Reading Orwell's "1984", the meaning, the messages, the 'hits' and 'misses"
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1proximity1
Well, I recently read---and for the first time---George Orwell 's novel 1984. Orwell has been, for his other writings--the essays, journalism and letters, with his essay, Such, Such Were the Joys being an all-time favorite---not only one of my very favorite writers of all time, he's far and away the writer who is most intimately like the person I am and have been over the course of years. When I read him or read about him, I not only hear and see myself (for better and worse) in his thoughts, I find that--writing life apart---my steps have at so many junctures, often unwittingly, retraced his own.
I found much to agree with in 1984 but also numerous places where I think he missed something significant. In posting this thread, I'd like to invite a discussion of these 'hits and misses', the things he best saw about the dystopic future he painted in the novel and, on the other hand, where his lessons, messages and hunches about the future world have been off the mark.
Just by the way, I don't think it matters a bit whether or not one's observations are particular to England, english life, or, whether they're drawn from experiences in the U.S. or elsewhere. After all, the novel posits a world in which there are three principal rival powers---Oceania, Eastasia and Eurasia. You and your own experiences may be drawn from any one of those or, even!, the lands outside them.
(Please cite passages from the novel to illustrate the points you argue, defend.)
I found much to agree with in 1984 but also numerous places where I think he missed something significant. In posting this thread, I'd like to invite a discussion of these 'hits and misses', the things he best saw about the dystopic future he painted in the novel and, on the other hand, where his lessons, messages and hunches about the future world have been off the mark.
Just by the way, I don't think it matters a bit whether or not one's observations are particular to England, english life, or, whether they're drawn from experiences in the U.S. or elsewhere. After all, the novel posits a world in which there are three principal rival powers---Oceania, Eastasia and Eurasia. You and your own experiences may be drawn from any one of those or, even!, the lands outside them.
(Please cite passages from the novel to illustrate the points you argue, defend.)
2proximity1
(from line 3, page 164, Penguin U.K. paperback edition, reprinted in 1984)
"It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance."
In that, looking back, one has to wonder what Orwell would have regarded as coming within the bounds of "sooner or later" and at what point he'd have thought the threshold of "leisure and security" being "enjoyed by all alike" had been attained.
I think that our experience since has tended to indicate that, as relative leisure and security has advanced to touch a larger and larger part of the general average public, it has not, contrary to Orwell's expectations, brought with it a great mass of people who in practical terms have shown much demonstrated ability to 'think for themselves' unless that notion is so diluted of practical value that it comes to mean, in effect, that in tuning in, say, Fox News, Bill O'Reilly's The O'Reilly Factor, Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh, they are exhibiting 'thinking for themselves' or, 'sooner or later' takes a very great deal more time to arrive.
Instead, I think experience shows us that there is nothing at all incompatible with what could arguably be called a generalized spread of leisure and security and a stubbornly-rooted failure on the part of great masses of people to 'think for themselves'. If anything, a kind of generally spread sense of leisure and security can be a powerful contributor to not thinking for one's self, it seems to me. In this, Huxley's vision of a society enfeebled by addictive attachments to pleasure-seeking, and to substances (physical and pyschic (as in media-entertainments) ), which provide it, from Brave New World , for example, was much more on the mark than Orwell's view on this point.
"It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance."
In that, looking back, one has to wonder what Orwell would have regarded as coming within the bounds of "sooner or later" and at what point he'd have thought the threshold of "leisure and security" being "enjoyed by all alike" had been attained.
I think that our experience since has tended to indicate that, as relative leisure and security has advanced to touch a larger and larger part of the general average public, it has not, contrary to Orwell's expectations, brought with it a great mass of people who in practical terms have shown much demonstrated ability to 'think for themselves' unless that notion is so diluted of practical value that it comes to mean, in effect, that in tuning in, say, Fox News, Bill O'Reilly's The O'Reilly Factor, Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh, they are exhibiting 'thinking for themselves' or, 'sooner or later' takes a very great deal more time to arrive.
Instead, I think experience shows us that there is nothing at all incompatible with what could arguably be called a generalized spread of leisure and security and a stubbornly-rooted failure on the part of great masses of people to 'think for themselves'. If anything, a kind of generally spread sense of leisure and security can be a powerful contributor to not thinking for one's self, it seems to me. In this, Huxley's vision of a society enfeebled by addictive attachments to pleasure-seeking, and to substances (physical and pyschic (as in media-entertainments) ), which provide it, from Brave New World , for example, was much more on the mark than Orwell's view on this point.
