1985 (14 page)

Evidently the Party uses techniques learnt from Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany to induce states of hopelessness and emptiness, out of which the voluntary confession of crimes uncommitted and the postures of maudlin repentance will come. And Room 101 represents the crude ultimate in mechanistic terrorization, for ‘the worst thing in the world' cannot be withstood, no matter what the inner resources of the sufferer. The technique depends on irrationality, the reflex response to a stimulus which varies from subject to subject – rats for Winston, snakes or black beetles or the noise of fingernails on velvet for another, the materials of terror chosen after loving consideration of idiosyncratic phobias. It is spectacular but implausible.

Implausible in its operation, to judge from Winston's response. The starving rats are about to be unleashed on him: they will jump on his face, tear open his mouth and start to devour his tongue. All that will stop O'Brien's opening their cage is Winston's utterance of the right words. He has not betrayed his mistress; now he must ask that she be eaten by the rats, not he. It is enough. The rats are called off. He has now betrayed everything and everybody. He is cured. And yet we know that enforced betrayal is not betrayal at all, that the conscience will quickly enough exculpate itself, blaming instead the machinery of the nerves that is not in the control of the intellect, and that an even stronger fidelity – reinforced by renewed hatred of the manipulators – will ensue. In fact, Ingsoc's knowledge of the techniques of breaking down individual resistance is crude and elementary. Yet this is in accordance with a philosophy based on doublethink. Big Brother both wants and does not want to be in total control. The victim is not a true victim if he is not allowed a modicum of hope.

The victory of the State over Winston Smith is not achieved through a systematic, or Pavlovian, reduction of his personality to the status of a mere mass of conditioned reflexes. As Orwell makes clear, he has to
conquer his resistance to Big Brother through the exercise of his own will, with some help from the Ministry of Love. He has to be shown the inadequacy of his own mental resources, which, in comparison with the rigorous metaphysics of the Party, are nothing – a mere bundle of inchoate velleities and catchphrases. He has been shown his essential emptiness, and now he knows that it must be filled with the only thing available to fill it – devotion to the Party and love of Big Brother. Ingsoc depends, then, on a kind of exercise of free will, for acceptance of its authority is nothing unless it is free acceptance.

Winston, during an evening spent at the club, has to listen to an imbecilic lecture on the relationship between Ingsoc and chess. We do not know what the content of the lecture is, but we do know that there is something chess-like about the relationship between the State and its members, as there is something chess-like also in the intellectual techniques which sustain the system. To use doublethink is to play chess – planning a strategy of thought and taking into account its unexpected disruption by an unforeseen move from the Party; to use Newspeak is to play a complex game with a limited number of semantic pieces. The game played by the State against Winston has had prescribed moves if no limitation on length: he has been granted freedom of manoeuvre, but he has had no hope of prevailing against the stronger player. At the end of the story, Winston sits in the Chestnut Tree Café4, pondering a chess problem in
The Times –
white to mate in so many moves:

Winston looked up at the portrait of Big Brother. White always mates, he thought with a sort of cloudy mysticism. Always, without exception, it is so arranged. In no chess problem since the beginning of the world has black ever won. Did it not symbolize the eternal, unvarying triumph of Good over Evil?. . . . White always mates.

White always mates because the better player has opted for the white pieces. But black is free to win if he can.

In that its citizens are free to play the game of memory control, of working out the devices of orthodoxy, the Orwellian State bears a direct relation to the one in which English Socialism, not Ingsoc, operates. Human souls have not been modified, prenatally or through infantile
conditioning, as they have in the
Brave New World
of Aldous Huxley. Orwell rightly saw that the neo-Pavlovian society, with its members incapable of unhappiness through sexual or social frustration, lacked that dynamic of conflict which animates real totalitarianism – a conflict dependent on the individual's awareness of the impairment of free will at the hands of the tyrant. On the other hand, it did not occur to him that the sustention of power could itself be a product of conditioning, that the Alpha-plus executive of the World State could no more break out of his predestined slot than could the Gamma-minus street-sweeper. Orwell was an inveterate proponent of free will, and even made his nightmare out of it. That Huxley's Utopia should be based on happiness rather than fear seemed to him to indicate a lack of élan. You cannot have dictatorship without misery.

