1984: Liberal Politics in a Post-Human World

Many professionals in other fields feel that literature has much to teach us about ourselves and about the society we live in. In Black Sun, Lacanian psychotherapist and linguist Julia Kristeva utilizes literature by Gerard de Nerval, Dostoyevky, and Marguerite Duras, among others, to talk about female melancholia. Political writer and literary critic Irving Howe writes about Solzhenitsyn, Andre Malraux, and George Orwell to talk about politics and the novel. Philosopher Richard Rorty also discusses the writings of Orwell in addition to Proust and Nabokov as well as a number of literary theoreticians such as Derrida and Nietzsche. By looking at a writer like George Orwell through the eyes of Richard Rorty and Irving Howe, we can see just how necessary literature is in its ability to show us aspects of where our society and government may go if we are not careful. Orwell's 1984 is a cautionary tale about what it means to lose our humanity and how stripping away our language contributes to that loss of humanity.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, books like Pamela by Samuel Richardson or Julie by Jean-Jacques Rousseau were said to strengthen our ability for truly inclusive democracy by teaching us to empathize with people different from us, in these cases, men empathizing with women. Literature has changed, however, in the 20th and 21st centuries. With mechanized warfare and now with technology that could not have even been imagined in earlier centuries, novels have changed to reflect a very different social reality. The early 20th century saw the perversion of the revolutions in Russia followed by what we now commonly refer to as the “horrors of World War II” and many writers in the post-war era were rightfully disheartened and cynical. Theodor Adorno asked if it was even possible, ethically, to write poetry after Auschwitz, saying ultimately that it was, indeed, barbaric that poetry was still necessary. Adorno says that suffering, “demands the continued existence of art while it prohibits it; it is now virtually in art alone that suffering can still find its own voice, consolation, without immediately being betrayed by it” (8). In the midst of all of these discussions about what had happened and what might happen, came George Orwell's most famous novels, Animal Farm and
1984, a fable and a cautionary tale, both focused on democracy betrayed.

One of the major aspects of democracy is the concept of the self. Literary and political critic Irving Howe wrote that ”the idea of a personal self, which for us has become an indispensable assumption of existence . . . [is] a cultural idea” (178). Growing as it did out of the liberal era, “it is susceptible to historical growth and decline and may also be susceptible to historical destruction” (178). Arthur Mizener describes

Orwell himself as a result of the cultural/liberal idea(1) of the human, saying that Orwell represents

“the great liberal tradition of western civilization at its best, the informed, sceptical [sic], compassionate mind, able to use the insights of any doctrine without fanaticism, completely unaffected by the lure of submission to cheap creeds . . .” (687)

At least one strain of literature was emerging, that of science fiction and dystopian fiction, focusing not on the positive, on empathy for other humans as an important part of the democratic mindset. In dystopian novels the focus was on cautionary tales of ways that we might end up losing our selves and our humanity. Rorty further echoes this when he says that while Orwell “was not the first to suggest that small groups of criminals might get control of modern states and thanks to modern technology, stay in control forever” that he was the first to ask how intellectuals would deal with a situation where “it had become clear that liberal ideals had no relation to a possible human future”(171). Howe takes it a step further, saying that “Orwell is trying to present the kind of world in which individuality has become obsolete and personality a crime [emphasis mine]” (189). “The whole idea of the self as something precious and inviolable is a cultural idea and as we understand it, a product of the liberal era,” which presumably, in the world of 1984, is now over.

Richard Rorty talks about Orwell as being “of his time” and in fact quotes Howe as well, saying that “Orwell is one of those writers 'who live most significantly for their own age'” (169). But ask anyone who has read 1984 for the first time, and they will tell you it is as true now as it was in 1948. 1984 was one of those novels on the cutting edge of what we now call “dystopian” literature, which abounds plentifully in science fiction. There are a number of novels that are not read much anymore except for their historical significance, but I think it is wrong to place 1984 among those just yet. And in fact, Rorty himself is quick to say that “his description of our political situation remains as useful as any we possess” (170). Rorty talks about Orwell's “earlier warnings against the greedy and stupid conservatives together with his warnings against the communist oligarchs” (170), but what makes 1984 such an enduring model is the stranglehold that both technology and language hold over our society now more than ever. We are closer to the Orwell's world with our 24/7 news media, with media outlets that cannot be trusted, and with advertising language that tells us what is hot is cold, what is up is down, ignorance is strength, war is peace, freedom is slavery.

