Book Review -- 1984 by George Orwell

Orwell's dystopian novel has been largely defined (or perhaps, redefined) by this book, published hot on the heels of the Second World War and reflecting a somewhat prophetic pessimism for the future (a pessimism reflected in his essay, "Into the Whale," 1940). Not only that, it has had a profound effect on the English lexicon, having coined a large number of terms that are still in use today, including "Big Brother," "Room 101," "Thought Police," and "Newspeak," just to name a few.

On one occasion Stephen Colbert started screaming, "Do it to Julia!" when he found out skim milk had been mixed into his coffee instead of cream in one episode of the Colbert Report. Security cameras are synonymous with the sarcastic remark that "Big Brother is watching you." The novel has had a profound impact on Anglophonic culture, especially the American psyche.

Films such as THX 1138 and Brazil, and novels such as Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, and V for Vendetta (the last one being a graphic novel) bear the marks of Orwell's vision of the totalitarian world to come.

Hot on the heels of my own ruminations upon Plato, I confronted one of his many and recent successors to the field of dystopian literature. Orwell creates a world of socialism come to England. Society is divided between the Party and the proles (shortened form of "proletariat"). The structure is reminiscent of many Western conceptions of Soviet government and state control during the Cold War, only taken to a very refined and effective extreme, harnessing advanced technology, industrial techniques, and psychology to keep 85% of the population complacent. The proles, however, are not the truly dangerous element--they're kept stupid and loutish. Rather, the Outer Party is where the most subversive elements are to be found. Orwell's IngSoc keeps its friends close and its (potential) enemies closer.

I cannot help but place this novel into a trinity of sorts alongside Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 and Aldous Huxley's A Brave New World. All three deal with totalitarian governments. All three describe how those governments keep their populations docile and controlled. And all three are radically different. In these comparisons, I see some weaknesses in Orwell's assumptions regarding how to keep a population submissive.

Primarily, I believe the way to keep people subdued and docile is to give them the very thing that THE BOOK (a text within a text) would deny them--leisure, tranquility, and plenty. The trick is to make them wholly and utterly dependent upon the government in order to provide these things. A friend once told me he'd happily sign his freedoms away in exchange for a holodeck like from Star Trek: The Next Generation. This is something I believe the United States has fallen into--a sort of totalitarianism of the corporation that has rendered the American populace complacent. Whereas Orwell's Party would deny the proles anything approaching comfort and leisure, the postmodern totalitarian regime would provide everything that the prole needs, while ensuring that his existence is dull, uneventful, unchallenging. In this regard, Bradbury and Huxley more correct than Orwell--remove intellectual stimulation, make people stupid, provide them with never-ending amusement and entertainment. Make them content. Keep them busy fighting traffic so that they can't muster the willpower to fight the Party. However, when the times of plenty are gone, and famine arrives (as it may well in the coming decades in the United States), the strict control measures of IngSoc and its ability to redirect the citizens' anger against enemies (both external and internal) may become more and more apparent.

Orwell was right about numerous things--the need for an enemy to hate for one. I've said it before, I'll say it again, the Democrats wouldn't have any unity whatsoever if it weren't for the Republican Party. They'd be at one-another's throats and the mudslinging, hate-filled race for the Democratic nomination is proof that Democrat constituents are a patchwork of mutually exclusive minorities with only the most tenuous common ground--the Republican Party.

Orwell is also right about Newspeak (nee Postmodern litcrit jargon), and how ambiguities can lead to the stifling of specific modes of thinking. I cannot help but consider Jacques Derrida sometimes. However, postmodern litcrit speak is in some manners, the exact opposite of Newspeak. However, the empty prattle of politicians these days, and their ability to fill the air with words while not truly saying anything of worth, is something that is most certainly reflected in Newspeak--especially the attribute of the language to render a politician incapable of saying the wrong thing--i.e. something that actually meant anything.

What is politically correct speech if not an attempt to control people's thoughts by controlling their language? At the very heart of this matter is thoughtcrime and the free will of an individual to harbor whatever thoughts and feelings are his own.

