People interested in Orwell's 1984 might also be interested in C. S. Lewis's' That Hideous Strength, a pre-Atomic treatment of the dystopian sci-fi future from an unexpected author that actually predates 1984. Here's a review... by Orwell. http://www.lewisiana.nl/orwell/
> His book describes the struggle of a little group of sane people against a nightmare that nearly conquers the world. A company of mad scientists – or, perhaps, they are not mad, but have merely destroyed in themselves all human feeling, all notion of good and evil – are plotting to conquer Britain, then the whole planet, and then other planets, until they have brought the universe under their control.
>...
> There is nothing outrageously improbable in such a conspiracy. Indeed, at a moment when a single atomic bomb – of a type already pronounced “obsolete” – has just blown probably three hundred thousand people to fragments, it sounds all too topical.
Interesting to note that Orwell railed against tyranny, control of the understrength masses by a powerful few, and the obliteration of individualism and C. S. Lewis wrote thinly-disguised Christian propaganda targeted towards children.
That Hideous Strength is anything but "thinly-disguised Christian propaganda targeted towards children." First, as a novel, it's openly Christian (which, combined with the sci-fi dystopia, makes it a pretty unique entity - I find it fascinating, myself). It may also help you understand the sort of things the Christian right fears from the likes of people like yourself.
Secondly, it's not targeted towards children. Even assuming a child would be paying attention after the first ten minutes' read: there's a sadistic lesbian police chief (a character of the sort whom Lewis is theorized to personally fancy), several open (if brief) discussions about sexuality and eroticism... to say nothing of the violent murders, suicides and tiger maulings.
It's not exactly what you'd consider child-safe, let alone targeted.
But I guess if you already know all there is to know about Lewis from the five-minute treatment in your local left-leaning literature class, or if you gleaned most of it secondhand from reading Neil Gaiman's The Problem of Susan, then you have no need to see anything that might interfere with your expectations. Go ahead and congratulate yourself on truly understanding the man.
Most people seem to think C.S. Lewis wrote nothing except Narnia. This isn't the case; Lewis was a convert to Christianity and wrote forcefully and critically about it, even while he subscribed to it. A good example of this is Mere Christianity.
Narnia itself was a critique: yes, Aslan is Jesus, but Lewis' point wasn't "Jesus loves you!" It was "Jesus is a force of nature and he is REALLY FUCKING SCARY."
He's not the kind of man I like defending, but Lewis wasn't doing "propaganda" any more than Dante was doing "propaganda" when he wrote Inferno. He was trying to speak truth to power and using fiction to do it.
It's an interesting article but of course the writing deadline was only a part of what killed him. His health declined during the period of being a tramp and working menial jobs in France where he was hospitalized with pneumonia. It didn't help being shot through the neck by a fascist sniper in the Spanish Civil War and also being a heavy smoker. Lastly, wintering in cold, wet Scotland isn't a good plan for anyone with bad lungs.
I read that book my senior year in high-school, and to this day I will cite it as one of the - if not THE - most influential books I've ever read. I know Orwell was no libertarian, but what I took from the book (probably influenced by a genetic proclivity towards rebellion and anti-authoritarian thinking) was a tremendous mistrust of government... which I suspect was a strong influence on my eventually settling into a libertarian worldview.
Some people say that Nineteen Eighty-Four wasn't written to be a warning, and maybe it wasn't - but I have a hard time seeing how anybody could read it and not discover something of a warning inside. And I think that's even more true given the various revelations over the past few years, vis-a-vis surveillance and diminishing civil liberties.
I encourage anybody who hasn't read Nineteen Eighty-Four to go read it immediately. If you aren't either angry has hell, or sad as hell, or both, at the end, you're a rare breed.
Meh... I don't much care for labels, and leaving it at "libertarian" is probably specific enough. But if you really care, I associate a lot with the "voluntaryist" and/or "anarcho-capitalist" schools of thought. My beliefs about the ownership of land are in a state of flux and I'm not actually convinced there is any truly objective way to settle that issue.
Look up Henry George, specifically "Progress and Poverty."
His land taxation regime is to say the least controversial, but it's still compelling and it's something. It's also considered responsible for much of the rapid progress out of medievalism in the Far East late in the 19th/early in the 20th Century. Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan all had periods of very rapid industrialization under land taxes.
No less than William F. Buckley referenced Henry George more than once.
It seems to me, this book is more relevant today than ever. Orwell might have erred with the date, but I think he didn't with the direction of human kind.
The state of the world is improving, sorry but it is, but that doesn't fit into the epic narrative that so many want to believe. Your life is not as epic a struggle as your parents or their parents, all men are essentially kings today in terms of freedom and opportunity and a million other metrics. No one reports good news, progress is not as exciting as doom.
I don't want to believe, that the world is rapidly being corrupted, but it is.
Freedom and opportunity?
Opportunity might be true in some areas (particularly IT), but not in other areas. Just because you think you are king, you are not!
Freedom, no, not at all. Democracy has brought much freedom to the people and after the 2nd WW freedom lived up to it's maximum, it seems to me. But in the last decades it declined rapidly.
