This month marks the 70th anniversary of the first publication of George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” a warning of what unchecked state power can become.
But what has always impressed me the most about Orwell has been what I consider to be the one indisputable theme in all of his works — that of simple human decency and that of human nature.
I first read “Nineteen Eighty-Four” during the summer of 1974. I was 11 years old and my sister, who was in college at the time, had brought the book home and I was intrigued by its cover.
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” That sentence, with its intimations of a world at once alarmingly familiar and grotesquely alien, begins Orwell’s book.
I devoured the entire book over a weekend. I have never since read anything as stark and as brutally grim as Orwell’s description of his dystopian world. It was 1974 and I thought it was possible that 10 years later I’d be living in Orwell’s cruel, unfeeling Oceania in 1984.
But now it’s 2019. Since the election of 2016, sales of the book have surged. This past week, media all over the world noted the book’s 70th anniversary. Most noted that the British author’s great work is as pertinent today as it ever was before. Others questioned if we are already living in an Orwellian state.
Think about that. In my mind, we are.
There are too many examples to list here to prove that point. The obvious ones are clear: government-sanctioned psychological manipulation and torture; attacks on freedom of the press; incessant lies spun as truth; the destruction of personal privacy; drones and surveillance cameras and the ability to see and hack into our lives at will; perpetual warfare; apathy toward human suffering; the lack of clarity over who is an adversary and who is a friend; people just disappearing. I could go on.
Yes, we’re in “Nineteen Eighty-Four.”
In the 45 years since I’ve read and re-read Orwell’s book, the cautionary aspect of his message isn’t hard to find; it’s there any time anyone simply hears or sees the words “doublethink” or “groupthink,” the “enemy of the people,” “Newspeak,” “Thought Police,” or “Big Brother,” and then pauses to consider their meaning in today’s world. Now add in “alternative facts” and “fake news.”
Whether it was his disdain for the Ingsoc oligarchy in “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” the coal-mine owners in “The Road to Wigan Pier,” British imperialism in “Burmese Days,” or the cult of personality in “Animal Farm,” Orwell reduced everything to the common denominator of basic human decency.
“If you had asked me why I had joined the militia,” he stated in “Homage to Catalonia,” which recounts his service in the Spanish Civil War, “I should have answered: To fight against Fascism, and if you had asked me what I was fighting for, I should have answered: Common decency.’”
If Winston Smith had rats for his worst deepest terror in “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” Orwell had his own special fear: “The thing that frightens me. . . is the intelligentsia’s inability to see that human society must be based on common decency, whatever the political and economic forms may be.”
Orwell himself was a socialist with a basic concern for the plight of the common man — a political philosophy that this past year been greatly maligned and greatly misunderstood and, as would be the case in a “Nineteen Eighty-Four” society, been attacked with plenty of fear mongering.
What lay at the heart of Orwell’s socialism was an elemental belief in the inherent worth and dignity of every person — a belief that finds expression in the following statement from 1942:
“The damned impertinence of these politicians, priests, literary men, and what not who lecture the working-class Socialist for his materialism! All that the working man demands is what these others would consider the indispensable minimum without which human life cannot be lived at all. Enough to eat, freedom from the haunting terror of unemployment, the knowledge that your children will get a fair chance, a bath once a day, clean linen reasonably often, a roof that doesn’t leak, and short enough working hours to leave you with a little energy when the day is done …”
This idea of common decency as a motivating force in political belief is today foreign to right wing extremists and those who support them. The intoxication of power, the lack of integrity and predominance of underhandedness is everywhere. Those facts, on this the 70th anniversary of “Nineteen Eighty-Four, is my greatest fear.
To most, Orwell’s famous dystopian novel is still an early-warning system for Western civilization. But I fear we may be too late. The fate of common decency is in our hands.
Otherwise, “if you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.” Orwell’s O’Brien said so.
John Paradis, a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel, lives in Florence and writes a column published the second Friday of the month. He can be reached at opinion@gazettenet.com.