Doublethink, thinkpol, Ingsoc and Newspeak. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis states how language plays an integral role in the way a society's people think. There have been movements to simplify and "dumb down" the English language in the United States before, although they've gotten little support. Over-reliance upon passive-voice in papers, articles, and other publications can cover omissions by removing the actor from a sentence. Orwell himself discussed this in his essay "Politics and the English Language."

Control of language is not the only component of the Party's program, but also the control of communication. In this age of highly centralized market control of communications, it is nearly impossible to escape the inherent media bias. The government doesn't even need to censor the information we acquire, the media does all of the gatekeeping for them. This has led to an institutional memory within American culture that is often erroneous. Falsified magazine articles earn Pulitzer Prizes and overtly biased films receive Academy Awards. What Orwell never realized is that the system polices itself, and the Proles allow it to do so--no Thinkpol is required.

So what are we given? Instead of Goldstein, produce a Klansman, a Teabagger, or a Creationist. Instead of Eastasia and Eurasia, show them Iraq or China. Make them think that they are fighting for freedom when they vote for somebody that was already picked for them. The media provides grist enough for the mill.

Yes, I'm a bit disgruntled and disbelieving about our current system. In my opinion, the entire totalitarian state is already here--has been since the 1970s, probably. This is why I'm plodding so depressingly slowly through de Tocqueville. However, everywhere you look in America, Big Brother is watching you. Most of us don't like to think about how nearly every move we make out of doors is recorded by a CCTV camera somewhere. They are mounted on traffic poles, the sides of buildings, within buildings--they're everywhere. And they never, ever seem to be there to protect you from the abuses of authority (especially since it is now illegal in many states to videotape the police).


To return to my assessment of 1984 and Newspeak, Orwell and postmodern literary criticism must ultimately come to blows. When four fingers are held up and Winston is told that the Party says there are five, the assumption is that reality is consensual. In a way, postmodernism asserts that through the denial of absolutes. Two and two make four regardless of whether you are black, white, Asian, gay or straight, making science and mathematics fields that transcend postmodern thought--something that they have been warring tooth and nail to overthrow. Magically, mystically, the Party in 1984 finds a way to overcome all that. If the Party wanted the sky to be green, everyone wouldn't just say it was green, they would convince themselves that it was green through doublethink.


1984 is also ultimately pessimistic about the human heart and the frailty and fragility of it. It is pessimistic regarding the inability of the human mind to withstand too much torture. It is a sad, hard look inside of us. We can be brainwashed, we can be convinced that the sky is green, that two and two make five, and we can make ourselves believe these things and be happy that we have no freedom.

• Ignorance is strength.
• Freedom is slavery.
• War is peace.

These are, to us, oxymorons, but to the Party, they are ironies and little else.

C.S. Lewis wrote in The Abolition of Man that a "post-human civilization" will essentially be totalitarian. If ethics are subjective, then that means that the most powerful people in society will determine what is right and wrong. This is strangely echoed in O'Brien's ill regard of Winston Smith's "humanity" when he makes him look in the mirror and witness his emaciated form.

What is important about 1984 isn't the prose or the diction. It is the scathing torment that Winston experiences throughout Part III. It is the fear that one must feel watching his mind erode and reality be rewritten. Orwell never attacked postmodernism directly--it was still in its nascent stages, and the likes of Derrida and Foucault had yet to explode upon the world and peddle their anti-thoughts. Heidegger wasn't much known beyond Germany yet. However, the seeds were being sown, and Orwell knew it. The book represents a flailing effort to spew vitriol and revulsion at what he saw that was only beginning to happen to the English language, to books and academia, to intelligence and thought. In that it is not quite coherent. It was written too early in the 20th century to capture all of the nuances of these trends, and it was written too late in Orwell's life (he died a year later) for it to have been more patient.

But that lack of patience gives it the roaring urgency that it needs. The book is grimy and gritty, not polished and smooth--this is because its world is grimy and gritty. Orwell is shaking his fist at Big Brother. Orwell is Winston, strapped in the bed, being told that two and two makes five, and he is refusing to believe it. The book, in this regard, is self-referential, I think. He doesn't know who Big Brother is, indeed, doesn't even know if Big Brother exists at all.