Do you mean, freedom in Iraq? Or in Afghanistan or other Arabian countries? Think twice! There might be some countries, yes, but they are far away from being real free.
You are totally correct in all you write. Yet, it is still quite easy to think of future 1984 scenarios.
For instance, consider the Chinese version of NSA, it is an ideal tool for a free economy (i.e. a working economy) with control of the population. The country has already got a capitalist economy married to a dictatorship. We expect China to open up and democratize, now that it is getting better and the average education is increasing. But what if the communist party instead starts to integrate with the military, increases automatic surveillance and goes the other way? "The future as a foot that stamps in a face" (iirc from 1984) might seem lika a nice scenario for quite a few guys in boots.
Will it happen? Afaik, the risk is small. But it certainly exists.
If taken at face value, it suffers from the same problem as "The Godfather", i.e. the picture of a perfectly consistent, always working system. That fit nicely into notions of the totalitarian state popularized about that time, and lasting into the 1980s and beyond. The alteration of the leading Communist regimes into whatever they have become--how do you characterize the PRC?--has not entirely destroyed the appeal of these notions.
It's worth re-reading this wonderful book every couple of years. Every time I do, I see something new, either in the story itself, or in the writing craft, or in the story's context in society, as our world changes.
It's also worth asking ourselves each time we re-read 1984, are we farther away or closer to the life depicted in the book, than last time we read it?
This is about about as far as I can remember society being away from 1984. The NSA bulk surveillance is bad (doubleplus bad?), but remember the most pernicious influence in the actual book wasn't the surveillance, but the criminalization of actual ideas and corrupting the language in order to accomplish that (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak).. in particular whiteblack (not to minimize your own nom de plume).
Enemy combatants,
Collateral damage,
Leader of the free world,
National security,
War for peace,
Premptive strikes,
Enhanced interrogation
Some Orwellian concepts:
War on abstract nouns (e.g on terror),
Pervasive surveillance,
Pervasive propaganda,
Casual use of torture,
Widespread hysteria and hatred over minor threats,
Former hated enemies now allies and vice versa,
Stark divides between the haves and have nots,
A distant and poorly understood enemy necessitates perpetual conflict and sacrifice
It's a really interesting book and I disagree that we are any farther on in these respects than we were in orwell's time. His book is of course a fantasy intended to illustrate our failings by exaggerating them, not a strict prediction of the future, but it still has a lot to teach us.
I was thinking of things like sexcrime or thoughtcrime, though I don't think it is called a war in 1984. In a broader sense though, this sort of War on x is very Orwellian I think because it's directing the public to scapegoat segments of the population (drug users, muslims as potential terrorists) and blame them for their ills, and see themselves as perpetually at war with members of their own society, in the same way that in 1984 those guilty of vague, abstract crimes became the enemy and worthy of hate, simply by virtue of a government pronouncement.
War has become normalised and part of everyday life, with the implication that as we are at war special rules apply and the enemy, as designated by the government, deserves no mercy because we are engaged in an existential struggle.
How has language been corrupted? They say exactly what they mean. They might lead you to believe they are saying something different, but is that language's fault, or is that because they are silver tongues?
> A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia.
I am familiar with everything he talks about, and have personally noted most of what he describes in political writing in the past. I guess I just don't think of it as a corruption of language; it's just kind of a given to me, that people speak in riddles and flowery phrases when they look to hide another meaning. I don't really see how English has changed as a result of it.
No, they change the meaning of language. Language is never living on an island. It lives with the users and the uses of it. By misusing the language, bending and caricaturing it, they corrupt it.
That's an artful phrasing, but an implication that your point 'is obvious' as the cornerstone of your argument is unconvincing.
I postulate that artful, metaphorical, or misleading uses of language is both neither misuse nor bending it, and I would like a clearer explanation of what a corrupted language looks like, aside from "being corrupt".
I give you one example: Because torture is forbidden, the US government just renamed the things they did to the prisoners in Iraq and Guantanamo, just not naming it torture. Or because if the people in Guantanamo where soldiers they would have special rights and the other way around, if they where not, they should get a normal trial. So they just called them other names just to disguise that what they do is not right!
That is corrupting the language.
And I even see it in Germany. Because the basic rights (like free speech) are defined in our constitution and "security" is not among them, our former secretary of the interior said this would be a "super basic right" -- thus also putting security above all basic rights ... and giving our rights in the hands of the NSA.
By this way, they corrupt our language and our thinking. Defining everything that way, how they pleasure and how they can betray us!
To call torture 'enhanced interrogation' avoids the use of the word torture because it has negative connotations, and tries to normalise torture by association with an accepted practice (interrogation), after all interrogation is what you do to prisoners isn't it?
It's a clear distortion of language to hide the truth; it has everything to do with language and the use of it, as it deliberately twists meaning in order to limit the thoughts of people who accept this term to describe certain actions. As Wittgenstein put it:
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world
Very good point here. Wittgenstein is right: By limiting (or bending) the language, also bending the thinking is done. I also see it in my own country, how language is used to bend the (acceptable) thinking in the society and to brainwash people.
