1984 x 4
I appeared on a podcast this week—to be aired later this summer—to discuss the value of George Orwell’s iconic novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, for young readers. I was asked whether its applicability to today’s America outweighs some of the darker, more adult themes that may dissuade some families from tackling this text. My answer and reasoning are outlined here. And I urge parents, teachers, and administrators to consider this argument over the summer and as they prepare for the fall semester.
Nineteen Eighty-Four should not be ignored. And it should not be read just once. It should be studied every year of high school. I’m calling it the “1984 x 4” project.
George Orwell was a man of contradictions.
He loathed capitalism, yet he became a wealthy author because of capitalism. He was an ardent socialist—which by definition requires high taxation on successful people—yet when he finally became prosperous after the publication of the bestseller Animal Farm, he altered his tax status to avoid the increased income penalty. His response when asked about this hypocrisy? “No one is patriotic about taxes.”
He was critical of British imperialism, yet he benefited from his family’s success and pursued employment opportunities in British colonies.
Orwell was an atheist, yet he respected the traditions and morals of Christianity, which he believed undergirded Western culture.
He claimed to align with the working class, yet he had no friends of that background. He was awkward around laborers and common men, unable to relate to those that didn’t share his intellectual and cultural interests.
He was unattractive and often preferred solitude to company, yet he seemed desperate for love, proposing marriage to four women and marrying twice.
He famously stated that only intellectuals could believe certain ridiculous ideas: “No ordinary man could be such a fool.” Yet, he was an intellectual himself.
One of his most renowned works is the essay “Politics and the English Language,” in which he calls for simplicity and clarity in writing and political discourse. Yet, he admits to regularly breaking his own rules as an author.
Orwell is one of those rare figures whose philosophies can be appropriated by those from disparate views, a man claimed by both the left and the right. Those on the left thought the elections of George W. Bush and Donald Trump ushered in frightening reminders of the world depicted in the novel. Those on the right thought the same regarding the elections of Barack Obama and Joe Biden. The left thinks Big Brother is conservative. The right sees the Party as progressive. And, in true Orwellian fashion, both sides are often correct.
In recent years, the novel has seen several sales spikes: in 2013, when there was an NSA surveillance scandal during the Obama presidency (which reflected the concerns many had during the implementation of the Patriot Act during the Bush presidency); in 2017, after Trump’s press secretary said the administration was using “alternative facts”; in 2021, during the voting confusion and buried news investigations that marked the beginning of the Biden presidency.
And, most recently, the phrase “Ministry of Truth”—in the novel, Winston’s place of employment where he is tasked with rewriting history and fabricating news material to be disseminated as propaganda—trended on Twitter and filled Google search boxes when the current administration announced its plans for an ominous Disinformation Governance Board. This came on the heels of Biden’s press secretary admitting publicly that the administration is actively colluding with technology companies on censorship efforts.
In my lifetime, Republican Ronald Reagan and Democrat Bill Clinton both claimed they would reduce the reach of the State. “The era of big government is over,” they each said. Yet it continues to grow, because the name of the party doesn’t matter. It’s always, as Orwell said, the Party.
We can be surveilled through the countless screens. The IRS can access our bank accounts. Unelected bureaucrats, with the power of police, can force healthy and law-abiding citizens to be confined in their homes. People who say something disagreeable can be punished socially or legally and sent to re-education seminars. Simply asking questions is often forbidden, and truth is determined by the Party. Voltaire reminded us that the simplest way to determine who holds all the power is to look for the ones you aren’t allowed to criticize.
Benjamin Franklin once said, “I am a mortal enemy to arbitrary government and unlimited power. I am naturally very jealous for the rights and liberties of my country, and the least encroachment of those invaluable privileges is apt to make my blood boil.” That statement doesn’t even seem possible in America today.
Listening to our current political leaders , as well as those breathlessly vying for prominence each election cycle, it is easy to see that their goals are to continue to infringe upon our lives, perhaps even to the point that every aspect of our existence is controlled by government. They want to tell us how to obtain medical treatment, how to be educated, how to spend our money, how to raise our children, how to eat, how to interact with nature, how to find employment, and how to operate our businesses. They want to deprive us of the right to protect ourselves or to choose with whom we want to associate. As in the novel, Big Brother wants us captive, afraid, and powerless.