Indeed, this leads my to my final thought--that, in the midst of this self-reference, a kernel can be formed from the third part of the book, a kernel that reveals the shape of things, not to come, but as they were within Orwell's final days. The Party, O'Brien, Big Brother, they all represent the changes and shifts that Orwell saw taking place in the English language and in the intelligencia as he was dying. Winston may represent him, or more than him--the mid-level intellects. Winston is the grounded man, the person who sees reality for what it is, while the Inner Party, everyone else, are the new-wave of thinkers that were just beginning to creep out into the light, just beginning to venture forth into the literate world and ensconce themselves within the ivory towers of Europe. Whether Orwell realized this or not, I cannot say. He probably didn't see it for what it was at the time. He saw the symptoms and did his best to diagnose the illness and, in the absence of a cure, develop a vaccine of skepticism, rage, and refusal.

1984 by George Orwell
Style A
Substance A+
Overall A+

Foucault and Psychiatry--Comments on MADNESS AND CIVILIZATION

Alright, it's been awfully long in coming. I've finished reading this book a long time ago, and I've finally gotten around to hammering out my thoughts and impressions on this piece of postmodern French thought.

But first, a little background on Michel Foucault. Perhaps the most influential thinker of the late 20th century, it is arguable that Foucault is far more well-known than a number of other recent thinkers such as Jürgen Habermas, Francis Fukuyama, Eric Hobsbawm, or Jacques Derrida. (NOTE: A pretty funny video regarding Habermas' and Foucault's philosophies in contention can be found here, complete with wickedly-funny "fuck you, Habermas, fuck you" exclamation by the speaker.) The general thrust of Foucault's philosophy is a criticism of modernity. To Foucault, the modern era (post-Enlightenment to be specific) is rife with inequalities and structures of power and oppression that need to be examined critically. In this, Foucault seems to adhere to a general principle that systems of power and oppression are simply a part of the human condition, something I gleaned from his debate with Noam Chomsky.

Foucault first entered the historiographical and philosophical world with Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique (titled in English as Madness and Insanity: History of Madness in the Classical Age) in 1961, which earned him his doctorate. He further cemented his influence with Naissance de la Clinique (English: Birth of the Clinic) in 1963 and Les Mots et les choses (English: The Order of Things) in 1966. But it wasn't really until 1975, with the English translation of the epoch-making Surveiller et Punir (English: Discipline and Punish) that Foucault achieved world-wide recognition as a seriously influential philosopher.

In his Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern (p. 423), Ernst Breisach describes Foucault's philosophy:

Michel Foucault--less closely tied to linguistic theory--stressed the aspect of hegemony in his view of history as a sequence of periods constituted by different discourses. Dominant discourses created collective identities through the exclusion of other discourses. Historical changes (those in prevailing discourses) were not brought about by thinking and acting subjects but occurred in the manner of geological shifts. Thus, instead of delving into the world of individuals, historians needed to become archaeologists of linguistic structures of power and oppression encrusted in writings and institutions.


Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault
This volume is an abridged translation of Folie et déraison. Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique, and a full translation has only been recently published by Routledge in '06 and is prohibitively expensive on Amazon. Thus, I satisfied myself with reading the standard abridged version in English, translated by Richard Howard.

Foucault's writing is extremely dense, even in translation, and is extremely influenced by his own specific jargon that he utilizes throughout the book. Though in later books he would come to edit, develop, or outright reject many of the terms and ideas he uses throughout Madness and Civilization, Foucault's discourse is nevertheless, heavily influenced by these very abstract terms that he never clearly defines. Part of this is because they are still apparently in development in this particular work, and would later come to be clarified in later works. One such term, for example, is "archaeology," which Foucault uses as "a metaphor for 'digging deep' into the underlying rules and assumptions of human sciences" (Windschuttle, 136). Another concept that is not totally formed is that of episteme (which later evolves into discourse and "discursive formation"), which is roughly a time period during which a specific paradigm of knowledge is accepted as the reality of the day. Throughout his work, Foucault behaves as if these paradigms actually do reflect the reality of that period, and are not simply the perceptions of the inhabitants of that particular time.

