Orwell, politics and power

Orwell, Politics, and Power

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Orwell, Politics, and Power

Craig L. Carr

For my students


ContentsPreface 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 THE EVOLUTION OF OCEANIA THE MORAL IMAGINATION THE PRICE OF POVERTY REVOLTING PIGS TECHNOLOGIES OF POWER GOD IS POWER ORWELL INTO THE FUTURE ix 1 16 37 59 84 106 128 155 161

Bibliography Index

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PrefaceThis is a book about George Orwells political thought; it is not another book about George Orwell. I take the distinctive political writings within Orwells literary corpus as a source of inspiration for theorizing about contemporary political issues and themes. I have not attempted to oer yet another biography of Orwell; nor is this yet another literary critique of Orwells writings or an evaluation of his prose reections upon the political and social conditions of his day. These works, needless to say, have already been written. What follows diers 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 qualies (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 Orwells nest 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 chiey 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 Orwells political writings. In so doing, I shall suggest that Orwells enduring contribution to political thought and theory, as well as his contemporary relevance for political thinking, rests with the political signicance of these answers. The moral of my story is relatively straightforward and can be put simply: Orwells 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 foundationalix

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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 Orwells 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 Orwells 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 Orwells 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 signicant today as it was in Orwells 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 oered 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. Ive 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 Manseld, Brad Maier, Lori Kinder, Gwen Thompson, Jennifer Pennell, Nathan Austin, Dan Enbysk, and Robin Barklis. I beneted greatly from the able research assistantship of David Robinson, Je 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 Orwells political thought.

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The eagerness and enthusiasm with which young readers engage Orwells political writings has never ceased to amaze me and is certainly emphatic testimony to Orwells great success as a writer. The questions, comments, and concerns expressed by my students have almost surely had a far greater eect on the formation of my own thoughts on Orwell than I can even begin to imagine. But for their eorts, curiosity, and dogged interest in Orwells political thinking I doubt that this book would ever have come into being. It seems only tting, 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 Dictatorshipsan age in which freedom of thought will be at rst a deadly sin and later on a meaningless abstraction. The autonomous individual is going to be stamped out of existence. George Orwell

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1The Evolution of OceaniaOn 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 novela minor classic, perhaps, but not a great novel. But a novel can be a great book without also being a great novel, and George Orwells Nineteen Eighty-Four is a case in point. Since this is a book about Orwells book, I want to introduce what follows by saying something about why I think Nineteen Eighty-Four is a great book. But rst a disclaimer. Im 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 novelnot equal, say, to the likes of Joyces Ulysses or Manns Magic Mountain, Im 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, Im just an admiring novice. But political thinking is not conned 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. Im 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 wasnt 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 in1

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ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWER

politics, he tells us, involves the [d]esire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples idea of the kind of society that they should strive after (Ibid.: 31213). 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 dont 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 Orwells 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 Orwells writing involved a theoretical inquiry into political life of the sort that has a traditional association with political theory. This inquiry culminates in Orwells 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 ow, that is the subject of this book.1

1The claim that Orwells political thought culminates in Nineteen EightyFour requires some qualication. 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 Orwells premature death. At the rather young age of forty-sixa point in life when many political thinkers are just getting goinghis frail lungs nally 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 Orwells 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 Orwells political thought should not be understood, then, to imply that the work provides us with the completion of a coherent political edice available for analysis and critique by future generations. Perhaps this is more typical than atypical. Thinkerspolitical or otherwiserarely stop thinking; they just run out of time. But it is worth wondering where Orwells political thoughts might have gone, where his art and his politics might have taken us, but for his unfortunate death.

The Evolution of Oceania

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As it is, however, we are left with Nineteen Eighty-Four as the nal, though hardly ultimate, expression of Orwells political thought. Yet the book can be seen as a culmination of sorts. The text presents us with his nest 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. Orwells 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 books chosen title: Nineteen Eighty-Foura 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 ocially 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 scientically 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 Orwells story.3) Technological sophistication is restricted to strategies of surveillanceto the apparently omnipresent telescreens that conjure up images of Benthams 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 st and sophisticated cunning. The largest class in Oceania, Orwells famous proles, constitutes eighty-ve 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 horric situation lives Winston Smith, the novels 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

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to grasp the nature and the logic of the world in which he lives. At novels end, Winston is cured thanks to the intervention of his tormentor/savior OBrien who nurses Winston back to sanity, back to Big Brothers 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 nd 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 dont, 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 OBrien, 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 OBriens point of view, I suppose we can say that Orwells 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 wasnt really transformed into a reasonable citizen of Oceania or that Winston was simply tortured into a passive acceptance of OBriens insanity. Winston, I also want to insist, was reasoned back to health; his return to the loving breast, as OBrien 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 nality of Winstons defeat deep in the bowels of the Ministry of Love is also a haunting feature of the story.


