George Orwell, 1984, part 1

all right we're going to have a look at george orwell's novel uh 1984 here and with it uh we'll be looking at the coming into the 20th century and looking at the last novel published by the famous english author orwell it's his ninth novel and it really is looking at some of the themes that we've looked at throughout the course already that go back as far as the swift's modest proposal and that is namely the dehumanization that it comes about alongside almost seems to accompany the idea of progress and the advance of civilization and when it does that it to some degree is answering back against the claims of the enlightenment to have advanced uh civilization and so forth and brought about great benefits but the chief of which is is progress and the progress that is being envisaged of course uh takes place on a number of levels but one of them most certainly and one that is seemingly without any dispute is that of scientific advance uh and in uh the days of orwell when he writes this so he writes it in in 1949 uh he's writing it in the wake of the second world war and it's aftermath and for those of us who are a little less acquainted with that particular time obviously that was the conflict between the nazi germany and its uh the access powers against the allied war efforts against them which resulted in the defeat of germany italy and japan it was a world war and yet at the same time as that one war was concluded another war began which was often referred to as a cold war now the cold war hadn't explicitly under those terms begun per se but stalinist russia had come about at that point and really what what 1984 presents to us is something akin to what is happening in stalinist russia namely an authoritarian government which used uh totalitarian uh um actions in order to control its population so that among other among other things uh a program of mass surveillance and the re repressive regime of dealing with dissent and so forth and one of the reasons that it's so compelling for so many is that uh orwell himself was a democratic socialist and indeed fought in the spanish civil war on the side of uh the left so it's not being written by somebody who was uh that we would normally attribute with a from from a conservative uh position but rather from one of its uh opponents as it were so that's one of the things that's made it most compelling and it was written as i say in 1949 it seemed very it's one of the two dystopian novels that we're going to conclude this course with but and at the time that i wrote it which was actually wrote it i read it for the first time which was actually 1984. it seemed more realistic in the threat that it presented in the dystopian picture of the future it portrayed than that of the other novel that we're going to look at uh brave new world now brave new world was written before that in 1932 so i'm taking them somewhat out of chronological order and it's a question that not that long ago it seemed so when i read them 1984 seemed more realistic and accurate in its depiction of the future in large part because the conditions of the cold war continued uh the soviet union uh communist china and its allies around the globe uh were very much repressing free speech and uh were and rights of assembly and controlling information and spying on their citizens and so forth and these seemed uh ever-present threats uh during the cold war which effectively and ended in uh 1970 sorry 1989 and 90 with the fall of the berlin wall and the swift demise of the soviet union not long thereafter a few years after that the collapse of the iron curtain and so to some degree 1984 has seemed a less realistic presentation of the future than uh has a brave new world i'll say more about that when we come to brave new world but in other ways it is now becoming more relevant once again because again the presentation of techniques of mass surveillance are very much upon us when we consider that we're under i'm speaking under the conditions of lockdown and we have means of tracking our uh our our presence uh we have uh in the use of social media we know that that we are being spied upon our identity is being revealed in these things and that these means of revealing identity can also be accessed by those who have less how shall i say it um benevolent uh views of uh or of what our our good is so they're using it really against our uh intentions rather than for our good and um so uh it seems to me that 1984 is is regaining something of its uh what it for the past 30 years seemed to have lost namely immediate relevance so with the idea that we can be surveilled that we can be tracked that our identity can be monitored and to some degree that our speech can also be corrected through what in 1984 it calls what do we call it double speak and so forth these the things seem to be ever real and more ever present now than they were a few years ago so chiefly to the means of double think double think is effectively an ability or a belief in contradictory ideas uh and holding them both simultaneously at the same time uh which is expressed in the in the we're gonna look at part one today uh we'll conclude the words uh of the book of uh the final chapter of part one uh the slogans of the party war is peace freedom is slavery ignorance is strength all of which seem to be contradictions of the enlightenment as well as contradictions of pure logic and they are that uh