"Many
societies in fiction are depicted as utopias when in fact they are
dystopias; like angels and demons, the two are sides of the same coin.
This seemingly paradoxical situation can arise because, in a dystopia,
the society often gives up A in exchange for B, but the benefit of B
blinds the society to the loss of A; it is often not until many years
later that the loss of A is truly felt, and the citizens come to realize
that the world they once thought acceptable (or even ideal) is not the
world they thought it was. That’s part of what is so compelling—and
insidious—about dystopian fiction: the idea that you could be living in a
dystopia and not even know it."
John Joseph Adams
American
society has been sliding toward the realm of dystopian science fiction —
toward a nightmarish mishmash of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Philip K. Dick
— since at least the early years of the Reagan administration, and
arguably a lot longer than that. (Since Watergate? The Kennedy
assassination? The A-bomb? Take your pick.) We may have finally gotten
there. We live in a country that embodies three different dystopian
archetypes at once: America is partly a panopticon
surveillance-and-security state, as in Orwell, partly an anesthetic and
amoral consumer wonderland, as in Huxley, and partly a grand rhetorical
delusion or “spectacle,” as in Dick or “The Matrix” or certain currents of French philosophy.
Let’s
step away from the brainiac analysis for a second and give full credit
to the small-town Republican and war hero who warned us about what was
coming, more than 50 years ago. In his 1961 farewell address,
President Dwight "Ike" Eisenhower spoke gravely about “the potential for the
disastrous rise of misplaced power” that lay in the coming coalition
between “the military-industrial complex” and “the
scientific-technological elite.” It would require “an alert and
knowledgeable citizenry,” Ike cautioned, to make sure this combination
did not “endanger our liberties or democratic processes.” As we say
these days: Our bad.
I can’t find any direct evidence that Eisenhower had ever read Orwell’s “1984” or Huxley’s “Brave New World,”
let alone that they shaped his insights into the heretical possibility
that the alternative to Soviet-style Communism might turn out to be just
as bad in its own way. Ike wasn’t the country bumpkin that many East
Coast intellectuals of that era assumed him to be (English was his best
subject at West Point), but he favored history and biography over
literature and philosophy. His dire and all too prescient vision of the
American future was no doubt drawn from the cultural climate around him,
so perhaps he can be said to have absorbed the Orwellian vision by
osmosis and made it his own. (Intriguingly, his granddaughter Susan
Eisenhower, an eminent foreign policy expert, seems aware of the connection and cites “1984” as a formative influence on her own career.)
After the recent revelations about grandiose NSA domestic surveillance campaigns, complete with PowerPoint presentations
that look like material from an unreleased mid-‘90s satire by Paul
Verhoeven, we learned that sales of one recent edition of Orwell’s
“1984” had apparently spiked
by almost 7,000 percent on Amazon. Are these facts actually connected?
Are these facts even facts? There’s no way to be sure, which may
illustrate how difficult it is to know or understand anything amid the
onslaught of pseudo-information. Maybe our current situation (as many
Twitter users observed) owes more to Franz Kafka than to Orwell.
If
people are really going to read “1984,” instead of just throwing it
around as a reference, that can only be a good thing. (You can also
watch Michael Radford’s excellent film version, with John Hurt and
Richard Burton – actually released in 1984! — online right now.)
It’s a devastating novel by one of the best writers of English prose of
the last century, and a work that shaped both the thinking and the
vocabulary of our age. But as a predictor or manual for the age of
permanent war, permanent political paralysis and Total Information Awareness (Adm. John Poindexter’s much-mocked predecessor to PRISM), it gives you only part of the story.
If
the technology of the national security state has finally caught up
with, and indeed surpassed, anything imagined by Orwell’s Big Brother,
who must rely on two-way “telescreens” and regular old secret agents to
keep tabs on every citizen, the context is almost entirely different.
Writing in the immediate aftermath of World War II, Orwell imagined an
indefinite combination of postwar British poverty and austerity mixed
with the drab, monochromatic austerity of the Soviet Union during the
worst of the Stalin years. He was also imagining the aftermath of a
future world-transforming war that would be even worse than the last
one. Although it’s more widely understood as a political metaphor,
“1984” also points the way toward “Planet of the Apes,” “The Hunger
Games” and countless other post-apocalyptic visions.
