Orwell's Revenge (7 page)

Blair was an hour into his work when the technician arrived to replace his screen. Burgess was a slow, flabby, dark man with eyes like black buttons set wide apart in his face. His skin had a greasy sheen, like the cuticle of an insect. He reminded Blair of one of the shiny black beetles that he had seen patrolling the areas of waste ground, moving with predictable, dull progress across the stones. For years Burgess had toiled as a petty engineer, going back and forth along the halls with a stack of manuals in hand. He had so distinguished himself by unfailing devotion to duty, lack of inquisitiveness, and absence of imagination, that he had finally been promoted to work on the screens, as an Assistant Sub-Deputy System Agent. This meant he was allowed to help carry replacement screens around the Ministry. Now, his mettle proved by years of acting as a porter, he had been promoted to the rank of Deputy System Agent.

Connolly, small and suspicious, and Burgess, ponderous and loyal: the Party belonged
to men like these. The machines, it was said, made such men possible, even necessary. Ever since Orwell's day, the Party had promised machines and more machines—machines to save work, machines to save thought, machines to save pain, machines for hygiene, efficiency, organization, more hygiene, more efficiency, more organization, more machines. And where did it all end? In a paradise of little fat men.

In the Party's day-dreams, of course, the little fat men were neither fat nor little; they were men like gods. But in a world from which physical danger had been largely banished the men like gods had turned out to be men like beetles. Technological progress had eliminated danger, and physical courage had not survived. There was no need for physical strength in a world where there was
never the need for physical labor. Loyalty and generosity were irrelevant—almost unimaginable—in a world where nothing went wrong. The mechanized world had grown safe and soft, and the men in it had found it impossible to remain brave and hard. Mechanical progress had produced a foolproof world—which had turned out to mean a world inhabited by fools. The Party had tied itself to electronic efficiency, and so tied men to the ideal of softness. But softness was repulsive. The Party had reduced man to a kind of walking stomach, without hand, or eye, or brain. Men had ceased to use their hands, and had lopped off a huge
chunk of their consciousness.

Burgess gave Blair a stupid, malignant glance, then beckoned brusquely to two of his five assistants. He waved Blair out of the cubicle, and the team squeezed in. Three other assistants were unwrapping the new screen in the hall. Burgess carried the blue box.

The screen was about the size of an unfolded newspaper, an oversized dull mirror about five centimeters thick. The men lifted it nervously into Blair's cubicle. A minute or two later they had unbolted the old screen, and mounted the new one in its place. There were no wires to attach, not even a power cord. One of the managers peeled a sheet of sticky paper from the front surface. Another few minutes passed, then the screen flickered into life. Almost immediately, an announcer's fruity voice could be heard. It appeared there had been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grams a week. Only a month ago, Blair seemed to recall, the ration had been thirty grams.

Burgess elbowed his way to the screen, and shoved his assistants out of the cubicle. He propped two thick instructional binders on Blair's desk. He opened the first with meticulous care, and stared at it intently for several minutes. Then, glancing at the manual every few seconds, he positioned the blue box in front of the screen. The man obviously had no idea what he was doing, and was terrified of missing some crucial step.

With agonizing slowness he pressed one and then another of the dozen or so buttons mounted on the front of the blue box. The box emitted a series of atonal whistles as each button was pressed. Burgess paused to turn a page in the binder; then the whistling resumed.
Abruptly, the fruity voice clicked off. On the screen there appeared instead a view of the Laseprint room fourteen stories below.

“All set, comrade,” said Burgess, his face gleaming with sweat. He was quite genial now, obviously relieved to have made it through the installation without a hitch. “Good to be back in touch again, eh, Blair?”

“Capital, capital!” Blair replied, with a weak grin. One always sought to convey a certain vapid eagerness when speaking to a member of the Outer Party. Burgess was an idiot, Blair thought behind his smile. An absolute idiot, venomously orthodox, typical of the types who controlled everything of any importance these days. The man had without exception the most stupid, vulgar, empty mind that Blair had ever encountered. He had not a thought in his head that was not a slogan, and there was no imbecility, absolutely none, that he was not capable of swallowing if the Party handed it out to him. “The human sound track” Blair
nicknamed him in his own mind.