Orwell said, “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” But that becomes increasingly difficult in a world of censored thought. In the novel, the Party maintains its authority over an ignorant populace by distorting the linguistic reality of the citizenry.
Do any of these literary terms from the novel sound familiar today?
Doublethink: The Party’s requirement that citizens hold two contradictory ideas at once.
“Censorship protects freedom of expression.”
“Men and women are completely different. And they are one and the same.”
“You need to show your commitment to anti-racism by…being racist.”
“We don’t believe in vaccine mandates. But you are required to be vaccinated to leave your house and live your life.”
“We believe in objective, impartial scientific research. But only our scientific research counts.”
Newspeak: Bureaucrats obfuscate by inventing fuzzy terms and altering existing definitions.
Women are “birthing people”.
Aborting babies is “health care”.
“Misinformation/disinformation” is any information the Party doesn’t like.
“Fair share” has become a phrase for which an actual number/percentage for taxation is never given, that is certainly not fair, and that has nothing to do with the polite concept of sharing.
Endless complicated pronouns are created that no one can possibly remember, and if you forget you are vilified.
Equality now means equity.
“Climate justice” means…I have no idea.
Memory hole: When officials try to erase their own words/deeds from public history with claims of “I never said/did that.” Perhaps the most illuminating segments on television and YouTube are supercuts of politicians saying/doing exactly that which they deny saying/doing.
Thoughtcrime: In reviewing another dystopian novel of the period, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, Orwell commented how “one is imprisoned not for what one does but for what one is, or, more exactly, for what one is suspected of being.” A quick tour through Twitter or a visit to a public university classroom will demonstrate the accuracy of this analysis.
“You may not have done anything racist, but you are one anyway. And denying it just strengthens the case against you.”
“You may not have entered the Capitol on January 6, 2021, or you might merely have questions about how ballots were counted during the chaos of voting through Covid lockdowns, but you are still an insurrectionist, a threat to democracy.”
“You may have spent your entire life caring for and respecting women, but you are still a misogynistic defender of the patriarchy.”
“You may have run an honest business for 40 years and generously and loyally supported your employees and served your community, but you are still an evil capitalist and exploiter of labor.”
What you do now bears no resemblance to what someone may assume you to be. Your label is everything. And one will be assigned to you whether you asked for it or not.
The novel also describes endless war. If the nation is constantly under threat, always in a state of emergency, citizens’ fear will lead to increased trust in the Party, which leads to reduced freedom for the people. Since the 1960s, we’ve had the War in Vietnam, the War on Poverty, the War on Crime, the War on Drugs, the Cold War, the War in Iraq, the War in Afghanistan, the War on Terror, the War on Marriage and Family Values, the War on Climate Change, and in the last two years especially, the War on Covid, the War on Fossil Fuels, the War on Guns, the War on Science, and the War on Democracy. And those are just the ones off the top of my head.
President Trump once said in an interview, “Everything is a war. With me, life is a war.” And The Atlantic recently wrote that the best thing President Biden can do to improve his poll numbers is to find “an enemy.” Such is the mindset of the Party.
In 1985’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman claimed that the future of America would likely resemble the self-induced imprisonment of entertainment and pleasure of Brave New World rather than the forceful security state of Nineteen Eighty-Four. But if Postman would have lived to see the last two years, he might have come to a different conclusion.
We all understand the threat of widespread disease and medical emergencies. Few would have envisioned government officials forcing people into confinement and isolation and requiring experimental chemical injections into the bodies of healthy citizens—and worse, disallowing debate over the rationality of those measures.
We all understand that America’s past has not been perfect, as no nation’s is. Few would have foreseen politicians endorsing the destruction of our cultural heroes and traditions and inventing new mythologies of our founding and values.
We all understand that group conflict is possible, or even likely, when diverse people live in close proximity. Few would have thought that our leaders would incite violence and racial turmoil among its citizens, excusing criminal actions–in true Orwellian doublethink–as “peace” and “justice”.
