An Enemy of the Sheeple

Someone I know posted this meme to Facebook the other day.  The best part of it, of course, is the irony of someone bitching about social media on social media, denouncing those who won't look up from their screens while keeping her eye glued to the screen to search for memes to show how woke she is.  You can never go wrong attacking Kids Today for real or fancied Internet abuse; it goes viral even after it's been debunked -- and who makes it go viral?  People with smartphones, of course.  Old people with smartphones.

A close second is that the supposed Orwell quotation is not actually by Orwell.  According to Snopes, it's cobbled together from some passages in Nineteen Eighty-Four for a 2017 stage version of the novel.  The reference to people looking up from their screens is a giveaway, since Orwell's telescreens were on the wall, like today's flat-screen TVs.  Whoever adapted it changed it to make it into a reference to smartphones.

I pointed this out to the friend who'd posted it.  Though she didn't get pissy over the correction, she replied that she hadn't checked the accuracy of the quote, she just posted it because she "liked the sentiment."

While the attribution is not unimportant, it's more important to me that the sentiment is bogus. The Internet, cell phones, and social media have often been used to organize resistance to unjust systems: from the Sanctuary movement to the Arab Spring to Occupy to the movement that helped bring down President Park in South Korea this year. True, many people just watch cat videos and such, but if they didn't have smart phones they'd be watching soap operas or reading Harlequin Romances and dime novels, or playing Candy Crush, or going to bear-baiting and public floggings.  Many people probably watch cat videos, etc. and organize to smash the state; they're not mutually exclusive.

I don't mean to exaggerate the extent to which people use electronics for activism, let alone to celebrate social media as "new forms of language production" that will turn us all into awesome post-human cyborgs.  I have no idea how much screentime is spent on political activism compared to celebrity watching, or what the proportion ideally ought to be.  My point is just that people are responsible for the uses to which they put their phones and their social media.  Many people aren't happy about that thought, of course: they have their priorities, following college and pro football trumps informing themselves.  But most Americans have never had much interest in informing themselves.

And don't forget that governments don't regard smartphones and social media as the opiate of the people: that's why we have mass surveillance of these media, shutting down Internet access when the natives get restless, etc. Our rulers and owners would be happier, it's true, if people were as passive and manipulable as this meme pretends; and that's one reason for smug top-down propaganda like this -- which is obligingly spread by people who fondly believe they're better than the brainwashed Sheeple.  The friend who shared it is apparently a Democratic loyalist; I doubt she was bothered by Barack Obama's attempt to harness the Internet to keep activism against his policies in check, or by the vacuousness of much of the liberal #Resistance to Trump's election.  (We've known each other for a couple of decades, but didn't become friends on Facebook until the past few weeks. What she has posted in that time has been consistent in its politics, so it's probably better for both our blood pressure that we weren't friends during the 2016 election campaign.)  I'm going to make a meme of my own using a photo of a bunch of young people staring at their phones: there will be a thought-bubble coming from each one's head, as they think: "Gee, I'm glad I'm not shallow and stupid like all these dumb people who never look up from their screens!"

The Revelation of Saint George

Sometimes I wonder what other people get from reading Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.  What made the biggest impression on me when I first read it at the age of twelve, fifty-some years ago, was the Two Minutes' Hate.  When I first had to go to pep sessions a year or so later in junior high school, I immediately recognized the 2MH mentality in Indiana basketball fans, though it's also visible in partisan politics.  Over time, other elements of Orwell's allegory have come to the fore in my mind; nowadays it's doublethink and the notion of a well-controlled memory, the ability to forget inconvenient facts on demand.

There was hilarity over Donald Trump's remark about "what's happening last night in Sweden."  Nothing had happened in Sweden last night, that was the curious incident.  Swedes reacted with indignation.  Trump then claimed he was referring to a story on Fox News the night before his rally, and tweeted "Give the public a break–The FAKE NEWS media is trying to say that large scale immigration in Sweden is working out just beautifully. NOT!"  More indignation and hilarity ensued, of course.  What I noticed what was, even though Fox News is evidently becoming more critical of Trump, the President let slip that he relies on "the FAKE NEWS media" for information about what is going on in the world.  Some in Trump's base obligingly now believe that "the FAKE NEWS media" are covering up terrorist attacks in Sweden.  (Just as about half of Democrats believe that the Russians hacked American voting machines to give Trump his victory last November.  I may return to this matter in a later post.)  Then look at this dishonest post from a liberal blog on the importance of a free press; Thomas Jefferson did not limit his criticism of the press to private letters, as Throckmorton claims, he acted.