contradictions of the aims of the enlightenment but also contradictions of pure logic uh and that's not insignificant and one of the things that i think is most uh important to note about orwell's 1984 is how much the novel centered around the aim to control thought through the means of controlling speech now we noted back in in swift's uh a modest proposal how words were used in a way that was calculating it it made reference to computation and the and the greater good and the benevole and the benevolence towards the irish and etc and dealing with various problems and appeal to science and the means by which to better humanity's lot that means of of betterment was also in view when we came to uh one of the novels the novella by by conrad heart of darkness remember in heart of darkness it also talked about the contemporary world in comparison to the to the empires of the past remember marlow begins with the claim that the thames river which runs up and through to london was once one of the dark places of the earth and what distinguishes the contemporary era from that of let's say the romans was our devotion to efficiency a specific mention of efficiency so this means this appeal to numbers uh as a way of relating to humanity is something that comes part and parcel with uh ongoing ages so a less and less an appeal to the humane disciplines the humanities understanding in terms of relationship in terms of personhood in terms of theology in terms of religious criteria and more and more in terms of criteria that are amenable to calculation computation and with that there is an a growing fog that surrounds uh narratives and even the loss of an objective narrative perspective we saw that in heart of darkness that marlow for all of his of his apparent centrality to the novel is a uh is not a reliable narrator he's not only not omniscient uh he's not even a reliable narrator his moral tenor is questionable and deliberately brought into question by marlow through or marlo by conrad through various means but one of them being simply his admiration for a figure who is plainly um an immoral man namely kurtz he admires him he thinks he's a great man and what seems to be the uh measure of his greatness is that he has discarded societal rules and mores as applicable to him he is like i said to you last time a sort of an uber match uh nietzsche's um the the the word that nietzsche in his um thus spake zarathustra to describe this man who is willing to go and above and beyond uh the moral limits of his society now that word ubermensch i said to you was a sort of a very technical term very difficult to translate into english because there is no word in english that corresponds to this at least to my knowledge in mountaineering he's there are two figures climbing the face of a mountaintop there's the man at the top and the man at the bottom the man at the top has is going up without anyone going before him and he nails into the side of the cliff or the rock face a spike and then he loops the rope through that spike and the man below him then climbs up that rope well the man on the top who has nobody pulling him upwards is the ubermensch it's sometimes translated as the superman in english very bad translation in that sense he is the man who has nothing to guide him and pull him upwards and that is how the character of kurtz is presented in heart of darkness but note that what it constitutes his supremacy over other people is simply that he rejects all moral law applies to him and does atrocities because of that we will find that that theme of moving beyond morality is not only repeated here in 1984 it becomes the central premise of the claims of these states that are presented in 1984 of which there are several uh the setting for the hero of uh orwell's novel 1984 is winston smith he is set in one of the three perpetually warring totalitarian states one is called oceania that's the one he lives in the other are others are eurasia and east asia oceania where he lives is governed by a party a totalitarian party and this totalitarian party has brainwashed its population to obedience to its leader and the leader is called big brother and the uh the party which is probably as i say modeled on the communist party uh of stalinist russia but could be found in other regimes around the world in communist is uh is governed by various layers there's an inner party and an outer party the inner party as it turns out is very small and it's a sort of everyone else serves uh to serves to perpetuate the uh explicit aims of the party so there are inner party members now these in winston-smith is not a member of the inner party he is a member of the outer party and he is in a sense there and terrorized by the inner party to strictly not only perpetuate the aims of the inner party and big brother but also to uh suppress his own thoughts and and conform them to the way of seeing reality that big brother wants him to see reality so he's not only supposed to do something that is beyond good and evil he is to think in such terms at that beyond that good and evil no longer exist as as thinkable and that is expressed in the very ideas that the possibility of two plus two equaling five could be something that he not only could agree to but could agree was the truth and winston smith finds this absurd it's absurd that there that the the statement two plus two could be made but also that he should think that it could be