: 217). The party matters because the party, and only the party, is eternal. Individuals are but moments in the life of something that matters beyond the ﬁnite individual, something eternal and all-powerful— the party. It was O’Brien speaking, but it could just as easily have been Hitler—or perhaps Schopenhauer.

5 Winston’s defeat is not yet complete, however, because O’Brien’s intellectual victory over Winston does not exhaust the steps necessary for his cure. Even though he capitulates to O’Brien’s metaphysics, he does not embrace Big Brother; instead he expresses his hatred of Big Brother. If his thoughts are not his own, if his individualism cannot be defended by appeal to the sanctity of the mind, his emotions are still his own; his hatred of Big Brother and his love for Julia are still his own. But this confusion lasted only as long as it took O’Brien to send Winston to Room 101, where the worst thing in the world awaited him—in Winston’s case (and apparently Orwell’s), this meant confronting rats.

102

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

In Room 101 Winston met his worst fears. And this is where we all must go to test the courage of our convictions. If Winston was to get the best of O’Brien, it would have to be here. The results disappoint. Once the cage was aﬃxed to Winston’s face and the hungry rats were ready to converge upon him, he knew what he had to do. He knew what O’Brien wanted and expected him to do. And he quickly did it; he gives up Julia, the woman he allegedly loved to save himself. Big Brother had spotted his tragic weakness and jumped on it. His fear was turned against him, and it proved stronger than both his hate for Big Brother and his love for Julia. His emotions were now under Big Brother’s control; they had indeed gotten inside him. Now there was nothing left of poor Winston; no bastion of the self that remained free from the totalitarian reach of Big Brother. What should we make of Winston’s failed joust with O’Brien? By way of exploring this question, I want to suggest that there is reason to keep the dramatic aspect of Orwell’s story separate from its theoretical aspect. The political point of the story rides with the latter aspect, while the literary point Orwell wished to make lies with the former. From a theoretical point of view, the story illustrates the extraordinary potential for totalitarian control brought into the world by the new technologies of power. Big Brother did not control by means of crude threats against the body; He has gone beyond the traditional strategy of coercion. He has captured the mind and in the process eliminated the individual. O’Brien defeats Winston intellectually because he out-reasons him, and here Winston really was powerless against O’Brien. Truth, both historical and epistemological, really can be captured, and once it is captured, the independent individual is powerless to stand against the manipulation that its capture makes possible. Big Brother’s edicts are true because His authority is the standard of truth that determines the understanding of social mind. The solitary individual has no alternative standard of measure. So, to stand against Big Brother as Winston did, to doubt his edicts, involves only a willful rejection of social mind, i.e., a willful rejection of truth. And this, of course, is exactly how we think of dementia. Sanity really is statistical. So, the new technologies of power now available make totalitarian control, and the corresponding eclipse of the individual as this notion is understood in the liberal tradition, entirely possible. This, as we shall see, is not the most chilling aspect of Orwell’s story, but it is a crucial element of the warning he wished to issue to his present and his posterity. What this means for the fate of the liberalism that mattered to Orwell remains to be seen. But a few preliminary remarks are in order at this point, and while Orwell never made them explicitly, they follow rather

Technologies of Power

103

straightforwardly from his political thought. The key issue is this: If liberalism as a political doctrine is thought to depend upon an underlying epistemology of the sort associated with realism, the philosophical erosion of this epistemology would leave liberalism in trouble. Liberalism depends upon the valorization of the independent individual as a being capable of independent thought and action. If this metaphysical understanding of the individual cannot be sustained, if persons are the dependent social beings O’Brien describes, what is left to valorize? The independent individual has been demystiﬁed by Big Brother and O’Brien, and consequently, the individualism underlying liberalism has been eclipsed. In vindicating O’Brien’s arguments against Winston, I have suggested that the theoretical foundations for this eclipse have merit, and I suspect this is a realization that had begun to dawn on Orwell. So the question that emerges from his political thought at this point is whether his theory oﬀers any indication of how liberalism might survive the erosion of its nineteenth century epistemological foundations. Let me leave this matter for Chapter 6 and turn now to the dramatic and literary side of the equation. Winston’s defeat invites readers to see if they might do better against O’Brien than Winston, an invitation Orwell almost certainly intended readers to take. Orwell left open, I think, two moves Winston could have taken to defend himself against O’Brien, and his failure to make either move suggests his ﬁnal weakness as a character. The ﬁrst move involves what we might call the Cartesian reply to O’Brien. Recall that O’Brien insists that when Winston capitulates, he must come to embrace Big Brother of his own free will (Ibid.: 210). The new inquisition does not torture the body in order to coerce false confessions out of its victim; instead it converts its victim by capturing “his inner mind” (Ibid.). To be cured of his dementia, Winston must actually understand O’Brien’s arguments and accept them because the force of reason requires this; he must recognize and accept his own intellectual defeat. This leads to a thought that tragically escapes Winston. If O’Brien must out-reason Winston in order to defeat him, he must also recognize and respect Winston as a reasoning being, and he must rely upon Winston’s ability as a reasoning being to get the job done. But this is the very capacity he hopes to control. Here then is the irony: O’Brien can lead Winston to the desired conclusion, but he cannot make Winston embrace the conclusion. So, a glimmer of independence remains within the individual that would seem to stand beyond Big Brother’s control. Understanding the technologies of power that O’Brien employs could thus be a source of empowerment for Winston. Just as the psychoanalyst cannot cure her patient by making

104

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

the patient accept her interpretation of things, O’Brien could not make Winston accept Big Brother. Winston had to do this himself, and the recognition of this fact counts against the total control of the individual that Big Brother hoped to achieve. O’Brien could not make good on his boast of making “the brain perfect before we blow it out” (Ibid.). The problem here is that O’Brien moves back and forth between a conceptual divide. On one hand, he insists that individual mind does not exist; it is merely an individuated aspect of social or collective mind controlled by Big Brother. But if O’Brien treats Winston like a computer that needs to be reprogrammed, he cannot insist that Winston must embrace Big Brother of his own free will. If individual mind goes, so does free will, and the sense of power O’Brien treasures is correspondingly diminished. One cannot control free will by making determinist arguments; one merely does away with it instead. But if O’Brien concedes, as he does, that Winston has a will to capture, it is always possible for Winston to refuse to let this happen. In this sense, Big Brother’s agenda is self-defeating because Winston could reasonably decide to remain unreasonable. He could have rejected reasoning illogically in favor of unreason. He could, in other words, steadfastly reject O’Brien’s arguments for no good reason, preferring unreason to reason. Now his dementia would remain incurable, and he would have frustrated O’Brien’s exercise of power. But Winston sadly failed to notice this possibility. Second, there was also available to Winston what I will call an Orwellian reply. (I call it this because I suspect it is the reply Orwell might have been inclined to oﬀer.) Winston simply lacked the courage of his convictions. As Patrick Reilly aptly puts it, “Winston does not believe in his values strongly enough to die for them” (Reilly, 1986: 54). Had he been stronger emotionally, he would have recognized (as he did) what O’Brien was up to and then elected to let the rats do him in. He would have been dead, of course, but he well knew that he was dead anyway. And he would have deﬁed Big Brother by not permitting them to get inside him. They can only get inside you, it turns out, if you let them in. And if one values one’s individuality strongly enough, this will matter more than life itself. So it seems that the integrity of the individual can be sustained in a confrontation with totalitarian power, but only if the individual is intellectually and emotionally up to the challenge. Winston lacked the self-discipline to manage his own fear. This is no small challenge, to be sure, but Orwell viewed it as the last bastion of the defense of individualism in an increasingly managed social world.

Technologies of Power

105

If Winston was the last man in Europe, Europe was already doomed. Winston’s fate was irrelevant to this larger concern. Winston’s lone rebellion against Big Brother would not have weakened the control of the inner party or sparked any revolutionary opposition to Big Brother. Things had gone too far wrong for any of this. The confrontation in the Ministry of Love thus signals two crucial points. First the political point: technologies of power now exist that make totalitarian control entirely possible. Second the dramatic point: even under such dire circumstances the solitary individual is not completely powerless if powerlessness involves the surrender of one’s sense of individual dignity. Winston lacked the strength of character to stand up against O’Brien’s physical and intellectual pounding, but his failure demonstrates how it is possible to stand up against this sort of thing. The totality of Winston’s capitulation becomes apparent when, with tears of love for Big Brother ﬂowing down his cheeks, he concedes that his victory over himself is complete. He could, ironically, have managed a real victory over himself had he accepted the rats and clung to his individuality just a little bit harder. Winston’s dramatic struggle reduces to a question of how ﬁrmly he wanted to retain his convictions as well as to a question about how thoroughly he really understood them. And because he did not fully understand them, he could manage neither the wisdom nor the courage required to defend himself against his tormentor. There is considerable speculation among Orwell’s biographers on whether his decision to stay in the Hebrides to ﬁnish his manuscript rather than seek medical help for his worsening tuberculosis constituted a form of suicide. That he intended to write other novels is apparent (Cf. Crick, 1980: 379–99; Ingle, 1993: 91). This is some indication that he planned to keep on living and working. But he also knew that his health was failing, and he placed great importance on ﬁnishing what was to become his last novel. So, perhaps it is not overly fanciful to suppose that Orwell was willing to risk a fate that the protagonist of his novel, and in so many ways his alterego, lacked the character to face. He wanted above all else to present his message to the world—a message of hope wrapped around a dire warning of what the future might hold if we are not careful.

6 God Is Power1 Early in Winston’s rebellion against Big Brother, he writes in his infamous diary, “I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY” (Orwell, 1961: 68, Orwell’s italics). Winston understood the advantage that comes with altering the past and more generally with “reality control,” as the point was put in newspeak. He even understood that his questioning of Big Brother’s edicts might be a sign of lunacy, and he understood, as O’Brien would later emphasize, that to hold a belief all alone was to be a lunatic—that insanity is statistical. What he did not understand, however, was why anyone would want to control the past—in eﬀect to control reality—in the ﬁrst place. “The immediate advantages of falsifying the past,” Orwell says, “were obvious, but the ultimate motive was mysterious” (Ibid.). The mystery would be resolved, at least partially, for Winston in the Ministry of Love. The answer to Winston’s most troubling question is given by O’Brien who tells Winston, “always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler” (Ibid.: 220). The WHY of it all, the power that moved Big Brother, was simply power itself. “The object of power,” O’Brien chillingly and somewhat obscurely tells Winston, “is power” (Ibid.: 217). Orwell here has O’Brien explain to Winston and the rest of us that, “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power” (Ibid.). But why? O’Brien’s explanation of party motives remains both rather inexplicable and largely incomplete. It is inexplicable because it seems terribly odd to think of power as an end in itself, as something people might actually want for its own sake and not instrumentally as a means to some other desired good. The explanation seems incomplete, on the other hand, because what readers should really want to know at this point is how power 106

God Is Power

107

came to be an end in itself, assuming, of course, that it is even possible to make sense of this. O’Brien does not think to explain this to Winston, and Winston does not think to ask. Yet this is the ultimate political question that emerges from Orwell’s novel. If the novel is to be read as a warning, and not just as a scary story, the possibility of power becoming an end in itself must be explained. With the required explanation, of course, comes the possibility of an antidote, for once we know the path that we should avoid, it becomes easier to recognize the path we should take. If we cannot ﬁnd in the text some reason to think power can become its own end, Nineteen Eighty-Four would provide readers with a scary story, but little else, and Orwell’s political thought, such as it would then be, would have little theoretical interest. The technologies of power discussed in the previous chapter are hardly diabolical in their own right. They are the product of some rather benign historical and philosophical insights on the nature of human understanding, and regarded for the moment as philosophical insights, the ideas underlying these technologies simply raise some challenging questions for the traditional Enlightenment understanding of truth, human inquiry, and the nature of reality. They display what we might regard today as postmodern doubt about the hubristic claims of Enlightenment thinking. Such insights are not, however, immediately or obviously understandable as weapons of reality control; rather, they oﬀer perhaps a more perspicacious insight into the human condition than anything present in their more popular Enlightenment views on human understanding. But this is hardly the place to engage these philosophical matters. What should concern us here is why Orwell thought it possible, if not probable, that these insights might be put to use by some lot of people (the high in Goldstein’s jargon) for the purpose of reality control, or why these ideas were transformed by this lot of people into technologies of power. Orwell’s curious explanation, once again, is that power has become its own end. So to make sense of Orwell’s political message, we must try to understand why he thought this could happen.

1 It is important to notice at the outset that there are really two distinct senses of power at play in Orwell’s political thought, one traditional and one (at the risk of a slight anachronism) rather postmodern in nature. Power on the traditional view is an attribute of persons, groups, or in Orwell’s case, parties. It involves the ability of some to control events, determine outcomes, and realize desired ends. Power on the postmodern view is more an

108

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

attribute of social institutions and/or systems of belief. It conﬁgures individual consciousness, determines outlooks, and sets desired ends. As Foucault describes it, “power [in this latter sense] is no longer substantially identiﬁed with an individual who possesses or exercises it by right of birth; it becomes a machinery that no one owns” (Foucault, 1972: 156). The most obvious example of traditional power is the power held by the political sovereign, i.e., political power. This power is a necessary feature of civil society. Someone must be empowered to keep the peace, control the individual tendency toward predation, resolve disputes, defend the polity from outside interference, and manage the manifold problems that arise in the course of social life. Such power is hardly problematic by itself; in fact, it seems altogether necessary if social life is to go well. Yet this merely returns us to the paradox of power noted at the outset: while we cannot do without this power in modern society, it is terribly diﬃcult to see how we can manage to live satisfactorily with it. Ideally, political power should serve the public good, but by giving power to the sovereign (government), society creates a potential threat to the public good, for the sovereign is now well positioned to serve his own ends rather than the public good. This, of course, introduces the classic problem with which political theorists have historically wrestled. James Madison put the point as succinctly as anyone, “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great diﬃculty lies in this: you must ﬁrst enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself ” (Madison, 1961: 322). Any group of people powerful enough to protect the polity is also powerful enough to rob the polity to suit its own needs and satisfy its own wants. It looks like Orwell’s Oceania has failed to realize this end, and Orwell might be understood to be suggesting, once again, that Lord Acton was right to worry about the corrupting power of power. But this conclusion is made problematic by the fact that power in Orwell’s Oceania has become an end in itself. The inner party does not solidify and reﬁne its power in order to promote its own interests. Inner party members are not interested in luxury; they are interested solely in power. If power corrupts for Orwell, it does not do so by making it easy for the powerful to give way to temptation, as with Lord Acton. Instead, it functions as a narcotic in its own right, and this makes Orwell’s political concerns all the more perplexing. The second or institutional sense of power that is present in Orwell’s political thought is importantly diﬀerent than this because it is not an attribute of persons. It is an external force that works on all persons and shapes individual consciousness and understanding. This explains why Foucault understood power as an aspect of knowledge and knowledge as