Orwell's “Politics and the English Language” is frequently seen as the essay in which Orwell was working on a theory of language that would influence, if not become, Newspeak in 1984 . Philip Rahv says that “Newspeak is nothing less than a plot against human consciousness . . . to reduce the range of thought through the destruction of words” (182). In “Politics and the English Language” Orwell talks about the way the language becomes dull and flat and in doing so, makes us not only duller and flatter ourselves, but makes us indifference to the actual perversion of language. This is a form of contracting the language, as in Newspeak, and limiting our own range of language and therefore thought. He writes, for example, about dead metaphors that cease to have any meaning, pretentious diction, abstract words, which he calls meaningless words, like democracy, patriotic, realistic, justice. These are words that have no objective referent (146). Orwell is against what he calls “ready-made phrases” (147) suggesting instead that an ethical writer will ask himself “is this image fresh enough to have an effect” (148). If it can't have an effect, it can't produce thought in either the writer or the reader. Orwell then uses these examples to talk specifically about political speech, saying, for example, that “a comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism cannot say outright ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results in doing so.’” He must instead say:

While freely conceding that the soviet regime exhibits certain features with the humanitarian may be inclined to deport, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavaoidable concomitant of transnational periods and . . . “

By inuring ourselves to ugly language that says nothing, we will be that much desensitized to ugly convoluted language that actually says horrible things, justifies cruelty. Collateral damage and acceptable losses come to mind.

George Kateb describes the way in which all of this can be rationalized in the name of group identity (8), which in 1984 must be preserved at all costs. “The group is a we [emphasis his]” Kateb says, “an incorporated self that is oneself enlarged to include everyone else or that is oneself and everyone else diminished” (8). We can think, here, of the “two-minute hate” that occurs everyday in Oceania against one of the other two countries in the world of 1984. It doesn't matter which country they are currently fighting against and thus currently hating. What is important is to maintain the group identity by having an enemy to hate. Kateb talks about “the preservation of group identity through group pride and xenophobia” (8). Kateb is concerned with morality and the world of 1984 is decidedly immoral. Rahv reminds us that “‘Doublethink’ is drilled into the Party members, which consists of the willingness to assert that black is white when the Party demands it and een to believe that black is white, while at the same time knowing very well that nothing of the sort can be true” (182). Few of the workers in 1984 have the conscience or consciousness, let alone the language, to express any kind of disagreement with the official policies that they live under. Kateb tells us that “aesthetic motives help to animate the pursuit of ideals . . . that are loved more than morality of are so loved that the moral const does not break into consciousness with any force” (11). The “two minutes hate” is an aesthetic practice that leads to group identity, much like cheerleading to urge on your team. To challenge the “two minutes hate” would not only damage moral, but would also constitute a thoughtcrime. As Rahv says, the goal of restricting language is make “thoughtcrime literally impossible because there will be no words in which to express it” (qtd in Rahv, 182). It is literally unthinkable.

Rorty further echoes this when he says that while Orwell “was not the first to suggest that small groups of criminals might get control of modern states and thanks to modern technology, stay in control forever” that he was the first to ask how intellectuals would deal with a situation where “it had become clear that liberal ideals had no relation to a possible human future”(171). Howe takes it a step further, saying that “ Orwell is trying to present the kind of world in which individuality has become obsolete and personality a crime [emphasis mine]” (189). “The whole idea of the self as something precious and inviolable is a cultural idea and as we understand it, a product of the liberal era,” which presumably, in the world of 1984, is now over.

So what role does the novel have to play if we are indeed at the end of a liberal era where we are not talking about the individual self anymore, but instead are talking about being “post-human?” Does being post-human mean that we have lost empathy, lost our humanity? In “History as Nightmare,” Irving Howe talks about the way that “Orwell has imagined a world in which the self . . . is no longer a significant value, not even a value to be violated.” Like 18th century novels, Rorty contends that Orwell, among other things, means to create or at least remind us of, our humanity, of our ability to empathize with others.

Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor. “On Commitment.” Trans. Francis McDonagh. Acessed April 10, 2009.
Howe, Irving. “The Fiction of Anti-Utopia,” The Orwell Reader: Text, Sources, Criticism. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1963.
Howe, Irving. “Orwell: History as Nightmare.” The Orwell Reader: Text, Sources, Criticism. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1963.
Kateb, George. “Aestheticism and Morality: Their Cooperation and Hostility,” Political Theory, vol 28, no 1, Feb. 2000, pp. 5-37.
Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press,1989.
Mizener, Arthur. “Truth Maybe, Not Fiction.” The Kenyon Review, vol. 11, no. 4, 1949, pp. 685–688. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4333102.
Orwell, George. 1984. The Orwell Reader: Text, Sources, Criticism. Ed. Irving Howe. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1963.
Orwell, George. “Politics and the English Language,” The Orwell Reader: Text, Sources, Criticism. Ed. Irving Howe. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1963.
Rahv, Philip. “The Un-future of Utopia,” The Orwell Reader: Text, Sources, Criticism. Ed. Irving Howe. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1963.
Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, Solidarity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Defending Millennials

I:

I am so tired of hearing "in the real world . . . " as a way of putting down 18-20 year old students and a way of further saying "I don't get that kind of treatment at my job, why should students think they should get special treatment?" It's petty and ridiculous and I will tell you why I think so.

I am on all kinds of education lists on social media. One day the conversation turned to extra credit as it so often does. Now, there are many reasons for and against extra credit assignments, but of course we eventually got to the usual and inevitable "In the real world, you don't get extra credit . . . ."

The fact is that many people DO receive extra credit in the form of bonuses and promotions and other little perks called "incentives." One person questioned if this was really extra credit, but it is credit given to someone over and above their salary for doing extra work. Sounds like extra credit to me.

And if you want to take the remedial view of extra credit, even if you are not doing well on the job they don't normally just fire you, but give you another chance to prove yourself, ie, extra credit. In the "real world" you don't get grades or write papers either. Your boss does not ask you to pull out a sheet of paper and write 200 words on the value of customer service. There is a difference between the conventions of what one does in the so-called real world and in a college learning situation, and I think that's ok. Students are there to learn and instructors, professors, teachers, etc. are there to teach. No one is there to serve a customer or client, help them to see an improvement in their business, stocks, or home investments just yet. Student and teacher. Student and mentor. Period.

This is all more of a move away from education as instilling the skills needed to be a good citizen and a well-rounded person and towards education as a form of discipline and training for corporate America, which let's face it, has also been a part of education for a very long time as well.

Personally, I am for anything that will make students do a little extra work and think harder. The thing about extra credit is that students rarely take advantage of it. Even if you make it available to them, they rarely have the time or inclination to take you up on it. They seem to just want to know that it's there.

II.

Moreover, I can’t help but feel that this is a form of discriminatory resentment, the suspicion that someone else, in this case another generation rather than another race or class of people, is getting something that you aren't. “These Millennials – they not only get an education (which has been leveled against generations at least since the GI bill if not sooner)(and which they have to go into enormous debt for), but also have all of this technology available to them at an early age and NOW they want EXTRA CREDIT when they are not doing well in their classes. What is with these kids? If I had had the kinds of advantages they have, why I would have aced all of my classes in ½ the time they take to text their friends. What nerve!”

This is the resentment of the very future that was promised to us. Now that the Silent or Greatest Generation, Baby Boomers, and the Atari Wave Gen Xers (see Strauss and Howe, 13th Gen) are too old to enjoy the full promise of the technology of the future, we resent that others have the opportunity to do so. Or perhaps, like George Orwell and Aldous Huxley warned us, the future is here, but it has turned out to be what Irving Howe called an un-utopia is his article The Fiction of Unutopia, what we now talk about as dystopia. Maybe it's not as great as promised. For every GPS that helps us find our location, we also secretly fear a Stephen Spielberg-Minority Report scenario in which our car drives us to work following the pre-programmed GPS route or takes us directly to jail. Maybe we didn't want all this technology anyway, and who are the Millennials to not see this? They are naive and blind to the downsides. Who wants all this technology anyway.

III.

It is not that far from resentment of Millenials and white male resentment towards women and “minorities” for affirmative action. How dare someone else get a piece of the pie? Or as it is now, “there’s not enough pie for me, and now somebody wants my already small piece?” I just saw an article on Facebook that said that white people claim more racism against them than people of color do. Everybody wants to be a victim it seems in this society, to justify their feelings of being left out and falsely blaming young people for being spoiled is another way of pointing to someone and saying “No fair. They got something I didn’t.”

“Adults” love to tell young people that the world isn’t fair, but they are the first to insist that Millennials haven’t “paid their dues” and yet are perceived to have the world as their oyster.

