George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is one of my favourite books. I devoured it on holiday in Copenhagen when I was about fifteen (surprisingly, I don't believe I've reread it since - I should do, I'm sure it's even better than I took on board as an impressionable teenager). It's also the book that got my partner, who struggles with dyslexia, to truly enjoy the art of reading - this was only four years ago, and he's now a published author of two novels so we owe a lot to George Orwell!
In addition to being a great story, it's also so incredibly accurate as a cautionary tale. If you like to discuss political and social issues within left-wing circles, it's impossible to avoid comparisons between day-to-day life in the United Kingdom in 2023 to day-to-day life in Airstrip One, Oceania. There are memes shared around frequently with messages like 'Someone tell the Tories Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four as a warning, not as a fucking instruction manual!' And they have a point. Be it discouragement of independent thought, the invention of a perpetual enemy, the increasing merging of words making it harder to express original thoughts or the boundaries between truth and fiction becoming more and more blurred, a lot of the stimuli we experience around us does resemble in ever-more disturbing ways the world that Orwell was warning us about. However, I feel that in some ways, Orwell's work is interpreted a little too literally, and with negative effects.
This post was inspired by a conversation I had with someone in the comments thread on the Facebook page of my favourite blogger, Tom Clark of Another Angry Voice (which is really worth reading, anyone who doesn't already). The conversation involved the fact that multiple MPs, many of whom are very decent such as Caroline Lucas and Mhairi Black, have decided to step down at the next election. The discussion moved on to how toxic the Westminster system is and how anyone who goes in genuinely wanting to help people finds themselves driven out by the cruel, bullying public school boys' club. Someone gave Jeremy Corbyn as an example of this. I pointed out that he hasn't announced that he's still there and hasn't been destroyed. They argued that his movement and transformative agenda has. I said that if that had been destroyed, the Labour Party wouldn't still be panicking so much about trying to crush it.
Someone in that conversation responded by saying that Jeremy Corbyn has become our Emmanuel Goldstein, and went on to write the following:
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The new grass roots movement Corbyn helped create has been destroyed utterly, ploughed into the grown and sown with salt. There's nothing left now. The left are finished in this country, those few of us who remain are like the last few dazed, lumbering dinosaurs stumbling around after the asteroid impact. It's their world now - the far right fascists, swindlers, crooks and robber barons, racists, boot boys, bigots, gammons, Daily Mail fodder, Incel shitheads. The future belongs to them, we are the dead. They never will be better. We're done for, it's over, welcome to hell. The end.'
Now, irrespective of how disillusioned one is with modern politics (and let's face it, there's A LOT to be disillusioned about) I don't think that's a very healthy attitude to have. I also don't think it's an attitude George Orwell would have approved of, although obviously I don't know for sure. If he had believed in this, though, I wouldn't see why he put so much time and energy into writing an amazing book about it all.
This encounter made me think of all the Orwell references I come across, day-by-day, week-by-week... and I came to realise that a lot of them, even if they're sincere and intelligent, are actually really not very productive. They're used not to improve the future, but just to bemoan the situation we're currently in. They're utterly devoid of hope, or of any action we can take to try to improve things for ourselves. I don't believe that's what the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is for.
Let's get a few things very clear. Number one, George Orwell may have been remarkably prescient in seeing where society was going, but he did not have access to a time machine. The reason he was able to predict things so accurately was because he wasn't really writing about the future, he was writing about what was at the time the present. He could see how callous, dictatorial and frightening our way of living was (curiously enough, during the very decade when we got the NHS and great social reform) and all he did in Nineteen Eighty-Four was follow things to their extreme logical conclusion. It's depressing that so far we haven't got off that track yet - but that doesn't mean we couldn't have done.
Secondly, I feel that people look at Orwell's work as though it's an inevitable, unavoidable part of what it means to be a human being living amongst other human beings. It is not. The outcome of a book is fixed - no matter how many times you read it, the ending remains the same. Winston and Julia's journey was futile to begin with, because the author decided it was. But we are not characters in a book, we are real people with control over our destiny. It doesn't have to be like this. We can create a society that isn't like the one Orwell warned us about. There are truly fair societies in the world (normally the ones capitalism hasn't touched yet) and it is a deliberate political choice not to adopt the same principles in our own. It is possible to break down the racist, sexist, ablest, classist, capitalist power structures defining our world, and start again in a way that is more caring to one another and to our environment.
Will we do that? I don't know. Like George Orwell and everyone else, I am incapable of truly predicting the future. Like George Orwell, I could hazard an educated guess by following our current social trends to their extreme conclusion - but I think I will not do that, both because the answer would be very depressing and also because I don't think it would be productive. But I feel secure in the knowledge that changing the way we live is possible. Not only is it possible, it is essential.
Read George Orwell's work, because it's amazing, and take it for what it was meant to be. Use it in the way you act, to make sure that we aren't living lives like those experienced by his characters. But do not take it and internalise that we have a fixed destiny that we can do nothing about. Life is WAY too fluid for that shit.