God Is Power

109

an aspect of power. At a fairly pedestrian level, this situation might seem to be in clear evidence in the text of Nineteen Eighty-Four. By controlling what Foucault would refer to as “knowledges” the inner party controls the outer party. Outer party members are caught up in a power grid that determines their being and deﬁnes their understanding. They do not question because they cannot question. They take their world as it is, just like the rest of us, because they cannot do otherwise. But this doesn’t quite get to the exact operation of institutional power in the novel because the knowledges in question are deliberately manipulated and massaged by the inner party. Inner party manipulation of the outer party is made possible, as we have seen, by the reﬁned inner party grasp of the technologies of power, and these new technologies simply make the exercise of traditional power all the more insidious. Institutionalized power, on the other hand, controls all elements of the population and cannot be the subject of control by any of them; it stands beyond human hands. It manipulates in its own right without serving any human master. We can put this issue aside for the moment, however, and notice another aspect of this power described by Foucault, who tells us that “there are no relations of power without resistances” (Foucault, 1972: 142). The body struggles against the conformity institutional power imposes upon it, and such struggles are in evidence in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Winston’s struggles against Big Brother oﬀer a clear example. But there is also a manifest lawlessness (of sorts, since there is no law in Oceania) on display in the novel. Julia, for example, has had a number of sexual liaisons, including some, it would seem, with inner party members, even though this sort of thing is forbidden by party dogma. Life goes on behind the scenes, so to speak, and the struggle of power to control body remains ﬁrmly entrenched. None of this should be taken to imply that Orwell anticipated Foucault or a Foucaultian vision of human life where people are mere marionettes jerked around by supervening power relations that their bodies struggle against, generally with only middling success. But Orwell’s vision of the human condition does seem to hint at a world in which power works its will on humankind, and people struggle against it, individually as well as collectively, sometimes hopelessly but also sometimes to gain a modicum of control over their lives of the sort that Foucault seems to have thought largely impossible. That Orwell had some rather inchoate sense of this sort of institutional power is evident from the stories he tells in several of his earlier novels. His characters are invariably caught in social circumstances that no one really controls, and they typically ﬁght against these circumstances in ways that always involve some form of failure. Flory, in Burmese Days, struggles

110

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

against his role of sahib without success. Indeed, Burmese Days is a lovely illustration of institutional power struggles—and here the literary world might simply have a more astute eye for the human condition than much modern philosophy, for all the players in the novel are struggling against the entrenched background of institutional restraint to realize their desired ends, and no one succeeds in any substantial measure. Flory seeks to defend the interests of his friend Dr. Veraswami and have him admitted to the European club without success. The Europeans struggle to keep their club free of natives, again without success. Only the deceitful U Po Kyin looks like he realizes his desired outcome, thus suggesting that cleverness is stronger than virtue in the struggles of life. But he too fails in the sense that he dies before he can make amends for his numerous infelicities as required by his religion. Ironically, and given the signiﬁcance of his religious beliefs, his failure in this regard may be taken to suggest that deceit is not nearly as rewarding as virtue after all. But be this as it may, all characters in the drama pursue ends in opposition to each other, and no one emerges as very successful by tale’s end. The social dynamic Orwell creates in the story controls the characters, whose independent eﬀorts to control this dynamic always fall a bit, and sometimes tragically, short. Both Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Coming Up for Air follow this general theme. Poor Gordon Comstock wars unrelentingly against the money god, just as his body wars against his principled stand at the very same time. Comstock’s disdain for the mindless pursuit of wealth in favor of more noble ends is honorable in its own right. But it is a war he cannot win, and in large measure because his own body won’t allow it. At the same time that he struggles to live a virtuous life—a life devoted to artistic accomplishment—he also wants all those things that money makes possible, and “those things” are simply the prerequisites of living a proper middle-class life. He is the victim of an institutionalized power that he cannot hope to overcome. Living decently demands money, and to make the money one needs, it may be necessary to compromise one’s ambitions and ideals. The most intriguing aspect of Comstock’s struggle, however, is his complete capitulation. When he ﬁnally surrenders to the relentless forces that press in upon him—and it would seem his own conventional sense of propriety, or the conventional sense of propriety that has shaped his soul, is at the heart of his undoing—he goes all the way. There is a parallel of some importance here between Comstock and Winston Smith. Both characters are re-made by story’s end, though in Comstock’s case there is no Big Brother to force his capitulation. Instead, Comstock’s capitulation is an illustration of institutionalized power, the power of social force to shape

God Is Power

111

the horizon of his mind and drive away his demons. Comstock’s capitulation was not just a matter of sour grapes; he really embraces the aspidistra he once loathed. One might proﬁtably wonder, of course, if Keep the Aspidistra Flying could have ended any other way. Is it possible to imagine that Comstock would win his battle with the money god? Was he, as so many critics have supposed, just another one of Orwell’s failed characters, a character who tragically lacked the inner strength necessary to sustain his own convictions? I’m not inclined to read the story this way. Winston could have beaten O’Brien, at least in a fairly middling sense and though it would have been a most pyrrhic victory. But Comstock’s predicament was unlike Winston’s, for Winston was confronted by a powerful person (i.e., a person in control of the new technologies of power), while Comstock was confronted with the power that emanates from social life and serves no master. And the latter, it would seem, is far harder to struggle against than the former. Comstock objected to the way his world worked, and his rebellion simply meant that he was denied those things his body wanted, for the interests of the body are properly satisﬁed only according to the dictates and strictures of social life. Against the shaping and molding force of social mind, Comstock had no chance. The story’s ending thus seems inevitable; because we cannot stop being human, we cannot avoid the structuring and conﬁguring force of institutional power. Perhaps, however, George Bowling, the protagonist of Coming Up for Air, is the most interesting of Orwell’s characters on this score. Bowling is caught on life’s treadmill but has little interest in the life of a rebel. He does not yearn for something better or more noble. Yet he has memories of what seems to him to have been a more decent time. The pace and complexity of social life have increased in ways he ﬁnds disconcerting, and he sees, albeit dimly, socio-political forces at work in the world that portend worse things to come. His world, it seems, is going increasingly mad, and he cannot imagine anyway of stopping the triumph of madness. He seeks shelter, or a momentary reprieve, by attempting to escape to his past, to a time when he could enjoy commonplace pleasures like having the time to go ﬁshing. But he learns the lesson also taught by Thomas Wolfe: you can’t go home again. Bowling’s quest for a quiet moment, for a little time-out from life, is innocent enough. But it is also rather foolish and naïve. What could have possessed him to think that the Lower Binﬁeld of his youth would remain untouched by social force? He wanted a vacation from his social world and learned instead that it is a place one cannot vacate, a force one cannot

112

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

escape. Yet he accepts his fate and his discovery with a degree of equanimity; if he cannot vacate his world for a moment, he is at least resigned to his predicament. Once Hilde, his wife, has found problems with the cover story he fabricates to hide his time-out from her, he knows there is no reason to protest her suspicions about an aﬀair and tell her the truth. He would not be believed. Our actions are interpreted and understood by social mind regardless of our true motives, and there is no point in ﬁghting against any of this. Bowling is trapped in an unhappy marriage and an unfulﬁlling job. He is trapped in a world that seems to be going crazy, and there is nothing that he, or anyone else, can do about it. Life marches on—not so much a “tale told by an idiot,” as a tale of idiocy without a storyteller. If Orwell had some sense of institutional power shaping individual lives—a disembodied power that shapes us all and is shaped by no one—as his earlier ﬁction suggests, it may make some sense to look for it again in Nineteen Eighty-Four. This is a form of power more insidious than anything Big Brother could imagine, for even (perhaps especially) Big Brother is also its pawn—a product of the push it has exerted on the world. But again there is reason to insert a cautionary note here. For while Orwell seems to have had an artistic appreciation for the sort of power Foucault’s more historical analysis describes, it doesn’t follow that Orwell believed, ala Bowling, that it was pointless and useless to struggle against it. To think otherwise would again make Orwell into a fatalist and determinist, and this is a place Orwell refused to go. Instead, he wanted to resist this power and thought it possible to do so (a possibility only dimly present in Foucault’s later writings); otherwise, Nineteen Eighty-Four really would have been a prediction about the future and not a warning about a condition we should want desperately to avoid.

2 Let me return now to the “Why?” question and see if we can make sense out of Orwell’s claim in Nineteen Eighty-Four that power has become an end in itself. One way to explain this is to think that Orwell was merely borrowing from James Burnham’s misguided reading of Machiavelli and supposing that human political history is an unending saga of class conﬂict with the middle class seeking the power necessary to depose the high and take its place. This view makes little sense in the context of Nineteen Eighty-Four, however, because the new high, the new managerial elite, has completely broken the power of the middle. Why, then, should it continue to seek and exercise power for its own sake? If power-seeking is an

God Is Power

113

inevitable consequence of class conﬂict, it must be viewed as a means to an end, with the end given by the interests of the classes in conﬂict. If power is suddenly to become an end in itself, it must be signiﬁcantly reconceptualized, and there is reason to wonder about what could possibly trigger this sort of thing. Another way to explain what Orwell was up to is to claim that he thought human beings are simply creatures that are psychologically disposed to seek power. The name of Thomas Hobbes, not Machiavelli, might be elicited in support of this view. Hobbes famously declared, “[I] put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death” (Hobbes, 1950: 64). But even Hobbes does not suppose that this desire for power follows because power is an end in itself. Rather, Hobbes supposed that the desire for power never ceases in a state of nature because one cannot be sure when one has suﬃcient power to procure all the things he or she might want or need. Where one’s future is insecure, one will seek all the power one can get in order to make one’s future as secure as possible. But this is not the predicament of the inner party in Nineteen EightyFour. We learn from Goldstein’s book that the inner party has ﬁgured out the basic cycle of political history, viz., the middle will ceaselessly seek power in order to unseat the high and take over the top spot. And the inner party has dedicated itself to making sure this will not happen. Thanks to their mastery of the new technologies of power, inner party elites have actually achieved this end. Their control of the outer party is complete, and they no longer have anything to fear from it. But still, “always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler” (Orwell, 1961: 220). We might try to sustain a Hobbesian account of power in the face of O’Brien’s remarks, however, if we suppose the inner party can never be completely secure in its power. Always there might be some deviant around, someone like Winston, willing to question the authority of Big Brother and inclined to incite others to stand against Him. Given this possibility, the inner party must always seek power in order to identify would-be revolutionaries and dispense with them. But this still seems to be an inadequate explanation of the inner party lust for power. It does permit us to think that the inner party seeks power in order to sustain and secure its desire for power; thus power becomes its own end. The inner party seeks power in order to have the power necessary to sustain its position of privilege come what may. This makes sense of O’Brien’s claim that “the object of power is power.” But it hardly does justice to O’Brien’s motives. After all, the inner

114

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

party could have spotted Winston as a deviant and simply killed him; it did not have to “cure” him before ridding itself of whatever threat Winston might have posed. But O’Brien explains, “The heretic, the enemy of society, will always be there, so that he can be defeated and humiliated over again” (Ibid.: 221). This is why the future will be little more than “a boot stamping on a human face—forever” (Ibid.: 220). Recall that O’Brien cultivates Winston’s dementia. He carefully leads Winston into thought crime, and he does so for the sole purpose of crushing him. This suggests that O’Brien is simply a demonic beast after all, and the inner party is little more than a cabal of these beasts. They seek power in order to exercise it. All they really want to do is stamp on their helpless and humiliated victims with their boots. This may seem to return us to a psychological disposition, but the disposition now attributed to the inner party—if not to humankind more generally—is far more insidious than anything imagined by Hobbes, or even Lord Acton for that matter. It suggests that Orwell supposed human beings could ﬁnd no greater pleasure in life than torturing helpless elements of their own species and that this is the most dominant instinct human beings happen to possess. But Orwell explicitly rejects such a view. In a 1946, “As I Please” column, he oﬀers some salient observations on the pursuit of power that deserve to be quoted in full: The desire for pure power seems to be much more dominant than the desire for wealth. This has often been pointed out, but curiously enough the desire for power seems to be taken for granted as a natural instinct, equally prevalent in all ages, like the desire for food. Actually it is no more natural, in the sense of being biologically necessary, than drunkenness or gambling. And if it has reached new levels of lunacy in our own age, as I think it has, then the question becomes: What is the special quality in modern life that makes a major human motive out of the impulse to bully others? If we could answer that question—seldom asked, never followed up—there might occasionally be a bit of good news on the front page of your morning paper. (Orwell, 1968c: 249) Orwell does not exactly follow this question up either, and we might question why he dismisses, without apparent evidence or justiﬁcation, the contention that the lust for power that he believed growing in his own age is not a natural instinct. But there is no reason to press this issue here, since for present purposes it is suﬃcient to note that Orwell did not think of the

God Is Power

115

lust for power that he parodies in O’Brien as a natural instinct. Whatever has caused O’Brien to see exercising power (and hence torturing others) as an end in itself, it is not built into his nature as a human being. He has been brought to this by some power other than his own. So we are left to speculate about why power has become its own end, and it is here that some attention to the notion of institutional power might help us out. Let me try to make some sense of this by calling Rousseau back onto center stage, for like Orwell, Rousseau supposed he lived in a corrupt age. Rousseau, again like Orwell, was not overly interested in detailing the causes of this corruption, but he does locate them in society, or rather, in a social order that has enabled, if not encouraged, a vicious self-love to dominate over humankind’s more sympathetic instincts. Society, this is to say, has produced selﬁsh and egoistic beings, and the way back to a more noble path, for Rousseau, requires people to be re-educated in a manner that cultivates a sympathetic appreciation for others. Something like this, I think, is also going on in Orwell. In defense of this, we need only turn once again to Goldstein’s book. Here we ﬁnd the oﬃcial inner party account of the politics of the human condition, and it is a politics of conﬂict and conquest. History is driven by the jealousies between the high and middle classes. Only the low lack the ambitions and jealousies that characterize class conﬂict between the high and the middle, and consequently, it is only among the low that some semblance of decency is to be found. But because the low are politically inert (and for reasons discussed previously), they are powerless to inject any moral message into the class conﬂict that dominates relations between the high and middle. In the past, the middle has succeeded in tapping into the low’s sense of decency and giving it a political expression. But the middle has done this largely in order to enlist the low to their side and get their assistance in bringing down the high. Even though the middle might actually believe their moral protestations after a fashion, these beliefs do not endure because once they become the new high, they will then seek exclusively to defend their position of privilege against a newly emergent middle. As Orwell tells it, the new high that has emerged after the Second World War has discerned the natural ﬂow of political history and set about to sustain its position by reﬁning and imposing new technologies of power on the middle. It does not want to become yet another victim of revolutionary transformation, and it is altogether conscious of the inevitable threat posed by the low. Thus it turns its attention to power in order to secure its position. The new motivating logic of the inner party is aptly described in Goldstein’s book, “The Party is not concerned with perpetuating its blood

116

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

but with perpetuating itself. Who wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same” (Orwell, 1961: 173). The aim of the new oligarchy is thus to sustain itself, and thus to end history if history is understood as the story of revolutionary political transformation. To do this, it must completely dominate the consciousness of the outer party. So, we return to the idea that the object of power is power; the only aim of the party is its own perpetuation—or the perpetuation of its position of political dominance. Only the truly powerful can remain in power, and so the party seeks power in order to remain in power. But of course, this is just a restatement of Hobbes, and nothing I have said so far explains why the future should be a boot stamping on a human face forever. We still cannot understand why O’Brien must torture and humiliate Winston rather than simply killing him. The point in need of emphasis, however, is that the inner party is itself shaped by its own reading of political history. It has supposed that the lesson of history is a saga of inter-class conﬂict, and it wants to protect itself against its possible future demise. To this end, it has reﬁned and exercised the new technologies of power to completely control the consciousness of its natural political enemy: the outer party. It has come to believe in its own need for absolute power in order to achieve total control of the outer party. It has, in eﬀect, made the world an indecent place because it has supposed that the world is an indecent place; it has taught itself to see society in terms of ongoing conﬂict instead of mutual cooperation. Accordingly, its focus is now on its need to triumph in an adversarial environment rather than on more noble matters. The egalitarian concerns of the liberal revolution that preceded its rule have no place in such a world, and they are dismissed as mere means to an end that the inner party has now achieved. The inner party’s new objective is control, and with time this has become its only objective. It is all that matters; it is all that they have to do. The ideals of the liberal revolution now matter only as tools in the exercise of the new technologies of power; they have no further meaning as moral norms in their own right. The world of Oceania has gone wrong, then, because social force has carried it to its ultimate expression of control. And nothing else of the culture that preceded it remains; the ideals and norms of a previous era have atrophied to the point that nothing is left of them. The inner party’s obsession with the power necessary to sustain its position has left its members with nothing to value, with nothing of importance, other than power. Even selﬁsh concerns like wealth and luxury no longer matter; all that matters is power because power is the only thing left in the culture for the inner