The techniques for total manipulation of the human soul were in existence in 1932, when
Brave New World
first appeared. Ivan Petrovich Pavlov had four years more to live, he had done his work, and had been able to see something of the possibilities of its social application. Like his fellow-countryman Bakunin, Pavlov was the product of a great phase of intellectual optimism which could not be held back by Czarist repression – indeed, censorship and obscurantism were a positive stimulus to the revolution of thought. Bakunin believed that men were already good; Pavlov believed that men could be made good. A materialist of the true nineteenth-century brand, he saw the human brain as an organ, in Wundt's words, secreting thought as the liver secretes bile, and no more of a mystery to the scientific investigator than any other organ of the body. The brain, seat of thought and emotion, instigator of action, could be probed, cut about, radically altered, but it must always be altered in the direction of a more efficient mechanism, a machine dedicated to the improvement of its owner's functioning as a human organism. This was the ultimate Pelagianism. The perfectibility of man should be not merely a pious aspiration but a scientific programme. He worked on dogs and discovered that their reflexes could be conditioned: ring a bell when bringing food and the dog will salivate: ring a bell without bringing food and the dog will still salivate. The potentialities of this discovery were enormous, and Huxley saw them clearly. In
Brave New World
, infants of the lowest social group must be made to hate consumer goods they can never afford to buy. Children are encouraged to crawl towards highly coloured toys with gurgles of delight; as they start to touch them, electric
bells shrill, sirens hoot, electric shocks are given off by the toys themselves. A few sessions of such conditioning, and the children will hate toys. In the same way, in maturity, they can be made to loathe champagne and caviar-surrogate. This is negative conditioning, conditioning employed in the service of rejection, but positive conditioning is used too. Make sweet scents and lovely music arise out of dustbins and the child is ready to be a life-long refuse operative.

The Soviet State wished to remake man and, if one knows Russians, one can sympathize. Pavlov deplored the wild-eyed, sloppy, romantic, undisciplined, inefficient, anarchic texture of the Russian soul, at the same time admiring the cool reasonableness of Anglo-Saxons. Lenin deplored it too, but it still exists. Faced with the sloth of the waiters in Soviet restaurants (sometimes three hours between taking the order and fulfilling it), the manic depression of Soviet taxi-drivers, the sobs and howls of Soviet drunks, one can sometimes believe that without communism this people could not have survived. But one baulks, with a shudder, at the Leninist proposal to rebuild, with Pavlov's assistance, the entire Russian character, thus making the works of Chekhov and Dostoyevsky unintelligible to readers of the far future.

Lenin gave orders that Pavlov and his family should be lodged in capitalist luxury, fed with special rations, and that every possible technical facility should be granted the master, so that he could devise ways of manufacturing Soviet Man. Pavlov went on working with his dogs (‘How like a dog is man,' as Shakespeare, if he had read B. F. Skinner, might have said), looking for the seeds of life in the cerebral cortex, afflicting the creatures with diseases of the nervous system in order that he might, with the utmost tenderness (for nobody loved dogs as Pavlov did) cure them. Meanwhile the Soviet police followed up hints about the induction of neuroses, the driving of the Russian soul to breaking-point. And the ancient point was being made about nothing in itself being good or bad, only the way in which fallible human beings use it. Certainly, humanism was being given the lie: man can be changed; the criminal can be turned into a reasonable citizen; the dissident can become orthodox; the obdurate rebel can be broken. But Soviet Man was not made.

We hear less of Pavlovianism these days than of Skinnerism. B. F. Skinner, a practising behavioural psychologist, teaches, and has written in his book
Beyond Freedom and Dignity
, about the conditions under
which human society can alone survive, and these involve changing man through a battery of positive reinforcements. It is never enough to demonstrate to man, on the assumption that he is a rational creature, the rational disadvantages of losing his aggressive tendencies and developing a social conscience. Only by associating a particular mode of behaviour with pleasure can it be made to seem desirable. The other, negative, way, whereby people associate an opposed mode of behaviour with pain, is inhumane. But there is something in all of us that is unconcerned with the manner in which circus animals are trained – whether with sugar lumps or the whip; it is the training itself that disturbs us. We make a distinction between schooling and conditioning. If a child plays truant or shuts his ears or throws ink-pellets at his teacher, this at least is evidence of free will. There is something in all of us that warms to the recalcitrant pupil. But to consider hypnopaedia, or sleep-teaching (which also features in
Brave New World
), cradle conditioning, adolescent reflex bending, and the rest of the behavioural armoury, is to be appalled at the loss, even if rewarded with sugar lumps, of individual liberty. Skinner's title appals in itself. Beyond truth, beyond beauty, beyond goodness, beyond God, beyond life. Big Brother does not go so far.

