Orwell's Revenge (9 page)

Like it or not, O'Brien reflected, the telescreens were essential. Orwell's design had worked well—still did for the most part. As promised, the network was now entirely self-powered. And for years it had seemed quite reliable. Orwell had in fact rambled on and on about this. The system was “robust,” Orwell had said, it was “fault tolerant,” it operated “peer-to-peer.” No single screen, no single cable, could bring down the whole network if it failed. It had all been meaningless jargon to O'Brien, but jargon draped in the one kind of authority—scientific—that O'Brien had never dared contradict. O'Brien had hated it.

He had hated even more the thought of ripping out the old system he had spent so many years building. O'Brien looked back at the map on the table, and he knew
that
was what he hated most of all.
There was no order to it. The cables snaked independently around the city, intersecting almost at random, it seemed. The map reminded him of one of those hideous bubble-like structures from the 1960s, the geodesic domes, every rib connected to every other, a shapeless globule with no central spine, no omniscient brain. The map was an abomination. On the map, the Ministry of Love seemed almost irrelevant. It was not the center of anything.

And now, with Orwell purged, with the old-guard engineers dead or lost in forced labor camps, and the few who had survived too terrified to think, with the Ministry's Laboratories in complete decay, the network was beginning to act up. Screens were failing in unusually high numbers. Not simply dying, but behaving erratically Suppose things got worse. Suppose the screens went completely out of control. Without telescreens, the Party was finished.

O'Brien resettled his monstrous body in the chair. He wondered idly when it was that he had grown so fat. It seemed to have happened suddenly, as if a cannon ball had hit him and got stuck inside. One night he had gone to bed still feeling more or less young, with an eye for the girls and so forth, and the next morning he had woken up in the full consciousness that
he was hugely fat. He was proud of his fatness now—he saw the accumulated flesh as the symbol of his greatness. He who had once been obscure and hungry was now fat, rich, and feared. He was swollen with the bodies of his enemies, a thought from which he extracted
something very near poetry.

But he was also old, and he knew he would soon be dead. He felt a numb weariness creeping up from his feet toward his knees. This happened every few days now. Some day, he knew, it would keep on creeping until it reached his chest. Until then, he had one great mission left—to save the Party. He had already convened the right people. He had spoken to Cooper. A competent System Manager of unquestioned loyalty would be found to investigate and correct the problems in the network.

For perhaps twenty seconds O'Brien sat without stirring. Then he pulled his chair over to the telescreen and barked out a message in the hybrid jargon of the Ministries: COMM-ONE-OPEN.
Items one comma five comma seven approved fullwise stop. Transmit. Item six doubleplus ridiculous verging crimethink stop. Delete. COMM-ONE-CLOSE. COMM-TWO-CLOSE.

The telescreen faded into darkness.

The machine itself is the enemy.
But whose? For Orwell, the answer is obvious. The telescreen empowers evil men in the Inner Party, like O'Brien and Charrington, and enslaves decent people in the Outer Party, like Winston and Julia. The telescreen is a two-way device
but with one-way control.
The ordinary lovers whisper and wait, helpless innocents who will inevitably be discovered and destroyed. The Thought Police watch and listen, evil brains behind the glass eye of the bottle.

There are two obvious objections to all this, however. Orwell has thought through the first with some care. It is the objection Bertrand Russell set out in
Power: A New Social Analysis.
Tyrannies, according to Russell, depend on a “huge system of organised lying,” which “tends to put them at a disadvantage as
against those who know the facts.” To put it in
1984
terms, tyrannies can't build telescreens. The second objection is more important. Telescreens will not abide tyranny.

Start with Russell's objection. How can a state in which “two and two will make five
when the Leader says so” maintain such technically complex things as telescreens? Orwell has
asked himself that question many times. His review of Russell's book includes a capsule summary of his answer. In
1984
terms, the answer is
doublethink.
It is “quite easy to imagine a state in which the ruling caste deceive their followers
without deceiving themselves.” “Do you suppose it is beyond us to produce a dual system of astronomy?” O'Brien asks Winston Smith in
1984.
“The stars can be near or distant, according as we need them,” O'Brien himself replies. “Do you suppose our mathematicians are unequal to that? Have you
forgotten doublethink?”

Now this requires a bit of a mental stretch, but it's not completely implausible. Perhaps Orwell is right: tyrannies might conceivably develop technologies as advanced as telescreens. This would require rigid isolation of a privileged and comparatively free community of scientists and engineers. Still, one can imagine that happening, particularly after
Sputnik.

But will telescreens abide tyranny? Orwell addresses only one small part of that question seriously. Even with doublethink, science inside a totalitarian state is not going to advance as it will in liberal societies. Freedom will thus develop more powerful weapons and in time will overwhelm Slavery from the outside. Or will it? Long before
1984,
Orwell had developed his answer. It appears, among several other places, in his 1943 essay, “Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War.”

Orwell's answer is quite simple: “Fascism, or possibly even a combination of several fascisms, [will]
conquer the whole world” simultaneously. Thereafter, the need to preserve military efficiency and defend against faster scientific advance in more
liberal societies will no longer exist. This is what has happened in
1984.
Oceania is indistinguishable from the world's two other totalitarian superstates, Eurasia and Eastasia. The political cultures of the three superstates have different names: Ingsoc (English Socialism), neo-Bolshevism, and Eastasia's “Obliteration of the Self.” But “the three philosophies are barely distinguishable, and the social systems which they support are
not distinguishable at all.” The result is perfect balance: the three superstates “prop one another up,
like three sheaves of com.” Science atrophies, but it atrophies everywhere at the same rate, so military balance is maintained.