God Is Power

117

party to value. And so there is nothing more for O’Brien to do than to exercise power; it is his only purpose in life because no other purposes are available to him. Thus he lives to torture and to prey upon those poor souls in the outer party that he can entice into thought crime. Power has become its own end because the culture has become thoroughly bankrupt, and the culture has become bankrupt because the inner party’s reading of history has led its members to think society is only an ongoing struggle between the high and the middle. The logic behind this process has already been explored in the elitist reading of Animal Farm. The pigs manage control of the lower animals on the farm for reasons that should now be fairly clear. The managers that make up the new upper class come to believe that society depends upon them, and their position of privilege is coterminous with the well-being of society. They must, therefore, work to control the middle which would undo things and send society back toward chaos. The pigs manage to achieve this control, but what should they do now? In his vision of Oceania, Orwell puts an answer to this question. There is nothing left for the managers to do but exercise the power they have amassed for themselves. The power necessary to control the middle became so important that it eclipsed all else, and the inner party is left with only its power. So its members have nothing to do but exercise it; power has become its own end, quite simply, because it is the only thing left. All other ends have atrophied and faded into history. This sorry state did not develop as a matter of diabolical design, however, but as a product of the inner party’s reading of history. Oceania is not a place anyone would deliberately design; it is simply a place where we might end up if we are not careful and if we fail to pay attention to the logical implications of the ideas that exert power over us. Shortly after his cure, Winston writes in the diary that had been returned to him, “God is Power” (Ibid.: 228). This is the ﬁnal lesson he learned from O’Brien. He might have written, “God is the Party,” because he has learned that the party is both omniscient and omnipotent. The party is eternal and all-powerful—God-like virtues to be sure. But he wrote, “God is Power” instead, and readers might be reminded that when O’Brien explained the party phrase “Freedom is Slavery” to Winston, he began by transposing the concepts in question. If we follow suit we might understand Winston to be saying that power is God. Power is eternal and unconquerable; power is all. In Hegelian terms (terms Orwell would not have much understood), power has manifest itself perfectly in the world. And there is nothing else left—no other gods, no other ends, no other values that matter. Nothing is left to temper the spirit and inspire a sense of human decency.

118

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

If there is solace to be found in the world Orwell has described, it would seem to be that the proles remain unscathed by any of this. But with the limitations that conﬁne the horizons of their minds clearly in front of us, this can be seen as small solace indeed. Their moral sense might remain intact, but they are incapable of harnessing this sense and turning it to political action.

3 Only one thing matters in the society Orwell fabricates in Nineteen EightyFour: power. Consequently, this is a place where power cannot be abused, for power is abused only when it serves some end it is not intended or expected to serve. In Oceania, however, there are no ends for power to serve, noble or otherwise; it only serves itself. This is the dominant cultural standard in Oceania, and no thought to the contrary remains to oppose it. O’Brien, then, can hardly be regarded simply as a sadistic and insensitive beast. He does not revel in Winston’s torture and does not seem to experience pleasure by imposing pain on Winston. He is more tutor than tormentor, and torment is merely a tool of his tutelage. Orwell gives O’Brien a curious countenance as he begins Winston’s cure. “He had the air of a doctor, a teacher, even a priest, anxious to explain and persuade rather than to punish” (Orwell, 1961: 203). He was, we are led to suppose, just doing his job, doing what he was supposed to do, and as much the puppet in all this as poor Winston. His consciousness was itself shaped by the understandings and knowledges that he imparted to Winston. Like a good party member, he embraced the party line. Big Brother, the mythic visage that represents the consciousness of Oceania, exerted his power over O’Brien as thoroughly as O’Brien exerted his power over Winston. Institutional power is at work here. Taken together, Orwell describes in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four a plausible logic that drives political development in spite of the speciﬁc concerns and intentions of individual actors. The characters at play are caught in a web of conceptualizations and understandings that incline them to make certain apparently logical moves. They are not necessarily bad characters or diabolical sages working for selﬁsh reasons to achieve desperately immoral and inhuman ends. They are, rather, creatures caught in the grips of understandings that push them in what Orwell thought to be dangerous and terribly inhuman directions. To leave matters at this, however, would mean that while Nineteen EightyFour would certainly be more than just a scary story, it would still lack

God Is Power

119

a clear political signiﬁcance. The novel would certainly introduce readers to a world we should want to avoid, and it would provide some clues about how such a world could come about. But what readers should want, and expect, from Orwell at this point is some indication of how Oceania might be avoided. If the story presents a plausible account of a society gone wrong, what we should want to know is what might be done to avoid this sorry predicament. Raising this point invites readers to ﬂash back to some of Orwell’s comments in “Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War.” There, it will be recalled, Orwell worried about how to prevent truth from fading out of the world, and came up with two strategies to prevent this from happening. “One is that however much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back, and you consequently can’t violate it in ways that impair military eﬃciency. The other is that so long as some parts of the earth remain unconquered, the liberal tradition can be kept alive” (Orwell, 1946a: 200). Shortly after writing this, and during the preparation of Nineteen EightyFour, Orwell seems to have given up on the ﬁrst strategy. Military eﬃciency mattered to Orwell at the time he wrote “Looking Back” because he supposed that some truths must be respected in order to marshal the military strength necessary to win wars and defeat enemies. Basic truths must be observed, pragmatically, in order to build eﬀective war materials, for example. As Orwell puts it in Nineteen Eighty-Four, “Physical facts could not be ignored. In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make ﬁve, but when one was designing a gun or an airplane they had to make four” (Orwell, 1961: 163). But the inner party’s discovery that “War is Peace” put an end to this particular need for truth, for when war is perpetual, no one really has an interest in winning. “When war is continuous,” Orwell says, “there is no such thing as military necessity” (Ibid.). Consequently, even here truth becomes simply a matter of whatever Big Brother says it is. Yet Orwell also seems to have recognized that new and emergent philosophical insights were reshaping our understanding of truth. In Chapter 5, I raised a question about whether liberalism depends upon an empiricist epistemology. Orwell appears ready to let go of this epistemology, or something like it, in Nineteen Eighty-Four. If reality is a condition of social mind, and if Big Brother controls social mind, then Big Brother is the source of truth, and to ﬁght against this is lunacy. But it is the ethical implications of all this that really troubled Orwell. It matters little, in the end, if the idea of truth as something objective and apprehensible to independent

120

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

individuals is exposed as wrongheaded. What matters is whether this signals a commitment to some form of collectivism (Orwell’s oligarchical collectivism) that erodes or undermines human decency. This is the sense of decency that has disappeared from life in Oceania. This loss of decency is what enables O’Brien to think that he is doing the right thing in exercising power over Winston in order to cure him and return him to the “loving breast” of Big Brother. To paraphrase Nietzsche, in a world where nothing is prohibited, anything is possible. But if Orwell was willing to abandon an objectivist sense of truth, as he appears to do in Nineteen Eighty-Four, he was far less inclined to abandon the belief in decency that he almost grudgingly at last connected with the liberal tradition. To sustain decency and defend against the possibility of totalitarian tyranny, one had to nurture the liberal tradition. One must, in other words, work to support the liberal culture in which the notion of decency, as Orwell understood it, is embedded, albeit imperfectly. Orwell’s most explicit articulation of this view is oﬀered in his 1942 essay, “Culture and Democracy.” There he says: Hardly anybody lies awake quivering with rage and hatred because somebody a little further down the street is committing ‘deviations’. And I suggest that this failure to develop a totalitarian mental atmosphere, even when the material conditions for it exist, is a sign that provided we can avoid conquest from without, our society will not lose touch with certain habits and values which have been its mark for hundreds of years. (Orwell, 1942: 89) The bit of optimism present in this passage is premised upon the belief that English culture is likely to change and move toward collectivist ends only if Great Britain is defeated by the totalitarian menace that threatened it during the Second World War. Orwell had no doubts that this menace was inimical to English culture. “Why is it that everything we mean by culture is menaced by totalitarianism? Because totalitarianism menaces the existence of the individual, and the last four or ﬁve hundred years have put the individual so emphatically on the map that it is hard for us to imagine him oﬀ it again” (Ibid.: 93). We can excuse Orwell’s questionable history— the individual ﬁrst got on the map in the early or mid-part of the seventeenth century—and still appreciate his point. Decency, which indicates respect for the independent individual in her/his own right, is a cultural artifact of the liberal tradition, and must be cultivated and nurtured accordingly. But this war-time epiphany sits awkwardly beside Orwell’s

God Is Power

121

pre-war understanding that if and when fascism/totalitarianism comes to England, it will come in the form of “the lion and the unicorn instead of the swastika” (Orwell, 1958: 231). So this optimism was properly tempered (even in “Culture and Democracy”) with the awareness that cultures can change from within and not just by means of military imposition from without. Orwell was sensitive to the social pressures that pushed England toward totalitarianism through the erosion of cultural values. The felt need on the part of the upper class to control the lower classes is still something that could drive political elites toward totalitarianism even in liberal cultures. This, as I argued above, is the message of Animal Farm when it is read as a story about the collapse and failure of the liberal revolution. The point is also echoed in Wigan Pier, where Orwell worries openly about the likelihood that the upper-class socialists will head toward fascism once they really get to know the lower classes. Institutional power, once again, works according to its own logic, and it can take people to places where they would otherwise not want to go if they are not very, very careful. Orwell’s essay, “Such, Such Were the Joys,” takes on added signiﬁcance in this regard. Whether the story is an accurate portrait of Orwell’s early education at St. Cyprians hardly matters here. What matters is that the work is a story about early education, a point and place where one might hope basic liberal values and the spirit of decency are cultivated in the youth of the country. But this is hardly what Orwell tells us transpires in places like Crossgates. Instead, we see again the ugly face of institutional power working against the cultivation of basic cultural ideals. Recall that Orwell claims in this work that life was characterized as a struggle that was always won by the strong and powerful, and the weak were accordingly suppressed: Virtue consisted in winning: it consisted in being bigger, stronger, handsomer, richer, more popular, more elegant, more unscrupulous than other people—in dominating them, bullying them, making them suﬀer pain, making them look foolish, getting the better of them in every way. Life was hierarchical and whatever happened was right. There were the strong, who deserved to win and always did win, and there were the weak, who deserved to lose and always did lose, everlastingly. (Orwell, 1946a: 36) This is the picture of a culture already well along the way toward Oceania. It is a picture of a culture that has already moved some distance from liberal values and ideals—a culture that has lost contact with itself. “I lived

122

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

in a world of boys, gregarious animals, questioning nothing, accepting the law of the stronger and avenging their own humiliations by passing them down to someone smaller” (Ibid.: 40). There was reason, then, for Orwell to temper his enthusiasm about defending liberal cultures against external totalitarian threats by noticing the great need also to defend the liberal culture from within. He worked to do this by insisting that if liberalism is to survive in England, it will need to change. He closes his essay “Culture and Democracy,” by returning to a familiar theme, “One must conclude therefore that though our democracy is bound to change—can, in fact, only survive by turning into Socialism— all that we mean by culture is inextricably bound up with democratic values” (Orwell, 1942: 97). The liberal revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, he seems to say, is still a work in progress. It succeeded in bringing an element of egalitarian domesticity into being only by compromising on the thorny problem of private property rather than insisting on more egalitarian ends (Cf. Dunn, 2005: 71–118). But the privileges of the propertied had, in Orwell’s judgment, brought a new aristocracy into being—the new caste system he so abhorred. This new presence constituted its own internal threat to the liberal spirit by revitalizing the ongoing struggle between the classes. Orwell’s attack on privilege, most conspicuous in The Road to Wigan Pier, and his corresponding lifelong commitment to something he called socialism seems in actuality to be little more than a call to complete the liberal revolution. To inspire such a political movement he had to call the ideals and principles of this revolution to mind in order to demonstrate how liberal cultures had pressed back toward privilege and away from equality (in fact). This involves a rededication to liberal ends in the face of liberal failings and compromises; it requires a reaﬃrmation of the end of equality and a stronger appreciation of what this means in practice. So, the rather familiar claim that Orwell’s political thought is riddled with contradiction—the charge that Orwell was both conservative and radical—is simply oﬀ-target (Cf.Woodcock, 1966: 159–62). Orwell’s conservative radicalism and his accompanying radical conservatism both make perfect sense when placed against the background of his liberal concerns—his concerns for simple decency. He wanted to complete the attack on privilege in order to promote and instantiate the political decency to which the liberal tradition once aspired. This is not a matter of advancing to the past but a question of returning to the ideals of the past to conserve them and at the same time to develop them more fully in the present.

God Is Power

123

4 Orwell’s fears about the decay and decline of liberal culture are outlined in their most frightening form in Animal Farm. The animals were unable to sustain their noble vision of an egalitarian society because they never really understood what this meant, with the notable exception of Benjamin, whose cynicism suggests that he never really embraced the ideals of animalism with much conviction.Accordingly,they were easy fodder for manipulation by the pigs. Orwell’s presentation of the same theme is somewhat more satirical in Nineteen Eighty-Four, but still disturbing. This satire is best displayed in the three key principles of the party: “War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery,” and “Ignorance is Strength.” On their face, all three look like direct contradictions and would seem to qualify as gibberish only. But readers soon learn that they have a terrible logic, and in a world where such things can be made to make perfect sense, power has indeed become God. The party need for the slogan, “War is Peace,” has already been mentioned. It resolves the problem of the need for an independent truth of some sort. The practical need for scientiﬁc and mathematical truth is eliminated if such matters are of little practical use. In a world where power matters rather than progress, the Enlightenment goal of achieving an accurate understanding of the natural world is no longer necessary. Like the pigs and humans in Animal Farm, the elites of the three imperial powers that have arisen in the world Orwell imagines in Nineteen EightyFour have more in common than in opposition. Fighting an eternal war works as a valuable mechanism of social control and helps resolve the problem of controlling the lower classes. So, eternal warfare helps secure peace for the elites of each empire without any need for the truth otherwise required for military eﬃciency. O’Brien rather straightforwardly explains why the second slogan, “Freedom is Slavery,” also makes perfect sense. Alone the individual faces a tragic predicament; he cannot escape his inevitable fate—death. But by submitting to the party, by becoming one with the party, the individual becomes immortal. He or she becomes a part of a greater unit and one that will live forever. So only within the party does the solitary individual become free from the boundaries of nature. The party slave is free from the limitations of his own individuality (Orwell, 1961: 218). As with the previous slogan, this one serves the speciﬁc interests of the party elite; both serve the ends of party power. Ironically, both are held in reverence by those very individuals they work to suppress.