It was always the Burgess types who got promoted. People like Burgess and Connolly, across the hall. The smart ones, the ones with any spark of real technical skill, got vaporized. Bernal, for example. Bernal and his Hush-a-Screen.

Blair glanced back at his rival. Something seemed to tell him with certainty that Connolly was busy on the same job as himself. Connolly obviously suspected the same. He was doing his utmost not to let his voice carry, addressing his screen in a sort of hoarse whisper. But that never worked; the screen then picked up stray sounds from other cubicles. It was in fact a constant problem in the long, windowless hall, with the double row of cubicles and the ceaseless background drone of voices. Sometimes the noise level got so high your screen recorded complete gibberish.

Bernal, Blair reflected bitterly, had solved the problem, and had been immediately vaporized for doing so. It was appalling! Bernal, the closest thing to a friend Blair had ever had at the office, Bernal with his mocking eyes, with his irrepressible interest in the technicalities of everything—vaporized, because he had lacked discretion and the
saving stupidity needed to survive within the Party.

He had arrived in the office one day hugely pleased, and announced that he had the solution to the whole problem. It was a sort of rigid plastic tent—Bernal had even built a prototype—that fitted neatly over the rim of the telescreen, creating a small zone of quiet. The “Hush-a-Screen,” he had called it. Bernal had vanished soon after. A morning came, and he was missing from work. Despite himself, Bernal had ended up a perfect member of the Party. Orthodoxy was unconsciousness.

And short of death itself, the best orthodoxy of all was a belligerent, anti-intellectual stupidity, of the kind that Burgess had been born with. Small wonder that all the useful arts in the world were either standing still or going backward. The Party dimly understood that it still needed the telescreens, still needed science for war and police espionage, and so tolerated
empirical approaches in these two areas. The Party's managers all ended up like Burgess anyway.

Blair felt a sense of helplessness take hold of him.
If there is hope,
Smith had written in the diary,
it lies in the proles.
But there was no hope. A prole's loyalty extended only as far as a prole could see, and for only as long as he could remember. Their market was just
a rubbish heap of detail, tiny things that would stay forever tiny. A prole saw no further than the stalls in the marketplace, and remembered nothing bigger than razor blades. A prole was like an ant, which can see small objects but not large ones, simply
another species of insect. Only Big Brother was an eagle. He alone saw everything.

This, Blair thought in despair, was the Party's real triumph. There were electronic files but no records, telescreens but no human contacts. Everything was connected, the past with the present, the people with Big Brother, yet all the connections ended in the empty basement of a single, huge Ministry. There were no humans anywhere, only insects, the machine, and the Ministry.

As Blair settled back in his chair, he took a last look at Connolly across the hall. The little men who scuttled so nimbly through
the labyrinthine corridors of Ministries were never vaporized. One of these days, thought Blair with sudden deep conviction, Connolly will be a System Manager.

So for Orwell, hypercentralized Ministries are economically inevitable, and nothing will slip more naturally into their adhesive hands than radios, gramophones, films, and the combination of them all, the telescreen. With that,
1984
falls into place.

One can indeed watch Orwell's thoughts about telescreen totalitarianism evolve in other writings he publishes while
1984
is crystallizing in his mind. Those thoughts take shape most clearly in Orwell's pre-
1984
dialogue with another writer and political theorist of his day, James Burnham. The rest of the world has largely forgotten Burnham, but it has not forgotten Orwell. The principal reason is Orwell's telescreen.

