Orwell That Ends Well

Rich Karlgaard from the March 1995 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

"'These manuals that you use--' O'Brien hesitated again. 'I wonder if there might be some simpler explanation of it all. Something for a nontechnical chap like me. Or do you--better still--that we might locate one of the engineers who helped write it? Someone from the '80s, perhaps?'

"Burgess gazed back expressionless. 'We could look. Can't say that I ever met any of the old guard. Most of them turned out to be saboteurs.' He spoke with increasing vigor, and the spittle began to gather at the corners of his mouth. 'Completely unreliable, most of them. Not really Party men at all.'"

Throughout Orwell's Revenge, Huber returns to a central question: How could Orwell, a writer so alert to the machinations and evils of totalitarianism, see capitalism and communications technology as tyranny's friend, rather than its undoing? Huber accuses Orwell of giving in to emotion. He hated the radio, and by extension all communications technologies, because of Josef Goebbels's brilliant use of them in spreading Nazi propaganda.

Orwell's contempt for capitalism was even less rational. Huber traces it to the Dickensian miseries young Orwell suffered at Crossgates, the boarding school he attended on scholarship before going on to Eton. Orwell wrote about it in his novel, Keep the Aspidistra Flying: "The very rich boys were more or less undisguisedly favoured; the poor but 'clever' scholarship boys didn't go riding, didn't get a cricket bat, didn't get a birthday cake, were caned more often, were publicly reminded of their poverty, and were expected to be snivelingly grateful to Crossgates for its charity."

If Huber's "palimpsest" has one major flaw, it is timing: It should have come out 10 years earlier. Not only because the publication date then would have matched 1984's famous title, but because the implications of computer networks as an instrument of freedom were less obvious a decade ago than they are today. After the collapse of communism, after Tiananmen Square, no serious thinker can credibly suggest that computers and advanced telecommunications favor the state.

In 1994, in fact, the argument has moved decisively in the other direction. Instead of arguing that emerging technologies will create a hyper-centralized brave new world, many now fret that ever-advancing PCs and broadband networks are balkanizing society into smaller and smaller niche markets. Critics from Charles Murray to Robert Reich look into the future and see an ever-wider skewing of the info-rich and the ignorant poor, with combustible consequences.

Reason readers will like how Huber cleverly addresses this important '90s debate. Late in Orwell's Revenge, he stages a debate-to-the-death between the high-ranking party official O'Brien and a jailed phreak:

O'Brien: "You will be astounded at how quickly your new world of free choice becomes ugly and depraved....
Free choice on the telescreen will bring about a frightful debauchery of taste....kicking little girls in the head will be O.K.; a film of a woman defecating will be O.K....Place every telescreen under private control, and the masses will wallow in filth far worse than the rubbishy entertainment and spurious news the Party supplies today."

Phreak: "Some, as you predict, will anesthetize their minds with visual opiates peddled over the network. But others will use their new power to choose wisely. In the cataract of information of the telescreened world, the most important right will be the right not to listen, not to speak, and not to share one's thoughts, words or gestures. Freedom of thought, freedom of assembly and religion, copyright and privacy, all pivot on a single, higher right: the right to communicate by mutual consent with other individuals possessing the same dignity, the same power of choice. That is the promise of the telescreen."

O'Brien: "By encouraging necrophilic reveries, a depraved artist may do quite as much harm as by picking pockets at the races. Private pornography inspires public violence. Private scheming and conspiracy culminate in fraud, extortion, or blackmail. The individual's freedom becomes the community's slavery. Freedom is slavery."

Phreak: "Freedom is sanity....The telescreen will give us necrophilic reveries, but it will also create room for the art of angels. It will supply passion but also reason. It will spread propaganda but also private discourse. It will give us spies, but also distance us from them. It will carry the proclamations of generals before battle, the speeches of fuhrers and prime ministers, the solidarity songs of public schools and left wing political parties, national anthems, temperance tracts, papal encyclicals and sermons against gambling and contraception--and it will also carry the chorus of raspberries from all the millions of common men to whom these high sentiments make no appeal. The network empowers electronic thugs at one end and the Thought Police at the other. But in the middles stand the great mass of men, simple, honest, and sane. So long as common men use the network too, their basic sanity will prevail. Freedom will be freedom."

O'Brien: "But not equality?"

Phreak: "No....Only one kind of human equality will survive the telescreen....The only kind of equality that men have the power to affirm. It is equal opportunity--an equal chance to converse, trade and collaborate with others by mutual consent. The telescreen offers equal dignity, nothing more. All other kinds of equality belong to Big Brother."

O'Brien: "So your glorious fantasy is not so glorious after all....Your telescreen will create wealth, it will distribute culture, it will educate the masses. Equality is therefore inevitable. A socialist utopia is at hand. Why do you insist that equality will not come?"

Phreak: "Some will use their telescreens for education, others for lotteries. The talented or industrious will embrace the new opportunities; the lazy or foolish will sink into tele-induced stupor. Hierarchies will not disappear. They will simply come to mirror inequalities among men themselves."

With rigor and flair, Peter Huber has produced a palimpsest that no serious student of Orwell, totalitarianism, or freedom can afford to ignore.