124

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

But of the three slogans, it is the third, “Ignorance is Strength,” that is the most disturbing and diabolical. Its meaning is simple: the ignorance of the people is the strength of the party. This is the condition that makes the two previous slogans eﬀective. The ignorance of the proles obviously serves the interests of the party by rendering them politically impotent in just the way the animals of Animal Farm were rendered impotent by their stupidity. So the inner party need only condition the outer party members in order to sustain its position of privilege by cultivating in them the spirit of “protective stupidity.” It is again apparent, then, that this slogan too works to the interest of the inner party, and taken together all three demonstrate the logic of domination that prevails in Oceania. Viewed against the background of our cultural understanding, of course, all three slogans are clearly nonsensical, and it is no doubt disturbing—as Orwell surely intended—to discover that they have a sordid logic about them. Part of what disturbs is that common understandings and simple meanings could be so easily stood on their head without eliciting even a whimper from the general public. But the second slogan disturbs for a different and slightly more sinister reason. To say that freedom is slavery is to take one of the basic values of liberalism and render it absurd. When this is done and believed, especially by members of the inner party, the liberal spirit has been exhausted. Nothing remains of the liberal culture that is the only defense against the possibility of this very thing happening. Orwell warns, in Animal Farm, about the foolishness of relying on “parchment barriers against the encroaching spirit of power” (Madison, 1961: 308). In Nineteen Eighty-Four, he illustrates the dangers that await liberal cultures if and when the concepts that articulate their basic ideals become empty vessels into which anything can be poured. So then, Orwell wrote to keep liberal political culture alive. He wrote from a fear that institutional power, that strange social force that conﬁgures us without our really noticing, was taking us in directions he considered dangerous. He wrote, moreover, as a classic liberal, i.e., as someone who believes that through understanding and awareness human beings can still exercise a strong control over their destiny in spite of the ravages of institutional power. Stephen Ingle has suggested that Orwell also wrote to take the intellectuals of his day to task, and there is undoubtedly a kernel of truth in this (Ingle, 1993: 92–5). Orwell frequently chided fellow writers for failing to take politics seriously; this he well knew, was also a political viewpoint.2 If writers turn away from politics, they fail to help popularize the political ideals of their culture. Writing, especially political writing, is perhaps the most necessary element of the public education required to keep the political culture alive.

God Is Power

125

But I think there is reason to say something more general than this. Orwell wrote, I want to say, to inspire political thinking, and in the process to defend the establishment of a free and unfettered press. He wrote to keep alive an intelligentsia that could serve as the keepers of the culture in and for their community. He wrote in the great liberal tradition of John Stuart Mill to defend those who would be “diﬀerent and exemplary” against the “despotism of custom,” which sounds like another way to conceptualize institutional power. If art was his medium, his message belongs to political theory. He wrote for everyone willing to read and to think. He wrote, he tells us, from a sense of injustice and to expose some lie, but this only gets to the surface of the matter. He also wrote in defense of decency and in support of a culture that was imperiled both from within and from without.

5 By using art as his medium, Orwell managed both to popularize and obscure his political thought. Because he wrote in the manner of the artist, he has managed to reach a far larger audience than more overtly political thinkers are able to reach. But his artistic style has also obscured the power of his political insight, particularly in his last two novels, by emphasizing the drama of the story at the expense of the political argument worth thinking about. It would be a great irony indeed if Orwell’s later ﬁction comes with time only to serve as entertainment for the proles, if it is read as just another scary story while political thinking decays in the fashion he anticipates in Nineteen Eighty-Four. But writers cannot control the future of their works, and in any event, Orwell wanted to be an artist as much as he wanted to think about politics. The marriage works only if someone makes the eﬀort to point to the political theory lying within the art—and this has been the primary reason for writing this book about Orwell’s book. It is unlikely that Oceania is a real political possibility, or that Orwell supposed that it was a real possibility. There is little reason to think that the ruling elites in a decayed political culture will display the overt honesty and insight that Orwell bestows upon O’Brien and admit that power has become its own end. The honesty Orwell builds into O’Brien is intended largely for dramatic eﬀect; it is the only way Orwell had to expose the political dynamic, with all its apparent horror, that chisels away at liberal culture. But little solace comes with the appreciation of this point. For the demise of decency and the corresponding erosion of a commitment to the integrity of the individual remains real, even while the ﬁction that political power merely serves liberal ends remains in place. This is the ﬁction that

126

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

Orwell’s ﬁction is designed to expose—the great lie that lies behind all the other little lies he notices. Of course, one trouble still remains. Orwell’s sensitivity for institutional power, as I have called it, seems inconsistent with his apparent conviction that his warning about the dangers facing liberal culture might actually serve their desired remedial end. If Orwell appreciated the force of institutional power, why should he not adopt a more fatalist or determinist stance on politics, of the sort that many critics have ascribed to Foucault. How is it possible, we might think to ask Orwell at this point, for us to stand outside the social forces at work on us long enough to control and direct them? If the Enlightenment sense of truth that seems to underlie and legitimate liberal optimism about human control of the future is exposed as just so much philosophical nonsense, why should we think it possible to harness the forces associated with institutional power? I will answer this, on Orwell’s behalf, by endorsing a bit of Orwellian skepticism and reconciling it with a bit of equally Orwellian optimism. We can never know that we are standing outside the forces of social control to direct, or redirect, them instead of simply being driven by them. But this is also a bit of knowledge that we do not need to have. We have a choice. We can either do nothing on the grounds that we cannot escape the social forces that shape and conﬁgure us, or we can do something in the belief that if we try we just might have a degree of success—Pascal secularized, if you will. This is a choice we must make in ignorance because we cannot know whether it is possible to control our destinies. Postmodern logic cuts back against the charge of determinism on this score. For to know that determinism is true and that we are simply the puppets of social force, of institutional power, would require us to free ourselves from this determinism long enough to grasp the truth of the matter as independent thinking things. And we cannot know whether we are capable of this; so we are left with agnosticism as the only possible conclusion that makes any sense here. But still we have a choice; still we must face something like Pascal’s wager. We can sit back and let social force take us where it will, or we can take up the pen and struggle against it. Orwell’s warning and his writing are testimony to the choice he wanted to make—to the choice he made, and this is really the only sensible choice to make. It is, of course, the only choice that is available to the moralist, because it is not epistemology, but decency, that drives him. It is not what we can do that matters in the end, but only what we should do. If we are wrong, we lose nothing; if we are right, we may be able to direct ourselves toward a better reality—a reality that looks

God Is Power

127

better than our present one because it reﬂects and displays more thoroughly, more suﬃciently, the values, beliefs, and principles we presently ﬁnd noble and endearing. Sustaining a faith in the human ability to build a better future need not be done with conﬁdence in the power of reason; it can be done just as well with a sense of doubt or even an element of irony. Orwell was no postmodernist, if by this we mean that the postmodernist is someone who rejects the ability of human reason to craft a better future. But I see no reason why the postmodernist must go to such excesses; postmodernism is more a call to intellectual modesty inspired by the rejection of Enlightenment arrogance. But Orwell was also not one to go down without a ﬁght, and anyone who shares and appreciates his moral instincts, and the liberalism that underlies it, would certainly want to join his ﬁght.

Notes 1. Cf. Orwell, 1961: 228. 2. “The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude” (Orwell, 1946a: 313).

7 Orwell into the Future

Orwell endures. His stories, especially Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, are still read. These two works in particular have had a good shelf life. They still entertain; they still trouble, although it isn’t altogether clear why. Both are scary and haunting stories, and this might explain why they still command an audience. Most everyone enjoys a scary story. But they may also endure for a more overtly political reason, for the liberalism they applaud has not yet faded from the historical stage. Liberalism breeds suspicion about political power, a suspicion that remains in place even while centralized political power in polities with liberal pedigrees continues to be on the increase. Stories about the threat political power poses to the ideals of liberty and equality are thus particularly scary for liberal spirits. So the question becomes: does Orwell endure because of his art or because of his politics? Probably it is a bit of both, and it is diﬃcult to separate the two. Orwell saw to this. But the question I’m raising is intended to ask if there is something about his political theory that continues to matter. In exploring this issue I’m not interested in the sociological conclusion that Orwell endures because readers ﬁnd something of continued pertinence in his political thought. I’m interested instead in whether we should ﬁnd something in his political thought that is still worth thinking about. I believe this is so, and while this hardly explains why Orwell endures, it does, if I’m right, suggest why we should continue to pay attention to his political thought. Getting clear on this requires a critical assessment of the contemporary relevance of his work as a contribution to political theory, and it is to this that I now turn.

128

Orwell into the Future

129

1 The warning Orwell issued in Nineteen Eighty-Four is bound to remain important as long as liberal political cultures continue to exist. His warning, after all, is intended to alert liberal cultures to the very real dangers inherent in political power. We cannot—the point is worth emphasizing— live without this power, and this is perhaps more true today than it was when Orwell wrote. The simple time before the First World War that elicited nostalgia from George Bowling, as well as Orwell—a time when much less was required in the nature of social management—is gone forever, and government is now a more present force in our daily lives. But if we cannot live without this power, we must remain ever vigilant if we are to live successfully with it. We need political power, and thus we must place a value upon it. Properly domesticated, it can serve the human good in important and altogether necessary ways. But if it is not eﬀectively domesticated, it may well become the only good—an end unto itself, and then it threatens all else that liberal spirits hold sacred. The decency that liberalism demands of us is always and invariably endangered by political power. Seen in the fashion recommended by Orwell, the arrogance of power is a constant threat to decency. Social forces, the ravages of what I have called institutional power, drive modern societies toward the erosion of decency and the resultant triumph of totalitarianism. The antidote to this hopeless fate that I have teased out of Orwell’s last ﬁctive eﬀorts involves a rededication to the fundamental values of liberal culture. And as Orwell might say, this is not such a platitude as it sounds. If we do not continuously cultivate these ideals and the decency they promote, we will likely lose them, and the result is not pretty. The Orwell I have discussed above is perhaps best regarded as the author of a terribly complicated and sophisticated morality play. It is not easy to adapt a seventeenth century vision of politics to the needs and demands of the twenty-ﬁrst century. To do so we must keep the moral sense inherent in this vision constantly before us and continuously remind ourselves what it demands of us. Social forces press in the direction of oligarchy or totalitarianism—these are much the same thing for Orwell, and to combat these forces we need to be attentive to the dangers these forces pose and make careful choices accordingly. Orwell naturally leaves this choice predicament to his posterity. Artists, like philosophers, cannot make choices for us; they can only assess the costs and beneﬁts associated with the choices we must confront.

130

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

Orwell’s own conviction that change was coming, that things were heading either toward oligarchy or toward democratic socialism, or in more contemporary jargon toward either a revised liberalism or a suﬀocating totalitarianism, suggests that he understood correctly that a choice between increased political power and decency is not necessarily a zero-sum game. Governments need the power necessary to manage social life eﬀectively. But increased governmental power does not necessarily imply totalitarianism, if we mean by totalitarianism a political obsession with power that overwhelms and undermines all sense of decency in society (or in the upper classes, as Orwell would have it). The trick is to accept that political power is necessary and still conﬁgure it according to the demands and dictates of liberal morality. The trick, that is, is to ﬁnd a way to reconcile the demands of social management with ends supplied by our cultural convictions and commitments—to make government serve all elements of society by promoting cultural ideals rather than allowing government to work as an agent of control to the advantage of the powerful and the corresponding disadvantage of the powerless. This does not seem like such a radical thought; it merely invites us to acknowledge that civil association is a cooperative endeavor rather than an ongoing conﬂict between competing social and economic interests. But its simplicity is obscured by two crucial factors that are not clearly distinguished in Orwell’s thinking. First, the liberalism Orwell quietly valued involves more than a moral vision that encourages respect for the independent individual. It also emphasizes individual initiative and development and generally permits this process to take place in what turns out to be a competitive environment where the victor gets the spoils. The economic theory that has attached itself to liberalism sits awkwardly beside the moral theory that is also housed there. Orwell was on to the contradiction evident here as we see in, “Such, Such Were the Joys,” when he says of his school days, “Broadly, you were bidden to be at once a Christian and a success, which is impossible” (Orwell, 1946a: 31). This contradiction thus threatens liberal morality, and the logic of cooperation it encourages, from within. This contradiction is complicated by the second factor, which involves the logic of management itself. Managers think they know best and suppose that their insider’s wisdom justiﬁes their exercise of authority. As the elitist reading of Animal Farm illustrates, this might at some point place managers in conﬂict with the managed when and if the managers think their right to rule is questioned by the managed. The road to Oceania may be paved with relatively benign (albeit paternalistic) intentions. In the face of opposition, the managers might ﬁnd it necessary to subvert liberal ideals

Orwell into the Future

131

in the name of what they consider to be the best interest of the society as a whole. Liberal morality is again threatened, this time from without as the logic of social management works to erode liberal values. This, in any event, is the reading of Nineteen Eighty-Four articulated above. Hanging in the balance, of course, is the explanation for why power might possibly become an end in itself. In the ﬁrst instance, the contradiction between being a Christian and being a success might be settled in favor of being a success. The pursuit of success in a competitive environment (or what is viewed as a competitive environment) may incline the competitors to seek power as the means to success. Once success is achieved, there is nothing left for the victors but the exercise of power. Christian ethics and liberal morality are accordingly displaced, victims of the competitive struggle. The class struggle which characterizes the ﬁght for success inclines the emergent dominant class to value only that which is necessary for victory in what is regarded as an essentially agonistic social environment. Power as a means is transformed into an end unto itself because it is all that matters to the combatants. In the second instance, the new managerial elite replaces liberal morality with its own sense of what is in the best interest of society. Its wisdom, its professional insight, is what matters, and the new managers must achieve control of society in order to protect people from themselves and their own ignorance. The view of political conﬂict oﬀered in Goldstein’s book suggests that the inner party came to see civil association in terms of class conﬂict rather than in terms of social cooperation, and it acted to preserve its position accordingly. Unfortunately, the reasons for its actions are not entirely clear in the text, but on my interpretation, the decay of liberal morality is driven by the second factor. Liberal morality decays because it eventually becomes an impediment to the control new bureaucratic elites think they must exercise in the name of social well-being. On this view, liberal morality is not displaced by the corrosive eﬀects of traditional class divisions and jealousies because the new managers are not like the old aristocracies. They are not driven by the historic sense of class conﬂict Orwell builds into Goldstein’s book. They are driven instead by a new logic—what we might call the logic of bureaucratic parentalism. They seek control because they know what is best; their professionalism is the source of their elitism and the force that erodes liberal egalitarianism. These threats to liberal morality permit us to understand Orwell’s belief that either of two futures is possible: oligarchy or democracy. Governmental power necessarily increases to meet the demands of social management in both possibilities, but the ends sought by managerial control are strikingly

132

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

diﬀerent in the two possibilities. In one, predatory control is unnecessary because people have come to appreciate that society is a cooperative enterprise where each lives to contribute to the well-being of all, and all share a concern for the well-being of each—this is but a simple description of what social cooperation means. The need for social management coupled with the triumph of liberalism’s egalitarian morality would take us to democratic socialism. In the other, management involves the control of some by others because this is considered necessary in order to achieve social wellbeing as this is understood by managerial elites. Power is cultivated in the latter condition in order to enable the powerful to preserve their management status against those whose foolishness would jeopardize good social order. This, needless to say, is the road to Oceania. This explains why it is possible to ﬁnd both radical and conservative elements in Orwell’s political thought. If we are to avoid Oceania, we must both conserve our sense of decency, and all that this simple notion implies from a moral and political point of view, and bring its demands to life more fully in our political future. Both these ends are required by a rededication to liberal culture. Orwell invites us to appreciate how far there is yet to go in realizing the ends of the liberal revolution, but we can do this only by acknowledging and resolving the twin evils that threaten the ﬁnal success of this revolution. Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four are George Orwell’s perhaps hyperbolic dramatization of what awaits us if we do not complete the revolution. Whether we agree with this or not, the point should not be taken lightly. Orwell, the political thinker, has given us a lot to think about, and from a political point of view, his work endures, and deserves to endure, as long as the revolution that mattered to him remains incomplete. Perhaps Nineteen Eighty-Four is not a great novel. But viewed politically, it is diﬃcult to deny that it is not a great book—far more than just a scary story.

