Book Review: 1984 by George Orwell (1/2)
The Despair of a World Without God: Part 2 Wedenesday
George Orwell (1903-1950) published his dystopian science fiction novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), in 1949, just after the conclusion of the Second World War. It is considered by many to be one of the greatest, most insightful and original dystopian stories in history, alongside Robert Hugh Benson’s Lord of the World, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, all of which portended the rise of ideological regimes and robotic warfare in the 20th century and the grave consequences which they represented for the development of global civilization. Each expressed the particular worldview of its author, and 1984 illustrates many of the sentiments and beliefs which Orwell held and wrote about in other works. From a Catholic standpoint, despite its potential pitfalls of misunderstanding, 1984 is an invaluable fictional rendering of the miasma into which the modern world of materialism, relativism and the worship of technical power can fall, a world which has abandoned God and the guidance of His Church, and for this reason, 1984 remains as clear a warning today as when it was first published.
The dichotomy of existence and non-existence and the power of humans to confer both is a central theme of 1984. Following the horrors of World War II and driven by the fear and despair it caused, Orwell’s dystopian future portrays the State replacing God and religion in society. For Party members, religion is completely banned and forgotten, and for the proletariat masses, “even religious worship would have been permitted if the proles had shown any sign of needing or wanting it.”[1] In the absence of real religion, the Party has thus become the people’s religion, with Big Brother as their savior.[2] This fact echoes the words of G.K. Chesterton, who once observed in Christendom in Dublin, “Once abolish the God, and the Government becomes the God.”[3] The goal of the Party is to erase all else from the lives of its members and consume them entirely in itself. As O’Brien, the primary antagonist of the story and chief Party torturer, explains:
Everything else we shall destroy—everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen… There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always… there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler.[4]
Since God alone has the power to create ex nihilo or to utterly destroy something,[5] the Party treats itself as God, presuming that executing people and removing any record or memory of them could truly erase them from existence. Similarly, the Party employs “doublethink” to change the past, something which even God cannot do. As St. Thomas Aquinas taught, following both St. Augustine and Aristotle, God “cannot effect that anything else which is past should not have been” for the reason that “there does not fall under the scope of God's omnipotence anything that implies a contradiction.”[6] In this way, the Party not only assigns to itself the power and authority of God, but even goes so far as to violate the very order of reality by coercing its members into giving it a power which is impossible, that of altering the past.
As demonstrated by the earlier discovery of Winston, the protagonist of 1984 who works in the so-called Ministry of Truth to replace former records with the new and contradictory narratives propagandized by the Party, of an old newspaper clipping which definitively disproved the official Party line accusing three of its original founders of treason,[7] even Big Brother lacked the power to actually change the past; instead, his power and that of the Party depended on the coercion of the minds and hearts of its members, forcing them to accept that which all knew to be false in order to avoid persecution by the Thought Police. As Winston describes it:
‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. ‘Reality control’, they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink’.[8]
As the chief application of doublethink, the Party sought to replace all language with its own artificial code, called Newspeak, by which it could exclude even the words themselves which contradicted its ideology. As implied in the Newspeak term INGSOC, meaning “English Socialism,”[9] Winston’s imagining of the consequences of Thoughtcrimes, or violations of Ingsoc, is inspired by the methods of 20th century socialist regimes, especially “Nazi” (itself identified as a Newspeak-style word)[10] Germany and Soviet Russia, which used similar practices and treated the State as God. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn observed in his 1970 Nobel Prize lecture, “Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his METHOD must inexorably choose falsehood as his PRINCIPLE.”[11]
Analogously, the “woke” politicians and influencers in society today who push to “cancel” people, whether living or dead, who do not adhere to the current trendy ideologies, to “fact-check” names, titles, logos, pronouns and even cultural and religious traditions to accommodate forced untruths, to disprove the rule by the exception and to advocate for policies based on political correctness and “virtue-signaling” regardless of their real harm or benefit, are often self-proclaimed socialists. Imitating the Thought Police, DEI advocates in schools, businesses and the media use doublethink to coerce people into “holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them” and thereby “playing tricks with reality,” as the narrator of 1984 describes it,[12] such as that there are no real differences between the sexes yet sex can also be changed, and often utilize subtle linguistic renaming to enforce their ideology, including the use of “gender-affirming care” for body mutilation surgeries, or “a clump of cells” for an unborn child. Also, like those who founded socialist regimes in successive attempts throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, socialists today continue to claim that their failed predecessors only misrepresented socialism’s true and original intentions, a position which Goldstein, the mysterious author of the anti-Party “book” read by Winston, himself advocates in 1984 and which may have thus reflected Orwell’s own socialist sympathies.[13]
In his book, Goldstein follows a historiographic approach which is both critical of Marxist and Enlightenment views of history as inexorable progress and determined only by economic or technological factors while also expressing many of the same views himself. Goldstein sees history based entirely on class strife, power dynamics and social manipulation; for him, the City of Man, which, according to St. Augustine, “is itself ruled by its lust of rule,”[14] is the only city, while the City of God is just an “imaginary” ameliorating instrument of the powerful,[15] harkening back to the Marxist idea that religion is merely “the opium of the people.”[16] Scientific advancement, not religion, is the answer to the world’s problems. Goldstein thus wrote,
From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations.[17]
The only reason this did not occur, according to Goldstein, is that those in power, the “high” tier of the social hierarchy, desired to remain in power, and so developed a system of continual warfare so that they could maintain their rank in a progressive, egalitarian industrial society which no longer truly needed them but which, through fear of war, turned power over to them.[18]
Goldstein’s theory of war may be critiqued by two instances in the story which can initially seem to corroborate his position. These include Goldstein’s reference to the endless but ultimately pointless exploitative border skirmishes between the three world superpowers in 1984 (Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia)[19] and the explosion of a rocket bomb near Winston earlier in the story.[20]
The first instance appears to support Goldstein’s view that war, especially in modern times, is only orchestrated by the high-ranking to keep their power. The problem with this view, however, is that human nature is fundamentally guided by conscience and acts in freedom toward the end of happiness. (CCC 33) No matter how corrupt the consciences of some people become, there will always be voices of repudiation in society which go against popular evils; for this reason, many wars, such as the American Revolution and Civil War, were primarily instigated for the purpose of righting a wrong and establishing justice. The same motive could also be applied to the invasions of Japan and Europe by the US in WWII and by its later wars in Korea, Kuwait and Afghanistan which were driven by moral concerns rather than any real or primary goal of gaining power.
