Orwell's Revenge (32 page)

So Orwell's brain is strangling in the coils of doublethink. For individuals, as for nations, he wants equality. The race-to-the-swiftest tendency is the problem; the Ministry is the solution. Crossgates is what descends on the nation that doesn't have the right Ministries. Hitler—the quintessential Ministry man—is what descends on the nation that does.

•  •  •

How then can we rid the world of Crossgates while still affirming “freedom” at every turn? We can't, except in French. And thus Orwell, the man who exhorts us to “drive out
foreign phrases” from our writing, is quite unable to discuss economic theory without first crossing the English Channel.

Perhaps the Frenchism of laissez-faire capitalism can be forgiven, but what Orwell really loves to hate is the rentier. In essay after essay
he excoriates “rentier capitalism,” “
the rentier-professional class,” and
the “rentier-intellectual.” And what exactly is a rentier? My French-English dictionary defines it as “stockholder, fundholder; person of property, man of independent means; holder of an annuity; rentier.
C'est un petit rentier,
he has a small private income,
he is a small investor.” Orwell's definitions are more colorful. Rentiers, says Orwell, comprise “an entirely functionless class, living on money that was invested they hardly knew where.” They are the “idle rich,” “
decayed throw-outs,” “simply parasites, less useful to society than his
fleas are to a dog.” Brush aside Orwell's fine invective, and you come back to this: the freedom Orwell can't stand is the freedom to earn money, invest it in private property, and pass it on to your children. Which explains Orwell's French. If he talked about the “free” market, he would then have to murder “freedom.” Linguistically, it is easier to liquidate a rentier.

But he doesn't fool anyone, not even himself. Equality—the kind of material equality that Orwell wants—and freedom—real freedom of effort, intellect, and personal industry—are irreconcilable. Like it or not, the free market is a big part of freedom—not just material freedom, but freedom of thought and speech and everything else. Some people produce newspapers, films, symphonies, operas, and plays; others pay to enjoy such things, and it's money that closes the loop. Crude as it sounds, spending money is a form of self-expression. Handing over cash is the most sincere way of declaring private preferences, whether they be crass, generous, foolish, wasteful, or ugly. Money talks. The rich like Ravelston in
Aspidistra)
get to run nice little socialist magazines as a hobby. The poor like Comstock) have to go off and work for horrible American advertising agencies. When it comes to freedom,
mind and money walk hand in hand.

Orwell knows this. He also knows that it doesn't mean much to preach about higher forms of liberty to people who are digging coal fourteen hours a day and starving in the cold the other ten. He knows that the race-to-the-swift tendency pushes society away from “economic justice.” He also knows you can't articulate any grand principles of freedom without grappling with economic freedom along the way. And
he knows you can't talk serious economic socialism
without drifting toward Big Brother. In
1984,
the Party has done many of the right socialist things. It has abolished private property and suppressed the free market. These are all things that Orwell the socialist believes
should
be done. Orwell knows that the Ministry of Plenty is a pillar of “oligarchical collectivism,” which he hates, but he knows it is also a pillar of democratic socialism, which he loves.

So Orwell is stuck. Either he says something nice about Big Brother, which would ruin
1984,
or he says something nice about economic freedom, which means (more or less) free markets, which means (roughly) the rentier-capitalist—the other enemy Orwell hates the Big Brotherhood of
1984,
but he is himself a socialist. He wants collectivism without Big Brother, and he doesn't know how to get it. The missing chapter in
1984
—the chapter on Freedom—is missing because of a completely unresolvable paradox in Orwell's own brand of Ingsoc politics.

•  •  •

Now you may suppose that I have dwelled on Orwell's half-baked socialism to add some ad hominem weight to my rehabilitation of the telescreen. But I am not trying to discredit Orwell simply by painting him red. What Orwell believes about free markets explains, in the end, what he thinks about telescreen totalitarianism.

It's easy for people like Hayek and Coase to embrace the marketplace of ideas; the logic and the rhetoric of the free market is portable. It's equally easy for people like Hayek and Coase to be optimistic about things like telescreens. More and better communicating machines in more private hands will mean more commerce, more shopkeepers, more rentiers, and more free speech too. Collectivists—or, if you prefer, democratic socialists—have a much more difficult book to write. The collectivists demand that powerful, expensive machines be expropriated and ministerialized. For efficiency, you see. Efficiency and economic justice. So when it comes to newfangled things like telescreens, the libertarian-collectivists must somehow explain how they will collectivize the media of communication without collectivizing the message, how they will collectivize your purse without touching your mind, how they will woo the Ministry of Plenty without falling into the
syphilitic embrace of the Ministry of Love. But they can't explain
that.
Because it can't be done.

Return then one last time to the question that led us to the market in the first place: Why didn't Orwell ever consider that telescreens might promote freedom? Why didn't he ever imagine that the slavery of a telescreened Ministry might be overwhelmed by the freedom of telescreens in private hands? That question led us to search for the missing chapter in
1984
—the chapter that would have set out Orwell's own, positive definition of Freedom. But all we found was another negative: freedom, whatever it is, is not the rentier-infested free market. The free market, after all, leads back to Crossgates, where the rich little bastards torture and humiliate the rest.

And oh yes, I forgot to mention this earlier. One typical indignity— one particularly memorable humiliation—for a scholarship boy at Crossgates was to be examined by richer boys on the size and power of his father's car—the car the scholarship
boy's father of course did not own. Orwell himself remembered that, long, long afterward. A scholarship boy wouldn't seriously consider the possibility of owning a movie camera either. Recall that when Orwell thinks of a movie camera in “New Words,” he reflexively conjures up some “millionaire” to own it. The private ownership of fancy machines evokes in Orwell almost unspeakably miserable memories. So, Orwell the adult concludes: one can defend (private) property only if one is more or less
indifferent to economic justice. For Orwell, then, Freedom really
is
Slavery, at least when freedom extends to people who make money and then buy expensive gadgets with it. He simply cannot stand the thought of a world organized around fancy private possessions.