The book begins with a description of the fanciful "Ship of Fools," that plied the rivers of Europe with its cargo of madmen, and the exclusion of lepers from cities and their incarceration in leprosariums. The book then moves into the Renaissance, in which madness was a reflection of humanity's distance from God, and discusses how the mad were often depicted in literature as somehow possessed of wisdom and knowledge because of their insanity. Then, the Enlightenment hits, and man is defined as inherently rational, with the irrational being defined as other. Since madmen are identified with the irrational, they are defined as other and segregated apart from society.

This is the general development of the book. Foucault moves us through a variety of historical epochs, each of which possessed a different paradigm regarding reality. In each paradigm, Foucault examines the relationship of the prevailing consciousness with madness and the mad. For example, in one epoch, the relationship between madness and unreason is integral to the treatment of the mad; in another epoch, madness and unreason are not necessarily identified with one-another. In one period, madness is scandalous and must be hidden from society at large, while in another it is on display. In one period, the asylum is a place of separation, in another a place of healing and rehabilitation, and in yet another a place of discipline. The treatment of madness and the understanding of madness also go through a variety of movements throughout Foucault's book, culminating with the enthronement of the psychatric priesthood as a major force in modern society.
The major thrust of his book seems to be that madness was originally understood as a form of knowledge, and that through exclusion, confinement, and institutionalization, this form of knowledge has been repressed by the authorities that the Enlightenment have created. This theme of "repression of knowledge" by Enlightenment authorities is a major theme in much of Foucault's work.

Criticisms of Foucault's historiography seem to rest on the veracity of his examples for major epistemological movements. For example, Keith Windschuttle (p. 162) describes scholarly attempts to locate an actual Ship of Fools (Foucault depicts it as a wholly real and extant vessel). The timeline of events that Foucault describes is presented by many of his critics as wholly false, such as the absence of any state-led program to incarcerate the insane between 1700-1900 in England (Windschuttle, p. 161). Foucault's supporters, however, point out that Foucault was not only discussing the confinement of the mad, but also orphans, the poor and homeless, and vagabonds. Indeed, Foucault is quite explicit in his equation of the mad with other groups that did not conform to a particular time period's epistemological paradigm. To Foucault, these groups form sources of knowledge that were oppressed and removed from the collective consciousness of an era.
Foucault's work as an achievement of scholarship is to provide a fascinating perspective on the changes in the collective perception of madness throughout the past five centuries. I am loathe to describe these changes as evolutionary, because Foucault seems to view these different periods as completely disconnected from one another. Evolution would imply growth. Foucault describes the transitions through which physicians' understanding of the causes of madness--these transitions at first appear to be evolutionary, i.e. developments in the discourse lead to further developments and gradual change. But this is an illusion. To Foucault, there is no evolutionary relationship between those who understood madness through the imbalance of humors and those who understood it as the texture of different physical fibers in various organs--these periods are completely disconnected and independent of one-another.

And here is where I can't really agree with Foucault. Although I like that he is critical of the Enlightenment, I find the division of time periods into separate epistemes that are completely unrelated to be a complete denial of causality. Perhaps I am far too modern to be post-modern, but I have always, and likely shall always, view historical development as most certainly cause-and-effect related, and therefore each age is dependent upon the previous ages' paradigms and knowledge.

Thus, Foucault's conceptualization of epistemes is inherently politically driven. Each epoch has its dominant form of knowledge and other forms are oppressed. The dominant form of knowledge seems to literally dictate the very shape that reality actually takes for Foucault. Therefore, I have to wonder if Foucault wanted to overthrow the current episteme in order to impose a wholly new form of reality in which the previously oppressed forms of knowledge would become the dominant paradigm. Foucault, as I said, seemed to believe that every episteme possessed its own systems of subjugation and repression, institutions of power and domination, and hierarchies. To Foucault, all hierarchies are predicated upon knowledge. The monopolization of a form of knowledge, especially a dominant one that played a pivotal role in the reality-paradigm, was a key to power, and was the source of various priesthoods such as psychiatrists, doctors, and lawyers--priesthoods that exist today under modern episteme.