true he might be able to he might say that it is but that he should think that it is is absurd to do so would it be to contradict the laws of logic and the laws of logic are part of the very thing that the new totalitarian state is there to subvert and this is really interesting and important here is i think what is going on in 1984 among other things and this is i think orwell's chief emphasis here is the use of language as a means of exerting power over thought now this is an advancement on what we see in certainly in uh the modest proposal there's no intent there's no attempt there to uh for to gain power over speech let alone thoughts there's there's irony being used in swift's presentation there's certainly satire he's satirizing the claims of the english landlords to be uh benevolent towards their tenants to take to care for the irish in fact that's the whole effectiveness of the satire is that they claim to be doing so in the name of christianity while at the same time eating the irish peasants out of house and home and consigning them to a life of depravity or poverty and effectively dehumanizing them so there's a great irony but it's in because there is a defined understanding of what good and evil are and right and wrong conduct and that's why the satire works when we come to uh the uh part of darkness those contours of good and evil are blurred and there's a fog that has descended the fog that's not only on the thames but is presented throughout the novel and there's a lack of clear objective perspective in that novel so already we're seeing an advancement of theme that's what i'm saying 1984 is a continuation of that general tenor and it's related specifically to how language is used in the totalitarian state and orville writes another book and i want to draw this to your attention it's called politics in the english language and i'll speak more about that when we come to the second part of the book in the third part of the book a different lecture when i talk about the the news speak and this particular reasons why the current regime uses speech as it does and when we kind of come in in part three i'm not going to discuss it right now as to why exactly the party does what it does the rationale for it not just that it does it but why it does it why does the totalitarian regime insist not only on having power but on making any and all other means literally unthinkable and it makes them unthinkable by controlling language so these ideas of dehumanization through the use of language and the control of language becomes a dominant theme in orwell's 1984 one that is a is a alive and present i would say topic in our day when again we are dealing with the control of speech uh whether through mass media outlets whether through the dictums of political correctness whether through people claiming to be triggered by others language through language as a means of self-identification rather than of conformity of things to reality other objective means of identify identifying uh not only objects but moral identities all these things are in play in this discussion which make 1984 as relevant now as it was when orwell first wrote it but let me draw back a little bit and give a little bit of an overview here of 1984. as i say it's an imagined future i i called it a dystopia uh it's a dystopia because uh the word utopia in english uh goes back to uh uh thomas moore in the 16th century that uh catholic writer uh who wrote the work utopia about a place that literally is a no place the word uh oh you in greek as a negative particle tapos is a place so an utopos is a non-place some suggest that utopia is also a reference to a better place and they say it's eu then rather than oh you um i don't think that's quite as valid but in which case it would be a better place and that the only currency that that seems to me to have the idea that it's a better place is because in its more modern renderings that is post 20th century uh a utopia is almost always objected to and presented negatively as a dystopia so the future the idea of the age of progress which we've seen marks the enlightenment and carries through all the way to the first world war has now given away to a sense of despair and doom and pessimism about the advancement of civilization uh which i would say remains with us for all the technological progress that comes from smartphones and zoom technology and and such there's a great sense of loss of humanity uh and a degradation of moral uh conviction of the loss of free freedom of speech freedom of assembly and so forth which are concomitant with um the terror being wrought about by the covet 19 virus all of these things could be seen as indicators of uh great losses but they are presented i'd say in orwell's uh work in in different ways so this is a political and it's also dystopian fiction and it's so famous that the word orwellian has now become an adjective and i think that's that in itself is speaking uh or is telling rather so who is this figure winston smith well as i say he's operating in oceania one of the three powers um he's not an important man actually he's a minor functionary in the outer party he lives in london it's a london that has been shattered by nuclear war that war took place uh shortly after world war ii when orwell is writing the novel uh the nuclear bomb had not only been developed but it had been used it had been used in uh in japan by truman to end the