George Orwell
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Total reviews: 11
Average rating: 4.5 of 5
What It Means to Be Human 4 out of 5 stars.
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I read this book because I was growing weary of my own ignorance. One-too-many references to Big Brother amid the post-911 proliferation of video cameras, wire-tapping, and concern about government intrusions into private life pushed me to question my own cultural literacy (thanks to author E.D. Hirsch, Jr. here). My job also sent me to southern Sudan in 2007, during which a colleague noted that I would need to visit a rather remote "Orwellian province". It turns out that province is called Unity State. After reading 1984, I get his drift.
It also occurred to me that the TV phenomenon Big Brother was likely produced by staffers who found themselves in their teens or early adulthood during 1984, while the audience to whom it caters may largely have been born well after that year. Given a generation who knows Big Brother not as the incarnation of thinly veiled government despotism but as the product of CBS Prime Time, there was reason to question more than my own cultural literacy. But what, or whom, we really need to discuss is Winston Smith.
Best I can tell, Winston Smith is me. Modern man; modern society but faced with the reality that government had morphed into political, economic, sociological, technological, and intellectual fiat - its greatest coup perhaps being the subtle control of free thinking. By changing content of archival media, limiting contact with others, or simply eliminating those who dare _remember_, all that matters is current perception, regardless of logical inconsistency. And if this is achieved, then Smith's government (for lack of a better term) is, and always has been, right and just. For if you never learned (or never remember learning) that 2 + 2 = 4, then 2 + 2 = 5 seems quite plausible.
The problem is that Smith dares to remember - dares to become conscious that another manner of thinking exists beyond the required and ubiquitous application of Doublethink, which he describes as follows: "To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself - that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed."
As the book opens, Smith fails to "consciously induce unconsciousness", the mere act of which is considered a crime - Thoughtcrime, to be precise. The sort of awareness with which he is left can culminate in nothing other than action, and action which can culminate in nothing other than death. "He was already dead, he reflected. It seemed to him that it was only now, when he had begun to be able to formulate his thoughts, that he had taken the decisive step. The consequences of every act are included in the act itself. He wrote, 'Thoughtcrime does not entail death: Thoughtcrime IS death.' Now that he had recognized himself as a dead man it became important to stay alive as long as possible."
This book is compelling because of the pains Orwell has taken to conceptualize a world in which government has conquered thought life as the last bastion of liberty. Once memory and perception is controlled, what better way to direct the mindless fervor of the masses than to create focal personifications for polarizing emotions: one to love (Big Brother) and one to hate (Emmanuel Goldstein). As such, manipulated thought can become concentrated action with the purpose of maintaining the entire regime in perpetuity.
It almost seems as if Orwell is trying to answer the question, "How bad could it (government) get?" to which it is tempting to reply, "How realistic is his answer?" Because so many of us, so many Winston Smiths, have seen smatterings of Orwell's answer in recent developments, there is good reason to be guarded and better reason to be proactive in the defense of intellectual freedom. Looking at the China, Burma, North Korea, and even western democracies of our day, it is easy to see hints of Doublethink and more overt evidence of a paralyzing fear of independent thought. But there is little reason to suspect that government can achieve a more frightening end: that of transforming the essence of humankind. Yet this is precisely where Orwell takes the reader. Smith's nemesis O'Brien notes, "The command of the totalitarians was 'Thou shalt.' Our command is 'Thou art.'" While this book is an excellent call to political and intellectual vigilance, the day government controls our essence as humans is the day government merits consideration as deity. Until then, I remain thankful for my ability to think otherwise.
Editorial Review:
What more can be said about one of the classic pieces of literature?
"Big Brother" could be called the Internet. If so, Mr. Orwell was twenty or so years off in his title, but not in his idea. Compare "newspeak" to today's "l33t sp34k", like lol, roflmao, pal, gg, and l8r