In the postmodern episteme that many cultural theorists such as Foucault seem to desire to bring about, the new leftist intellectual serves as a replacement for the hierarchical "right wing" intellectuals of the old, modern, Enlightenment-era paradigm. Therefore, my favorite critique of Foucault's politics is by Keith Windschuttle (p. 142), regarding Foucault's philosophy of challenging the Enlightenment and the modern Western epistemological paradigm:

"There is one area, however, where Foucault demonstrably fails to break with the Western revolutionary tradition. Every grand scheme to transform society that has ever been dreamed up by an intellectual or academic has always given a major role to intellectuals and academics themselves. Foucalt rejects the idea of the 'universal intellectual' who claims to represent or speak on behalf of the oppressed masses in order to institute a new world order. Instead, he substitutes the idea of the 'specific intellectual' who advises the locals to help them with their immediate struggle. However, the essential role for the intellectual is different in nominal terms only. In Marxist theory, the proletarian masses need the universal intellectual to inform them of their historic mission and to help them realise it; in Foucault's version of politics, more specific groups, such as prisoners, identify their own immediate issues but still cannot define their historic significance nor conduct an effective resistance without the intervention of the intellectual. Despite his support for a less centralised politics, Foucault's postmodern intellectual still wants to be the centre of attention, just like all the radical intellectuals who have gone before him."

(Emphasis added by me.) What makes people think that under the new paradigm the oppressed groups will actually find liberation? Perhaps they will be more enfranchised, but in reality, everyone's just traded one priesthood for another, and again, the monopoly of power-knowledge structures continues.

To return specifically to the work under question, however, it is indisputable that Foucault has achieved something important with his work. He's thrown down a very heavy gauntlet and challenged a number of historiographical preconceptions. This is, to me, a positive thing. His scholarship and perspective are incredibly unique, and I very much agree with his tendency to critique the prevailing power-knowledge hierarchies that dominate a time-period. His methods are both fascinating and challenging. I only wish that these techniques would be applied to non-Western societies as well. Confucianism, for example, is screaming to be analyzed just as critically and rigorously, but since it is essentially a non-Western power-knowledge structure and predicated upon a radically different reality-paradigm, it is beyond the interests of the politically motivated post-modern, post-structuralist cultural theorists.

References:
Breisach, Ernst. Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Windschuttle, Keith. The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists are Murdering Our Past. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 1996.