2 But read with the hindsight that over ﬁfty years aﬀords, we might want to ask if the choice predicament Orwell supposed we faced, and perhaps continue to face, is accurately crafted. If we don’t preserve and develop liberalism, we will likely get totalitarianism. If, however, this warning and call to arms is not eﬀectively illustrated, we may miss the reality of the threat Orwell worked to warn us about. Now that 1984, the year, is long gone, and Big Brother seems to be nowhere in sight, it is easy to suppose that Orwell’s fears have been averted and his warning heeded with reasonable success.

Orwell into the Future

133

But we should not embrace this conclusion too quickly, for even today— perhaps especially today—moralists like Orwell and Rousseau might ﬁnd something on the political horizon to worry about. I want to explore this matter circumspectly by engaging initially in a bit of amateurish literary critique. In particular, I want to juxtapose Orwell’s mission in Nineteen Eighty-Four with two other dystopian novels with which Orwell’s novel is often compared and whose company it is often supposed to share: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We. But ﬁrst I must introduce two earlier works of ﬁction which should help illustrate the diﬀerences between Orwell’s novel and the stories told by Huxley and Zamyatin. The two novels I have in mind are Mary Shelley’s popular, Frankenstein (1969), and Bram Stoker’s minor classic, Dracula (1992). Both Shelley and Stoker wrote morality plays, but their stories have strikingly diﬀerent villains. Shelley worried in familiar biblical fashion about the human dedication to a soulless science. What fate awaits human beings if they place their future in the hands of a science that eschews all moral bounds? What happens when the pursuit of knowledge, no longer informed by a sense of morality, drives human development? The result, of course, is the creation of a monster and the corresponding possibility that humankind will unleash upon itself an evil it is ultimately unable to control.1 Stoker, on the other hand, wrote a chilling portrait of human struggle against unspeakable evil. He imagined a predatory beast, not living and not dead, that feeds oﬀ human beings and in the process brings them into his world and places them under his power. Stoker’s novel places people in an environment where they must compete against evil in order to preserve their humanity, and to do so, they must marshal the resources at their disposal to defeat a powerful and cunning foe. The vampire is a predatory villain that lives oﬀ human blood and is driven to subvert humanity by preying upon it. The human struggle to defeat the vampire is a classic conﬂict between decency and power. Once human, the vampire has become something decidedly inhuman, a creature that not only lives oﬀ the blood of its victims but also brings them under its supreme power. Defeating this foul beast is the only way that humanity can hope to preserve its freedom, for the vampire takes both the blood and the will of its victims and expands its empire only by doing so. Both Huxley’s Brave New World, and Zamyatin’s We are stories in the tradition of Shelley’s Frankenstein. They anticipate social worlds where science and math, the oﬃcial exempliﬁcations of Rationality unchained, chart

134

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

the parameters of life. Such worlds have little place for morality; it is discarded as a useless myth and replaced by the agents of Reason: science and math. They fulﬁll in horriﬁc ways the Enlightenment faith that Reason, put to the service of politics, can chart a path to Heaven on earth. For Huxley and Zamyatin, however the path charted leads not to Heaven in any recognizable sense, but to an icy, soulless Hell. The disenchantment that a scientiﬁc and technological age has brought upon us has morphed into a re-enchantment with Reason and given birth to a new pantheism with Rationality and its siblings as the omnipresent Deity. Orwell was no apostle of Reason in this sense. He too worried about an unchained science and technology and the greater complexity and pace of life that it introduces into the human condition. As George Bowling laments, or as Orwell laments through Bowling, modernity is bringing forth a technological sophistication that comes with a price; lost amidst the dim and whirl of machinery is simplicity, a closeness to nature, and the appreciation of simple pleasures like the leisure of ﬁshing. Yet Nineteen Eighty-Four is not an attempt to expose and embarrass the inhuman face of Rationality. It is not a novel in the tradition of Shelley’s Frankenstein; instead, it belongs to the genre of Stoker’s Dracula. It is a vampire story. In Orwell’s novel, politics has not been transcended; it has been, in a tragic sense, deformed. Nor has morality been transcended; it has been eclipsed. The inner party preys upon the outer party, capturing the will of its individual members in order, like the vampire, to bring them into its domain and subject them to its will and way of life. This too is a sort of pantheism, but the omnipresent Deity here is Power, not Rationality. To defeat the vampire, one must ﬁrst recognize it and appreciate its power. To combat the vampire, one must understand that it is present and acknowledge the threat. To be sure, the vampire has powers at its disposal that make it a potent foe, but its greatest power lies with its unbelievability. Seen as it really is, the vampire is an ugly, disgusting creature; seen as it really is, it doesn’t take much to abhor the vampire. The great challenge, however, is to see the vampire as it really is, for the vampire is able to take many familiar and commonplace forms. So, recognition is a problem in its own right—perhaps the chief problem in combating the vampire. Orwell tells us a great deal about how his vampire class came into existence; he tells us how the play of politics, coupled with emergent technologies of power brought the vampire into being. It is sometimes fashionable in the vampire stories that have followed Stoker to portray the vampire as a kind of tragic victim. And we might think of O’Brien in these terms as well. He seems at times to be as much a victim of institutional power as Winston is

Orwell into the Future

135

a victim of his power. He has been made into a monster; he has lost his humanity as we see in his eﬀorts to strip Winston of his humanity and transform him into a living dead creature. Orwell unmasks the vampire and enables us to see it as it really is. He unmasks the world of the vampire and shows how easily it can, and just might, become our world. His story is an eﬀort at recognition; this is the crucial ﬁrst step in alerting us to the danger of the vampire.

3 Put metaphorically, the key question about the contemporary pertinence of Orwell’s political thought involves asking whether his story still enables us to recognize the vampire. Orwell describes a hideous world and exaggerates the horror of Oceania in order to unmask the vampire. His template is the totalitarianism he knew in the early part of the twentieth century. And we might today reply conﬁdently to Orwell that we noticed the trend and defeated it; we recognized the specter of the vampire and took the necessary steps to stop it short. Today the lands that were to comprise Oceania are safe and comfortable within the conﬁnes of a lively liberal tradition. There still seem to be vampires out there—the specter of international terrorism in the wake of 9/11 is now frequently parodied in this fashion— but we are on to them, are able to recognize them, and have found the collective social will to defend our liberal tradition against them. Of course Orwell’s warning about the need to be ever vigilant in the face of the corrosive eﬀects of institutional power remains pertinent, and so, Orwell remains pertinent as well. But the spirit of liberty remains in place; government remains constrained both by legal restraints and by a vigilant citizenry. There are no O’Briens among us. Or so it might seem. Those who feel conﬁdent in this conclusion, and wish to thank Orwell for his timely warning (which just might have helped), would do well to reﬂect upon the fact that Orwell deliberately crafted a dystopia that remained highly legitimate in the minds of its citizenry. No one in the story, save Winston, saw it coming and no one, again save Winston, recognized its presence. The true nature of the vampire is diﬃcult to discern; this too is part of Orwell’s warning. And it introduces another reason to think his political theory remains of contemporary value. Here it is worthwhile recalling who constituted the inner party and why institutional power worked its will on these characters to the extent that they were led to impose their political will on outer party members. This “new aristocracy” was composed of “bureaucrats, scientists, technicians,

136

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians” (Orwell, 1961: 169).2 These, it would seem, are Orwell’s new vampires; these are the characters who will be driven to manage and control life in Oceania. These are the new masters of traditional power and the new puppets of institutional power at the same time. It is an interesting collection of characters and, with the exception of professional politicians and perhaps trade union organizers, not a group that one would ordinarily think to be politically focused or ambitious. Again with the possible exception of trade union organizers (included, perhaps, to dramatize the sense of betrayal that invariably lurks within Orwell’s socialist inclinations), it is a collection of job descriptions usually presumed to serve the public under a liberal political scheme. But they also may be taken as the high priests of a new and emerging social order. The complexity and sophistication of modern society that Orwell foresaw and abhorred make such job descriptions necessary if modern society is to be properly managed. And managed it must be! The more complex and technical our new world becomes, the greater becomes the need for a community of managers to make sure things go well in society. Organization, coordination, and control become the new ends of civil association, and eﬃciency, rationality, and orderliness emerge as the new values and ideals of the civil enterprise. This is the world of the bureaucrat and the scientist, the latter an expert in technical sophistication and the former a master of management. Teachers, technicians, and sociologists (social scientists) add their expertise to the mix in ways necessary to manage and control this new social order. For the most part, of course, the list contains job descriptions that involve more than just public service, for the descriptions listed also qualify as professions and the people who occupy them as professionals. Of the various deﬁnitions of a professional, the one I want to emphasize at the moment involves the notion of authority associated with a particular trade or calling by virtue of the level of learning and sophistication that has become attached to it and that is presumed to be necessary to pursue it eﬀectively. Professionals viewed in this sense may be imagined as something like a new aristocracy; they are the new controllers of social life and guardians of social well-being. But why should we also think that they threaten to become our new vampires? This motley list of professionals looks like it should naturally thrust us back into the genre of ﬁction inspired by Shelley. It seems like it should be Rationality that is the monster lurking behind the heavy reliance modern society places upon them. But Orwell does not fall in line with

Orwell into the Future

137

Huxley and Zamyatin even here because he attributes a political consciousness to his collection of professionals that is really quite foreign to their professional natures. They pay attention to political history, and more curiously, they see themselves—or come at some point to see themselves—as an aristocracy with interests that set them in opposition to the classes beneath them. But what sense can we make of this? Institutional power is of course at work here, but what are the social forces that overwhelm this new class of managers? Orwell wanted to emphasize that the modern world is neither very new nor very brave; it is the same old political world only with new technologies of power that substantially change the nature of class conﬂict and hostility. It is the same old political world that classic liberals worked to render somewhat more benign and decent. The new managerial class that has arisen may have presumptions toward public service, but they are still just vampires in professional clothing. This new class is out to displace the remnants of the capitalist aristocracy—the capitalist and the shareholder—and place itself in a position of social preeminence. The new managers merely trigger an old conﬂict; class interests continue to drive historical change, at least until some new high manages to amass the power necessary to put an end to the process. Orwell has told us what has happened to bring about Oceania and he has indicated why it has happened. The erosion of liberal morality, we might hypothesize, is a product of the arrogance of the new managers. They have no need for moral concerns—no need for decency—they have science and reason on their side. At the heart of decency lives the great liberal virtue of equality, but the high priests of science and reason can easily begin to think of themselves as a class apart. Those who know what is best will not likely think those they must serve with their knowledge are their equals for very long. The elite reading of Animal Farm explains why pigs and humans alike continually face the problem of controlling the lower classes. Base and selﬁsh motives unite with self-conﬁdence in the new wisdom to drive the emergent managerial elite in search of power. So for Orwell, the new managerial class introduces a new threat on the social horizon; this is the group likely to become our new vampires rather than our new saviors.3 But he never explores very deeply the psychology of the required transformation; he never really explains the “birth” of the vampire and the corresponding “death” of the public servant. He elected to think of this group as a class in its own right and to suppose that it would also come to regard itself in these traditional political terms. But he does not walk us through the process by which the public servant becomes the

138

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

public’s predator. He supposed that the social forces that drive institutional power are the old and familiar ones associated with class conﬂict. But was he right to think in these largely historical terms, or is there a new source of institutional power that has emerged on the historical stage? Orwell’s vampire story invites us to ask if he saw accurately the true source of the vampires he warned us about.

4 By way of exploring this issue further, I want to say something about yet another novel that may help shed a bit of light on the issue at hand. It is not a political novel, and its author had little apparent interest in politics. It may not be a great novel either, but it is an extremely good one. It ﬁrst appeared in America in the early 1960s and quickly developed something of a cult following among the youthful readers of that day. It oﬀered much to inspire the rebellious spirit of a generation, and in some ways, it is a distinctively American novel that captures and explores what is perhaps the central paradox of American political culture. The book, of course, is Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Kesey, 1962). In Kesey’s story, Big Brother has given way to Big Nurse, and Winston Smith has given way to an entirely diﬀerent sort of deviant: Randall Patrick McMurphy. (This time the Irishman is on the other side of the struggle.) The setting is the state mental institution of Oregon, located in Salem. The inhabitants of the institution (characters no doubt informed by Kesey’s experience while working in a mental ward during his days in graduate school) are divided into two groups: the Chronics and the Acutes. The Acutes are by far the most interesting group because they are in the ward, for the most part, voluntarily. Unable or unwilling to make their own way in life, they have chosen to live in the ward and submit themselves to the care and guidance of Nurse Ratched, or “Big Nurse,” as she is called. Unlike Big Brother, Big Nurse is real, and she exhibits a loving care and concern for the welfare of her charges. Things are calm, tranquil, and orderly in the ward before the arrival of McMurphy. Nurse Ratched has constructed a thoroughly managed and perfectly controlled, if somewhat artiﬁcial, existence for the Acutes that is largely premised upon their acceptance of her authority. She knows what is best for the Acutes and lovingly cares for them because they cannot care for themselves. But McMurphy quickly introduces his own particular brand of mayhem into the ward. He is a roguish, fun-loving sort who has had more than one brush with the law, and he is in the ward because he thinks an

Orwell into the Future

139

insanity plea to a criminal charge can get him out of doing hard time. In many ways, McMurphy is a typical character of the American frontier, brash, self-reliant, independent, and hostile to authority. Viewed as a model of American individualism, he is ungovernable, and perhaps his appeal to readers is understandable in these terms. In the more contemporary jargon of social science, however, he is a sociopath. He is simply incapable of living amicably with others; his life is a history of cheating, stealing, and barroom brawls. So his character is chameleon-like; it changes according to the way readers elect to view him. In Orwellian terms, we might say he is a deviant, a lunatic, a minority of one because he elects to live by his own rules, disregard authority, and take advantage of anyone and everyone he can. It is not long before McMurphy is locked in a death struggle with Big Nurse, and the battle of wills between the two is curiously reminiscent of Winston’s struggle against O’Brien. Though the technologies of power at Nurse Ratched’s disposal are fairly primitive by O’Brien’s standards, the outcome of the conﬂict is similarly a foregone conclusion. Yet McMurphy is a greater threat to Nurse Ratched than Winston was to Big Brother. The Acutes are enthused and inspired by McMurphy’s bold deﬁance of Big Nurse and rather charmed by his free spirit. They take to him and follow his lead without really thinking or caring about the chaos he introduces into the ward. He is a Pied Piper of anarchy and his charisma soon erodes Big Nurse’s control of her charges. Winston was a lone rebel, but McMurphy commands a following and begins a real revolution. With her authority challenged and her hold over the ward slipping away, Big Nurse resorts eventually to the power at her disposal, and McMurphy is ﬁnally rendered docile by means of a lobotomy. McMurphy was overmatched, and everyone knew it. His fate, like Winston’s, was a foregone conclusion, but there is something endearing about his struggle and tragic about his defeat. The book ends on an ambivalent note: do the Acutes, who manage a modest rebellion against Big Nurse because of her treatment of McMurphy, leave the ward and take charge of their own lives, or do they forget McMurphy in the end and return to the loving care of Big Nurse? Read as a Christ’s tale—a favorite reading of many literary critics—we might suppose that McMurphy succeeds in saving the Acutes from the clutches of Big Nurse, though he must make the ultimate sacriﬁce to do so. I prefer to read the book, however, as another vampire story. It is a vampire story with a twist, of course, because the vampire in this book fails to capture McMurphy’s will, though she succeeds, in a fashion, in rendering him undead by cutting his will out of his body. She does so in order to prevent McMurphy from robbing her of the wills of the Acutes that she has