It is just a question of viewpoint. What they do is, they try to change thinking and confuse what is acceptable in the society. Language aside, it is a sign of a weak society in my opinion, because they are allowed to goon with this.
I'm trying to doubleplusthink on this one, but I really can't see any evidence of criminalization of thoughts. I have some pretty deplorable thoughts myself, and I seem to be getting away with it.
"A federal appeals panel has upheld the 20 year sentence of a lolicon found to have received illustrations of underage sex by email, saying that “it is not a required that the minor depicted actually exists”, and so ruling art not to be universally protected free speech."
I was wondering if someone would bring that up. The prohibition of virtual child pornography is probably the closest thing to thought crime that we have.
I think that using a particularly narrow example of restricted permissible expression isn't proof that society is getting closer to the totalitarian nightmare of 1984.
Art, in part, put a guy in jail for 20 years, that is double the average of the crime of actual rape. I think that's going in a direction that we shouldn't go.
You should just watch with an open mind what is going on in the world. There might be no mass-thought-reader yet, so you get through with your deplorable thoughts, but just take as a small example the era of McCarthy -- those that openly expressed possible communistic thoughts where persecuted.
Or (to name a more current example) just say at the NY airport that the security measures are bullshit! ... just as doublethought-enhancer.
The McCarthy era was both a long time ago and is almost universally regarded as a political and ideological failure. Are you saying that our society is infested with crypto-McCarthyists?
I don't answer to posts that are not earnest. (I could answer to the first sentence alone, but it does not make sense to me to answer in the context of the second)
conviction for conspiracy to commit when no actually commission happened is an example (consider the FBI convicting someone of a terrorist plot when all other participants are FBI agents).
Or, frankly, when a punishment for a crime is increased by its intent (e.g. race related or anti-homosexual) -- it's not only the crime that is punished but the thought behind it as well.
Those FBI stings are a pretty good example, though I would say that it's more textbook entrapment than thoughtcrime. It seems that they are selecting more for the ability to be manipulated over their ideological positions.
As far as hate-crime goes, the notion behind increased punishment there is that the victims include an entire terrorized community, not just the direct victim. If I throw some trash on some guy's lawn, there's one victim (the guy). If I burn a cross on some guy's lawn, there are multiple victims (the other black families in the neighborhood). It's an important distinction.
I think, it's just the opposite. Since the fall of the communist idea (of course it has fallen already before), one religion now is dominant: Capitalism. Meaning, anybody that does not believe in the "true god", is guilty of Thoughtcrime.
Except they're not thrown in gulags, persecuted, or even inconvenienced. Quite a few self-proclaimed socialists and marxists I know, with public blogs and other hallmarks of modern political activism, work for large corporations. No one cares.
I live in Poland, a post-communist country. Just yesterday I heard an interview on (public) radio with some (state-sponsored) university professor arguing that life was better under the previous system. No one cares.
There is proper thoughtcrime, like racism, or denying holocaust that can get you in trouble, fired, even arrested. But that is still really mild compared to 1984 or 1984.
I think, we will see what will come. But when you state the wrong things even today you can get into trouble. Of course it is still not so obvious as in 1984 or in the USSR system, but things change rapidly today and I see it in "free" Germany as thoughts are forbidden and when you say them openly, you will be banned from the public.
It is just a small step from there to be arrested, as we saw before.
Even today, if you have the wrong name you can be disallowed from flying in the "land of the free". Because the government put your name on the list.
Some woman fought against this list, but the government even played tricks, that the trial could not go on. Where is there democracy or freedom?
Might be. I must admit, that I do not know Brave New World as good as 1984.
Might be, that there are more exact descriptions of our future around. But one thing I think is dominant and alarming: The "free" world does not converge to a system of even rights and freedom for all, but into a new system of control and inequality, that might in turn even top the system of the middle ages.
Orwell had tuberculosis, not uncommon for people from urban environment in his day. That's why the "bad lung". Whether he smoked or not is probably quite irrelevant.
Orwell fought against Fascism ( both of the Lft and of the Right) , and mercantilism/empire. Not capitalism. Something can be one of those, but not both. These things are quite precise terms that have very specific meanings.
The point of 1984 is not that some sinister cadre has seized power ( that's more like Alan Moore in "V for Vendetta" ) but rather that people stopped wanting to think at all, and the resulting regime met their preferences
better as they simply stopped thinking at all.
George Orwell averred that Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) must be partly derived from We.
Orwell began Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) some eight months after he read We in a French translation and wrote a review of it. Orwell is reported as "saying that he was taking it as the model for his next novel."
> His book describes the struggle of a little group of sane people against a nightmare that nearly conquers the world. A company of mad scientists – or, perhaps, they are not mad, but have merely destroyed in themselves all human feeling, all notion of good and evil – are plotting to conquer Britain, then the whole planet, and then other planets, until they have brought the universe under their control.
>...
> There is nothing outrageously improbable in such a conspiracy. Indeed, at a moment when a single atomic bomb – of a type already pronounced “obsolete” – has just blown probably three hundred thousand people to fragments, it sounds all too topical.