uh second world war and it was used and justified in the sense of ending a war by using this terrible means and orwell is highly critical of that very thing that the use of the atom bomb but smith's function is uh to rewrite history in a uh rather ironically uh named ministry of truth in in [Music] orwell's 1984 basically everything is the opposite of what it is it is presented as so the ministry of truth is there strictly and solely to present the party line and to bring it in line with the party's aims and wishes and to rewrite his history accordingly and that's really actually quite interesting that they understand the means of controlling the future is to control the past and and orwell is of course thinking about how history was being rewritten in uh soviet russia to airbrush out uh people from even from within its own ranks uh who had fallen afoul of the powers that be and they were effectively literally airbrushed out of photos so that the people were now non-persons no longer mentionable that sort of action of rewriting history was not only the history of the victors it so that it was given a different angle those that were no longer on side with the powers that be were literally become they became non-persons as if they had not existed at all so that's his job he is there to rewrite things and the problem for winston smith is that he longs for truth and he longs for decency and anything and decency includes anything that might resist the party's will so it's not decency in a moral sense winston smith is not a uh i don't even think he's a good man he's certainly not a moral man he's willing to do anything and everything to defy the party including uh explicitly immoral actions but any means of resisting the party he regards as good and in that he's then not he's not a hero per se it's more that he's an expression of the human person um and how the human person irrespective of their goodness or personal evil will suffer at the hands of a totalitarian regime that's predicated on power and simply power over human nature now if we wanted to see other books that bore on this same theme there are a couple that i would recommend um but the most appropriate ones in addition to obviously huxley's brave new world are probably cs lewis's that hideous strength which is not a political novel per se it's more about the educational establishment and i would direct you to another work by by lewis namely the abolition of man where he talks about this gaining power over nature and specifically over human nature which is characteristic he thinks of 19th century thinking come mid 19th century onwards the power over nature which marks modern science starts to move from the uh the realm of things outside human nature and become explicitly applied to human nature so now the power over nature is the power over human nature and that power will be exerted by some not for the benefit of all but for the benefit of a few and the few will be the scientists or those who are what lewis calls our conditioners so lewis's the abolition of man i think you could find is a direct commentary on the same sorts of general themes as we see here but as i say winston smith is the spokesman for a sort of a rebellion against this he wants a to envisage a world where this was uh the world in which he lived where other than it is and so he uh becomes fascinated by the idea which at this point is is a conspiracy for which he has no evidence that actually exists that there is a brotherhood out there where a group of dissenters and yet he is aware that he is constantly being surveilled and that's part of the theme big brother is watching you there are posters with a big brother pointing down at you in much the same way as we saw uh in written lord kitchener the poet posters pointing at you or in the in the united states uncle sam point the figure you know i want you um these pictures which represented the political military leaders of the day were used by orwell to suggest the same sort of thing but yet with far more malign intent with totalitarian attempt to control all of life well uh winston smith um is is as i say the main protagonist here and the goal of using smith here is to experience the the this nightmarish world uh through his eyes and in his so he he's in that sense the hero i don't think unlike in uh heart of darkness we are to question winston smith's uh moral compass we aren't necessarily to think of him as a perfect man but we are supposed to think that his moral compass is more or less accurate and that's because he regularly depicts how it stifles individuality and it stifles his ability to reason and it stifles humanity in general and it stifles anything that will contradict the narrative of the pop the powers that be so in other words it stifles all the things that the enlightenment had claimed it would deliver for humanity a greater individuality or autonomy a greater application of reasoning and finally a greater sense of the brotherhood of man all of these things are deliberately and self-consciously uh contradicted and undermined by big brother and by the three great totalitarian powers which more or less operate on the same wavelength but in different spheres and they are at war with one another the war being very useful for the purposes of control but here we see the end of the enlightenment more or less i don't think the aims of the enlightenment have gone but that this dystopian note is