“In his second term, in response to serious criticism from the New England newspapers … he instructed the state attorney generals in New England to prosecute the newspaper editors for sedition in the same way he had opposed such behavior when it was done by the federal government,” said Ellis, the historian.

The move further alienated Jefferson from the journalists, as well as the clergy.

When I think about it, I wonder how new the supposed collapse in mainstream media credibility really is.  How long have we had "mainstream media" in the US anyway?  What that term usually refers to is elite corporate media like the New York Times and the Washington Post, along with the Associated Press, United Press International, and the national broadcast networks -- just three of them when I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s.  But how many Americans read the Times?  How many New Yorkers, even?  I can't imagine it was that many, surely not a majority.  So how were the "mainstream media" mainstream?  Only, I think, in the sense that elites see themselves as the real, mainstream people, and the vast majority of the population as the fringe, barely human at best.

The Internet didn't exist when I was growing up, but there were many other ways to disseminate information: local newspapers, local radio and TV, churches, unions, the American Legion and other veterans' organizations, fraternal organizations, and schools -- and most of these were illiberal in their politics, and careless about facts (to put it mildly).  If you poke around Snopes.com for a while, you'll find that many falsehoods you see in your Facebook feed go back to the pre-Internet period.  This one, for instance, still circulates long after Madalyn Murry O'Hair died, and the FCC still gets mail and phone calls about it.  You probably wouldn't hear much about it from the mainstream media, but such rumors play an important role in many, many people's political beliefs.

Think of Father Charles Coughlin, a Roman Catholic priest whose radio program drew 40 million listeners in the early 1930s.  He attacked President Roosevelt, who he claimed was really a Jew (a popular accusation by the Right in those days), incited violence against Jews, and was only silenced by the Church after the US was already at war with Nazi Germany.  He remained a priest, however, retiring in 1966, and continued to denounce Roosevelt into the 1970s.  Yesterday I saw an item linked on Facebook which called evangelical Christians "the American Taliban."  Aside from the evil of stereotyping all evangelicals, it included Rick Santorum -- a Roman Catholic, not an evangelical -- in its denunciation.

Which reminded me of some late-night TV shows I've seen when I'm in northern Indiana, on the NBC affiliate out of Notre Dame University: they feature grim, bearded white men fulminating about the diabolical secularization of our society, with recreational abortion, unisex bathrooms, gay marriage, and the like; the only hope is return to the True Roman Catholic Church.  Sometimes I wonder if they are aware that not so long ago, people like them would have been seen as agents of the Papacy, trying to impose Canon law on America.  Which is what they are, in fact; they're just not much of a threat right now.  But when I think of candidates for the American Taliban, I think of these guys.  (Note: these programs don't appear on public-access cable at 4 in the morning, but are broadcast at 11 p.m. or so on a major-network affiliate station.)

But back to Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four.  The book is often called "prophetic," but it's really a kind of apocalypse, like the biblical book of Daniel or the Revelation.  A prophet, technically, is a person through whom a god speaks.  Prophets do sometimes make predictions, but very seldom about the distant future, and even their predictions are warnings of what will happen if they aren't heeded.  So, for instance, Jonah warned that Yahweh would destroy the city of Nineveh in thirty days if the Ninevites didn't repent.  They did so, from the King on down, and the city was not destroyed.  Jonah sulked about this, and Yahweh chided him for lack of humanity.  (That's how you know the book of Jonah is a fable, not actual prophecy: ordinarily Yahweh demands mass murder through his prophets, ordering his servants to set humanity aside in the name of purity and obedience.)

