1984: Can Orwell’s Nightmare Still Become Reality?: It All Depends on What You Do When the Rats Are on Your Face

I was born a couple of months after George Orwell died, early in 1950. He was not then a very famous writer. In fact, he had been little known and virtually poverty stricken until 1945, when he published Animal Farm at the age of 42. Three British and 20 American publishers had refused it, partly because of its fiercely anti-Soviet stance. But it became a success, his first. A few years later he wrote 1984, and died shortly after its publication.

Both books have now sold over ten million copies. By the time I read 1984 in junior high school it had become a standard text in many schools. It has marked this new year with a frightening aura.

What stuck with me, and sticks with most people, is a mood. The mood is dreamlike: a dingy, urban nightmare where nothing changes, not the scenery (brown, decaying slums), not the conditions (always being watched, always anxious and slightly drunk on synthetic gin), and not the people (noisy and busy, yet listless, impersonal). As in a nightmare, you can’t get out. The eye of Big Brother is on you. You are never alone but always lonely. Your only privacy is inside your skull. Orwell showed a peculiar genius for creating a nightmare, one that persists after you wake up.

In the closing months of 1983 I reread 1984, uncertain how it would seem after all these years. It did not disappoint me. As 1984 becomes history, I suspect the book 1984 will in an odd way acquire more force. People will stop reading it to guess what the future will be and pay more attention to its timeless message.

To read 1984 as a prediction of the future is to read it wrong; it was not prediction, but prophecy of the Old Testament type—a warning against evil, particularly political evil. Thus it doesn’t go out of date any more than Jeremiah; evil is always in.

I didn’t expect to find a message for Christians in 1984, but it is there plain enough. Orwell describes a struggle between good and evil, and he shows the process whereby an evil order overwhelms the people who try to fight it. His evil powers seek more than victory—they seek to convert the rebels to their way of thinking, making perfect conformity. Orwell’s understanding of good and evil are not far from Christian; according to 1984, the antidotes to political poison lie in truthful words and loving acts, and he spells out what that means. Only his conclusion needs correction. He knew evil, he knew the good that evil wants to destroy. But he did not understand the strength that can endure and paradoxically conquer under the most savage victory of evil. To understand that, he would have needed to understand the Cross.

malcolm muggeridge, Orwell’s friend, wrote, “One of the great weaknesses of the progressive, as distinct from the religious, mind, is that it has no awareness of truth as such; only of truth in terms of enlightened expediency.…

He [Orwell] was allergic to institutional and devotional Christianity, and considered himself—in a way, justly—as being temperamentally irreligious. Yet there was in him this passionate dedication to truth …; this unrelenting abhorrence of virtuous attitudes unrelated to personal conduct.…”

V. S. Pritchett wrote of Orwell, “Tall and bony, the face lined with pain, eyes that stared out of their caves, he looked far away over one’s head, as if seeking more discomfort and new indignations.” I find it easy to switch the descriptions to Jeremiah, or Ezekiel, or Amos, or indeed any of the prophets. They told uncomfortable truth about public, political sins; they spoke to the kings and priests and prophets and leaders of society, hating their truthlessness, their systematic gypping of the poor and helpless, their love of power at all costs. So did Orwell, and he paid for it.

He could write beautifully. Consider this description of a street in Paris: “A ravine of tall, leprous houses lurching towards one another in queer attitudes, as though they had all been frozen in the act of collapse.” Or his aphorism on Dickens’s novels, “rotten architecture, but wonderful gargoyles.” Yet if anything he pulled away from this gift in favor of stating the truth in as plain-spoken, unadorned a prose style as possible. His famous essay, “Politics and the English Language,” fought against trumped-up political nonsense language with these rules of thumb: “Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print; never use a long word where a short one will do; if it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out; never use the passive where you can use the active; never use a foreign phrase, scientific word or jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.” Using these rules, he thought, writers would have to think rather than just spout. They do not make bad rules for Christian writers, or preachers, either. Using clichés or ready-made phrases, we don’t have to think what we mean; neither does our audience.