a dystopian note decidedly against the claims of the enlightenment to bring about human progress and so orwell writing in the context of two world wars is very much uh casting doubt on the uh humanity that the enlightenment claimed to be delivering against christian uh assertions uh before that so remember the enlightenment is a sort of a back a knee-jerk reaction against christian europe and the claims of the church to advance uh not only christ's lordship over all creation but to benefit human nature by pointing to the god man jesus christ and his rule and reign and his benevolent character and his gracious nature all these things are disputed by the enlightenment which is very much of an anti-christian movement in in many of its aspects but it does not dispense with things that it is inherited from christian europe namely uh the belief in reasoning and the in the belief in the importance of the individual or the person now the enlightenment enhances that by making individualism into autonomy which is a very different thing all the same it has at least a corollary to christian forms of discourse and understanding these are totally abandoned in 1984. as i say the individual matters not reasoning matters not brotherhood matters not what matters is devotion to the party and its aims um so when uh o'brien who becomes uh in the first chapter a somewhat peripheral figure but a figure that seems very important to winston uh he's an official of the inner party and uh winston believes that he is a member of this brotherhood um and approaches him winston is primed and probably deceived by his own desires to believe that o'brien is actually his friend and that they somehow might destroy uh the brotherhood because the truth of the matter is o'brien is a member of the not only a member of the inner party but totally devoted to the inner party and whose uh aims towards winston smith are to trap him and to effectively uh make him an utterly uh to utterly conform him to the aims of big brother so he's the great villain as it were um uh winston smith then uh is uh while he's up so while he's opposed to big brother and in fact he he buys a diary and commits various crimes crimes one of them being writing down the words down with big brother in his diary another having a an illegal love affair with a woman by the name of julia we'll come to that when we come to part two because that's where that begins uh but finally an attempt to try and achieve freedom and independence from big brother through various means he gets a flat above an area as to say he makes love to julia but he he uh demonstrates all sort of autonomous all manner of autonomous activities and the two together absolutely despise big brother in every um every shackle on human freedom that big brother seems to represent so they are in that sense um in their persons resistant to big brother and in that sense uh since the big brother and everything he represents seems to be insidious they represent heroic conduct and the reader is drawn to their part because of that so in in uh and and what becomes clear as the story progresses is winston smith's uh devotion to the group of individuals that seem least uh powerful in the novel namely those that are called the proles the prolet uh referenced the proletariat uh marx referred to them as the common people the working men um he knows as a party member the outer party remember there are about six million of them and then there's an inner party but the he he knows from having worked within the party that it is it cannot be destroyed from within and he probably by this point thinks that uh even his hopes about the brotherhood has no power to defeat the thought police the only means of destroying the party will come from the pros and so he says that our hope for the future will come from the polls because they are the great mass of humanity 85 percent of the population of oceania are the pros and so he he lodges great hope in them and he notices that the party's means of control seem only to apply to the intellectual establishment and orwell's commentary here on the intellectual class of which he is a member is really interesting and it seems to jibe with what both c.s lewis and j.r.r tolkien notice about people who are highly educated namely that they are less free than those who are less well-educated and that the uh the aims of those in power seem chiefly to be directed to conforming those who have to the middle classes who are seem to be the stupidest of all in in lewis's reckoning in tolkien's reckoning and it seems to be in orwell's reckoning so those that have sufficient education to believe themselves to be uh capable of seeing through things are in fact those most uh willingly subjecting themselves to the double speak and the view of reality that the powers that be present to them and so in that sense once again it seems rather appropriate to our day but i'm running short on class time so i'll leave it with that and i will pick it up in a lengthier lecture next time and i'll see you then

Channel: Dr Scott Masson

Views: 484

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: 1984 author george orwell, George Orwell (author), big brother, george orwell 1984, george orwell politics and the english language, george orwell socialism, nineteen eighty-four (book), winston smith

Id: 4ipjqt6CUvs

Length: 36min 29sec (2189 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 22 2021