1985
Page 8
Not innocent so much as shrewdly aware of how far they can go. And how far their economies will permit them to go. It's interesting to note, by the way, that the Orwell war rationale hasn't worked in the nuclear age. I mean the using-up of the products of the industrial machine in wasteful war, in order to keep the standard of living low. That notion came from Nazi Germany - guns not butter. The American economy has been marked by colossal expenditure on armaments accompanied by an ever-growing consumption of pacific commodities. It's as though the intercontinental missile and the colour television set reside in the same area of economic expansion. In the modern age you can't keep the two kinds of ingenuity apart - the lethal and the allegedly life-enhancing. Indeed, it's possible to sum up part of the age in terms of a synthesis of the two - you know what I mean, the cosy television evening with the Vietnam war as part of the chromatic entertainment. The American war adventures have been tied up with teaching the world the merits of consumption. Nothing Orwellian there.
But something Orwellian in American imperialism - the building of a kind of Oceania with the centres of power, as with Ingsoc, curiously hidden, dispersed and anonymous. The CIA a kind of Thought Police. The doublethink of democracy, self-determination, freedom of speech and action reconciled with bullying and brutality. A free Francophone Canada? Unthinkable, shoot the dissidents. Too much American capital invested in Our Lady of the Snows. A communist government in Italy? Not to be thought of. I, a harmless British apolitical writer living in Rome, was well aware that the CIA was tapping my telephone. Doing their job, in the name of global freedom, the travelling men of the Thought Police.
Let's be sensible. There's nothing in the traditions of the United States which predisposes them to authoritarianism on the European model. The hysterical anti-communism of the fifties can be seen as a symptom, though an unpleasant and dangerous one, of an ingrained hatred of centralized authority. You can't deny that America did a great deal to promote democratic self-determination in western Europe. Truman, Acheson, Marshall Aid. There was a kind of arrogant assumption on America's part that she knew best, that God had endowed her with a moral superiority that was the reward of an enlightened democratic tradition, but that's very different from collectivist tyranny.
Well, one thing is true, and this is that authoritarianism is no monopoly of the big powers. Africa is full of nasty little tyrannies. Territories that were supposed to have groaned under the colonial yoke gained liberation only to set up dictatorships. Go to Singapore, where Mr Lee presides over a clean unmalarial heaven of free trade. His political opponents are in jail or abroad on courses of what is called self-education. The police drag long-haired youths to compulsory barber-chairs. The media have that bland, uncontroversial quality you associate with Franco's Spain - society weddings, bonny babies, kittens in ribbons. Cinematic candour is called pornography. I lived in Malta for a few years in an atmosphere of censored books and banned films, lingerie advertisements solemnly snipped out of imported British newspapers so that the youth of Malta might not be inflamed. The Maltese government confiscated my house, still full as it was of possibly incriminating books and papers. There are a host of repressive governments everywhere, their tyranny animated by the hypocrisy of doing what is considered 'best for the people'. O'Brien's candid admission that Ingsoc seeks power for its own sake is, compared with the small tyrannical liars, positively healthy.
Let's think of the bigger, older, genuine democracies for a moment. What we ought to be looking for is signs of inroads on personal freedom. There's no doubt that technologies of oppression exist, of a kind that makes Orwell's snooping Thought Police seem very primitive. Now what worries me is the difficulty of making up my mind about these technologies. I don't want to be led into condemning technology in itself. Take the computer. Norbert Wiener and Warren McCulloch developed it as an aspect of legitimate philosophical investigation into the way the brain works - see how far a machine can simulate a human brain, and then what's left over is the essentially human - but it was inevitable that cybernetics should become a useful science, and we all know how usefulness tends to be interpreted - in terms of control over what can be controlled, and that mostly means human beings.
A computer is a neutral thing. Information is a neutral commodity. The more information we have the better. That's the way I look at memory banks and so on.
But once the State gets hold of computers it's led on to the inevitable path of amassing information about its citizens. I don't know whether that's bad in itself, but I'm thinking of what happened in 1971 in safe, free, democratic little England -
You mean the Census?