The fact is that people have said that about all of our generations.

IV.


The so-called Silent Generation or Greatest Generation was portrayed in popular culture as Beatniks and rebels (without causes) when they were young. They were a threat to the old order and had to be put in their place, which was in the suburbs working newly middle class jobs for the corporations who had been rehabilitated in the wake of America’s defeat over fascism into good corporate citizens offering good jobs to Americans. After all, what is good for Chevrolet is good for America.

Of course, who could have anticipated that the Baby Boomers who came after them would be a bunch of smelly hippies holding sit-ins and teach-ins rather than going the colleges and universities that had only been recently unlocked to them by their parents. What nerve they had, demanding democracy in those very universities, let alone an end to war and a just society. They should just shut up and take their place as the next generation of workers.

Then, when the Baby Boomers took the reins, they criticized the Gen Xers, my generation, for not engaging in mass movement politics as they did. We were all a bunch of apolitical slackers who contributed nothing to society, choosing skateboarding and video games over communes or worse, Alex P. Keatons and Charlie Sheens who had abandoned their parents values altogether in favor of greed. Many of those who did not go that route and chose instead to go their own way rather than working soulless corporate jobs got met with the parents' lament "when are these children going to move out of the house?" I believe that many Millennials are facing a similar lament from their own Baby Boomer and Gen X parents.

V.

Do you see the pattern I am presenting here? The fact of the matter is that the Millennials will find their own way(s). They are dealing with an economy much like the one that I came of age in with little opportunity, but at least 25 or 30 years ago we still had a social contract in place, which appears to be more than we have at this moment in time.

More than that, they have global warming and an America in decline (at least for the moment). Like most young people, they appear to be governed by people who do not share their values. And add to that the fact that many people see them as over-privileged brats. I recently watched a video in which Millennials addressed this perception of them. One person that stands out from the video is the young woman who said she felt so privileged to have to work 4 part-time jobs. I imagine that will also someday be used against her children. “You young people today! When I was your age I had to work 4 part-time jobs!” But let’s hope she has a little more perspective than that.

So as a college instructor, I actually burn when I hear people talk about students and how spoiled they are or how they don’t understand the workings of the “real world.” Of course they don’t. I didn’t either. I asked my teachers for unreasonable things like extensions and extra credit. I cut class. I didn’t understand how the world worked, and I was in the top 15 percent of my high school graduating class and even graduated a year early. I made several embarrassing missteps early on in my working life. I had what adults would call “book smarts” and not “street smarts.” But “street smarts” come from hardship. Don’t we all want our children not to go through excessive hardships?

I can only guess that most “adults” have repressed these memories to protect their own psyches and in order to further protect themselves, they must also vilify all of those lazy, naïve young people that came up after them.

VI.

I remember working in a test scoring center. The students had been assigned to write about a time when they had to overcome something. Most of the students wrote about a hard class or a cheerleading tryout. But some had terrible things, like one who had a friend decapitated in car accidents or more frequently, surviving abuse. I remember our scoring director telling us not to discount the cheerleading stories if they were well-written because she said “a cheerleading competition should be the worst thing for a 15 year-old to worry about.”

VII.

There is plenty of time to figure out the “real world” and maybe even reshape it in ways that the previous generations could not or did not or to at least leave it a little better. Frankly, this business model doesn’t work for us anyway and maybe businesses should look at how education or non-profits are run and take their cue from that, rather than seeing non-profits or education as a place to retreat from the "real world." The “real world” is overrated and should be shaken up and reshaped anyway.

The fact is that at nearly 50, I still don’t understand the so-called real world and if we were really honest with ourselves, few of us do. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be so much information available on the web about how to get along with one another, how to get jobs, how to buy a house, etc. No one knows how it works. We somehow all suspect that it’s a secret society to which we don’t know the handshake. And so we resent anyone who we perceive as getting just a little bit ahead of us, whether that perception is correct or not.

VIII.

Are some Millennials spoiled and overprivileged? Sure. Just like there have been spoiled and overprivileged children who grow up into spoiled and overprivileged adults since the beginning of time. I think Cain and Abel could probably be scrunched into that category as well if I were willing to take the time to do so. There were Silents, Baby Boomers, and Gen Xers who were spoiled and overprivileged. And there are those who are smart and conscientious and willing to work hard, and many of those are my students. I have sat by and watched 3 generations of young people vilified by the media all in the same way. I’m not going to listen to or believe it any more.