1985 (10 page)

What, then, is the good act? To clothe the naked, tend the sick, feed the hungry, teach the ignorant. These separate acts add up to a concern with promoting, or restoring, in a living organism its native capacity to act freely within the limits of its natural environment. These acts are always good, but they are not always right. Ignorance is strength, says Ingsoc. The Nazis said: let the Jews shiver, starve and die. The good act admits no differentiation of race or species in its object. It is good to mend the broken wing of a bird or to save the life of a
Gauleiter
. The goodness of the saint is characterized by total disinterestedness; the goodness of lesser beings may have motives mixed, unaware, not clearly understood; but the good act tends to grow wild and be unrelated to expediency, policy or law. The good intention, as we know too well, may have evil consequences. Charles Dickens, involved in a train crash, went around pouring brandy indiscriminately down the throats of the injured, thus killing several. He was not, however, a murderer. But the capacity to perform the truly good act is related to a high degree of intelligence and knowledge. Progress may be regarded as a gradual increase in human capacity to understand motivation and free good intentions from the evil of ignorance.

Evil, in its purest form, shares with good this attribute of disinterestedness. If good is concerned with promoting the ability in a living organism to act freely, evil must be dedicated to taking such freedom away. If we are Pelagians, we accept that man has total liberty of moral
choice. To remove that choice is to dehumanize. Evil is at its most spectacular when it enjoys turning a living soul into a manipulable object. To confer death is evil enough, but torture has always been regarded as worse. The State has a considerable interest in dehumanizing. It tends to arrogate to itself all matters of moral choice, and it does not care much to see the individual making up his own mind. It is essential that men in power maintain a distinction between the will of the ruler and the will of the ruled. The will of the ruler must, ideally, be totally free; that of the ruled of a greater or lesser freedom, according to the greater or lesser autocratic nature of the State. The State is the instrument whereby the ruler manifests power over the ruled. In so far as this instrument must meet as little opposition as possible in performing its function, it may be said that evil as manifested in the State can never be wholly disinterested. But Orwell's cacotopia represents the establishment of an authority so sure of itself that it can afford to find its chief delight in committing evil for its own sake – that is to say, slowly, deliberately, systematically reducing men and women to gibbering subhuman creatures screaming under torture. This is the ultimate cacotopia, to which Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and a host of little autocracies have tended but which they have never been able to achieve.

It is perhaps typical of Orwell's wholly secular culture that he could see the possibility of evil only in the State. Evil was not for the individual: original sin was a doctrine to be derided. Orwell's Socialism permitted, even insisted, that man should be capable of moral as well as economic improvement. His Augustinian pessimism only applied to that projection of man known as the oligarchical State. The State is the devil, but there is no God. The view that evil is somehow outside the individual still persists in a West that has discarded all but the rags of its traditional beliefs. Evil is accepted, to be seen in the My-Lai massacre, in the Charles Manson slaughters, in the daily rapes and murders that animate the streets of major American cities. But it is comforting to believe that this evil is not built into the human entity, as Augustine taught,' but comes from without, like a disease. The devil and his attendant demons own the monopoly of evil, and they are concerned with possessing human souls and lighting them up with all the panoply of evil, from blasphemy to cannibalism. They can, perhaps, be exorcised. But evil does not grow in man himself. The superstitious feel happier
about their own back-slidings if they can attribute them to the Father of Lies. The Orwellians blame it all on Big Brother.

Orwell seemed to believe that the real world, as opposed to that of his feverish and genuinely diseased imagination, was moving in the direction of bigger and worse cacotopias. States would grow greater and more powerful. Equipped with the most devilish technology of oppression, they would more and more reduce the individual to a gibbering humanoid. The future presented an unequal contest between man and the State, and man's defeat would be humiliating and total. We must now see if his prophecy is coming true.

How does today's world of international politics compare with the one that Orwell envisaged?

Very different. There are superpowers, but they don't find it easy to exercise control over the lesser states. The lesser states have not been absorbed into the big ones. The post-war age has been remarkable for the spirit of devolution, uncountable acts of decolonization, the setting up of a host of independent tyrannies, oligarchies and genuine democracies. True, we talk much of spheres of influence, interlocking systems and so on, but there are no great centralized blocs on the Orwell model, all sharing similar ideologies. And where does the power lie? The literal power that drives machines sleeps in Islamic oil. To Orwell, the Middle East was to be merely part of the trapezial zone of cheap labour for the superstates to quarrel over. Islam is one of the genuine superstates, with a powerful religious ideology whose mailed first punched Christendom in the Dark Ages and may yet reimpose itself on a West drained, thanks to the Second Vatican Council, of solid and belligerent belief.