In fact, despite its destructiveness and loss of life, war can be a rallying factor for a nation – if its cause is believed to be just. The mere fear of death is insufficient for this; rather, it requires a general sense of the moral rightness and necessity of the war. During WWII, this sense was widespread in American society, and so everyone worked together to empower the economy and overcome seemingly invincible enemies; however, with the Vietnam conflict, many in the US saw it as unjustified, especially due to poor leadership, the weight of the draft and the influence of the media, and so the economy often struggled to compensate and the fighting eventually ended in failure, even though the US warred against a far less powerful adversary. In this way, war, like other human actions, is morally variable according to the motives and methods of its agents - it is not always merely a tool for competition in a “balance of power” between sheltered elites.
In the second instance, the corrupted sources and evil results of war are truly revealed. Even when justified, according to the principles of Just War theory taught by the Church, (CCC 2309) and despite whatever material benefits may come from it, war always results in the senseless destruction of human life and property, especially that of civilians, as well as moral depravity and environmental decimation, and comes only from a breakdown of dialogue and an unwillingness to right injustices on one or both sides. J.R.R. Tolkien, writing in 1944 during the final stages of WWII, expressed this fact poignantly:
The utter stupid waste of war, not only material but moral and spiritual, is so staggering to those who have to endure it… not of course that it has not is and will be necessary to face it in an evil world. I sometimes feel appalled at the thought of the sum total of human misery all over the world at the present moment: the millions parted, fretting, wasting in unprofitable days – quite apart from torture, pain, death, bereavement, injustice. If anguish were visible, almost the whole of this benighted planet would be enveloped in a dense dark vapour, shrouded from the amazed vision of the heavens! And the products of it all will be mainly evil – historically considered.[21]
The rocket bombs, like the one which fell near Winston and which may have been dropped by Oceania simply to maintain a climate of fear,[22] illustrate the violations of human dignity which war inevitably entails. Contrary to Goldstein, mere advancement of technology, education or wealth is not enough to prevent war, or to correct the evils against which war is sometimes a legitimate reaction. Neither can anarchical hedonism, as advocated by Winston,[23] foster authentic happiness or promote the common good, since “whosoever committeth sin, is the servant of sin.” (Jn 8:34 DRA) True peace requires true justice. As the Catechism teaches,
Peace is not merely the absence of war, and it is not limited to maintaining a balance of powers between adversaries. Peace cannot be attained on earth without safeguarding the goods of persons, free communication among men, respect for the dignity of persons and peoples, and the assiduous practice of fraternity. Peace is ‘the tranquillity of order.’ Peace is the work of justice and the effect of charity. (CCC 2304)
[1] George Orwell, 1984 (East Delhi, India: Pharos Books, 2019), 60. Kindle.
[2] Orwell, 1984, 15.
[3] G.K. Chesterton, Christendom in Dublin (London: Sheed & Ward, 1932), 44. Kindle.
[4] Orwell, 1984, 215-16.
[5] Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference, 2020), 301. Kindle.
[6] Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, I, q. 25, a. 4 (Coyote Canyon Press). Kindle.
[7] Orwell, 1984, 64.
[8] Ibid., 30.
[9] Ibid., 31.
[10] Ibid., 1984, 247.
[11] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Nobel Lecture in Literature 1970,” at The Nobel Prize (1 July 2022), at www.nobelprize.org.
[12] Orwell, 1984, 171.
[13] Orwell, 1984, 172-3.
[14] Augustine, The City of God, I, preface, at New Advent, www.newadvent.org.
[15] Orwell, 1984, 163.
[16] Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843), at Marxists Internet Archive, www.marxists.org.
[17] Orwell, 1984, 154.
[18] Ibid., 155.
[19] Ibid., 153.
[20] Ibid., 68.
[21] J.R.R. Tolkien; Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien (eds), The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 75-6. Kindle.
[22] Orwell, 1984, 125.
[23] Ibid., 102-3.
Sorry, Kaleb! This was meant to go out 7 pm! I guess we get a Kaleb two-fer this morning!