Our own
society, with its endless array of electronic gizmos, opulent luxury
goods and a vibrant and/or morbid pop culture capable of invading every
waking moment (and the sleeping ones too), looks nothing like that. At
least on its surface, it more closely resembles the pharmaceutically
cushioned, caste-divided and slogan-nourished Dr. Phil superstate of
Huxley’s “Brave New World,” which is built around constant distraction
and consumption and in which all desire for transcendence and
spirituality can be answered with chemicals. But we certainly don’t live
in the atheistic, full-employment command economy envisaged by Huxley
either — he was imagining an unholy technocratic union of Lenin and
Henry Ford — even if many people on the right remain convinced that
Barack Obama is leading us there.
For a long time, especially in
the ‘80s and ‘90s, it was customary for intellectuals who addressed the
differences and similarities between Orwell and Huxley to assert that
“1984” had not come true and that Huxley had come closer to predicting,
as Christopher Hitchens put, it the “painless, amusement-sodden, and
stress-free consensus” and “blissed-out and vacant servitude” of the
postmodern age. I think the best of these comes from Neil Postman’s
withering assessment in the foreword to “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” a landmark work of cultural criticism published in 1985:
What
Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was
that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one
who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of
information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would
be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would
be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea
of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley
feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some
equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal
bumblepuppy.
That’s wonderfully vivid writing, but
almost three decades later the question doesn’t look quite so clear-cut.
What I see in the paradoxical America of 2013 still looks like Huxley
on the surface, with Orwell making a strong comeback underneath. Banning
books has largely proven both impractical and unnecessary, as Postman
says (which is not to say it doesn’t happen here and there). But as we
have seen more than once recently, the government’s security forces and
even more sinister pals in the private sector guard their secrets
fervently, and react with fury when some of them are exposed. The truth
can be kept from us and also drowned in irrelevance, and what Postman
calls a trivial culture (Postman’s argument, here and elsewhere, has
more than a whiff of anti-pop snobbery) can also be a captive culture.
In
many respects American culture, seen from the inside, is more diverse,
tolerant and interesting than ever before. Yet the American nation-state
seems to be in terminal decline. It is politically ungovernable,
bitterly divided by class, caste, region and ideology. The executive
branch and the “military-industrial complex” have expanded exponentially
since Eisenhower’s day, accumulating more and more power where it can’t
be seen. Read carefully through the recent news about the NSA
revelations and you can see a few tendrils of this stuff: We know more
than we did two weeks ago, but there are still entire government
agencies whose names and missions are unknown, and programs so secret
that Congress votes to fund them without knowing what they do. On the
international stage, America plays a grotesque supervillain role,
blundering from nation to nation like Robocop in an endless war that has
yielded only hatred and mockery. Radical Islam has always been our
enemy, except when our enemy has always been Communism.
In 1946,
two years before writing “1984,” Orwell wrote an essay about the new
form of social organization he saw on the horizon. He predicted it would
do away with private property, which didn’t happen – but if we suppose
that his idea of private property meant individual autonomy and freedom
from debt slavery, this starts to sound more familiar:
These
people will eliminate the old capitalist class, crush the working
class, and so organize society that all power and economic privilege
remain in their own hands. Private property rights will be abolished,
but common ownership will not be established. The new “managerial”
societies will not consist of a patchwork of small, independent states,
but of great super-states grouped round the main industrial centres in
Europe, Asia, and America. These super-states will fight among
themselves for possession of the remaining uncaptured portions of the
earth, but will probably be unable to conquer one another completely.
Internally, each society will be hierarchical, with an aristocracy of
talent at the top and a mass of semi-slaves at the bottom.
That
vision of the future, so much more sober than what we’re used to
calling “Orwellian,” sounds eerily like the world we actually live in
(with a few doses of Ayn Rand thrown in). So far as we know, our
Huxley-Orwell hybrid society emerged organically from the end of the
Cold War, rather than resulting from an apocalypse or a grand plan. It’s
almost a case of life imitating art, as if Earth’s rulers had selected
the most effective elements from various dystopian visions and
strategically blended them. But I’m not sure we can blame all this on a
secret meeting of the Bilderberg Group,
or some Lee Atwater ad campaign. As in “The Matrix,” we chose the
simulacrum of democracy and bumper stickers about “freedom” instead of
the real things. We chose to believe that our political leaders stood
for something besides rival castes within the ruling elite, chose to
believe that a regime of torture and secrecy and endless global warfare
was a rational response to the tragedy of 9/11. We still believe those
things, but our dystopia is still messy, still incoherent, still
incomplete. Which means, in theory, that it can still be undone.
(More Andrew O'heir articles here.)
OneLove
:::MME:::
