1985 (15 page)

Sexual aggression had already been drastically burnt out of certain rapists, who first had to fulfil the condition of free choice, which meant presumably signing a vague paper. Before the days of so-called Gay Liberation, certain homosexuals had voluntarily submitted to a mixture of negative and positive conditioning, so that a cinema screen showed naked boys and girls alternately and at the same time electric shocks were administered or else a soothing sensation of genital massage was contrived, according to the picture shown. I imagined an experimental institution in which a generic delinquent, guilty of every crime of rape to murder, was given aversion therapy and rendered incapable of contemplating, let alone perpetrating, an anti-social act without a sensation of profound nausea.

The book was called
A Clockwork Orange
for various reasons. I had always loved the Cockney phrase ‘queer as a clockwork orange', that being the queerest thing imaginable, and I had saved up the expression for years, hoping some day to use it as a title. When I began to write the book, I saw that this title would be appropriate for a story about the application of Pavlovian, or mechanical, laws to an organism which, like a fruit, was capable of colour and sweetness. But I had also served in
Malaya, where the word for a human being is
orang
. The name of the anti-hero is Alex, short for Alexander, which means ‘defender of men'.
Alex
has other connotations –
a lex
: a law (unto himself);
a lex(is)
: a vocabulary (of his own);
a
(Greek)
lex
: without a law. Novelists tend to give close attention to the names they attach to their characters.
Alex
is a rich and noble name, and I intended its possessor to be sympathetic, pitiable, and insidiously identifiable with us, as opposed to them. But, in a manner, I digress.

Alex is not only deprived of the capacity to choose to commit evil. A lover of music, he has responded to the music, used as a heightener of emotion, which has accompanied the violent films he has been made to see. A chemical substance injected into his blood induces nausea while he is watching the films, but the nausea is also associated with the music. It was not the intention of his State manipulators to induce this bonus or malus: it is purely an accident that, from now on, he will automatically react to Mozart or Beethoven as he will to rape or murder. The State has succeeded in its primary aim: to deny Alex free moral choice, which, to the State, means choice of evil. But it has added an unforeseen punishment: the gates of heaven are closed to the boy, since music is a figure of celestial bliss. The State has committed a double sin: it has destroyed a human being, since humanity is defined by freedom of moral choice; it has also destroyed an angel.

The novel has not been well understood. Readers, and viewers of the film made from the book, have assumed that I, a most unviolent man, am in love with violence. I am not, but I am committed to freedom of choice, which means that if I cannot choose to do evil nor can I choose to do good. It is better to have our streets infested with murderous young hoodlums than to deny individual freedom of choice. This a hard thing to say, but the saying of it was imposed on me by the moral tradition which, as a member of western civilization, I inherit. Whatever the conditions needful for the sustention of society, the basic human endowment must not be denied. The evil, or merely wrong, products of free will may be punished or held off with deterrents, but the faculty itself may not be removed. The unintended destruction of Alex's capacity for enjoying music symbolizes the State's imperfect understanding (or volitional ignorance) of the whole nature of man, and of the consequences of its own decisions. We may not be able to trust man – meaning ourselves – very far, but we must trust the State far less.

It is disturbing to note that it is in the democracies, founded on the premise of the inviolability of free will, that the principle of the manipulation of the mind may come to be generally accepted. It is consistent with the principles of Ingsoc that the individual mind should be free, meaning free to be tormented. There seem to be no drugs in use on Airstrip One, except temporarily mind-dulling cheap and nasty gin. A strong centralized State, with powerful techniques of terrorization, can keep the streets free from muggers and killers. (Queen Elizabeth I's England hanged rioting apprentices on the site of the riot.) Our own democratic societies are growing weak. There is a great readiness to be affected, in the direction of the loss of authority, by pressure groups of all kinds, including street gangs as much as aggressive students. The lack of a philosophy at the centre (which neither Ingsoc nor Communism lacks) is matched by indecisiveness in dealing with crime. This is human; we leave draconian deterrents and punishments to the totalitarian States. But the eventual democratic response to crime may well be what could be represented as the most human, or humane, or compassionate approach of all: to regard man's mad division, which renders him both gloriously creative and bestially destructive, as a genuine disease, to treat his schizophrenia with drugs or shocks or Skinnerian conditioning. Juvenile delinquents destroy the State's peace; mature delinquents threaten to destroy the human race. The principle is the same for both: burn out the disease.