Orwell fought in the Spanish Civil War and was wounded, then nearly arrested for being in the “wrong” Communist faction. When he escaped to Britain he found the liberal press uninterested in publishing any account of Spain apart from the “correct” anti-Franco view. For relentlessly telling the truth of what he had seen, Orwell was ostracized by his fellow socialists. Orwell never forgot or forgave that willful blindness of the Left any more than he forgot his own conservative middle class’s willed ignorance of poor people’s misery. Truth made him lonely; he kept no party line.

All through his life truth came first; in his last years, love and beauty became equally important to him. As World War II ended he persuaded his reluctant wife, Eileen, to adopt a baby boy. A few months later, while he was away serving as a war correspondent in defeated Germany, Eileen died unexpectedly. Always a lonely, intensely private figure, Orwell was shattered. To everyone’s surprise, he determined to keep their son. Orwell was sick, and those were not the days when men raised children. Yet more than keeping him, he lavished tenderness on him. Somewhat pathetically Orwell proposed marriage to a number of women he barely knew. One letter of proposal read: “There really isn’t anything left in my life except my work and seeing that Richard gets a good start. It is only that I feel so desperately alone sometimes. I have hundreds of friends but no woman who takes an interest in me and can encourage me.”

No woman accepted him, and he determined to move to an extremely remote house on the Scottish island of Jura, two boat rides and an eight-mile walk from anywhere. He loved its raw beauty and the sea fishing. There, dying of tuberculosis, he wrote 1984.

Six months after it came out he was in his grave. Curiously, the lifelong atheist had requested a Church of England funeral, which his friend Malcolm Muggeridge helped arrange, observing that “it was obvious a good number of those present were unfamiliar with Anglican liturgy.”

In retrospect it seems to have been inevitable that Orwell’s last work should mark this year with a fearful aura. But no one could be sure of that in 1950, when he died. The book might, like so many novels, have been quickly forgotten. Its endurance is particularly curious since the plot of 1984 quickly slips from the mind. If you are like me you remember the mood, and can be prodded to remember one or two of the coined words or fictional events—but not much more. Let me jog your memory.

Winston Smith, an obscure member of the Outer Ring of the ruling party, has been thinking rebellious thoughts. Though he has no hope of escaping the eye of Big Brother, he takes three rebellious steps. First, he starts a diary, an act so private and thus rebellious it is sure to end in his execution. He begins to write down his secret thoughts, which quickly lead him to the blasphemous words, DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER.

Winston’s second rebel act is to fall in love. He and Julia, another Party member, arrange a series of trysts. Love is not allowed between Party members, for it suggests the possibility of loyalty to someone other than Big Brother, and erotic energy expended toward some cause other than his.

Together they join in a third act of rebellion when O’Brien, a high-ranking colleague at the Ministry of Truth, recruits them for an underground rebellion. Winston and Julia swear absolute loyalty to this Brotherhood.

It turns out to be a trick. They are arrested and O’Brien becomes Winston’s torturer and inquisitor. A few days of steady application of pain, and Winston will eagerly say anything, sign any documents. But the Party seeks more. They want to make Winston a new man who loves Big Brother and accepts as gospel anything the Party says. If they say two plus two is five, then to him it really should be. The Party loves power, and they will not be satisfied until they have power inside Winston’s skull.

After weeks of torture, Winston would willingly give them this power. He would willingly believe any lie, if he could make his mind do it. Indeed, he almost can. But one problem blocks him: he still loves Julia. He cannot help loving her. In his sleep he cries out, “Julia, my love!”

The climax to his conversion comes when they strap to his face a cage filled with starving rats. Winston loathes rats, and these, huge and hungry, will attack his eyes, tear at his cheeks to get at his tongue. At the last moment, as the cage is strapped on, he realizes in black panic how to save himself:

“Do it to Julia!” he shouts. “Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don’t care what you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia! Not me!”

The rats are taken away. Having betrayed her, not just in words but in actual desire, his last resistance is gone. When he and Julia meet they no longer feel any twinge of love. As Julia says, “Sometimes they threaten you with something—something you can’t stand up to, can’t even think about. And then you say, ‘Don’t do it to me, do it to somebody else.…’ You want it to happen to the other person.… All you care about is yourself.”

