Danny's Weblog

The meaning of Orwell's 1984

I vaguely remember reading an analysis of 1984 which suggested that Orwell thought that his world in 1948 actually *was* the world of 1984; he only set the novel in the future, with a few irrelevant sf touches like the telescreens and the names of countries, in order to get it published.

Unfortunately I couldn't find that idea in a casual web search. Indeed, one of the first webpages I found was so collossally badly written that I wondered how it could possibly have acquired pagerank: studentweb.tulane.edu [http://studentweb.tulane.edu/~jgray1/]

This is much better, though tendentious: findarticles.com [http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1571/is_49_17/ai_81790763]

As usual the Wikipedia entry is valuable: en.wikipedia.org [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four] although it does not address my point.

My previous article re Orwell and Big Brother: www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Opinions/Politics/Miscellaneous/bigbrother01.html]

I have been thinking about this issue because for several years I have been reconsidering my entire worldview and tearing away successive layers of belief about historical events. Having come to believe that the British and US governments created the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for their own purposes, I found it easy to see what HMG gained from the war in Ulster, and so forth.

In particular, 1984 shows scenes of grinding poverty which are more similar to the grim conditions of Britain in 1948 than the Ipods and holidays in Ibiza which we see around us. But what was Orwell actually saying? The Wikipedia article shows that in the world of the novel, the government ("inner party") deliberately kept the people in poverty:

The point of continuous warfare is to be rid of the surplus of industrial production to prevent the rise of the standard of living and make possible the economic repression of people.

I have been feeling more and more keenly that living standards for most people have hardly risen over my lifetime. It's true we have mobile phones and widescreen tvs, but many more important things – job security, public transport, access to medical care – have become much less satisfactory. And yet technological advances have taken place. Productivity has been steadily rising for fifty years; why are we still working 40-hour weeks? More people own their own homes now, but their homes' rise in value is at the expense of their own children. Do people realize that? That they are taking those holidays in Ibiza by refinancing a debt which is being imposed on their children?

So I believe Orwell's analysis was valid for 1948, and 1984, and 2008.

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