140

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

already captured, though we should bear in mind that the mostly passive Acutes are fairly willing victims of the vampire. Just as Winston ﬁnally embraces Big Brother of his own will, the Acutes have similarly surrendered to Big Nurse, and the forces that brought this surrender about will likely return as the memory of McMurphy fades. Has power become its own end in Kesey’s story as Orwell supposes it has in Nineteen Eighty-Four? I believe it has, though the dynamic on display in Kesey’s novel diﬀers importantly from the self-conscious obsession with power for its own sake that O’Brien documents. Orwell’s vampires are a diﬀerent breed of undead than Kesey’s vampires. O’Brien exercised power for its own sake because there was nothing else for him to do. No other values or norms remained to inspire in him a more humane and sociable behavior. The obsession with power was the antidote to class conﬂict, and with the conﬂict vanquished, only the vapid exercise of power remained as a reason for living. But Nurse Ratched was neither so diabolical nor so evidently self-aware. In her case, power has merged with authority; she is the perfect embodiment of imperium. Nurse Ratched, of course, belongs to the new professional class—a nurse by training but in reality a bureaucrat clad in white. She is responsible for the care of those in her ward; this, we might say, is her calling. She has the required training and expertise—the foundation of her authority—necessary to get the job done. The doctors in Kesey’s book have little actual power. They are responsible for the health, mental and physical, of their patients, but the care of the patients is not in their hands. This belongs to Nurse Ratched who assumes the role of governor. The Acutes must be managed; the ward must be managed, if things are to go well. The Acutes, in turn, live quiet, docile, comfortable, but managed and unchallenging lives thanks to the loving guidance and nurturing of Big Nurse, and they concede, at least prior to McMurphy’s arrival, that she knows best. Their behavior may reasonably be described as childlike; while they often grumble over Nurse Ratched’s decisions, they obey nonetheless because a life of managed care is preferable to the burden of independence. Big Nurse has the power of the institution at her disposal, but she is accepted as an authority ﬁgure by the Acutes because she has the expertise and character to provide them with the personal guidance they cannot manage for themselves. McMurphy’s rebellion, of course, is a substantial challenge to Big Nurse’s authority. McMurphy would breathe a bit of life back into the Acutes, though it doesn’t seem that he makes them independent so much as he makes them dependent upon him. But Big Nurse does not render

Orwell into the Future

141

McMurphy undead because she fears he is a threat to her power, though she recognizes him as a threat to her authority. She concludes instead that he must be dealt with because he is a threat to the ward, a conclusion rooted in her own sense of authoritativeness. McMurphy is a subversive who endangers the well-being of those under her care. She is the expert on what is best for the Acutes, and so she must act to prevent the spread of his deviance. This is not a vampire that acts from purely selﬁsh or egotistical motives; this is a vampire that acts because she ﬁrmly believes she knows what is best for others and must accordingly protect them against themselves. She captures the wills of the Acutes not because she needs them but because she thinks they need her. Yet if the motivation diﬀers, the predation is much the same. The more challenges are brought against her authority/power, the more her sense of authoritativeness requires her to expand her power to preserve her imperium. She acts in what she considers the best interest of the ward, but what she doesn’t notice is that she also needs the Acutes. A nurse without any patients has nothing to do. But more than her job depends upon her patients; she also depends upon them because her character has merged with her function and she is what she does. She is a caregiver, and this means she must work to make sure that others need her care. So she cultivates the power necessary to make sure that she is able to be a caregiver. While Kesey’s vampire is not exactly Orwell’s vampire, the threat posed by Kesey’s vampire is much the same. Big Nurse must consolidate her power in order to preserve her authority, and she must preserve her authority because she is convinced she knows what is best for those subject to her care. The care she pursues now deﬁnes for her what is good for her charges, and in the face of rebellion, she must dominate the rebels in order to save them. In her world there can be only two kinds of people: the caretakers and the cared for, just as in O’Brien’s world there can be only two kinds of people: the powerful and the powerless. Orwell elected to emphasize the horror of the vampire, to unmask it and reveal it in all its true ugliness. This is a crucial step in the warning he wished to issue. He made O’Brien morally hideous so we could see the vampire for what it is. But Orwell’s hyperbole may both underestimate and misrepresent the vampires he wanted to call to our attention. It is not easy to unmask the vampire because its unmasking must be believable, and the vampire is not without resources of its own. Part of its strength comes from its ability to appear attractive and alluring to its intended victims. It is easy to spot the vampire when it says, “The object of torture is torture,” but much harder to recognize it when it insists that, “The object of care is care.”

142

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

The trend toward totalitarianism/oligarchy that Orwell feared depends, of course, on the inclination of some to seek power to the point where power becomes an end in itself. This is why the “WHY” question matters so much to his political thought. In his more phlegmatic moods, he speaks as if some people seek power simply because they are scoundrels, “middling people who feel themselves cramped by a system that is still partly aristocratic, and are hungry for more power and more prestige” (Orwell, 1968c: 178). But this makes little sense if he cannot explain their hunger. To write this hunger into class conﬂict also makes little sense, since we must still wonder why the upper classes develop this hunger. This is why I have elected to read Nineteen Eighty-Four against the background of elite theory and to emphasize the institutional power I see at work on O’Brien and his inner party colleagues. But Orwell still needed to make his vampires recognizable, and his literary zeal to expose the vampire inclined him to suppose that the new managerial class he saw on the horizon would function in some fairly traditional ways. It would seek power and once in power proceed to consolidate its power by means of the new technologies at its disposal. But this may actually misrepresent the vampires that emerge with the rise of the new managerial and technological elite. Kesey invites us to wonder if this new elite might actually break from the traditional political concern with the consolidation of elite power for the defense of its own interests and seek power instead because it is convinced that the care of the polity is in its hands. Here the consolidation of power is not driven by a desire to defend private interests but by the belief that the consolidation of power is required in order to promote the public interest. The crucial diﬀerence between these two portraits of the vampire is illustrated by the mindset of the new elite. Orwell wondered why some people bully others, though he never put a satisfactory reply to his query. But two responses are possible. First, some bully others because they want to for some selﬁsh reason, and second, some bully others because they think they are really helping them. Orwell relies upon the ﬁrst reason to explain the drive toward totalitarianism, while the struggle between Nurse Ratched and McMurphy in Kesey’s novel illustrates the second. Institutional power is on display in both cases of course. Like Stoker’s vampire, both O’Brien and Nurse Ratched cannot do otherwise; they are carried along by social forces they cannot even begin to comprehend. They are the products of their age and behave accordingly, the willing puppets of social mind. But Orwell’s managers can only see their political world in the traditional terms of class conﬂict, while Kesey’s managers now see things in terms of the caregivers and the cared for.

Orwell into the Future

143

This also explains why Kesey’s Acutes do not fall outside the political landscape in the way the proles did for Orwell. The Acutes are not the forgotten ﬂotsam of society (this lot falls to the poor Chronics); instead they are the carefully monitored targets of care. Unlike Orwell’s proles, they are not free; they are the happy (albeit indolent) children of the new elite. If there is a middle class in Kesey’s story, it is probably the doctors who provide needed medical service but do so at the behest of the managers charged with making sure things run smoothly in the ward. Thus Kesey’s ward is a much friendlier and more comfortable place than Orwell’s Oceania, but it is no less hostile to the freedom of those in need of management and certainly no less dismissive of basic human equality. Orwell needed, it would seem, to make Oceania a recognizably horrible place in order to alert us to the threat on the horizon—in order to point out the vampires among us, to beat on the metaphor a bit longer. But doing so comes with a risk. If Orwell’s vampires do not look like our vampires, his warning may actually make little sense to us. Perhaps he simply didn’t see the new vampires clearly; perhaps he couldn’t think that political power could be separated from the phenomenon of class; or perhaps he did not know how to model the new vampires in his ﬁction. This hardly matters, of course; what matters is that Orwell saw vampires in the future. And if they look to us now more like Big Nurse than Big Brother, the reason is because Kesey saw more clearly than Orwell the nature of the institutional power at work in society. Yet this is hardly reason to dismiss Orwell’s political thought as irrelevant today. To evaluate Orwell’s contemporary importance, we need only consider the way his political thought helps us see if the vampires he feared and hoped to call to our attention are actually walking among us.

5 We might begin to ponder this by noticing that there are evident features of recent American political history that mimic certain features of life in Orwell’s Oceania. Since the close of the Second World War, for example, the United States has been constantly at war, just as Oceania was constantly at war. The defeat of fascism in the Second World War quickly gave way to a seemingly eternal struggle between what was billed as the forces of good against the “evil empire.” The so-called cold war between western states, chieﬂy the United States, and communism turned out not to be endless, and even became rather hot from time to time—thus incurring the wrath of large numbers of America’s youth in the 1960s. But western “victory” in the cold war was quickly accompanied by a new global war on terrorism

144

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

that continues apace as I write, and even with a change in the political party presently occupying the executive oﬃce. In both cases, concerns for national security shifted citizen relations with government and brought about greater intrusion into personal lives and increased intolerance toward dissident voices. The cold war saw the birth of the communist witch hunt as the federal government sought to identify the enemy among us. People did not disappear and fade from existence as in Orwell’s Oceania, of course, but they might as well have. Careers were destroyed; lives shattered; and liberty ignored as the government worked tirelessly to protect us from the deviants in our midst. It did so, moreover, to protect us, for the external enemy was ruthless, relentless, and cunning. Americans needed protection from the purveyors of subversive ideas which might lead innocent citizens from the straight and narrow and grow the seeds of sedition. All this, mind you, in the name of the defense of liberty. The pursuit of internal intrusions into the liberty of citizens has again surfaced in the wake of 9/11 and the declaration of a new world war—this time one against global terrorism and Islamic radicalism. Once again American politicians have declared the need to make the world safe for democracy—now even taking a greater step and working to make the world more democratic, whatever that means—by curtailing the spirit of democracy at home and ravaging homes abroad in search of alien terrorists. The Patriot Act—no doubt a name that would have brought a wry smile to Orwell’s face—dramatically extends government authority to limit what were once considered inviolable civil liberties in the name of national defense. Governmental snooping, greatly facilitated by new technologies that make Orwell’s telescreens seem horribly obsolete, is once again authorized in the name of protecting the citizenry from an unscrupulous and merciless foe. The notion of terrorism, which came into existence during the French Revolution to signal the terrible acts of control and intimidation undertaken by the new government, has been reworked and distorted to identify a collection of zealots willing to attack innocents in order to subvert good order and achieve their radical ends. It is easy enough to notice that institutional power is again at work in all this. Those labeled terrorists are invariably outgunned by the minions of the caretaker state and so they hide and wait their opportunity to strike—nothing new here. Guile and camouﬂage oﬀer the logical strategy. So, to combat groups whose members refuse, and for good reason, to ﬁght in the open and by the Marquess of Queensbury rules, the caretaker state must resort to greater prying and surveillance. An old joke from the

Orwell into the Future

145

Vietnam era had it that Americans might have to destroy the village in order to save it. A modern version would seem to apply to the caretaker state; to preserve freedom it seems we must eliminate it. Even when there is nothing left of freedom to preserve, the caretaker state will still justify its control in the name of preserving freedom—freedom, it would seem, really is in danger of becoming a kind of slavery. When the elitism of the new caretakers has eclipsed all semblance of equality, the caretaker state will still champion itself as a paragon of democracy. And something very much like Orwell’s protective stupidity (“crimestop”) will leave everyone fairly happy. What troubles, it is perhaps fair to say, is not only the apparent triumph of “newspeak” in the caretaker state.4 What troubles is the relative ease with which the caretaker state expands its imperium in the name of managing national (or international) crises. That the Patriot Act compromised civil liberties, for example, is hardly disputed. Whether it was a necessary and appropriate response to the threat identiﬁed in the wake of 9/11 is rather disputable. But what seems surprising is that the dispute was never engaged. No national colloquy followed either its introduction or its passage; no public political discussion mounted on the propriety of this extension of governmental authority. The whimpers from the American Civil Liberties Union, for example, fell on largely deaf citizen ears. There is obvious irony in this, for civil liberties are intended to protect citizens from the excesses of governmental power, and in a country, like the United States, that has been traditionally suspicious of governmental power, civil liberties are ordinarily considered to be of great value. But few blinked when the caretaker state insisted on the need for expanded authority in order to defend the land from an unknown external threat. At the very least one might expect a democratic polity to decide for itself where it wants the line between liberty and security to be drawn. When the caretaker state assumes the authority to draw that line, and when its subjects (the notion of citizen makes little sense under these circumstances) permit this to happen, it is reasonably easy, even if one hasn’t read Orwell, to guess where the line will go. What then of democracy? It hardly matters that it is Big Nurse and not Big Brother behind all this. The threat to the liberal revolution is much the same. Decency can be as imperiled by caregivers as it can be by power-drunk tyrants. And O’Brien, it should be remembered, was really a bit of both. His insistence that the inner party exercises power for its own sake, that it has no more noble motives, suggests the latter view. No vestige of caregiving remains in Orwell’s Oceania; only the need to torture endures. But O’Brien still exempliﬁes

146

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

something of the spirit of the caregiver. He wants Winston to understand the logic that powers Oceania, and he adopts the visage of the tutor in the process. Caregiving in Oceania is no longer a motive that drives the inner party, if it ever was, but O’Brien still cares about the job of curing Winston.

6 These remarks are merely suggestive and hardly exhaustive, but there is little need to belabor the point further (Cf. Wolin, 2008). Perhaps, however, enough has been said to conclude that there is reason to put George Orwell in the vanguard of what might be called those apocalyptic political thinkers who warned their posterity of the totalitarian implications of the caretaker state. If Orwell’s sense of totalitarianism was informed by fascist arrogance and Stalinist brutality, he nonetheless seemed to recognize that the defeat of fascism hardly marked the end of the totalitarian threat in the west. Fascist war-mongering and Stalinist paranoia were little more than variants of a trend that threatened liberal societies independently of Nazism or communism. Driven by institutional power, the states of the west, once reasonably liberal in both spirit and design, seemed to Orwell to be drifting away from their heritage. And the forces that drove them introduced a new and perhaps even more sinister threat to the moral end of human decency. For all his foresight, Orwell could not thoroughly grasp the new vampires on the horizon or fully understand the new threat modernity was bringing against the still nascent and unfulﬁlled liberal dream of equality in fact. He knew they would not come in the guise of Nazi thugs, but in Nineteen Eighty-Four he made them morally ugly anyway because he wanted us to see them as he feared they would be. He understood that the great liberal revolution might be over even before it had been completed— that this revolution is, and will likely always remain, a work in progress. In this sense, there is reason to pay tribute to Orwell as the father of contemporary apocalyptic thinking, not because of the prescience of his forecast, but because of the power of the warning he issued. He saw certain sociopolitical forces looming on the horizon, and if he did not see them clearly enough to model them eﬀectively in his ﬁction, he at least grasped their implications thoroughly enough to understand the threat they posed to the moral perspective they endanger. This is what we should expect from a moralist with the courage to turn to political thinking. It wouldn’t do to wrap Orwell too thoroughly in the garb of St. John, to be sure, but he does reveal to us what we might call the horrible visage of

Orwell into the Future

147

the new Leviathan—something I have been referring to as the caretaker state. This state would seem to deserve the title “Leviathan,” because there is a sense in which it does rule as king “of all the children of pride.”5 Not only is this new state all-powerful, it also reduces its citizens to the status of children to be cared for because they cannot care for themselves. If these childlike creatures retain an element of pride in themselves, swear to their freedom and believe in their equality, it is because they are unable to grasp the world as it has become. Like Orwell’s proles, they have lost all sense of the past, if in fact they ever had any, and live contented lives under the imperial management of Big Government. If Orwell could not see Leviathan clearly, he still had a general idea of what it would look like. The key political features of Oceania, albeit put forward hyperbolically for dramatic eﬀect, mirror with scary accuracy the basic elements of Leviathan. There are at least ﬁve features of Leviathan worth noting, features that can also be found in Orwell’s Oceania, and it might be worthwhile to say a bit about each.