Arthur Koestler, a man who has endured communist incarceration and torture, and hence is disposed to horror at the very thought of brain manipulation, nevertheless now seems to believe that something will have to be done to change humanity if humanity is to survive. The dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki started a new era – one in which we face the possibility of the death of the race. Because of his strange cerebral make-up, the horror created by man can be the means of destroying man: the supreme product of reason is in the hands of unreason. In his book
Janus
Koestler points to the ‘paranoid split between rational thinking and irrational, emotion-based beliefs' and suggests that something went terribly wrong in the biological evolution of
Homo sapiens
. He cites the theory of Dr Paul D. MacLean, of the National Institute for Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, to the effect that man was endowed by nature with three brains – a reptilian one, one inherited from the lower mammals, and a third, a late mammalian development, ‘which has made man peculiarly man'. These three brains will not gear with each other: the term
schizophysiological
has to be applied to man's central nervous system: man is a diseased creature.

‘Man can leave the earth and land on the moon,' says Koestler, ‘but
cannot cross from East to West Berlin. Prometheus reaches for the stars with an insane grin on his face and a totem-symbol in his hand.' It is not just a matter of inability on the part of the neocortex to control the old animal brain that makes man as he is. It is also the fact that he has a remarkably long period of post-natal helplessness, which makes him disposed to submit to whatever is done to him, and this leads to the blind submissiveness to authority which welcomes dictators and warlords. Man does not go to war to satisfy his individual aggressive urges: he goes out of blind devotion to what is represented to him as a cause. Again, language – that time-spanning creation that may be the highest achievement of the higher cerebral centres – abets the irrational, divisive element which expresses itself through war. Language, out of which high art is made, is also, ‘in view of its explosive emotive potentials, a constant threat to survival'.

Koestler rejects the ‘reductionist' approach to man, which turns him into the pliable matter of Pavlov or Skinner. But he favours the use of drugs:

Medicine has found remedies for certain types of schizophrenic and manic-depressive psychoses; it is no longer Utopian to believe that it will discover a combination of benevolent enzymes which provide the neocortex with a veto against the follies of the archaic brain, correct evolution's glaring mistake, reconcile emotion with reason, and catalyse the breakthrough from maniac to man.

Whatever the approach, whatever the therapy, this view of man as a diseased creature is sincerely held, and the need for somebody to do something about him is represented, by Skinner and Koestler alike, as extremely urgent. Man is living on borrowed time; cure, for the night is coming. Strange that the expert beings who are to administer the cure are themselves men. Can we really trust the diagnostics and remedies of these demented creatures? But the assumption is that, though all men are ill, some are less ill than others. Call, for convenience, the less ill ones well, and we have two kinds of being – we and they or, in Prole Oldspeak, us and them. They are ill, we must cure them.

It was the sense of this division between well us and sick them that led me to write, in 1960, a short novel called
A Clockwork Orange
. It is
not, in my view, a very good novel – too didactic, too linguistically exhibitionist – but it sincerely presented my abhorrence of the view that some people were criminal and others not. A denial of the universal inheritance of original sin is characteristic of Pelagian societies like that of Britain, and it was in Britain, about 1960, that respectable people began to murmur about the growth of juvenile delinquency and suggest, having read certain sensational articles in certain newspapers, that the young criminals who abounded – or such exuberant groups as the Mods and Rockers, more playfully aggressive than truly criminal – were a somehow inhuman breed and required inhuman treatment. Prison was for mature criminals, and juvenile detention centres did little good. There were irresponsible people who spoke of aversion therapy, the burning out of the criminal impulse at source. If young delinquents could be, with the aid of electric shocks, drugs, or pure Pavlovian conditioning, rendered incapable of performing anti-social acts, then our streets would once more be safe at night. Society, as ever, was put first. The delinquents were, of course, not quite human beings: they were minors, and they had no vote; they were very much them as opposed to us, who represented society.