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The demise of Winstons 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 ction, readers are usually treated to a bit of optimism at the end. In Zamyatins We, for example, the revolution is on the verge of success at the storys close, and the One State seems headed for nal collapse. But there will be no such collapse in Oceania because the inner party wont 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 identication 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 Orwells 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 storyand he succeeded. Sometimes writers tell stories simply because they want to scare their audience, but of course there are dierent 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 ourished 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 oered 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: Dont 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

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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 Orwells purpose as a warning backed by a plea: Dont 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 Orwells warning triumphantly by saying, We didnt! 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 condence, 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 cant 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, OBrien. During his torture/cure at OBriens hands, Winston is taught a terrifying lesson about life in Oceania. The logic of Big Brother is nowhere more forcefully described than when OBrien 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


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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, OBrien continues in a fashion that signals Orwells fears about the end of history: But alwaysdo not forget this, Winstonalways 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. Oceaniain fact, all of humankind it would seemhas lost its struggle with political power in the novel. It is no longer domesticated or even able to be domesticated. It now rules without qualication or compromise, and it will continue to do so forever. If humankind succumbs to totalitarianism, there is no escaping itforever.

2This 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 specic 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.

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Im not concerned here with the rst 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 faceforever. 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 eective 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 dierent way) new technologies of power that are mastered and rened 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 Orwells 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 reections 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. Orwells account of these technologies and their use to eclipse the integrity of the independent individual could easily be taken as the most


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unsettling aspect of the entire novel. But his vivid portrayal of the eectiveness 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 Orwells 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 Actons famous quip that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. On the standard view, power corrupts because humans are too weak, too morally awed, 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 againan 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 ones 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 endin this case the egoand thus still seems to fall rather short of being an end in itself. This makes Orwells 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

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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 Orwells 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 dierent 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.

3By 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 signicance; they are crucial aspects of Orwells 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, Winstons love interest in the story, falls to sleep when Winston reads them to her. They may similarly have put many a nave 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 Goldsteins book, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism (Orwell, 1961: 15278). 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 Goldsteins book is ocially 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,


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Winston asks OBrien whether the materials in the book are true, and OBrien assures Winston that as a matter of description they are in fact quite true (Ibid.: 215). Goldsteins book tells us that political history is a story of conict 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 conict 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 Orwells account of class conict 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 conict continues apace, and readers are told that the jealousies of a new and emergent middle is responsible for all this. But Goldsteins 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 Goldsteins 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

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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 partythe 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 rene 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 rened and perfected; to resort once more to Hegelian jargon, the idea of tyranny has now fully manifest itselfthe rational has become the horrible, and the horrible has become the real. Goldsteins 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 eorts, 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 nally arise and unseat their oppressors is presented by Orwell as a feature of Winstons dementia, for Winston insists, even though he knows better, that the future


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lies with the proles. But as OBrien forcefully illustrates, if the future lies with the proles, there is no future. The people will not awaken politically and throw o the yoke of oppression, for the peopleboth the low and the middleare seemingly unaware of any oppression in anything approaching signicant 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. Orwells historical account of Oceania is hardly bereft of logic, but its logic turns Marxist optimism on its head. He oers 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, Orwells inner party, fathoms 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 Goldsteins book is not Orwells history/ future. The particulars are borrowed largely, if not entirely, from James Burnham, whose speculations about the inevitable rise of a managerial class caught Orwells attention on more than one occasion.4 Orwell found little merit in Burnhams 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 Orwells world was to not let this future come about.

