{"id":964,"date":"2004-12-17T09:57:04","date_gmt":"2004-12-17T17:57:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp\/2004\/12\/hanging_in_with_george\/"},"modified":"2020-12-12T10:49:50","modified_gmt":"2020-12-12T15:49:50","slug":"hanging_in_with_george","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/2004\/12\/hanging_in_with_george.html","title":{"rendered":"HANGING IN WITH GEORGE"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Jan Herman<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

When 1984 came around smack in the middle of the rose-tinted Reagan era, many in the\u00a0commentariat had a field day noting that George Orwell, for all his genius, had overstated his\u00a0case. The future he’d warned of in “1984”<\/span><\/b><\/a> simply hadn’t come to pass.<\/p>\n

Yeah, right. Thinking of Bill Moyers<\/span><\/b><\/a> this\u00a0morning, it occurred to me that the subversive heresies of Big Brother’s chief enemy, Emmanuel\u00a0Goldstein, are worth quoting. They come from Goldstein’s historical treatise, “The Theory andPractice of Oligarchical Collectivism,” which is embedded in Orwell’s novel and is smuggled to its\u00a0doomed hero Winston Smith, who reads it avidly.\u00a0Goldstein’s first chapter begins:<\/p>\n

Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age,\u00a0there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have\u00a0been subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their relative\u00a0numbers, as well as their attitude toward one another, have varied from age to age, but the\u00a0essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly\u00a0irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always\u00a0return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Goldstein goes on to point out that the “aims of these three groups are entirely\u00a0irreconcilable”:<\/p>\n

The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to\u00a0change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim — for it is an abiding\u00a0characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than\u00a0intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives — is to abolish all distinctions and\u00a0create a society in which all men shall be equal.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Orwell’s pessimism, expressed through Goldstein, is inescapable. It is Goldstein who writes\u00a0that “no advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought\u00a0human equality a millimeter nearer.” But there can be no question that it is Orwell who’s\u00a0speaking.<\/p>\n

And here we come to a passage in Goldstein’s treatise that might as well have been addressed\u00a0to those of us who’ve lived long past 1984 into the 21st century:<\/p>\n

The heirs of the French, English, and American revolutions had partly believed\u00a0in their own phrases about the rights of man, freedom of speech, equality before the law, and the\u00a0like, and had even allowed their conduct to be influenced by them to some extent. But by the
\nfourth decade of the twentieth century all the main currents of political thought were\u00a0authoritarian. The earthly paradise had been discredited at exactly the moment when it became\u00a0realizable. Every new political theory, by whatever name it called itself, led back to hierarchy and\u00a0regimentation. And in the general hardening of outlook that set in round about 1930, practices\u00a0which had been long abandoned, in some cases for hundreds of years — imprisonment without\u00a0trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions, the use\u00a0of hostages and the deportation of whole populations — not only became common again, but were\u00a0tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened\u00a0liberals.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

OK, so Goldstein doesn’t actually exist. He’s a fiction created by the oligarchy (the High caste\u00a0of the Inner Party that rules in the name of Big Brother). He’s an enemy of the people, a strawman to divert attention from the failures of the oligarchy, a way to focus patriotic hatred, just as\u00a0Big Brother himself is a fiction created by the oligarchy to instill fear.<\/p>\n

These many years later in the midst of the neocon era — when the twin engines of misrule are\u00a0also hatred and fear — I’d say Orwell’s portrait of the future rings even truer than it did 20 years\u00a0ago.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Jan Herman When 1984 came around smack in the middle of the rose-tinted Reagan era, many in the\u00a0commentariat had a field day noting that George Orwell, for all his genius, had overstated his\u00a0case. The future he’d warned of in “1984” simply hadn’t come to pass. Yeah, right. Thinking of Bill Moyers this\u00a0morning, it occurred […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[26,18,4,23,17],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-964","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-books","7":"category-literature","8":"category-main","9":"category-news","10":"category-political-culture","11":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbvgEs-fy","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/964","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=964"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/964\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43560,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/964\/revisions\/43560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}