(i) A chief feature of Leviathan is its fundamentally undemocratic nature, as illustrated by the political impotence of the people subject to its rule. I do not mean by this that Leviathan has eclipsed democracy, for the vestigial elements of both democratic institutions and democratic spirit remain. But the Acutes don’t govern the ward. This is the job of Big Nurse. Democracy is not lost in Leviathan; it is merely managed. The drift of political practice is away from full citizen participation, open and unfettered public discourse and deliberation, political institutions responsive to the concerns of the people, and a basic equality in the distribution of key political resources, particularly wealth. Correspondingly, the drift is toward political management of public aﬀairs by appropriately trained professionals, increased technological, scientiﬁc, and economic sophistication, and rule by a collection of managers devoted to the practices and values of management. Under Leviathan, the public interest is no longer shaped by public discussion and allowed to bubble up out of the concerns and desires of the people. The managers of Leviathan impose their vision of the public interest from the top down and sell it to Leviathan’s subjects. Orwell’s infatuation with the lower class enabled him to notice the greatest challenge a viable democracy must overcome: the ambivalence and limited mental horizons of the working poor. The emergence of Big Brother is largely, though by no means entirely, a consequence of the obliviousness

148

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

of the great bulk of ordinary workers who sustain society and receive precious little in return. They cannot aﬀect their political environment because they lack the consciousness to do so, and consequently, they cannot serve as an eﬀective check against the power of an emergent Leviathan. Perhaps, however, George Bowling is more interesting in this regard, for he was sensitive enough to notice the social change that brings Leviathan into being and also prescient enough to appreciate that there was nothing that he, or anyone else, could do about it. Leviathan—centralized social management—was coming largely because it is an inevitable response to the ever increasing trend toward complexity in modern life. In Coming Up for Air, Orwell expresses his own frustrations about a political future he cannot prevent. As social aﬀairs become increasingly complex, as the network of economic and technological relations continues to grow, the need for political management shifts away from the local community and toward centralized authority. Leviathan is the inevitable result of the need for management on a vast social scale. The limited horizons of the proles, like the limited concerns of the Acutes, are characteristic of ordinary people trying to live ordinary lives and ﬁnd a moment of joy amidst the swirl of global events. Politics, like professional athletics, becomes a spectacle for such folk, and they are left behind as mere spectators as historical events unfold on a scale well beyond their comprehension. Kesey has McMurphy inspire the Acutes to take back their lives and defy the dogged management of Big Nurse, but even if he convinces readers that the Acutes have found the courage to leave the ward and strike out on their own, we must still wonder how long solitary individuals can hope to sustain themselves when confronted by the awesome power of the combine. The challenge to democracy that Orwell foresaw cannot involve turning back the clock to a simpler time; it must be viewed as the diﬃculty associated with inspiring the people somehow to make the managers of Leviathan their servants rather than their masters. It is just here, of course, that Orwell’s warning ends, for even if the proles should awaken to appreciate the ugliness of Big Brother, it remains far from clear exactly how they could hope to get along without him. If an open election was held in Oceania, one suspects Big Brother would win—even without ﬁxing the election. The people need their managers, and it is this need that underwrites the authority of Leviathan.

(ii) The second feature of Leviathan Orwell foresaw is understandable enough once the need for social management is acknowledged, for the new managers

Orwell into the Future

149

form an elite with a natural tendency to develop a self-conscious awareness of themselves as such. Orwell details the elite status of his vampires, the inner party, but elected to make them appear more overtly demonic than, say, the controllers of Huxley’s Brave New World. Here Kesey’s vampires seem more descriptive of Leviathan than Orwell’s inner party. In the fashion of Huxley, the new elite is deﬁned in terms of it social role and the particular expertise necessary for the fulﬁllment of this role. Knowledge (authoritativeness), as Foucault observed, is not a power resource; it is power. Knowledge and power are fused in modern imperium, and the possessors of imperium become the new emperors with an inclination to understand themselves in these very terms. Big nurse is distinguishable from the Acutes thanks to her sparkling white uniform and her smug self-conﬁdence. Like Orwell’s inner party, the managerial class/caste that emerges with Leviathan is not hereditary. It is a meritocracy composed of those with the necessary ability and proper training to rule, i.e., to control events on a national, if not global scale. Elitism, of course, has been the constant and eternal enemy of democracy. The elite are diﬀerentiated from their subjects within Leviathan not by birth but by talent and training. Leviathan ﬁnds ways to resupply itself with needed elites; it separates the able and the ambitious from the rest of the population in order to cultivate the perpetuation of the managerial class. We may quibble, of course, with just how meritocratic Leviathan really is. The elite class/caste controls the resources necessary for the training of future controllers, and consequently, Leviathan displays a distinctively familiar upper-class bias. But the resources necessary to become a controller, to achieve imperium, are perhaps less signiﬁcant under Leviathan than the psychology of control itself. Elite theory traditionally presumes that some are ﬁt to rule and others suited only to be ruled, and in this it is quite distinct from democratic theory which supposes that the ruled should have a hand in ruling themselves. Leviathan becomes elitist, then, when some suppose it is their calling to rule—this is what their training and expertise have equipped them for—and others accept the view that they are to be ruled because this is where their best interest lies. This is the view of Kesey’s Acutes, of course, but not exactly of Orwell’s proles, who lack even this modest amount of imagination. The peculiarity of Nineteen Eighty-Four is that the inner party controls only the outer party, and it does so by making outer party members think they are part of the controllers. Orwell’s vampires don’t prey upon the proles, for the proles are politically insigniﬁcant. Kesey noticed something diﬀerent, his vampires control everyone subject to their authority—everyone, this is to say, outside the managerial elite. But they do so in the name of the

150

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

public good, in the name of the good of those controlled; and it is the acceptance of this on the part of the controlled—their fait accompli—that is the most distinguishing feature of the new Leviathan. Orwell’s proles couldn’t see the political reality of their situation; the horizon of their minds was too limited. Bowling could see the political reality of his situation but believed things were out of his control. The subjects of Leviathan will also see things as outside their control, and may even become thankful for the expertise of their managers. Their yoke of oppression, if we can speak in these terms, at least has a velvet lining. But elite rule remains inconsistent with equality, and no amount of velvet can change this.

(iii) Of course the velvet does not guarantee that the yoke will be entirely comfortable, and the third feature of Leviathan comes into view when it is not. It took only one rebellious sociopath to throw Nurse Ratched’s tranquil ward into near chaos. Here again Orwell’s vampires diﬀer from the new vampires of Leviathan. The childlike proles were beneath party contempt. Because they were no threat to the inner party, they virtually controlled themselves. But Kesey’s Acutes were not like this; they proved to be potentially rebellious children not always willing or inclined to follow the loving commands of their manager. Such rebellion is a threat to management and to the managerial class, and this is something the managers cannot accept. The aim of management is orderliness and tranquility. The well-managed society is one where things go as the managers think they should; this is how the public interest is to be realized. Here we meet the dark side of imperium; Leviathan demands that the managers monopolize power in the name of control. The velvet comes oﬀ when the Acutes pull against the yoke. But at this point we may think Orwell was a bit ahead of the game. The controllers of Animal Farm recognized the need to control the lower animals even though they were not the least bit rebellious. The psychological shift from liberalism to Leviathan lies behind the elite’s obsession with power, and for reasons already noticed. Power is an aspect of imperium, made necessary because subjects may be reluctant to accept those decisions that managerial elites believe to be in their best interest. Even Orwell’s lower animals questioned the claimed privileges of the pigs. Rebellious children must be dealt with; the managers do not expect them to know what is best for society. Sometimes they must be made to accept the decisions of those with authority. It isn’t always pleasant, but it is the way of parentalism. Consequently, it is the way of Leviathan. Big Nurse must

Orwell into the Future

151

terminate the threat posed by McMurphy; the ugly side of the new vampire becomes evident only when the wills it seeks to control attempt to assert a bit of independence. Democracy is sometimes unruly and always agonistic; Leviathan will have none of it. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell describes a Leviathan that has been around for quite some time. Power has become its own end because it is the only thing the new vampires have to value in a world where liberal ideals have decayed. The inner party seeks to control the outer party because it perceives the outer party as a historical threat to its position of privilege. Huxley was not so cynical—or at least not cynical in quite this way, and the same can be said for Kesey. Mustafa Mond, Huxley’s controller in Brave New World, and Nurse Ratched are alike in this regard. Both grasp imperium because both understand it to be necessary for a properly and eﬀectively managed society. It is their authority, not their class interests, that justiﬁes their exercise of imperium. Both are true to their elitism; both are convinced that they know best, that they have the proper ability and training to rule. Imperium thus becomes an end in itself for Leviathan, and of course power is an element of imperium.

(iv) The image of the velvet yoke also introduces the fourth feature of Leviathan anticipated by Orwell. While the new psychology of power (imperium) brings Leviathan into being, the emergence of new technologies of power are necessary to sustain it. The controllers can control eﬀectively and eﬃciently thanks to the strategic manipulation of information. Subjects are told only what they need to know. To turn Orwell right side up, political truth enters the world with the rise of Leviathan. In a place and at a time where spin control is a practiced art, where justiﬁcations for elite actions change rapidly as circumstances require, where misinformation and disinformation are the norm, and where the institutions of Leviathan shroud their actions in secrecy, the control of understanding and thinking is not diﬃcult. This is the world of newspeak, thought control, historical revision, and the like. Certainty is not dead here; it is merely manufactured. Orwell put his faith in the freedom of speech and press to defend against the minions of thought control. His imagination might have failed him in this regard, for if freedom can become slavery, it seems altogether possible to reconcile thought control with freedom of speech and press. Madison’s “parchment barriers” will not do much to defend liberty if the spirit of liberty is lost amidst the citizenry. In Animal Farm, Orwell aptly illustrates the impotence of his own appeal to the freedom of speech and press.

152

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

(v) The control of information and understanding, a key strategy of imperium, dovetails nicely into the ﬁfth and ﬁnal feature of Leviathan imagined by Orwell: the eclipse of political meaning. This involves the reconstruction of political culture through a process of redeﬁning, or in some instances obfuscating, key political notions and ideals. The controllers of Leviathan master the strategic use of political symbols and manufacture legitimacy by exploiting the values and principles of the culture they have transcended. Americans are repeatedly told that their land is the greatest of democracies, even while the vast majority of the American public is politically apathetic and disengaged. As Sheldon Wolin has recently illustrated with his usual insight, democracy in America is an increasingly managed aﬀair (Wolin, 2008). Americans continue to pay homage to their country as a “land of the free” without ever giving much thought to what this means. But increasingly the freedom Americans value seems limited to doing those things the controllers consider permissible. Yet freedom matters little in a place where, and at a time when, conformity is manufactured and then enforced. Freedom, like equality, matters in a culture that values individuality, but individuality has little place in a tightly controlled environment. Here one must ﬁt in, ﬁnd one’s niche, and meet expectations. The individual has been transformed under Leviathan into a deviant. Kesey did not have a hard time making McMurphy a champion of individuality, but it was this very trait that cost him is freedom and eventually his mind. Kesey’s imagery of the combine works to good eﬀect here, for the combine shapes and processes and spits out endless bundles of stuﬀ that are indistinguishable from one another. Freedom is now the freedom to do what one should according to the controllers of Leviathan. Yet paraded before the people as an ideal, freedom still stirs the heart of the vast number of Leviathan’s subjects who could not hope to make conceptual sense of it. Leviathan is hardly so foolish as to openly insist that “Freedom is Slavery,” but it has become whatever Leviathan says it is. As Mill observed in the middle of the nineteenth century, if a society loses its sense of eccentricity, it cannot hope to reclaim it. The aim, of course, is control—that is, eﬀective social management, and the eclipse of political meaning is but a strategy in the process. Yet this puts things badly, for it suggests a deliberate game-plan on the part of the controllers. It supposes that the elites of Leviathan are purposely manipulating political meaning and understanding for some self-serving end, that

Orwell into the Future

153

there is some grand conspiracy at work behind the scene designed to dupe the poor unsuspecting masses. I have argued above, however, that Orwell was no conspiracy theorist, and no one needs to be such a theorist in order to grasp the steady approach of Leviathan. One need only appreciate the workings of institutional power. Leviathan, in the form of Oceania, was a product of social force for Orwell. The social world has moved in the direction of complexity, and the management of a complex social world gives rise to an increasing reliance upon bureaucracy, technology, and science. But increased bureaucracy, technology, and science pave the way for ever more complexity, and so the cycle of social change drives us ever nearer Leviathan. Politics moves beyond the community and toward the institutions of state imperium; politics moves out of the hands of the people and into the waiting arms of the new vampires.

7 The path of political development, it would seem, is toward Leviathan, but along the way we ﬁnd George Orwell, the apocalyptic political thinker, with his revelation and his warning ﬁrmly in hand. His political thought is a call to consciousness, backed, of course, by a plea. He is an antiquarian thinker whose sense of decency was shaped by what he imagined to be an imperiled revolution. He would have us reclaim the meaning of our most cherished liberal notions, notions he believed—rightly or wrongly—to dwell in the hearts of the ordinary workers. He would have us complete a revolution begun over three hundred years ago and reclaim our past by doing so. Perhaps ironically, he would have us collectively strive to exercise a degree of control over ourselves and our future and stand up to the forces of institutional power/control. In spite of his reservations about the political consciousness of the workers, Orwell understood that collective political self-consciousness is the only defense against institutional power and the encroaching Leviathan. We are perhaps closer to Leviathan today than we were in Orwell’s day, but we are not there yet, for the liberal spirit—Orwell’s crystal spirit—has not yet faded out of the world. George Orwell described himself best when he described Charles Dickens. He was a nineteenth century liberal, and the political purpose that inspired his writing involved the defense of a morality that places the notion of simple human decency at its center. Of course there is no returning to the nineteenth century; the simplicity Orwell treasured is a casualty of modernity as he well knew. But Orwell invites us to think about how

154

ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

decency might be kept alive in an era of complexity, and his invitation was issued with an element of urgency, for he also understood that decency itself was a likely victim of complexity. Who can say what might take its place, but without decency the prospects would not seem to be good. But for those suﬃciently inspired to worry about this sort of thing, Orwell’s political writings will continue to endure.

Notes 1. Orwell was a great admirer of H.G. Wells, of course, but Wells was in many ways the antithesis of Shelley. While I think Orwell’s work belongs more to the genre of Stoker than Shelley, he shared Shelley’s concern for a soulless science and the deiﬁcation of rationality. 2. The list, seemingly inspired by Burnham’s Machiavellians, received several formulations by Orwell. In one of his essays on Burnham for example, Orwell indicates he believes Burnham right to notice that the trend in recent years is toward an oligarchy with the elite leaders composed of “scientists, technicians, and bureaucrats.” Later he describes Burnham’s new managerial class as composed of “scientists, technicians, teachers, journalists broadcasters, bureaucrats, [and] professional politicians” (Orwell, 1968c: 178). 3. Cf. James Burnham, (1941, 1943). See also, Orwell, (1968c: 160–81). 4. Imagine, for example, some of the events that took place on college campuses during the 1960s, like the bombing of the ROTC building at the University of Wisconsin. Would this not today qualify as a form of domestic terrorism and send chills down the spine of many Americans who have been told to worry about the subversive threat terrorists of all strips pose? It is worth noticing how quickly terrorists have become the new communists. 5. Cf. Hobbes, (1950: 209).