We must, say both Koestler and Skinner, accept the necessity of change. A new race,
Homo sapientior
, must be created. But, I say again, how far can we trust the therapists, who are as imperfect as ourselves? Whose blueprint of the new man must we follow? We want to be as we are, whatever the consequences. I recognize that the desire to cherish man's unregenerate nature, to deny the possibility of progress and reject the engines of enforced improvement, is very reactionary, but, in the absence of a new philosophy of man, I must cling to whatever I already have. What I have in general is a view of man which I may call Hebreo-Helleno-Christian-humanist. It is the view which the Savage in
Brave New World
, who has been reared in the wilds on a volume of William Shakespeare, brings to the stable Utopia of AF 632: ‘I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.' The World Controller, Mustapha Mond, sums it up for him: ‘In fact, you're claiming the right to be unhappy.' Or the right,
perhaps, not to find life dull. Perhaps the kind of humanity that can produce
Hamlet, Don Giovanni
, the Choral Symphony, the Theory of Relativity, Gaudi, Schoenberg and Picasso must, as a necessary corollary, also be able to scare hell out of itself with nuclear weapons.

What I have in particular is a kind of residual Christianity that oscillates between Augustine and Pelagius. Whoever or whatever Jesus Christ was, people marvelled at him because he ‘taught with authority'. There have been very few authoritative teachers in the world, though there have been plenty of authoritarian demagogues. It is possible, just possible, that by attempting the techniques of self-control that Christ taught something can be done about our schizophrenia – the recognition of which goes back to the Book of Genesis. I believe that the ethics of the Gospels can be given a secular application. I am sure too that this has never seriously been tried.

The basis of the teaching is as realistic as Professor Skinner's, though the terms are rather emotive. Sin is the name given to what the behaviourists would like to cut, burn, or drug out. There is a parallel between the cohesion of the universe and the unity of man. This makes a kind of sense out of the doctrine of the Incarnation. In order that the unity of man may be more than a mere aspiration, love, charity, tolerance have to be deliberately practised. The technique of loving others has to be learned, like any other technique. The practice of love is, we may say, ludic: it has to be approached like a game. It is necessary first to learn to love oneself, which is difficult: love of others will follow more easily then, however. If I learn to love my right hand, as a marvel of texture, structure and psychoneural co-ordination, I have a better chance of loving the right hand of the Gestapo interrogator. It is difficult to love one's enemies, but the difficulty is part of the interest of the game.

The serious practitioners of the game, or
ludus amoris
, will find it useful to form themselves into small groups, or ‘churches', and meet at set intervals for mutual encouragement and inspiration. They may find it valuable to invoke the spirit of the founder of the game. Indeed, they may gain strength from conjuring his, in a sense, real presence in the form of a chunk of bread and a bottle of wine. If they believe in the divine provenance of the founder, they will be able to strengthen their sense of the need to promote human love to the end of human unity, since this is a figure of the unity of the divinely created cosmos. Men and women must practise the technique of love in the real world and not seal
themselves off into communes or convents. The existence of the State is acknowledged, but it is accepted that it has little to do with the real purpose of living. Caesar has his own affairs, which he considers serious but are really frivolous. The practice of love has nothing to do with politics. Laughter is permitted, indeed encouraged. Man was put together by God, though it took him a long time. What God has joined together, even though it be an unholy trinity of a human brain, let no man put asunder. Pray for Dr Skinner. May Pavlov rest in peace. Amen.

