Why is George Orwell’s 1984 still relevant in 2019? Jesse Mulligan takes a deep dive into the novel with Melbourne University’s Robert Hassan.
George Orwell Photo: BY 2.0
For most of the '20s and '30s, the idea for 1984 had been gestating in George Orwell’s head. It was a time between war, and World War I had set the world on course for turmoil.
“He grew up and spent his formative years in the '20s and '30s and he saw the rise of communism in Russia, and the rise of Nazism in the '30s in Germany, and he saw these two twin poles of tyranny and totalitarianism which got him thinking,” says Hassan.
The novel 1984 (published in 1948) depicts a world that had gone crazy and become a brutal, and brutalised, place. There was no place in this world for human dignity or truth, he says.
The novel imagines Great Britain is a province of a superstate known as Oceania which is ruled by The Party. At the head of The Party is Big Brother and The Party employs Thought Police who persecute independent thinkers.
It was a world that Orwell could see brewing in reality, says Hassan.
Published in 1949, in the US it was seen as subversive. In Eastern Europe, illegal copies of the book circulated widely where people could see Orwell’s world in their everyday lives, says Hassan.
The world was essentially divided into two blocks after the 1940s, he says. There was communism and capitalism - each side of the iron curtain.
The capitalist US, trying to get an edge, raced ahead to produce arms and developed the atomic bomb in 1945. The Russians, responding in true Cold War fashion, built their own bomb and exploded it in 1949.
“Power and its contestation was very much a stark and global defining, global dividing issue in the 1940s.”
In 1984, language as illustration of an idea was important, says Hassan.
An example of this is Orwell’s doublethink - the ability to hold two contradictory opinions at the same time, without thinking they are contradictory.
It’s like being a Democrat and a Monarchist, says Hassan.
Another of Orwell’s ideas was language in politics and how it was changing in the 1920s and '30s. Newspeak is the official language in 1984.
“He was drawing upon, I think, the Russian habit of using the diminutive to express, maybe someone’s name or an organisation. In the book he calls what is officially the idea of English Socialism, Ingsoc [the predominant ideology of Oceania] and in this he was just paralleling what was happening in Russia through the use of the Politburo… a stand alone word but it is actually an abbreviated term for the political bureau of the Russian Communist Party.”
These terms in the 1984 universe allowed The Party to portray itself as something different, as something new, he says.
“It wanted to, by 2050 in the book, replace old English with Newspeak and people begin to speak this way, in a way which was formulated by The Party and in The Party’s interests ... snappy terms, terms which say something in a modern-sounding way, but was party propaganda."
It was also a way to stop everyday language have meaning, Hassan says.
You may notice Orwellian terms like ‘alternative facts’ finding themselves into modern langauage.
Kellyanne Conway, Donald Trump’s advisor, famously used the term ‘alternative facts’ in an interview in January 2017.
Hassan says: “If we have alternative facts then we have a very, very different world, a world that is muddied, a world that is unclear, a world where the idea of a fact itself is disputed.”
What constitutes a fact has always been in dispute in philosophy, he says, but in politics a fact is a fact, is a fact.
Language isn’t the only thing from 1984 that’s made its way into the real world.
While Orwell imagined a world where government surveillance was standard, he would never have thought that we would willingly give up our information, Hassan says.
“Already there are Samsung sets and smart TVs like that can listen to us and they can take key words and record what we’re saying and use that as data for market research, Google does the same, Facebook does the same, our smart phones do the same.”
We’ve become a "surveillance society or a dataveillance society,” he says.
And if you haven’t read the book and having been meaning to for years, Hassan says; “If you’re interested in power, if you’re interested in technology, if you’re interested in how governments function and how governments today function alongside big corporations and what it means for your life in terms of economy and freedom, being a person who is able to live a private life, live a dignified life, live a life which is not totally and utterly commercialised, where everything has a price, pick it up…”
It makes you think, he says, and we need to think.