Look at the things the State wanted to know. Status of head of household, relationship to other members of household, how many cars owned, did the cook have an oven, was the toilet inside the house, country of origin, country of parents' origin, previous addresses, education, marital status, number of children, and so on. Some refused to fill in the form, but the vast majority meekly complied. 800 tons of paper, 105 000 enumerators, PS10 000 000 of the taxpayers' money. But only 500 prosecutions. There was a maximum fine of PS50 for not answering questions. Alan Sillitoe, the novelist, gave his age as a hundred and one and was fined PS25. A man of seventy-three and a woman of sixty-six weren't able to pay the fine attendant on their passion for privacy, so both went to prison. Then it was revealed by the department of the Registrar General that some of this secret information was going to be leaked to commercial organizations. One firm said boastfully that it would have details of 90 per cent of the entire population on its computers by 1980. The police easily get access to this kind of stored information. 152 800 people who'd been patients in psychiatric hospitals have had the most intimate details of their lives computerized. Intelligence levels, whether or not they've ever been in prison, the degree of constraint necessary to get them there, a full diagnosis of the mental ailment, special slots for details of drug addiction, epilepsy, alcoholism -
But is there anything really so sinister about the truth? And, for that matter, about violation of privacy? When young people copulate openly in public places, who are we to ask that our biographies go unpublished?
I don't know, I don't know. But think - the State is only an instrument. Everything depends on who has control of that instrument, which can so easily be transformed into a weapon. It's unwise to assume, even with our heightened wariness of tyranny, a continuation of a tradition of liberalism. A new Hitler could arise in Europe and be overjoyed with the information made available by a civil service thinking in the old terms of restraint and democratic rights. Undoubtedly the computers of the world have Jews neatly listed, as well as dangerous intellectual freethinkers. And even now, suppose a crime has been committed, and a man in middle age is suspected, one suffering from epilepsy with four false incisors -. The nation's blood groups are computerized. The State knows the addresses of all the men with red hair.
You're saying that nobody is fit to be given knowledge. We have to take a chance on this sort of thing. I insist on the neutrality of knowledge. Justice is always as likely to be done as injustice. Besides, I see signs everywhere that the State is losing power rather than gaining it.
In Russia? In China? In the bloody little republics that issue no news?
I mean in those areas where the luxury of freedom has been for a long time taken for granted, as much as clean water and mains electricity. I'm not forgetting, by the way, that the essential thing in life is to live, somehow. That if the only way to get a daily bowl of rice is to be in a stinking jail - well, open up, let me in. That in some parts of the world the antonym to State tyranny is not personal liberty but impersonal chaos. No, I mean the civilized West. America, Britain, western Europe. We've seen no charismatic bull-necked leaders around for a long time. Politicians are generally despised, statesmen derided, a United States president can take a deserved whipping. Orwell believed that the media, especially the new ones like television, would be in the hands of the State, that here wa
s an apt instrument for propaganda, harangues, lordly directives. It hasn't worked out that way at all. Politics can't compete with soap opera or old movies. The posters and slogans we see concern taste-pleasing commodities, not omnipotent Big Brother. We have a bearded Southern colonel who offers us nothing more oppressive than fried chicken, we have handsome open-air smokers of Kool or Kent. The State can't gratify taste or sense or excite sympathetic tears or the rib risible. It knows it can't have our souls. All it can get is our money, and that is, true, a real oppression that didn't seem to interest Orwell (though, I gather, he tried to turn himself into a limited company to protect his royalties from Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm). The State exerts its power on us chiefly through fiscal tyranny, in the insolence of brutal demands, not graceful requests, in the immorality of taking money for things not necessarily wanted by the payer, and all without contract - give us your cash or you go to jail; as for what we do with it, that's our concern, brother. The State calls up young people to fight wars that nobody wants except the Pentagon and the arms manufacturers. The State shows its ugly face most blatantly in the police, which increasingly uses methods learnt from the totalitarian torturers, but shows itself also more and more not to be an arm of the State so much as a quasi-autonomous force, able to shoot first and ask questions after. But we're not bludgeoned too much into orthodoxy, chiefly because there isn't any orthodoxy.