In the final scene, not long after this revelation of selfishness, Winston looks adoringly, wonderingly, gratefully at the ugly, televised face of Big Brother. His humanity, which made him a rebel, has been destroyed.

In rereading 1984, an odd comparison occurred to me: C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters. Lewis invented a correspondence between devils in order to show the way Satan might work on a particular individual. Of course, by showing how evil works he meant to encourage the corresponding virtues.

Lewis’s devils (like good evangelicals) concentrate on personal sin, not public, political evil. We have good evidence that Satan takes interest in public affairs as well. The evidence may be more pointed to Christians in Russia or South Africa or Iran, but the fact that Americans today may go to jail for killing a duck but not a human fetus has reminded us that even here evil is not strictly nonpolitical.

1984 provides a map of public, political evil: how things would be if they got as bad as possible, and how they would get that way. Big Brother might as well be Satan in power.

But 1984 is not just about evil any more than Screwtape is. For each evil there is a corresponding virtue. The evil is public and political, but surprisingly (since Orwell was a lifelong, passionate socialist) can’t be conquered strictly at a political level. The virtue needed is fundamentally personal. When Winston Smith starts a diary, or falls in love, he is a true rebel. But when he joins the rebellious Brotherhood, he becomes just like the staunchest Party members. It is no accident that “Brotherhood” rings with “Big Brother.”

Winston’s inquisitor, O’Brian, asks him, “ ‘You consider yourself morally superior to us, with our lies and our cruelty?’

“ ‘Yes, I consider myself superior.’

“O’Brian did not speak. Two other voices were speaking. After a moment Winston recognized one of them as his own. It was a sound track of the conversation he had had with O’Brian on the night he enrolled himself in the Brotherhood. He heard himself promising to lie, to steal, to forge, to murder, to encourage drug taking and prostitution, to disseminate veneral disease, to throw vitriol in a child’s face.”

Orwell is not saying that politics is a hopelessly immoral business. That would reverse his entire life’s stand. He is saying that politics is utterly hopeless unless those engaged in it can be fundamentally good. That means caring for beautiful things, for undistorted language, for human love more than power, more even than life, more even than freedom from torture. Big Brother doesn’t ultimately care about political philosophies; he wants to squeeze the personal life out of us. The struggle against him is not one political philosophy against another, nor the Party against the Brotherhood, but man against himself. The question is, can man be good enough to save himself? Can he preserve his spirit?

Big Brother cannot stand to leave a single thought independent of him. If people are to believe his lies—compliance is not enough, they must believe—he must destroy truth. How? Orwell proposes—and here I think he is most original, and most important—you must destroy language and history.

Am I better than an amoeba by anything more than extension? Isn’t accumulation, perfection, ambition, mere pretension? Basic is being an amoeba cut to the kernel with an unobstructed view—it’s essentially my stance in relation to You.

—Merle Lamprecht

In 1984, Newspeak, the ugly language of political jargon, is slowly replacing English. Syme works on the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak dictionary. He tells Winston, “You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We’re destroying words—scores of them, hundreds of them, every day.… Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.… By 2050 … there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think.”

Winston rebels by starting a diary.

For George Orwell, words are necessary to thought. People who cannot or do not read and write, whose language becomes limited to jargon, will never think anything but what is fed them. We evangelicals, our language full of jargon, could think about this. It may help explain why we cannot counter the public evil of our times that instead creeps over us.

Winston’s job at the Ministry of Truth is to revise history on a daily basis. He alters the back copies of the Times newspaper—new ones are printed, old ones destroyed—so that nowhere in the world will a shred of evidence exist that anything other than the Party’s version of events ever happened. People who don’t know history, Orwell suggests, are anchored to nothing. They blow like leaves in the winds of current opinion.

Here, too, evangelicals may take warning. We have the Bible, a great fund of history. But we sometimes act as though we are the first generation of “real Christians” since Paul and Peter. Unglued from our past, we lack a standard of comparison for our own and the world’s behavior. Thus we blow in the winds of the latest trend and are subject to the materialism around us without even realizing it.

Through Doublethink—the ability to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time—Big Brother can induce rootless people to believe his three big slogans: WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. Our current nuclear condition, in which missiles are dubbed Peacemakers, and the only hope of reducing our weaponry lies in building more, comes to mind. But so does an evangelical subculture in which being a “King’s kid” may mean material wealth, while the only King’s kid in the Bible had no place to lay his head.