We all understand freedom of expression is sometimes ugly, and not everyone’s ideas are valuable enough to be taken seriously in public. Few would have predicted that here, in the only country in the world that explicitly protects speech, bureaucrats would collude with technology companies and news publications to promulgate censorship of not only ordinary citizens, but also respected scientific, artistic, academic, journalistic, and other public voices.
Few people could proffer such prognostication. But George Orwell did.
Literature is the glimpse into the world of potential. It is a proposal of how things could be. It offers examples of how we might choose to act, given particular circumstances. Nineteen Eighty-Four is not simply the construction of a fantasy world that does not or will not exist. Versions of it have already played out and, no doubt, more will emerge. Orwell’s warning for us is not to be perfunctorily skimmed and placed back on the shelf, something to say you’re aware of to appear culturally literate. It must be employed as an exercise, done in repetition.
So, what might “1984 x 4” look like? Here’s a rough sketch, focusing on four main themes: Truth, History, Speech, and Philosophy.
Year one: psychology of language and manipulation of truth
Year two: totalitarian regimes throughout history, with historical background of Britain, Germany, and the Soviet Union leading up to and during WWII
Year three: free speech, journalism, and political propaganda
Year four: Marxist philosophy and how economics, sociology, and politics become intertwined
In addition to the text of Nineteen Eighty-Four, here are some supplemental offerings to consider:
Excerpts from The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Excerpts from The Black Book of Communism by Stéphane Courtois, et al.
John Milton’s essay, “Areopagitica”
John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, particularly chapter two
Excerpts from The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
“The Unknown Citizen” poem by W.H. Auden
“Silence Dogood, No. 8” essay by Benjamin Franklin
“No One Died in Tiananmen Square” essay by William Lutz
“Our Peculiar Hell” essay by Richard Lowenthal
“George Orwell and the Politics of Truth” essay by Lionel Trilling
“Politics and the English Language” essay by George Orwell
“The Prevention of Literature” essay by George Orwell
Excerpts from The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek
A “1984 x 4” plan is not intended to be strictly regimented. I do not claim to have all pedagogical answers on this matter. Rather, educators and parents should determine from the text(s) what they feel is most useful for analysis. I, as Orwell, respect readers’ intellectual freedom to decide for themselves. The goal is participation, not perfection.
Political philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” For high school readers, those growing up in a world increasingly blurred by superficial, manufactured, even completely untrue presentations of reality, Nineteen Eighty-Four is more valuable than ever. For those who struggle most with discerning factual evidence and legitimate knowledge, they would be most fortified through repeated exposure to the novel.
It is too important to pick up only once. Its ideas need to be absorbed. Its descriptions of isolation and torture need to be felt repeatedly, deep in the bones. Its desperate pleas for free thought and language need to be tattooed on the souls of all readers. Students need to dwell in the novel’s valuable themes so an aversion to totalitarianism in all its forms becomes automatized.
Orwell ends his novel with pessimism. Winston now loves Big Brother. The world appears set, unyielding, conclusive. But we do not have to suffer the same fate. We can read. We can see the warning signs. We can learn.
The book of Ecclesiastes reminds us that “There is nothing new under the sun.” For those that do not study history (the stories of what has already happened) or literature (the stories that could happen), they are bound to an unnerving now, a perpetual present in which everything is happening immediately and for the first time. But history and literature, though sometimes harrowing in their real and imagined depictions, can comfort us, prepare us. “We have encountered this scenario before,” we can tell ourselves, “and we are ready to respond.” We can face our fears and venture into a future that is a little less unknown.
Orwell was a socialist. I am a capitalist in the extreme. Orwell was an atheist. I am a devout Christian. Orwell lived many decades and thousands of miles away from my own world. So what brings the two of us together? An unyielding devotion to freedom of expression. His ability to write such work and my ability to read and critique that work, agreeing and disagreeing at my discretion, is what links people across time and space and brings stability to an ever-evolving world. And Nineteen Eighty-Four can do the same for you too.
When we can create and share and discuss and wonder, we are always on the precipice of discovery, of finding ourselves and one another. When we can communicate freely, truth is never out of reach. And we can live lives of liberty and hope—if only we choose to.
The “1984 x 4” project—think about it, while you still can.