Bibliography Arendt, H. 1958. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Cleveland, OH: Meridian Books. Authority. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Berlin, I. 1969. Four Essays on Liberty. London: Oxford University Press. Bowker, G. 2003. George Orwell. London: Little, Brown and Co. Burnham, J. 1941. The Managerial Revolution. New York: John Day, Co. —. 1943. The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom. New York: John Day, Co. Carr, C. 2000. On Fairness. Aldershot: Ashgate. Cole, G., H. Laski, G. Orwell, M. Sutherland, and F. Williams. 1942. Victory or Vested Interest. London: George Routledge & Sons. Connolly, M. 1987. The Diminished Self: Orwell and the Loss of Freedom. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Crick, B. 1980. George Orwell: A Life. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co. Cushman, T. and J. Rodden, eds. 2004. George Orwell: Into the Twenty-First Century. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Domhoﬀ, G. 1967. Who Rules America? Englewood Cliﬀs, NJ: PrenticeHall Inc. Dunn, J. 2005. Democracy: A History. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. Flathman, R. 1973. Concepts in Social and Political Philosophy. New York: Macmillan Press. Foucault, M. 1965. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. R. Howard. New York: Vintage Books. —. 1972. Knowledge/Power: Selected Interviews & Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. C. Gordon, trans. C. Gordon, L. Marshall, J. Mepham, and K. Soper. New York: Pantheon Books. —. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A Sheridan. New York: Pantheon Books. Garson, G. 1977. Power and Politics in the United States. Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath.

155

156

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gerber, L., ed. 1984. The Limits of Liberalism. New York: New York University Press. Gilbert, M. 1992. On Social Facts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hamilton, A., J. Madison, and J. Jay. 1961. The Federalist Papers. New York: New American Library. Hegel, G. 1952. The Philosophy of Right, trans. T. Knox. London: Oxford University Press. Hobbes, T. 1950. Leviathan, ed. M. Oakeshott. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Hollis, C. 1976. A Study of George Orwell: The Man and His Works. London: Hollis and Carter. Hunter, L. 1984. George Orwell: The Search for a Voice. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Huxley, A. 1932. Brave New World. New York: Harper & Row. Ingle, S. 1993. George Orwell: A Political Life. Manchester: Manchester University Press. —. 2006. The Social and Political Thought of George Orwell: A Reassessment. New York: Routledge. Kant, I. 1970. Kant’s Political Writings, ed. H. Reiss. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kesey, K. 1962. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. New York: Penguin Books. Kuhn, T. 1962. The Structure of Scientiﬁc Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Laski, H. 1975. Review of The Road to Wigan Pier. See Meyers, George Orwell: The Critical Heritage. Lewis, P. 1981. George Orwell: The Road to 1984. London: Heinemann. Lief, R. 1969. Homage to Oceania: The Prophetic Vision of George Orwell. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press. Locke, J. 1960. Two Treatises of Government, ed. P. Laslett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lowi, T. 1969. The End of Liberalism: Ideology, Policy, and the Crisis of Public Authority. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Lustig. R. 1982. Corporate Liberalism: The Origins of Modern American Political Theory, 1890–1920. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Machiavelli, N. 1964. The Prince, trans. A. Gilbert. New York: Hendricks House, Inc. Maddison, M. 1961. “1984: A Burnhamite Fantasy,” Political Quarterly XXXII, 71–9.

Bibliography

157

Madison, 1961. See Hamilton. McConnell, G. 1966. Private Power and American Democracy. New York: Vintage Books. Meyers, J. ed. 1975a. Orwell: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. —. 1975b. A Reader’s Guide to George Orwell. London: Thames & Hudson. —. 2000. Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Michels, R. 1959. Political Parties, trans. E. Paul and C. Paul. New York: Dover Publications. Mill, J. S. 1951. Utilitarianism, Liberty, and Representative Government. New York: E.P. Dutton. Miller, D. 1997. On Nationality. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Mills, C. 1956. The Power Elite. London: Oxford University Press. Mosca, G. 1939. The Ruling Class, trans. H. Kahn. New York: McGraw-Hill. Newsinger, J. 1999. Orwell’s Politics. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Orwell, G. 1933. Down and Out in Paris and London. New York: Harcourt Brace, & Co. —. 1935. A Clergyman’s Daughter. New York: Harcourt Brace, & World, Inc. — 1936. Keep the Aspidistra Flying. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. —. 1942. Culture and Democracy. In Victory or Vested Interest. See Cole. —. 1946a. A Collection of Essays. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. —. 1946b. Animal Farm. New York. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. —. 1950. Coming Up for Air. San Diego: Harcourt, Inc. —. 1952. Homage to Catalonia. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. —. 1958. The Road to Wigan Pier. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. —. 1961. Nineteen Eighty-Four. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. —. 1962. Burmese Days. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. —. 1968a. The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 1. An Age Like This 1920–1940, ed. S. Orwell and I. Angus. New York: Harcourt Brace & World, Inc. —. 1968b. The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 3. As I Please 1943–1945, ed. S. Orwell and I. Angus. New York: Harcourt Brace & World, Inc. —. 1968c. The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 4. In Front of Your Nose 1945–1950, ed. S. Orwell and I. Angus. New York: Harcourt Brace & World, Inc. Pareto, V. 1968. The Rise and Fall of Elites. Salem, NH: Ayers Co.

158

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Plato, 1961. The Collected Dialogues, ed. E. Hamilton and H. Cairns. New York: Pantheon Books. Rai, A. 1988. Orwell and the Politics of Dispair. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rawls, J. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Reilly, P. 1986. George Orwell: The Age’s Adversary. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Reiss, H., ed. 1970. Kant’s Political Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rousseau, J-J. 1979. Emile, trans. A Bloom. New York: Basic Books. —. 1981. The Reveries of a Solitary Walker, trans. P. France. New York: Penguin Books. —. 1986a. Political Wriitings, trans. and ed. F. Watkins. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. —. 1986b. The First and Second Discourses and Essay on the Origin of Language, trans. and ed. V. Gourevitch. New York: Harper & Row. Searle, J. 1995. The Construction of Social Reality. New York: Free Press. Sheldon, M. 1991. Orwell: The Authorized Biography. New York: HarperCollins. Shelley, M. 1969. Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. London: Oxford University Press. Steinhoﬀ, W. 1975. George Orwell and the Origins of 1984. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Stoker, B. 1992. Dracula. New York: Penguin Books. Tocqueville, A. 1969. Democracy in American, ed. J. Mayer, trans. G. Lawrence. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. Walzer, M. 1974. Spheres of Justice. New York: Basic Books. Winch, P. 1958. The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Wittgenstein, L. 1958. Philosophical Investigation, trans. G. Anscombe. New York: Macmillan. Wolin, S. 2008. Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Woll, P. 1977. American Bureaucracy. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

Bibliography

159

Woodcock, G. 1966. The Crystal Spirit: A Study of George Orwell. Montreal: Black Rose Books. Young, J. 1968. The Politics of Aﬄuence. Scranton, PA: Chandler Publishing Co. Zamyatin, Y. 1972. We, trans. Mirra Ginsburg. New York: HarperCollins.

This page intentionally left blank

Index egalitarianism 20, 33–4, 36, 70–3, 76–7, 122, 131 elitism 68–72, 131, 137, 151 and the new aristocracy 135–8, 145, 149–50 empiricism 92 Engels, F. 76 equality 12, 28–9, 31–3, 35, 55, 69, 74, 128, 143, 150 in fact 33, 55, 61, 122, 146 and liberalism 62, 137 and socialism 32–3, 63, 75 spirit of 76, 79–80 Eton 18, 36

American revolution 11, 76 amour proper 31 anarchism 61, 64 Aristotle 11 authority 136, 138–40, 145, 151 Bentham, Jeremy 3 Berlin, Sir Isaiah 98 Blair, Eric 14 see also Orwell, George Bowker, Gordon 3, 36, 58, 65, 83 bureaucratic parentalism 131 Burke, Edmund 16 Burnham, James 13, 68, 71, 74, 112, 154

fascism 14, 29, 55, 57, 60, 65, 81, 121, 143, 146 fetishism of commodities 34 fraternity 11, 32 Foucault, Michel 4, 8, 55, 108–9, 112, 126, 149 freedom 28–9, 31, 35, 66, 82, 133, 143, 145, 152 of the press 125, 151 and slavery 123–4 of speech 63, 76, 151 of thought 63 see also liberty French revolution 11, 76, 144

capitalism 38, 66, 83, 137 caretaker state 142–7 centralization of politics 60–3, 69, 80, 128, 148 coercion 102 cold war 65 Connolly, Cyril 36 Constant, Benjamin 86 Crick, Bernard 5, 39, 58, 105 crystal spirit 38, 55, 77, 153 democracy 33, 63, 122, 131, 144–5, 147–9, 151–2 democratic socialism 32–4, 41, 61, 63, 65, 75, 130, 132 Dickens, Charles 27–30, 34–6, 38, 60, 68, 75, 86, 153 Don Quixote 90 doublethink 81, 100 Dunn, John 122

Glorious Revolution of 1688 76 Gollancz, Victor 39 Hegel, G.W.F. 5, 12 Hitler, A. 101

161

162

INDEX

Hobbes, Thomas 9, 113–14, 116, 154 Hollis, Christopher 15 horizon of consciousness (of the mind) 42, 46, 53, 79, 111, 118, 147, 150 see also social horizon human dignity 33, 55, 61, 86, 91 Huxley, Aldous 3, 133, 137, 149, 151 imperialism 14 and British presence in India 21 indecency 18, 20–3, 25–6, 30, 33, 37, 82 and capitalism 66 in Oceania 89 and politics 27 of poverty 48, 50, 55 power of 86 and social inequality 72 individual will 8, 133–4 individualism 91, 100, 104, 139, 152 Ingle, S. 105, 124 James, William 99 Joyce, James 1 justice 11, 31, 49, 61, 74, 78 Kant, I. 17, 73 Kesey, Ken 138, 140–3, 148, 151–2 Kuhn, T. 99 leisure, problem of 43, 46, 50, 67, 134 Leviathan 147–53 authority of 148 see also caretaker state liberalism 59–62, 75–6, 122, 124, 127–8, 150 and decency 120, 129 end of 81, 85, 88 and individualism 103, 120 and morality 130–2, 137 and totalitarianism 64–5, 80, 84, 130 and truth 93, 95–6, 102, 119 liberty 11, 61–4, 76, 128, 135, 144, 151 and security 145 see also freedom Lief, R. 15

Locke, John 75–6, 86 Lord Acton, (Dalberg-Acton, Lord John) 9, 73, 108, 114 Maddison, M. 115 Madison, James 108, 124, 151 Mann, Thomas 1 Marx, Karl 12, 38, 48, 58, 70, 75–6, 83 meritocracy 149 Michels, Robert 83 Mill, J.S. 62, 86, 89–90, 96, 125, 152 Miller, David 94 Mills, C.W. 83 modernity 60, 62–3, 74, 81, 84, 88, 134, 146, 153 moral realism 17 Mosca, G. 83 Napoleon, (the man) 77 nationalism 94–5 Nazi Germany 63 Newsinger, J. 83, 85, 151 newspeak 99, 101, 106, 145 Nietzsche, F. 120 oppression 12–13, 69, 76–7, 101 Orwell, George in Burma 21, 23–5 and Eric Blair 14 as liberal 61, 65, 75–82, 86, 122 life of 2, 18–20, 25, 39, 48–9, 105 as moralist 17–35 and political thinking 49, 62, 64, 85, 107, 125, 146 as socialist 34, 41, 59 works, essays and stories “Charles Dickens,” 27–8, 36, 68, 75 “Culture and Democracy,” 63, 120–2 “Inside the Whale,” 58 “Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War,” 38, 55–7, 62, 72, 77, 119 “Shooting an Elephant,” 23–5 “Such, Such Were the Joys,” 18, 121, 130 “Why I Write,” 20, 26

Index works, novels and books Animal Farm 32, 35, 40, 45, 51, 56, 94, 123–4, 128, 132 and the after-revolution 70–1, 74, 76, 81–2 elite reading of 68–74, 77, 80–1, 117, 130, 137 liberal reading of 75–9, 81, 121 traditional reading of 65–8, 77 Burmese Days 21–5, 110 Coming Up for Air 57, 59–60, 62, 64, 69, 110–11, 148 Down and Out in Paris and London 39–46, 49, 51, 53 Homage to Catalonia 32, 55–7 Keep the Aspidistra Flying 39, 47, 53, 59, 110–11 Nineteen Eighty-Four 28, 32, 57, 62, 75, 94, 96, 109, 119–20, 124–5, 129, 133, 140, 146, 149 and Goldstein’s book 10–13, 27, 71, 107, 113, 131 as a great book 1–3, 128, 132 O’Brien and Winston’s confrontation 4, 85, 87–92, 98–105 and political development 118 purpose of 5–7, 112 as satire 35, 123 story of 3–5, 10–12, 56–7, 62, 71, 76, 84–7, 113 and torture 89–91 as vampire story 134–42 The Road to Wigan Pier 29, 39, 46–8, 51–5, 59–1, 81, 83, 121 Paine, Thomas 76, 82 Pareto, V. 83 Pascal, B. 126 Patriot Act 144–5 Plato 69, 73 political conﬂict 11 political history 11 political legitimacy 3, 80, 152 political meaning 152–3

163

political power, problem of 6, 9, 14–15, 27, 30, 60, 69, 108, 129 see also power political progress 27–8 political science 12, 83 postmodern doubt 107, 126–7 poverty 12, 14, 33–4, 48–9, 51 and Orwell’s political thought 37–57 and powerlessness 40–3, 46, 52–3, 55–7 as social and political problem 39 power arrogance of 129, 150 and authority 140–1 as end in itself 7–9, 85, 89, 106, 112–17, 125, 131, 151 institutional 113–28, 134–8, 142–3, 146, 153 and knowledge 149 modern and postmodern 107–9 natural instinct for 114–15 psychology of 9–10, 84–5, 151 technologies of 8–10, 12, 29, 68, 78, 84–102, 105–7, 109, 116, 134, 137, 151 Pritchett, V.S. 17 racism 21–3 Rai, A. 68 rationality 134, 136, 154 Rawls, John 83 realism 92, 98–9, 103 Reilly, P. 104 Rousseau, J-J. 16–17, 20, 23, 26, 30–6, 82, 115, 133 Russian revolution 65, 68, 73, 75–6 St. Cyprians 18, 121 Schopenhauer, A. 101 science, danger of 133–4, 136–7, 154 Shelley, Mary 133–4, 136, 154 social horizon 42, 47 see also horizon of consciousness social mind 8, 100–2, 111–12, 119, 142 and individual mind 94–8

164

INDEX

socialism 32, 59–61, 64, 122 and equality 32–3, 37 see also democratic socialism Soviet communism 64 Soviet Union 63, 65, 68 Stalin, Joseph 65, 73, 146 Steinhoﬀ, W. 15 Stoker, Bram 133–4, 142, 154 technology 134 terrorism 135, 144, 154 Thoreau, H.D. 17 thought crime 86, 89–90, 101, 114, 117 timocracy 73 totalitarianism 6–7, 13–14, 26, 57, 61–5, 74–7, 81, 88, 120–1, 129, 132, 135 source of 85 and truth 94–5 trust 93, 97 truth 62, 82, 86, 92, 102, 107, 119–20, 123 historical 93–8 intersubjectivity of 98–101

and language 99 political 151 scientiﬁc 98–101 tyranny 12, 33–4, 60, 73, 120 unreason 4, 104 unsocial sociability 17 vampires recognition of 141–2 threat of 133–7, 140–3, 150 Warburg, Fredric 5 Wellington 18 Wells, H.G. 154 Wittgenstein, L. 99–100 Wolfe, Thomas 111 Wolin, Sheldon 146, 152 Woodcock, George 36, 59, 82–3, 85, 122 Zamyatin, Yevgeny 3, 5, 15, 133–4, 137