What you mean is that there's a lot of power about, but it's not centralized on the Ingsoc pattern. That there are, indeed, forces always ready to diminish State power, though oppressive enough in their own ways. Multinational companies that can make and break governments but don't give a damn about matters of responsibility to thought, art, sentiment, health, morality, tradition. The manipulators, the true investigators into the power of propaganda, meaning doublethink, subliminal suggestion, rendering us unfree in the realm of what we consume. Trade unions. Minority groups of all kinds, from the women's liberationists to the gay sodomites. And where we expect the State, that takes our money, to protect us from the more harmful of the anarchic forces of the community, there we find the State peculiarly powerless.
You mean the gangs that roam mean streets, robbing, raping, putting the boot in. There aren't any of those in Oceania, because the aggressive instincts incident to youth are channelled, as they were in Nazi Germany, into organized robbing, raping, and putting the boot in on the State's behalf. Or perhaps just putting the boot in. What you want is more and more ruthless police, also skilled at putting the boot in. Well, the situation for most of us in the democracies has been neatly contrived by the growth of technology and the advance of violence. What is life? Work followed by television. We dare not go out in the evenings, but why should we, when the whole of life is brought to our hearths?
That's all it is, a coloured TV image - a family hearth. When we were permitted coalfires we saw far better pictures in them.
Dullness followed by dullness. Real sleep and two kinds of surrogate sleep. Perhaps we'd be happier loving Big Brother.
Don't, for God's sake, say that. Don't even think it. Because it's precisely when we admit to the inadequacy of our private lives that the State is only too happy to step in to fill the vacuum you call dullness. A night out with the boys of Biffsquad Number Seven, dear. Polishing his boots. It must have been exciting to put on a swastika armband and go siegheiling at a Nazi rally. Life ought to be adequately fed and fairly dull. That's civilization. And if we don't really like the dullness, then we'd best do something about expanding our own inner vision. We can go to a George Orwell class. Armed, of course, against the more truculent of our fellow-citizens.
We're not being fair to the State, I suppose. When it doesn't scare us we sneer at it. Do you believe the State can be, well, beneficent?
The Welfare State, which Britain has but America hasn't, though it fills the postboxes with welfare checks, all too lootable. It's good to have National Insurance, but what happens to the exercise of charity? We can't be kind to the poor when the State kills the very concept of poverty. Industries nationalized, and the workers become civil servants, unfireable, hence not giving a damn. Without tooth and claw, no urge to work. All nationalized industries fail. Anyway, how can the State be beneficent when it's using other people's money? Bureaucracies are self-perpetuating. Bureaucracies are haughty and inefficient. What do we need the State for? For the conduct of a foreign policy, which means having an army, and for the maintenance of civil peace, which means the police. Always guns and a filing system.
Let's accept, anyway, that the State in the free West is not moving in an Orwellian direction. We read what we wish, look at pornography on the streets, can buy pieces of plastic ordure, make love without official hindrance. We howl for greater and greater sectional liberties and usually get them. Yet the State remains an ogre. Especially to the young.
Ah, the young.
Bakunin's children
It is no new thing to mistrust or fear the State. The nineteenth century went further than our own in wishing to dismantle it as an instrument of oppression. Thinkers like John Stuart Mill saw war as a typical emanation of the State, a terrible evil impossible to individuals or free human communities, and a justification in itself for regarding the State as an unnatural monster. Karl Marx found in it the machinery for capitalist tyranny and believed that it would rust and fall to pieces when the proletariat gained power. Michael Bakunin, Marx's contemporary, dedicated his life to the overthrow of the evil giant, and his spirit is still with us - or rather it has been resurrected, often unknowingly, among the young. Marx regarded him as a fool and a poseur, if not a Czarist secret agent. History, a full century after his death, calls him the father of revolutionary anarchism.