There isn't a sharp dividing line between classical prophecy and apocalyptic, but one of the characteristics of the latter is that its "predictions" are generally backdated, ascribed to someone who lived in the more or less distant past.  You can tell when the "revelation" was written by noticing the point at which the "predictions" stop being true.  Producing repentance isn't the intention, because God planned everything before the creation of the world; the destruction will come, with only a faithful remnant saved, no matter what people do.

It has often been pointed out that in Nineteen Eighty-Four Orwell wasn't predicting.  Except for the telescreens, almost everything he wrote about was already present in 1940s England during and immediately after the war: the rationing, the missiles raining random death and destruction, the surveillance, even the ability to forget what had happened minutes before for political purposes.  (The occasion was the way the Soviet Union went from being an ally of Hitler to an enemy of Hitler, pretty much overnight -- and the Enemy of Your Enemy Is Your Friend, in wartime anyway.)  There has been a lot of criticism of Orwell's relationship to the Left, much of it apparently justified, but to my mind the important thing was his attempt, however inadequate and biased, to criticize his own side.   Attacking the Other is always safe; attacking Your Own is not.  That, too, is still with us.

So seeing Nineteen Eighty-Four as a prophecy or prediction, and praising Saint George for his anticipation of things to come, is as mistaken as praising Daniel for predicting what would happen to Israel centuries in the future.  The "predictions" in Daniel were written after the fact, with 20/20 hindsight; once the book's future history catches up with its present, the predictions fail.  In the New Testament Revelation, the predictions fail immediately; the author was avowedly writing about his own present, and the End did not come.  Whatever strikes a reader now about Orwell's imagined future is most likely the things he saw in his present.  Which doesn't mean I don't value the book, or his criticisms of political culture; Orwell could be called a prophet in the original sense, one who addresses the present to pronounce judgment.  Except that Orwell, an atheist, didn't claim to speak in the name of a god.  He used other conventions.

What led me to write this post, however, was something else.  I began thinking about the ways that people use the past, and famous people from the past, to borrow authority for their beliefs and prescriptions.  This isn't necessarily invalid; history is important to human beings.  If you're going to talk about the Constitution, you're talking about past authorities.  What I'm talking about is the invention of history, as in the blogger who elided Thomas Jefferson's overt actions against the freedom of the press.  This tactic appears to me to be as popular an approach on the Left, broadly defined, as on the Right; among secularists and atheists, no less than among the religious.  Quotations from illustrious historical figures, modified to fit the present better or simply invented altogether, are more compact versions of apocalyptic thinking.  Our Founding Fathers foresaw the future in every detail, and we need only recover the true meaning of their words to conduct ourselves rightly, according to their wisdom.

I was also moved to write this post by someone's reference to Nineteen Eighty-Four as a "political allegory," which it is, but the context made me suspect that the person thought of an allegory as something like Scripture as fundamentalists think of it: all Truth and Wisdom is encoded there, and it is up to us to interpret it rightly.  If we can, we can save ourselves, and so on.  But an allegory is a conscious invention, and Nineteen Eighty-Four is no exception.  (Nor is Atlas Shrugged, or Stranger in a Strange Land, among other novels which have been used by some of their readers to guide their lives.)  Orwell had no special mystical knowledge; he wrote the book out of what he knew, or thought he knew, and out of what he saw.  He threw in plenty of sex and violence, just as you'll find in the New Testament Revelation, and made it a good read, with enough ideas to provoke some thought.

What this suggests to me is that, as I've long thought, much of what people (including me) think of as religious is not specific to religion.  The use of quotations -- often invented or taken out of context -- from long-dead authorities, usually called "proof-texting" in a religious context, looks to be as popular among the non-religious and anti-religious as it is among the devoutly religious.  Stories, allegories, fables too; officially we secularists know that our stories are fictional, but that knowledge often falls by the wayside.  Or the use of monumental, hushed spaces intended to humble and awe mere humans before the greatness of the geniuses who brought us the wisdom of Heaven.  To say nothing of Us/Them and scapegoating the Other. These are all human tendencies and (sometimes) failings.  They come naturally to most of us, and it takes work to learn to depersonalize and abstract ideas for thought -- though that, too, is part of religion, its philosophical and theological arm.  People who draw on books like Nineteen Eighty-Four for thought are not different in kind from people who draw on the Bible, the Quran, the Sutras; nor do they differ in the ways they use these authorities, only in the specific authorities they use and interpret.