He spends his adult life declaring that tomorrow's world won't be. Hayek is wrong. Capitalism is finished. The one world even more horrifying (to Orwell) than
1984
is a world owned by the small rentier capitalists, a society like Crossgates, in which the scholarship boy is tormented forever because his father doesn't own a big personal computer. And that horror—his own, personal, childhood horror—is one that Orwell never does overcome. He sees everything perfectly, except for his own
boyhood face in the mirror.

Who then will own the telescreens in the future according to Orwell? Surely not the rentier-capitalists who send their spoiled sons to
Crossgates. Motor cars, movie cameras, radios, telephones, dishwashers: in Orwell's economically just world, none of these things is going to be privately owned. They're all
going to be owned by the Ministry of Crockery, or something much like it. That's the answer to horrible Crossgates. But Ministry ownership will be pretty horrible too. That's 1984.

•  •  •

If Orwell had lived to the age of eighty-two,
as his own father did, he would have died in 1985. A life that long would have allowed him to read history's own review of 1984 and given him time to compose his own letter-to-the-editor in reply. Perhaps his reply would have drawn from “New Words” and “Poetry and the Microphone.” In any event, Orwell would have written, and written frankly, in a spirit of reflection and honest, self-critical inquiry. He was never a man afraid to face facts, even facts that contradicted what he himself had once believed. As often as not, he had already written the contradiction himself. Orwell thrived on doublethink.

In fact he lived it, and in the end he died it. He described himself
as a “Tory Anarchist,” by which (when describing Jonathan Swift with the same words) he meant a man despising authority
while disbelieving in liberty He began his adult career as a colonial policeman in Burma, running a network of spies, and ended it with
1984.
He hated the radio, and he spent two years broadcasting for the BBC. “One of the most horrible features of war,” Orwell wrote in 1938, “is that all war propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from
people who are not fighting.” Five years later he himself was part of England's wartime propaganda machine. “I suppose sooner or later we all write our own epitaphs,” he observed,
reflecting on that irony. Yes, Orwell would have written his own answer to
1984
—the book and the year too—if he had been given the time.

But Orwell's own epitaph was to be written long before the telescreen's. The pinnacle of doublethink in Orwell's own life comes during the writing of
1984
itself. In 1947, having completed only a very rough first draft of the book,
Orwell learns he has tuberculosis. The best treatment is streptomycin, a new American drug that is still generally
unavailable in England. David Astor, the son of an English lord,
arranges through family connections in the United States to have a special
shipment sent to Orwell's hospital. “I am a lot better,” Orwell writes in a letter in April 1948. He sets feverishly to work
completing his last novel. The first words of Winston Smith's diary—“April 4th, 1984”—are probably composed on April 4, 1948, or very close to that date. Orwell has been given another two years to live—-just enough time to finish his greatest book and witness the beginning of its enormous triumph. Those two years have been given to him by the genius of American capitalism and the patronage of a rentier member of the English upper class.

Orwell died on January 21, 1950, at the age of forty-six.

^I
Interestingly, Orwell
misquotes
the Declaration of Independence, omitting “just” from “governments . . . deriving their just powers.”
1984,
p. 313.

^II
The passage emerges as: “Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.”

The Gestapo is said to have teams of literary critics whose job is to determine, by means of stylistic comparison, the authorship of anonymous pamphlets. I have always thought that, if only it were in a better cause, this is exactly
the job I would like to have.

“As I Please” (1945)

“I wrote it. That is to say, I collaborated in writing it. No book is
produced individually, as you know.” O'Brien says this to Winston Smith toward the end of
1984.
He is referring to
The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism,
the book ostensibly written by Kenneth Blythe, which occupies the middle section of
1984.
But O'Brien didn't write that book either. Blythe and O'Brien are, of course, inventions of George Orwell. Whose real name was Eric Blair. So there we have it: one book, four authors.

Or why not five? Upon reflection—upon careful reflection, after reading
1984
many times—I came to realize that Orwell had made some serious errors. He had also written my charge:

4.4.48 g.o. book malreported telescreen rectify forecasts misprints malquotes doubleplusungood rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling.
^I

Yes, Orwell expected this to happen. By 1984, “[a]U history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly
as often as was necessary.” By 1994,
1984
would be history too, and ready for the cleansing.

•  •  •

One of my own telescreens—the one used sometimes by my six-year-old daughter to play
Mixed Up Mother Goose
—is hooked up to a Hewlett-Packard flatbed scanner with an automatic document feeder. Inside the computer I've installed a circuit board manufactured by Calera Recognition Systems. I directed the H£ Calera, and my computer to devour the mutilated copy of
1984.
I fed the pages into the scanner, thirty or so at a time. The computer and scanner hummed and groaned for about five hours, after which the book had been scanned in its entirety and converted into electronic text. As I described in the Preface to this book,
1984
was on my hard disk, in an ASCII file, occupying 590,463 bytes of storage. The rest of Orwell's books, essays, and letters soon followed, along with Shelden's excellent biography

I use a very fast word processor, XyWrite III+, running on what in 1993 was a reasonably fast machine—a 66 MHz 80486—with ample RAM (16 megabytes) to contain the entire book in dynamic memory. With
1984
loaded into my word processor, I am able to jump from the first word to the last in just over 1 second. I can search through the book at will for any particular word or phrase. I can move from one occurrence to the next as fast as I can hit a single key.