1984 is a world operated by lies, by fear, by hatred for the enemy Big Powers. What can counter this evil? Some of Orwell’s answers are familiar to us, some not. The love of language, the memory of the past, the preservation of simple, uselessly beautiful objects, the beauty of nature, the love between parents and children, and the love between a man and a woman are his antidotes for political poison. People with no space in their lives for such loves, Orwell suggests, become mere political fodder. His own life, particularly the last years when he seized fatherhood with such passion, shows that he was not writing pure theory.

Socialists usually offer an optimistic view of mankind, and so Orwell’s 1984 ends surprisingly pessimistically. Evil conquers.

Some have suggested this pessimism came because Orwell was dying as he wrote. Actually he was merely expressing a dilemma he had seen for some time. He knew that man’s central problem was the death of Christian belief. In 1944 he wrote, “Since about 1930 the world has given no reason for optimism whatever. Nothing is in sight except a welter of lies, hatred, cruelty and ignorance, and beyond our present troubles loom vaster ones which are only now entering into the European consciousness. It is quite possible that man’s major problems will never be solved.… The real problem is how to restore the religious attitude while accepting death as final. Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.”

Before then, in 1940, he had written of Europe’s rejection of God—which he approved—this way: “For two hundred years we had sawed and sawed and sawed at the branch we were sitting on. And in the end, much more suddenly than anyone had foreseen, our efforts were rewarded, and down we came. But unfortunately there had been a little mistake. The thing at the bottom was not a bed of roses after all, it was a cesspool full of barbed wire.… It appears that amputation of the soul isn’t just a simple surgical job, like having your appendix out. The wound has a tendency to go septic.”

The only answer lay, vaguely, in teaching people to think of themselves as brothers in the name of humanity rather than God. “We have got to be the children of God, even though the God of the Prayer Book no longer exists.” He was impatient with Christians who tried to couch their beliefs modernistically, clouding over their historical creeds with liberal sophistication. Yet, “I do not want the belief in life after death to return, and in any case it is not likely to return.” He did not want it to return because it had propped up, he felt, the oppression of the poor. But in any case, he thought the belief impossible to retrieve, like a belief in magic or ghosts, for the average person raised on science.

The outcome of 1984 is unrealistically pessimistic, and I think the reason lies here: Orwell had no image of man made of any material but dust. The absolute conformity of 1984 is impossible; no imaginable government could really control all language, all history, all activity. But even if a government could, such conformity is also impossible because man is made of better stuff than Winston Smith. Humanity is not good enough to save itself, but it is too sturdy for Big Brother to grind to sawdust. Humanity survives, may even thrive, under incalculable torture. Solzhenitsyn has shown this in a way we can never forget. Even after people betray each other, as Winston did Julia, and Julia did Winston, they can and do forgive themselves and each other. Love between two people can survive even their own selfishness.

By the satanic rules of 1984, everyone must betray his friend. Imagine Screwtape speaking instead of O’Brian: “You are a flaw in the pattern, Winston. You are a stain that must be wiped out.… It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be.”

And thus, “There are occasions when a human being will stand out against pain, even to the point of death. But for everyone there is something unendurable—something that cannot be contemplated.” Under such pressure—the rats—Winston cries out, “Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia!”

And who wouldn’t?

One man did not. If anything was worse to Jesus than pain, anything unendurable, impossible even to contemplate, it was abandonment by his Father. In comparison, a starving rat in the face would have been an easy out. But he never said, “Not me!” Do it to someone else! Not me!” Pilate, Judas, Caiaphas were near at hand, deserving substitutes for death and divine rejection, but Jesus never betrayed a soul.

According to the rules of 1984, this is intolerable—a leak in the system, a proof of the Party’s vulnerability. Even if it happened only once, with a single man, it would punch a permanent hole in the Party’s airlock—a hole through which others might escape.

Tim Stafford is a free-lance writer living in Santa Rosa, California. He is a distinguished contributor to several magazines. His latest book is Do You Sometimes Feel Like a Nobody? (Zondervan, 1980).

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