Anarchism has, thanks to him, always carried overtones of violence: you can almost smell cordite in the word. But it resolves coolly and harmlessly enough into its Greek elements - an, without; archos, a ruler. Bakunin, a Russian aristocrat, large, hairy, emotional, good-hearted, contradictory, clumsy, heroic, has somehow stamped the term with his own personality. He was, unlike Marx, incapable of systematic thought, and this led him to the impulsive doublethinkful, or doublefeelful, adoption of incompatibilities in what he thought of as his philosophy. He loved man, he preached universal brotherhood, and yet he loathed both Jews and Germans. His cult of the hero, beard blowing in the wind on the barricades, had a touch of fascism in it. He rejected authority, and yet for a time could preach revolutionary dictatorship on the Leninist model. He was the rank meat in a more rational anarchical sandwich, tastier than the dry bread of theory that Proudhon offered before him and Kropotkin after. Without him, anarchism would have been merely Utopian thinking in books little read: he humanized, or heroicized it. He made the anarchist into a Byron.
Bakunin was born in 1814, before Napoleon met his Waterloo. The despotism that still rode over Europe was matched in Bakunin's mother, whose own reputed tyranny was the cause, or so Bakunin said, of his eventual loathing of all restrictions on liberty. Others, with perhaps more reason, have suggested that his childhood was so idyllic that his subsequent anarchism was an unconscious attempt to get back to the Garden of Eden. He was the eldest son in a family of eleven, idolized by his sisters and brothers alike, but aware of the diversity of tastes and talents possible in a small human community, its capacity for being cohesive despite the contrary tuggings of the temperaments of its members. Why could not the greater human society of the city, the nation, eventually the world, partake of the quality of the family? Bakunin confessed, late in life, to an incestuous passion for his sister Tatyana, a snake in Eden, but normal sexual capacity seems to have been curiously lacking for a man of such hairy volatility. He married, but his wife sought other beds and another father for her children. He perhaps dreamed lust and revolution in the same sector of his brain. His words were always fierier than his acts.
He became a cadet in the Russian army and made, apropos of war, a statement that many of us now would be too hypocri
tical to accept: namely, that men fight not to win but to revel in the glandular releases of danger: battles are better than the brutal monotony of most people's daily lives. On the other hand, he realized that wars also meant stupid discipline and humiliating regimentation, and it was his revolt against this aspect of army life that primed his revolutionary fervour. He left the army and went to the University of Berlin to study Hegel. The Hegelian definition of the human spirit - 'an I that is a we and a we that is an I' - seems to be reflected in Bakunin's own 'I do not want to be I, I want to be We,' which in turn gives a meaning to Zamyatin's title We. Hegel's image of history as a moving towards revelation of the truth, a dialectical process of struggle between ideas, not a mere treadmill of events, fired many of Bakunin's generation both to reject a philosophy that was too much set in the world of spirit and to accept a system that could be applied to the world of brute matter. Socialism needed a metaphysical interpretation of history, and Hegel's dialectic provided the structure for building one. Bakunin made an idiosyncratic dialectic for his own use. History was moving towards the building of a better world, therefore new things were better than old. If you destroyed old things, new things came into being to take their place. Ergo, let us all start to destroy old things. This is what makes the term anarchism carry such terrible, and attractive, overtones.
Bakunin took up revolutionary anarchism as a career. 1848 was the great year of European popular risings (that is to say, risings engineered by intellectuals in the name of the people), and Bakunin followed them around, always just missing their great moments. He was too late to be on the Paris barricades, but he showed such revolutionary fervour in the capital of the new French Republic that he was sent off by its government to start a revolution in Poland. He stopped in Prague on the way and organized bloody battles in the streets - oppressed Slavs versus Hapsburg oppressors, with a foregone conclusion. While in Dresden, still not having managed to reach Warsaw, he was caught up in the Saxon rebellion, captured by the forces of the crown, sentenced to death. Reprieved, he was handed over to the Czarist police, incarcerated horribly in St Petersburg, then sent to Siberia. He got away, tried at last to liberate Poland, failed, led the twenty-four-hour revolutionary commune at Lyons, organized innumerable secret societies, contested the leadership of the First International with Karl Marx, and at length tried to die a hero's death on the barricades of Bologna. The Italian rising collapsed in ignominy, so Bakunin crawled to Switzerland to die in his bed. He died disillusioned. He thought the forces of reaction were too powerful for revolutionary anarchism. But anarchism went marching on.