Historical Thoughts for Today: The Crusades and Critical Thinking

As I'm currently reading through John Haldon's Warfare, State and Society in the Byzantine World, I couldn't help but stumble across this relatively new history of the Crusades by Lin Claster entitled Sacred Violence. Now, I've read and found quite revealing a few books on the Crusades. They are an especially embarrassing episode in the history of Western Christendom due to the savagery and barbarism of the European warriors in the Holy Land. The very title of Claster's book, Sacred Violence, is itself, extremely loaded and purposely chosen to get attention, especially from prominent left-wing academic strongholds. What is often forgotten is the truths of pre-modern warfare. We tend to view the world from a very different perspective from pre-modern cultures, and while it is quite the vogue for postmodern moral relativism to be the lens through which contemporary academics examine numerous non-Western, pre-industrial, and developing societies, that lens is all-too-often abandoned when those same academics critique their own past. The reality of the situation is that Crusaders behaved no differently than they would have behaved in battle against another Christian opponent. In a chapter on the chevauchée, John Lynn's Battle: A History of Combat and Culture describes the brutal realities of medieval warfare juxtaposed against the ideal forms of Christian combat (i.e. the tourney). He cites numerous examples of violence against civilians, something explicitly opposed by the clergy. These factors are often forgotten when writing from the standpoint of a political agenda, as so many vogue historians are wont to do. The History Channel is constantly airing programs about the Crusades which remind us that the Europeans massacred so many innocents when they captured Jerusalem that the "blood ran up to their knees" in the streets. The realities of ancient and medieval war are often gruesome, especially when a city or other fortified strategic site resists and must be besieged for an extended time. Social stratification and culture had just as much an impact on the Crusaders' violent temperaments as their religion (perhaps moreso), but the years of training to be a knight and the social and cultural rights, privileges, and responsibilities that go with it are often forgotten when a modern historian is excoriating how "Christians" were slaughtering civilians in the streets of Jerusalem. It is often forgotten that under the Rashidun and Umayyad Caliphates, the Muslims had experienced over a century of constant expansion and religiously-motivated conquest. The conquered peoples were often given the choice of slavery or conversion if they were pagan. If they were Zoroastrian, Jewish, or Christian, they were usually encouraged to remain dhimmi, which, in effect, made them persecuted populations within their own lands. The dhimmi were often discouraged from conversion because they provided an important tax source, as well as served to foster social stratification and a sense of privilege for Muslim citizens. Author and blogger R. Scott Bakker, on his Three Pound Brain site, brings up an important topic in examining the humanities and the ability to think critically. According to Martha Nussbaum in her recent Globe and Mail interview, the humanities provide the tools of critical thinking. But the tools she enumerates–logic, systematic knowledge, imagination–are also the tools of rationalization, and make no mistake, our penchant for rationalization is the great foe. ...In fact, the place you’re most likely to find critical thinking is the sciences, not the humanities. The sciences train you to suspend your commitment to your conclusions pending evidence, whereas the humanities train you cook up evidence for conclusions you have already committed to–usually because they ‘feel right.’ Where the sciences train us to swim against our cognitive instincts, the humanities train us how to more effectively indulge and exploit them–how to win arguments rather than how to get things right. Bakker is absolutely correct here. Far too often we discover that the humanities is a place where almost all of the criticism is biased. The Crusades are a fantastic example--the idea of objective standpoints are all well and good, but the reality is that everyone's research and exposition results in lengthy opinions with well-researched (i.e. selected) back-up information and sophisticated rationalizations. For example, would a truly neutral and realistic viewpoint of the Crusades result in a very negative assessment of Islam or Christianity? Then, regardless of the assessment's results, the fact that people of faith would be offended results in the assessment's characterization as biased and bigoted. Science, as a discipline, is to be unbiased and absolutely neutral, but the scientists themselves are not always so. The result is the process of debate and argument within the scientific community. Views are challenged, and above-all, facts should be pursued. A fine example of this in the humanities, actually, would be the intense debates between philologists, historians, and linguists regarding the identification of a civilization known in Bronze Age Hittite documents as Ahhiyawa. A century ago, initial translators were elated, thinking they'd discovered evidence of Homeric Greeks in the historical record (i.e. Achaeans -- Ἀχαιοί). There was a sudden and powerful backlash attempting to disprove the connection. Skeptics saw the connection as far-fetched. The debate slept for decades, only to be revived in books and academic journals in the late 1970s, thriving in the 1980s, and resolving in the 1990s. Most historians are in favor of identifying Ahhiyawa with a Bronze Age Mycenaean Greek kingdom (or group of kingdoms). This is seen as the most likely reality, a conclusion reached by debate and critical examination of the arguments and texts. As the decades wore on, parties started out absolutely neutral and were swayed in one direction or the other by the arguments for and against the identification, and then brought their own assessments to the table. The problem with this sort of debate is that it doesn't always refine fact out of opinion. In fact, you can't really refine fact out of opinion at all. You can only make educated guesses. And that's the result. We have no factual evidence that the Mycenaean Greeks can be identified with the men of Ahhiyawa, just a darn good guess. And that guess is subject to human error in a way that science should not be. In other words, we have no precise measurements. No systems of experimentation or control. And all of our debates are regulated by the skill of our debaters. Adeptness of argument isn't necessarily determined by logic, but also by rhetoric, or worse, sophistry. Thus, can we ever approach a realistic assessments of the Crusades, or any other event in human history for that matter? One that is fully factual? Unfortunately, no. But, interestingly enough, I think that is one of the greatest strengths of both historical study and the humanities in general. Because, truth be told, perhaps Michel Foucault was correct when he said that all historians and philosophers write are fictions. In some ways that is a debilitating weakness. In others, it is a strength. Science seeks to minimize the human element. The humanities are named for their subject matter and enveloped wholly in them.