Orwell thus seems to have covered his intellectual flanks. With doublethink, even tyrannies can develop telescreens. With sheaves-of-corn geopolitics, military stability can be maintained thereafter. Everything hangs together. Totalitarianism, once established worldwide, endures forever. The birth of the telescreen is the death of free speech.

Which—if you think about it for just a second more—is still a very curious
thing. After all, the telescreen—like the radio, gramophone, and the film camera it supersedes—is a medium of expression. It is the newfangled printing press, just vastly more powerful than the old. It is the supernova among far dimmer stars in what Marshall McLuhan called
The Gutenberg Galaxy.
And what do we find? The development of a fantastically capable new printing press means the end of literature, the end of art, the end of intellectual freedom, the end of thought itself. And
that,
all in all, is hard to swallow.

•  •  •

Part of Orwell's pessimism about the telescreen derives from the medium itself. “[T]he English are not gifted artistically,” Orwell confidently declares in “
England, Your England.” “They are not as musical as the Germans or Italians, painting and sculpture have never flourished in England as they have in France.” But “there is one art in which they have shown plenty of talent,
namely literature.” In sum, pictures, sounds—all media other than the written word—are not really British. This quaint (and, for all I know, correct) cultural reductionism has obvious implications for a man who plans to take on the telescreen. Telescreens in the office for the convenience of insect men? Certainly. Telescreens for Wagnerian music or semipornographic Botticelli nudes? No doubt. But telescreens, being picture machines, obviously have nothing to add to the artistic freedom of England.

That's basically what Orwell concludes, but Orwell himself knows better. Pictures and art, even English art, belong together. Again and again in his books and essays he uses the simile of the glass walls of an aquarium to illustrate problems of
separation and communication. “Good prose is like a window pane,”
Orwell writes in a 1946 piece. “When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page,” he says in his brilliant 1939
essay on Charles Dickens. Seeing the picture, seeing the face—the images are all important for
Orwell and his writing. The first, most horrifying propaganda scene in
1984
is a film clip in which helicopters are machine-gunning a woman and child in a lifeboat. “If you want a picture of the future,” O'Brien offers at the end of the book, “imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” At the end of
1984,
as at the beginning, it is the
picture
that tells it all.

Indeed, a complete one-line answer to Orwell's disdain for the artistic and expressive value of telescreens is set out in Orwell's own classic essay, “Politics and the English Language.” Orwell is explaining the art of good writing. He is emphasizing how important it is not to rush things down onto paper, especially in a day when language is dilapidated and stock clichés often substitute for hard thought. “When you think of something abstract,” Orwell explains, “you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning
as clear as one can through pictures.” Yes,
pictures.

But there is no other sign Orwell ever imagined that picture machines might empower the artist, liberate the press, and expand intellectual freedom all around. Orwell never does manage to grasp the connection between his own vivid word-pictures and the picture-words of the telescreen.

•  •  •

For Orwell, the other thing irredeemably wrong with the picture-machine is that it's a
machine.
Try as he may—and he
does
try—Orwell simply cannot persuade himself that machines will ever enhance personal freedom.

In one part of his brain, Orwell understands perfectly that science, technology, and empirical thought are the very antithesis of oligarchy, collectivism, and Big Brother. In a 1943 essay, for example, Orwell— the man with his own pet theory about “English art”—scorns Nazi distinctions between
“German Science” and “Jewish Science.” Science, Orwell recognizes, is one of the great enemies of totalitarian government, the most potent antidote to systematic lying. He says this explicitly in several early essays and repeats it in
1984.
In
1984,
the word “science” has been completely abolished, “any meaning that it could possibly bear being already
sufficiently covered by the word Ingsoc.”

Orwell is equally certain that machines are essential to reduce human drudgery and raise standards of living. Indeed, “human equality cannot be realised except at
a high level of mechanical civilisation.” He thinks it a great shortcoming of capitalism that free markets develop
only those machines that are commercially valuable; he is sure that “the rate of mechanical progress will be much more rapid
once Socialism is established.” In 1984,
as in earlier essays, Orwell assures us that minimum standards of decent living are now “technically possible” for all, because machines have made them possible. Orwell firmly believes that a certain level of machine-supplied plenty would be a blessing.

He is equally fascinated by other good things that machines might accomplish. Though a writer himself, he scorns “hostility to science and machinery” that stems from “the jealousy of the modern literary gent who hates science because science has
stolen literature's thunder.” As a BBC broadcaster, Orwell commissions a series of talks that include “Science and the People” and “Science and Politics”; one of the first speakers is a specialist on the newfangled
technology of television. “The Western man invents machines as naturally as the Polynesian islander swims,”
Orwell writes in
Wigan Pier.
“Give a Western man a job of work and he immediately begins devising a machine that would do it for him; give him a machine and he thinks of ways of improving it. I understand this tendency well enough, for in an ineffectual sort of way I have that type of mind myself. . . . I am perpetually seeing, as it were, the ghosts of possible machines that might save me the trouble of
using my brain or muscles.”

Orwell, far better than most of his contemporaries, has brilliant insight as to what those ghosts might some day accomplish. At a technical rather than a political or sociological level, Orwell is
tremendously prescient about technology. His
1984
telescreen is a practical reality today, already widely used for teleconferencing. Orwell's “speak-writes”—machines that transcribe the spoken word into electronic text—are now being perfected. These things are familiar to us, but Orwell described them all when primitive, one-way television was the high-tech marvel of the day All of the technological props and gadgets that Orwell describes were in fact made possible by the transistor. Yet the transistor was discovered at Bell Laboratories only in 1947, the year Orwell completed his first draft of 1984.