Dear dear. But you have to admit that the main outlines of Orwell's prophecy have come true. America, Russia and China will do, surely, for the three great nightmare powers, armed to the teeth, ready for explosion
.

But not exploding. There've been no dangerous naked encounters. Logomachies, yes, but no nuclear attacks on New York or Moscow or Peking.

No condition of perpetual warfare?

Two minor wars a year on average, true. India fights Pakistan, Israel fights Egypt, Jordan fights Syria. Shooting matches in Palestine, Cyprus, Kenya, Aden, Java, Indo-China, Algeria, Angola, Mozambique, Goa, Tibet, Nigeria, Greece, Dutch New Guinea, the Congo. But no engagement of the superpowers, except by proxy. Korea and Vietnam. So-called Russian advisers on the Golan Heights in 1967. Both Russians and Chinese training the guerrillas of the People's Liberation Front in South
Yemen. But Russian forces have only been directly and openly involved in their own sphere of action – to counter the East German rising of 1953, to put down the Hungarians in 1956, the Czechs in 1968.

But there's the germ of Orwell's Eurasia –sovietized Europe
.

How much of Europe? Western Europe became sick of authoritarianism after not only Hitler but years of Prussianism, Hapsburgism. Russia could only build Eurasia by force. And Russia's scared of using too much force. So is America. The great paradox of the period since 1945 has been the intrepidity of the little nations in the waging of little wars and the reluctance of the great powers to face each other directly.

Those looked to me very much like direct encounters, or very nearly so – the Korean armistice in 1953, the missile business in Cuba in 1962
.

But the assumption that Orwell made, and he wasn't the only one – big atomic war to be followed by a thug's agreement to keep a limited conventional warfare going – seems to belong to a very remote past. We all feared the Bomb once: it was our daily nightmare. Look at the literature that came out of the late forties and the fifties. Take Aldous Huxley's
Ape and Essence
with its picture of post-Bomb Southern California reverted to savagery, with mutated freaks killed at birth, seasonal sex, the Lord of the Flies, Bomb-bringer, appeased with prayers and sacrifice. Take L. P. Hartley's
Facial Justice
, with a guilt-ridden post-atomic world in which everybody is named after a murderer and all human enterprise is blocked, because all we do is evil. Take
Dr Strangelove
, as late as the early sixties. Take novels like
Fail-Safe.
Orwell failed to see that the terror would come about before a nuclear war could get started. So did everybody else.

He failed to see, also, that mere atomic bombs would be quickly followed by thermonuclear devices of far ghastlier potential. I suppose you could sum up the nuclear age like this – the big powers scared to act except vicariously, or in minor acts of punition in their own spheres of influence; the little nations warring around the immobile feet of the giants. The giants aware of the ease with which the ultimate blast could be triggered, aware too of the consequences – not millions of dead people but a macrotonnage of ruined electronic equipment on both, or all, sides; the pygmies innocent in their belligerence
.

Not innocent so much as shrewdly aware of how far they can go. And how far their economies will permit them to go. It's interesting to note, by the way, that the Orwell war rationale hasn't worked in the nuclear age. I mean the using-up of the products of the industrial machine in
wasteful war, in order to keep the standard of living low. That notion came from Nazi Germany – guns not butter. The American economy has been marked by colossal expenditure on armaments accompanied by an ever-growing consumption of pacific commodities. It's as though the intercontinental missile and the colour television set reside in the same area of economic expansion. In the modern age you can't keep the two kinds of ingenuity apart – the lethal and the allegedly life-enhancing. Indeed, it's possible to sum up part of the age in terms of a synthesis of the two – you know what I mean, the cosy television evening with the Vietnam war as part of the chromatic entertainment. The American war adventures have been tied up with teaching the world the merits of consumption. Nothing Orwellian there.