When Winston Smith takes part in one of the daily mandatory sessions of Organized Hate, he is aware of how efficiently the emotion of homicidal loathing is aroused in himself by a two-minute montage of noises, and images. He is aware too of how the hatred he is made to feel can be used as an indifferent weapon, pointed at anyone or anything. This was perhaps one of the big discoveries of the period in which Orwell planned and wrote
Nineteen Eighty-Four
– that hate could, once aroused, be pointed like a blowgun at any object that the State decreed was hatable. It is, of course, necessary for doublethink that emotions should be automatically transferable from one object to another, without the necessity to take thought and consider why the hatable has now become the lovable, and vice versa. Eastasia changes, in mid-sentence, from friend to enemy, and emotional adjustments have to be immediate. Orwell was doubtless thinking of how the attitude of his own country to Soviet Russia, once as fiendish as Nazi Germany, now a fellow-victim of Nazi aggression, had to change overnight. The great age of hypocrisy had begun.

Evelyn Waugh, in the last third of his
Sword of Honour
, reminds us of how Soviet Russia became not merely an exemplar of democratic freedom but a vessel of holiness. The British State ordered that a jewelled sword be forged in honour of the defenders of Stalingrad, and this Excalibur was solemnly exhibited in Westminster Abbey. The Free World, that had loathed Stalin, now called him Uncle Joe and loved him. When the war was over, of course, hatred was in order again. The free swivelling-around of emotions, as in a gun turret, had become one of the regular techniques of the modern age.

Traditionally, we have always hated a thing because it is intrinsically hatable. Christianity, though it enjoins love of people, commands hatred of certain qualities that may inhere in them – cruelty, intolerance, greed and so on. There was a time when we knew what the hatable qualities
were; now we are no longer sure. Traditional vices are presented in the popular press as virtues. A man, film star or tycoon, who has been proud, covetous, lustful, envious and gluttonous and achieved a name in the world through the exercise of such vices, is a hero, not a monster. Tolerance is weakness, cowardice is prudence. The notion of intrinsic loathability no longer exists.

It seems to follow that lovability does not exist either. Love comes into
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, but it is neither the disinterested, generalized love of the Gospels nor the romantic love of nineteenth-century novelists. It is certainly not a love appropriate to marriage vows. Winston receives a note from a girl whose name he does not even know. It says simply, ‘I love you.' He at once palpitates with fear and excitement. The love that the girl, whose name turns out to be Julia, claims to feel for him is, we learn, based on a recognition that his political orthodoxy is imperfect, and that his disaffection is ready to be expressed in the only form she knows – a willingness to fornicate. Fornication is forbidden by the State, since it offers a pleasure the State cannot control. To make love physically is an act of rebellion. This imposes on the sexual act a bundle of virtues which it is not, in itself, well able to sustain. But the statement ‘I love you' is here as much a mockery of the values traditionally attached to the phrase as is the State's own institution of a Ministry of Love.

The main fictional weakness of
Nineteen Eighty-Four
lies here. There is an insufficiency of conflict between the individual's view of love and the State's. Winston and Julia do not oppose to Big Brother the strength of a true marital union and, by extension, the values of the family. They have fornicated clandestinely and been caught naked in the act. There is a sad moment when Julia, whose sole notion of freedom is the right to be sexually promiscuous, gives Winston a potted history of her love affairs. Winston rejoices in her corruption, and Orwell seems to abet the false antithesis – oppose to the moral evils of the State the moral evils of the individual. And yet, as we know, the history of Orwell's own love life is one of trust and devotion: he was not extrapolating a frustration in his fiction. He was perhaps merely being prophetic. In 1984, whether Big Brother is there or not, the traditional view of love will have disappeared, and through no fault of the repressive State.

One of the achievements of American civilization is the devaluation of the institution of marriage. This has had much to do with the Puritan condemnation of adultery as a deadly sin; the scarlet letter is burnt into
the American soul. Divorce is preferable to adultery, divorce sometimes being a euphemism for serial polygamy. But divorce is rarely presented, in American fiction or American life, as the wholly regrettable, unavoidable, last-resort surgical operation of a less permissive tradition. Love is a sort of car that has to be replaced by a newer model. It is an electric light bulb whose hours of illumination are numbered. It is equated, as in the mind of Orwell's Julia, with sexual desire. Sexual desire does not die, but it requires a change of object. Like hatred, it is a gun.