Who Controls the Present Controls the Past

I hear that George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is a best-seller again.  That's always a good thing, and if people are reading it with an agenda, that's nothing new. (If they're reading it. Buying a book, as I well know, is not the same as reading it.)  Nor is a surge in its sales new, as the NPR story I just linked indicates.  It happened, for example, right after the election of Ronald Reagan, and "Another time sales of the novel spiked was in 2013, after revelations by whistle-blower Edward Snowden about the extent of U.S. surveillance operations. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the state keeps constant watch on its citizens to spot potential 'thought-crimes' or rebellion."

I was pleasantly surprised by this remark:

Richard Keeble, chairman of The Orwell Society and editor of the book of scholarship, Orwell Today, said Orwell would also have critiqued other aspects of Obama’s presidency. “In terms of double-think”–a term defined in the novel as the ability to hold two pieces of contradictory information at one time–“let’s think back to a so-called Nobel peace prize winner who waged war for most years of his presidency,” Keeble said.

This time the new popularity of the book is inspired by the presidency of Donald Trump, of course.  And that involves a good deal of doublethink and memory control on the part of many of Trump's Democratic critics, who must be sure to forget anything negative about Obama or Hillary Clinton.  Luckily, they have plenty of practice, forgetting or ignoring inconvenient facts.  Mention any of the less inspiring aspects of Barack Obama's record, no matter how well-documented, and they'll denounce you for making up stuff in the pay of the Republicans.  I'm quite impressed by their ability to block out Obama's support for the Saudi invasion of Yemen, for example, even when I or some other thought-criminal brings it to their attention.  I've sometimes mistaken this, along with their transitory pretense of concern for Syrian children, for a poor memory; but no, it's a strong, controlled memory that won't admit inconvenient facts in the first place.  Like Trump's base, they live in a hermetically sealed alternate reality, just a different one.

So I threw together a little post on Facebook:

"Wait a minute - Oceania hasn't always been at war with Eurasia! We were at war with Eastasia just yesterday!"

"Stop dwelling on the dead past! We need to focus on the future! You just want Eurasia to win!"

I was trying to decide whether to change the last sentence to "You're just trying to normalize Eurasia!" when my post got a couple of likes from liberal Facebook friends, both of whom misunderstood it.  One regularly posts awful political doggerel; I've never actually met him, and I'm thinking of unfriending him.  His comment was a link to his latest product, denouncing the "Trumpies."  So he missed the point.  The other I've known for more than thirty years, since he was a student at IU; he worked for the Clinton campaign last year, and assiduously passed along its talking points in response to criticism of Clinton on Facebook.  His comment: "And the Victory Tobacco ration will be raised from five units to two units! Another triumph on our behalf by Big Brother!"  Pretty clearly he missed the point too, but then he's an Inner Party member with a well-controlled memory.  (He was one of those who missed the point of a satirical Onion article about voting from last year, seemingly taking it at face value -- and he's not that stupid, at least ordinarily.)

If you want a picture of the future, though ...

"Edgy."  Isn't that the cutest thing?  Just a few months ago my liberal Democrat friends were assuring me that she had no interest in politics, she'd only been dragged into the campaign by her mom.  Chelsea Clinton was born in 1980; you do the math.

The Limits of Language: Andrew Hodges's "Towards 1984"

I missed Alan Turing's centenary, though I didn't have much to say about it anyway.  Turing was a brilliant man, brutally mistreated by his government for his queerness, and he deserves to be remembered for a number of accomplishments.  One of the most impressive things I've learned about him as a person was that he doesn't seem to have felt any guilt about being queer, which was unusual though not unique among British buggers of his generation.  (The circle of friends that included W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, for example, seems to have been just as comfortable with their sexuality as Turing.)