4By the end of this book readers should understand why I think Orwells 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

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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 protably the political challenges we continue to face. Orwells confrontation with the problem of political power belongs to this category of political thought. As students of politics, we can learn from it, but rst we must decipher its lessons. And that is the purpose of this book. I have said that this is a book about Orwells book. By this I mean to signal that this is not a book about George Orwell or Eric BlairOrwells 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 Orwells story develops out of Orwells life and his other works. If we recur to thinking of Nineteen Eighty-Four as a culmination, of sorts, of Orwells political thinking, it becomes important to see how this culmination has grown out of his previous reections on politics. One way to do this is to consider his literary oerings 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 Orwells political thinking progresses, concerns that help congure his literary journey. First of all, we need to become familiar with Orwells 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 nally, 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 Orwells political claims. Orwell scholars may object that I have ignored certain aspects of Orwells life or distorted others, but such objections are of no concern to me because Im not really concerned with Orwell/Blair the writer. Im concerned instead with what Orwell wrote, and my aim is to tell a coherent story about the political thought I nd there. Orwells work, especially Nineteen Eighty-Four interests me, as a political theorist, because Im interested in the political paradox I nd at the center of Orwells 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


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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 Orwells novel, my medium corresponds with its message, and if it happens that Ive gotten Orwell wrong (whatever that might mean), I make no apologies as long as my political message is relatively clear.

Notes1. This is hardly the only book that has been written about Orwells book (Cf. Lief, 1969; Steinho, 1975); nor is it likely to be the last. But unlike previous books, Im not inclined to explore the literary origins of the story; instead, my aim is to analyze and assess its political signicance. 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 Zamyatins 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 nally managed to procure a French translationthe French title is Nous Autresand his review is based upon this. Of course, it is also easy to overestimate the inuence Zamyatins work had on Orwell, and no doubt several works of ction substantially inuenced the construction of Orwells novel. See Steinho, 1975: 329. 4. See James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution (1941), and The Machiavellians (1943). For Burnhams inuence on Orwell, see Christopher Hollis, (1956), and Michael Maddison, (1961). Orwells most extensive discussion of Burnham is James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution, (Orwell, 1968c:16081).

2The Moral ImaginationEdmund 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. Rousseaus moral disappointment in his fellow man inspired him to think about how humankind might outgrow its corruption and get on a proper moral track. Orwells 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. Rousseaus moral angst, coupled no doubt with his advancing paranoia, sent him toward misanthropy near the end of his life. Orwells premature death left his moral critique unnished and his moral quandary unresolved. It may also have spared him Rousseaus misanthropy, though Orwell retained a fondness throughout his life for the ordinary working sti, 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 Rousseaus political thought, one must rst 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 Orwells political thought is with the moral instincts16

The Moral Imagination

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

1Where on earth do moralists come from? Why, that is, are some peoplea rare breed it seemsinclined to expect moral decency from their fellow human beings and to suer a form of moral indignation when their expectations are not fullled? 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 nd 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 nd 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 congure Orwells political thought.

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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 wellenough 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 eorts. 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 naivet characteristic of the moralist, that his readers should care about all this. As Orwell tells it, he initially encountered indecency at Crossgates, the ctionalized 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 rst 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 nding 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 familys social station. This made all the dierence; he just didnt t 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 specic virtues valued not only by the schoolmasters but also by his fellow students. Here Orwell can speak for himself:


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By the social standards that prevailed about me, I was no good, and could not be any good. But all the dierent 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: 356) In academic terms, Orwell was reasonably successful in school, but he could not shake o the stigma of class dierence 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, Orwells italics). Whether true or not, this perception is indicative of Orwells 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 dierence of status and worth. The wealthy are not just richer than the members of the lower classes, they are, in some seemingly undened 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 ones birthright allowed one to be. Because Orwell lacked the proper class status, he supposed he must be decient 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 hardattributes 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 ones place, and with it, ones role in society. Here one discovers ones

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future and ones worth in the social scheme of things. Individual merit and personal achievement dont matter; all that matters is the product of birthright. The class/caste system sees to this. This introduces the rst and perhaps primary source of the moral indecency that so outraged Orwell. The social world is divided, and ones 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 dont know if this is invariably characteristic of the moralist, but it certainly introduces another bond between Orwell and Rousseau.

2Whether 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 childs 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 Rousseaus confessions, also have a more theoretical purpose; they both illustrate and personalize the indecency that haunts a world whose citizens should know better. They oer 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.


