George Orwell, Ray Bradbury, the Hebrew prophets, and Socrates all had something in common: They worried about the future. Socrates, in observing current trends in technology, worried about the emerging world of books that used the new fangled alphabet. Perhaps sensing that philosophers would become obsolete, he complained that no matter how many times you asked a book a question, it always gave the same answer.
Conversely, and owing to the adage that, “things could always be worse,” Ray Bradbury in his book Fahrenheit 451 worried that a future where no one reads books, where they have technologies which simulate the pleasures of reading without its profound effects. The resultant triviality in both cases serves to spoil society.
In the ironic case of Socrates, who as far as we can tell wrote nothing down, his reported dialogues by side kick turned scribe Plato, particularly Republic, have become bedrock testaments of the West. In Republic we learn that the worst of lands is ruled by lawyers (written laws), and physicians (rote treatments of disease), producing a place of the perpetual scheming and sickly. We expel a sigh of relief and mutter, “thank goodness that never came to pass,” as we write large checks for health care we can’t use and taxes we can’t understand.
Bradbury worried over a land that had schools whose primary duty was to make sure students didn’t say certain things or read books, librarians who not only hid books but discouraged you from finding them, and “firemen” who, like modern civil libertarians that specialize in the suppression of civics, actually start fires rather than putting them out. Bradbury’s concern that seems opposite that of Socrates regarding books is rooted in the same place. In trusting our thoughts to another medium, in Bradbury’s case to screens controlled by committees (!), and perhaps in Socrates’ case on paper controlled by editors and progeny, we lose memory both private and communal, as unquestioning members in a consensus, as society with dementia; a dystopia.
George Orwell’s dystopia haunts the present in his 1949 novel 1984, creating an indelible memento of the destruction of public memory by the corruption of meaning in language. Terms like “newspeak”, the reduction of language to what may only express the interests of the consensus, “Big Brother”, the disembodied and uncanny power that cancels people and removes their thought from public conversation, “thoughtcrime”, the disagreement with consensus, and perhaps the most lurid term of all, “Orwellian”, all stand as mental boundary stones which the ignorant or partisan often shift in the dead of bad rhetoric’s night. Can those who have read his book not say that Orwell envisioned a time when titles of agencies like “Planned Parenthood” stand for groups that plan the opposite, when invisible authorities can remove people and words from conversations, or when the capital city of the “free world” is a barricaded outpost of martial law? Can we not have realized an “Orwellian” reality? Words are like footballs, and the defense must always rise against the side trying to move that ball down the field, doing this best when they can take the ball from the other side. “Orwellian” is such a term and such a cultural football, a word that anyone can drop when things aren’t going their way - but it has a distinct meaning.
Orwell’s thoughts are persisting in his book, even though the center of the Orwellian theme has always been the “memory hole,” a drain in the ironic “Ministry of Truth” that serves to erase history and introduce nonsense into language, a viral attack on meaning that dulls the conscience and encourages us to stop thinking about or challenging the consensus. And while Socrates’ worry that we might not think for ourselves in only repeating what we have read may have merit, Bradbury’s antidote for public dementia is effective. The remedy for the shifting dunes of modern social media are the steadfast rocks of literature. 1984 is one of the shoals upon which surging tyranny breaks.
Sales of the septuagenarian 1984 spiked in 2013 during the revelation of extensive US government spying upon its own citizens, again in 2017 when a spokesman for President Trump coined the term “alternative facts” in reference to an illusory free press, and now is a top 10 Amazon best seller for the year 2021. Following years of intensified government spying, unaccountable “Big Brothering,” and the dawn of a supposed popular government barricaded against its people, the sales of this book are surpassing the marks of prior surges.
This is good news, but in another Orwellian turn, this phenomenon has not been widely reported, as was its prior high demand, this fact falling down the “memory hole”. Whereas sales surges of 2013 and 2017 especially were broadcast universally and incessantly, should you consult your social monitor screen and “google” this subject today you will note an absence of “facts” (alternative or otherwise) about this book’s current popularity. You will, however, find articles from proper editorial authorities telling you that the current purchasers and quoters of this book aren’t smart enough to really understand it (so don’t look in those pages, proles!). You will also read in a modern socialist online magazine alarmingly called “The Jacobin” that 1: Orwell was a socialist (he was), therefore 2: everything he says must always be understood to mean who he was, not what he meant; a fallacy known as ‘Bulverism’. In summary, “pay no attention to “Orwellian” fears, and you don’t understand them anyway” (as ordered by the mysterious power that controls what you may know or say in public).
Read books. Insist on letting the books speak. In the senile modern West, old documents are like friends we are supposed to know, so our helpful orderlies tell us who they are and what they mean to us when they occasionally visit in cultural hospice to avoid any unpleasantness. Don’t lie there gumming the tapioca of current literacy. When choosing between Orwell and “Orwellian” go to the author, buy and read the book. You’d be surprised if you looked into the visitors lounge and saw the authors who’ve been denied even a visit. Right now, there are some teachers and librarians, orderlies in our hall of memory, trying to turn away a visit by our old friend Dr. Suess, since apparently he might upset us. I can hear some yelling in the hall. Check the current best selling books list at Amazon (you won’t see this on the NY Times) and join the literate.
More books to read that are anxious to talk to you today: The Rise of Totalitarianism, by Hannah Arendt: The Gulag Archipelago, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn: History in English Words, by Owen Barfield
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