But the mentions of Turing that I encountered online often mentioned Andrew Hodges's 1983 biography of Turing, Alan Turing: The Enigma (Simon and Schuster).  When I read in the gay press that Hodges was working on the biography, I began looking forward to it.  Hodges was well-qualified to write it, for he not only had the mathematics and technical background to understand Turing's professional work, he was a gay activist and writer, co-author with David Hutter of an important Gay Liberation pamphlet called With Downcast Gays, published in 1974 but available online.  This was important because even in the 1980s, most biographies of important gay or lesbian figures were marred by homophobic armchair psychoanalysis purporting to show why the Subject had turned out That Way.  Hodges was having none of that, and his groundbreaking biography not only did justice to Turing but helped set the tone for future biographies.

Aside from With Downcast Gays, I'd also read an article by Hodges published in the Canadian radical gay magazine The Body Politic at the end of 1979.  Its discussion of the way language affects our ability to think about homosexuality made a big impression on me -- it was the first critique of Orwell's dicta about language I'd read till then -- but it was never reprinted anywhere and wasn't available online as far as I could discover.  The flurry of attention to Turing's centenary and to the biography reminded me that I'd been meaning to write to Hodges and ask him about it.  I knew he had a website with some of his writings on it, but "Towards 1984" wasn't there, so I hoped to persuade him to add it; I could even send him the text if he didn't have it.  So I wrote to him, and he kindly gave me permission to post it here.

As its title implies, "Towards 1984" is dated now, but as Hodges wrote, the issues it (and Orwell's novel) deals with are still current.

TOWARDS 1984

by Andrew Hodges

(This article first appeared in Body Politic #59, December 1979 / January 1980.)

As the real 1984 approaches and becomes just another calendar year, one thing is certain: there will be no lack of voices claiming to draw political lessons from George Orwell's book. Indeed, the election posters for Mrs Thatcher's Conservative Party have already suggested that we should believe Labour policy to be leading Britain into an Orwellian nightmare. 1984 has sold millions of copies; it is a standard text for school examinations. But what does it hold for us?

A number of Orwell's suggestions have become reality; a number have not. That is not the point. The real value of the work is as a modern Gulliver's Travels, as serious political satire, and in particular as a thesis on the politics of language. It was Orwell's idea that language was not simply a means of communicating thought, in the way that an open road affords space for every kind of traffic. Rather, language could be more like a railway system, with a laid-down schedule which could convey only ideas of a defined shape and size, fitted into the compartments which the managers provided. Only these right ideas could ever be used.

But Orwell's target was narrow and distinct: not the language of everyday conversation, but the official languages of his own class and time, the British educated middle class of the 1930s and 1940s. Wartime censorship, Communist Party theory, military euphemism, Times leaders and newsreel journalism -- every case involved its own trahison des clercs in which state violence of revolting enormity could be justified or concealed by the manipulation of language. It was his thesis that language was not merely symptomatic of engineered thought; rather, that language determined what thoughts it was possible to have. "How could they believe it?", "How could they accept it?", Orwell asked of his contemporaries, and his answer was that once they had accepted a political language, then their thoughts could not be other than would fit inside its concepts.

It was a small step for him to suggest in 1984 that the State might consciously impose its official language upon its servants with that very objective in mind. This was a major theme of the book, summed up in its definition of "Newspeak", the officialese of the Anglo-American superstate. It was its purpose that:

...the expression of unorthodox opinions, above a very low level, was well-nigh impossible. It was of course possible to utter heresies of a very crude kind, a species of blasphemy. It would have been possible, for example, to say "Big Brother is ungood." But this statement, which to an orthodox ear merely conveyed a self-evident absurdity, could not have been sustained by reasoned argument, because the necessary words were not available....

The modern Newspeak of "extremist", "moderate", "security", has continued to keep Orwell's critique as alive as ever. But our reaction to Orwell's ideas must necessarily be more critical. In 1984, it was possible to escape from the official thought by means of ordinary language, the old English language, associated with good old ordinary decent things and feelings. Orwell seems to have thought the common language of his day to be a perfectly adequate vehicle for thought. But was it? Was it only the official, or state-imposed language that constrained what it was possible to think? Clearly we can see that it was not: in Orwell's own description of Newspeak, he wrote:

In somewhat the same way, the Party member knew what constituted right conduct, and in exceedingly vague, generalised terms he knew what kinds of departure from it were possible. His sexual life, for example, was entirely regulated by the two Newspeak words "sexcrime" (sexual immorality) and "goodsex" (chastity). Sexcrime covered all sexual misdeeds whatever. It covered fornication, adultery, homosexuality, and other perversions, and, in addition, normal intercourse practised for its own sake....