But something Orwellian in American imperialism – the building of a kind of Oceania with the centres of power, as with Ingsoc, curiously hidden, dispersed and anonymous. The CIA a kind of Thought Police. The doublethink of democracy, self-determination, freedom of speech and action reconciled with bullying and brutality. A free Francophone Canada? Unthinkable, shoot the dissidents. Too much American capital invested in Our Lady of the Snows. A communist government in Italy? Not to be thought of. I, a harmless British apolitical writer living in Rome, was well aware that the CIA was tapping my telephone. Doing their job, in the name of global freedom, the travelling men of the Thought Police
.

Let's be sensible. There's nothing in the traditions of the United States which predisposes them to authoritarianism on the European model. The hysterical anti-communism of the fifties can be seen as a symptom, though an unpleasant and dangerous one, of an ingrained hatred of centralized authority. You can't deny that America did a great deal to promote democratic self-determination in western Europe. Truman, Acheson, Marshall Aid. There was a kind of arrogant assumption on America's part that she knew best, that God had endowed her with a moral superiority that was the reward of an enlightened democratic tradition, but that's very different from collectivist tyranny.

Well, one thing is true, and this is that authoritarianism is no monopoly of the big powers. Africa is full of nasty little tyrannies. Territories that were supposed to have groaned under the colonial yoke gained liberation only to set up dictatorships. Go to Singapore, where Mr Lee presides over a clean unmalarial heaven of free trade. His political opponents are in jail or abroad on courses of what is called self-education. The police drag long-haired youths to compulsory barber-chairs. The media have that bland, uncontroversial quality you associate with Franco's
Spain – society weddings, bonny babies, kittens in ribbons. Cinematic candour is called pornography. I lived in Malta for a few years in an atmosphere of censored books and banned films, lingerie advertisements solemnly snipped out of imported British newspapers so that the youth of Malta might not be inflamed. The Maltese government confiscated my house, still full as it was of possibly incriminating books and papers. There are a host of repressive governments everywhere, their tyranny animated by the hypocrisy of doing what is considered ‘best for the people'. O'Brien's candid admission that Ingsoc seeks power for its own sake is, compared with the small tyrannical liars, positively healthy
.

Let's think of the bigger, older, genuine democracies for a moment. What we ought to be looking for is signs of inroads on personal freedom. There's no doubt that technologies of oppression exist, of a kind that makes Orwell's snooping Thought Police seem very primitive. Now what worries me is the difficulty of making up my mind about these technologies. I don't want to be led into condemning technology in itself. Take the computer. Norbert Wiener and Warren McCulloch developed it as an aspect of legitimate philosophical investigation into the way the brain works – see how far a machine can simulate a human brain, and then what's left over is the essentially human – but it was inevitable that cybernetics should become a
useful
science, and we all know how usefulness tends to be interpreted – in terms of control over what can be controlled, and that mostly means human beings.

A computer is a neutral thing. Information is a neutral commodity. The more information we have the better. That's the way I look at memory banks and so on
.

But once the State gets hold of computers it's led on to the inevitable path of amassing information about its citizens. I don't know whether that's bad in itself, but I'm thinking of what happened in 1971 in safe, free, democratic little England –

You mean the Census?

Look at the things the State wanted to know. Status of head of household, relationship to other members of household, how many cars owned, did the cook have an oven, was the toilet inside the house, country of origin, country of parents' origin, previous addresses, education, marital status, number of children, and so on. Some refused to fill in the form, but the vast majority meekly complied. 800 tons of paper, 105 000 enumerators, £10 000 000 of the taxpayers' money. But only 500 prosecutions. There was a maximum fine of £50 for not answering
questions. Alan Sillitoe, the novelist, gave his age as a hundred and one and was fined £25. A man of seventy-three and a woman of sixty-six weren't able to pay the fine attendant on their passion for privacy, so both went to prison. Then it was revealed by the department of the Registrar General that some of this secret information was going to be leaked to commercial organizations. One firm said boastfully that it would have details of 90 per cent of the entire population on its computers by 1980. The police easily get access to this kind of stored information. 152 800 people who'd been patients in psychiatric hospitals have had the most intimate details of their lives computerized. Intelligence levels, whether or not they've ever been in prison, the degree of constraint necessary to get them there, a full diagnosis of the mental ailment, special slots for details of drug addiction, epilepsy, alcoholism –