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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 aw 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 suers with his throbbing ulcer. But still, these are not altogether bad people; if they suer a degree of shame, they are hardly wicked. Perhaps one never really likes themthey seem to whine a bit too muchbut 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 Orwells 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 suered 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. Florys ght, and his nal failure, are typical of the various battles, and the inevitable defeats, Orwells characters invariably experience. Flory is unique among the Englishmen who inhabit the European club in Orwells 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 ocial pressure on the members of the European Club to admit a native Burman to their ranks. The overt racism of the other English

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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 novels end, U Po Kyins 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 Orwells 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 rulerule made possible and calm in the end by English armsis 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 specic 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. Orwells 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


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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 eectively? Could he have successfully championed Dr. Veraswami at the Club and secured his election? His failing was that he could not eectively hide the skeletons in his own closet; he could not escape the implications of his aair 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 dierent 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 Florys 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

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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 aair with the woman cost him any chance he had to marry Elizabeth, and he could not endure the public shame he had suered at the hands, ultimately, of U Po Kyins cunning. Florys attention to the Burmese, symbolized both by his association with Dr. Veraswami and his aair 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 dierent when it came to Elizabeth. Orwell provides no indication in the story to suppose that U Po Kyin was privy to Florys 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 Floryand good luck for U Po Kyin. Flory would likely have been able to live with the shame of his aair 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 ClubU Po Kyins intended outcome. Yet, in spite of Florys 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 oended 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 denite things. To come all that way, rie in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothingno that was impossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white mans life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at. (Orwell, 1946a: 153)


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Flory ultimately suered 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 ocially presents the predicament he faced in this situation as something of a moral dilemma: Was shooting the elephant justied 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 doesnt 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 facehow one is seen by othersmatters 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 aair 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 eectively, not by shooting the elephant, but by walking away from a thoroughly indecent enterprise.

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3If 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 inthe subject of his early political writingsbut in the novelty of his eort 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 peoples idea of the kind of society that they should strive after (Ibid.: 31213). 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, Orwells italics). If there is simplicity in thisand if there is, it need not be a viceit is because it makes the moral world into a fairly simple place. Indecency exists, and in Orwells later years he thought it to wear the mask of totalitarianism. But decency also exists, and the problem is to nd 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 childs morality play, and to expose things in this light is the rst 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


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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 rst glance looks like an enormous platitude: If men would behave decently the world be decent (Orwell, 1946a: 52). And Orwells 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 Dickenss platitude in 1948, when he nished 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 progressthe 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. Progresspolitical progresshappens, 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 problemhow to prevent power from being abusedremains unsolved (Ibid.: 65). By the time we get to Goldsteins 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 Orwells 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

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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, Orwells attraction to moralism inclined him to pay a powerful tribute to poor Dickens. Why does Dickens endure as a writer of signicance? Orwell answers this by insisting, But in his own age and ours he has been popular chiey because he was able to express in a comic, simplied 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, Orwells 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 snued out by even the most egregious indecency. Such must be the case if the moralist is to have any hope. A basic senseOrwell supposes it to be an emotionof 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 Orwells 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 cant 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 Winstons 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.


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There is no longer any place for the idea of freedom and equality in his emotional make-up. The only remaining emotion is what OBrien 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 nave 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, Orwells 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 rm ground with his rather nave 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 brotherhoodour sense of decencytriggered by occasional artistic renditions of grotesque injustice of the sort on display in Dickens, perhaps, or in Orwells later ction. 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

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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 sucient 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 eective is to turn to theory and oer 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 isnt very eective. In Nineteen Eighty-Four we learn that Orwell gured out that there wasnt 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.

4Rousseaus 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 diculties surrounding the matter, diculties that Orwell only slowly came to notice. Orwells reading of the moral situation of his day was not unlike Rousseaus. Rousseau supposed, perhaps with a bit of justication, 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 dierent and selsh sense. Humankind has been corrupted by society; selshness, he supposed, had come to dominate human behavior. Social power, we might say with deliberate obscurity, has had a corrupting aect 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 inuence on human action; for this decency is juxtaposed


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by a dierent sort of emotion, an unseemly sense of self-love Rousseau calls amour propr (Rousseau, 1979: 418 and passim). Absent the proper moral education, amour propr is likely to dominate the self and incline people to become selsh egoists who prot 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, Orwells 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 freedomideals championed by Rousseau as well as Orwellare possible only

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