Millions of readers must have swallowed unquestioningly Orwell's definition of homosexuality as a "perversion", together with the connotations of "immorality" and "normal" -- just as they would have gone along with the use of "he" in that paragraph to imply (as a "rule of grammar") a person of either sex. Why not? These were the available concepts, the "proper words" that English had to offer. Whether Orwell intended this classification consciously or not is beside the point; in either case this was simply the ordinary written English of 1949, in which sexual expression had to be packaged and valued by a tiny range of nasty words.

To be more precise, a writer who was sufficiently sensitive to value-judgment might, by a sufficiently laborious discussion, avoid the unconscious communication of received ideas. Thus in 1948, the authors of Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male had been able to use the word "homosexual" in a very precise sense, carefully detached from the connotations of "abnormal." It was no easy task, as they themselves explained, and one which met with profound resistance from the "scientific" world as well as from popular opinion. But for those without access to the language of academic authority, words imposed the bounds of possible thought, in which "queer is good" was almost as self-evident an absurdity as "Big Brother is ungood."

Another observation to be made on reading 1984 is that all those features of the State which Orwell presented in imagination as the most deeply appalling were none other than those which in 1949, were being experienced in reality by homosexual people in Anglo-America. Not only the commonplaces of censorship, blacklisting, guilt by association; not only imprisonment on police say-so; but compulsory drug treatments, castrations, electric shocks, even brain surgery; the implication and betrayal of friends or lovers; the required confessions of thoughtcrime in the dock. Worst of all, according to Orwell's book, defiance was robbed of all meaning when history would never know or care, when the past would not even be known to exist.

But Orwell would never have perceived the connection. And we too are so well trained to think of homosexual oppression as not counting, not mattering, not being "real" politics or history, that it seems fanciful to make the comparison, a slur on "real" political martyrs. But this training is itself performed by the available language, which has defined homosexual oppression as a "non-political" form of dissidence, as a "social" or "psychological" or "medical" problem. Perhaps most poignant of all is the fact that Orwell chose as a symbol of escape from the official system the drama of a spontaneous heterosexual affair. For the millions of readers, the ultimate dreadfulness of 1984 has been brought home as the system where love to be a crime, where lovers could not even be seen to touch, even to know each other for fear of the State; where the smallest sign of affection was a political gesture. And how many of them have considered that all of this was so for homosexual lovers in the real world of 1949, of 1959, of 1969, of 1979? Indeed, our position is in a sense worse than that of Orwell's rebels, who at least had the cultural resources of "ordinary language" in which to express their spontaneity. But for us, the ordinary language of sexuality is something that must be fought for: childhood training and cultural values discarded and a second language learned in order that spontaneous feeling can be realized.

And yet, for that reason, one cannot but be cheered by reading 1984. The figure of Winston Smith was brought to say and believe that "Big Brother is good," just as so many of us have succumbed to "Queer is bad," yet so many of us have not given in. Not only have we continued to utter the "crude heresies" that the old available words allowed, but we have, since 1949, since 1969, found new words, new images, new language to express ourselves. So often we are immersed in conflicts over what seem mere words: our words (the straightforward use of "gay") are hated; the available "ordinary" words ("promiscuous", for example) constrict a million different experiences into one foolish epithet; the official words of psychology and of law degrade and imprison thought as well as people.

Yet we are gaining: with an ever-expanding vocabulary of word and picture, poetry and history, music, film and art. Orwell, against his own will, reminds us that the expansion of language is no ignoble cause, nor some unreal shadow of "real" politics, nor our own strange peripheral problem. 1984 has touched so many people because it touches the heart of things that matter. That is its lasting integrity and heroism -- and that is ours, too.