Kenyon College - Reveille Yearbook (Gambier, OH)

Page 20 text:

1984 In the few decades since Orwell wrote 1984, we have gone a long way toward domesticating the idea of the total state, Irving Howe, co-editor of Dissent, wrote last year, indeed, to the point where it now seems just one of a number of options concerning the way peo- ple live. George Orwell's classic antiutopian novel, published in 1949, shocked and depressed Western readers in the heyday of Stalinism. Later, some of it's phrases became common shorthand for horror — Newspeak, double- think, Thought Police, the Ministry of Love, Big Brother. More recently, scholarly arguments have raged over the importance of the dif- ferences between 'authoritarian' dictatorships (Chile, South Korea, Franco's Spain) and 'totalitarian' regimes (U.S.S.R., China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam) where, in near-Orwellian fashion, party cadres seek to shape the ordinary citizen's everyday life. What make 1984 so shocking today, is that in its fundamental conception, it now seems so ordinary, so plausible. The disease that has a frenzied world in its grip has been accurate- ly diagnosed. It is the disease of Power State power and economic power immorally exploited. We know the disease. We do not know the cure. We do not even know the prognosis — whether men will sur- vive or be utterly quelled and defeated. George Orwell has created a novel that tells the story of a com- paratively normal fellow, Winston Smith, who is caught in the inex- orable machinery of the monolithic state. He is hounded by the forces of hatred, fear, and cruelty which the new civilization exalts, pursued and beaten into mental and spiritual death. His privacy is gone. In his squalid apartment the telescreen tells him always what to do, how to move and talk and think, what to believe. His every motion may be observed by the I ought Police through a telescreen. Smith works in the Ministry of I ruth, falsifying official records and news reports every time the state changes its domestic of foreign policy. Thus history is destroyed and the state controls the past as well as the present and the future. Ibis ignorance, an essential condi- tion to the survival of such a state, is exalted. This is an important con- ception in Orwell's drama about the disease of power run rampant, but h is not close enough to our statistical and communications systems to contain terrifying mean- ing for our own way of life? No.