In his “
Second Thoughts on James Burnham,” published in 1946, Orwell agrees with Burnham on many major points. “Capitalism is disappearing, but socialism is not replacing it,” Orwell writes. Coming instead is “a new kind of planned, centralised society” ruled by an oligarchy of “business executives,
technicians, bureaucrats, and soldiers.” Small nations will coalesce into “great super-states grouped round the main industrial centers
in Europe, Asia, and America.” “Internally, each society will be hierarchical, with an aristocracy of talent at the top and
a mass of semi-slaves at the bottom.” This is
Orwell summarizing Burnham, but it is also Burnham summarizing Orwell.
For almost a decade before Burnham, in
Wigan Pier,
Coming Up for Air,
and countless earlier essays, Orwell has been making identical predictions—and in better prose than Burnham's.

In his “Second Thoughts” essay, Orwell accepts Burnham's thesis that “a planned and centralised society is liable to develop into an oligarchy or a dictatorship.” Indeed, Burnham's conclusions on this point “are difficult to resist. . . . The ever-increasing concentration of industrial and financial power; the diminishing importance of the individual capitalist or shareholder, and the growth of the new ‘managerial' class of scientists, technicians, and bureaucrats . . . all these things seem to point in the same direction.” The many details of Burnham's prewar predictions that have
not
been fulfilled (Hitler's inevitable triumph, for example)
“do not disprove Burnham's theory.”

And yet, at the end of his essay on Burnham, Orwell declares that Burnham is fundamentally mistaken after all. The most astonishing thing about this pronouncement is its timing. The essay is published in 1946. Orwell is just beginning to write
1984,
the novel that will persuade millions of readers that Burnham's geopolitical vision is correct. But when he reviews Burnham head on, Orwell concludes that Burnham has missed the one critical point. Which one? “[T]he ‘managers' are not so invincible as Burnham believes,” says Orwell. Burnham has ignored “the advantages, military as well as social, enjoyed by a democratic country.” “[0]ne should have been able to see from the start that such a movement as Nazism could not produce any good or stable result. . . . [C]ertain rules of conduct have to be observed
if human society is to hold together at all.”

This is a perfectly sensible criticism of Burnham; the one remarkable thing about it is that it comes from
Orwell's
pen, a pen that is about to write
1984,
a pen that has been writing exactly the same kind of thing as Burnham for a long time. Only a few years earlier, Orwell had reviewed Bertrand Russell's
Power: A New Social Analysis.
In that book, Russell argues that
tyrannies eventually collapse because they depend on lies. “[W]e cannot be sure that this is so,” Orwell replies. “It is quite easy to imagine a state in which the ruling caste deceive their followers without deceiving themselves. . . . One has only to think of the sinister possibilities of the radio, state-controlled education and so forth.”

Does Orwell then agree with Russell, that tyranny is self-destructive, or with Burnham, that tyranny is durable and strong? In 1940, when he reviews Russell, Orwell is with Burnham. In 1946, when he reviews Burnham, he is with Russell. In 1948, when he finishes
1984,
he is with Burnham once again. What's going on? The answer is “the radio . . . and so forth.” The answer is the telescreen.

In 1946, Orwell is (temporarily) sure that Burnham is wrong. As a responsible critic, Orwell takes pains to explain why. Burnham has relied on Machiavelli, but Machiavelli's theories, valid enough when “methods of production were primitive,” are now obsolete. World politics have been transformed. By what? By “the arrival of the machine.” Industrialism has made human drudgery “technically avoidable.” “In effect,” says Orwell, “Burnham argues that because a society of free and equal human beings has never existed, it never can exist. By the same argument one could have demonstrated the impossibility of aeroplanes in 1900, or
of motor cars in 1850.” Burnham's key mistake has been to misunderstand the political implications of new technology.

And having written that, Orwell puts Burnham to one side and sets to work on 1984. As he writes, Orwell finds himself thinking again about just where it was that Burnham went wrong. He thinks about machines—Orwell is
always
thinking about machines. And then it hits him: Burnham's geopolitical prophecies are right after all! The Orwell of the 1930s, who anticipated all of Burnham's ideas by years, was right too. Superstate totalitarianism is coming again. Burnham didn't correctly understand why; he blamed it all on the Machiavellian instincts of the ruling oligarchy. But Orwell now grasps the real reason. Big Brother is coming because of the advent of a new machine. He is coming by telescreen.