Orwell and We - Research Paper Example

Orwell and We Introduction In 1984 and We there are different, stark and dystopian views of the future that have to do with an overall loss of freedom. There is a loss of sexual freedom and there is a loss of thought freedom. In both of these novels, the government is central and wants to control the citizens to the extent that the citizens are to be brainwashed into believing how the government wants them to believe. The brainwashing occurs with physical and mental torture, and this is the way for the state to absolutely control its citizens. This is a view of the future which Orwell and Zamyatin didnt actually believe was going to happen, but they both feared that the societies of the world would be going down those roads, so they wrote their dystopian novels about this. There are a variety of things that Orwell was warning us in his novel, and these themes are reflected in We. One is that there should not be a country that is too powerful, because that reduces the freedom of the citizenry. Related to this is the warning about tyranny – if the government is too powerful, then it represses its citizens. Repression and censorship, which comes when a government is tyrannical, is another warning that Orwell sounds, and, with this, comes sexual repression. This essay will be structured in the following ways – first, the concept that a government may become too powerful will be examined, by looking at how this is portrayed in each of the novels. This really is the central tenet of each of the novels, because a government that is too powerful is one that will react like the governments do in each of these novels. Analysis First, Orwell seems to be cautioning against the idea that any one country could become too powerful. The slogan in the future was “War is Peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength” (Orwell 26). The implication in the novel is that there are three super states that are at perpetual war with one another (Williams 12). That said, although some might misinterpret the novel as being against socialism or communism, in that, during this period of time, the Soviet Union was still a super power, therefore could be construed as being one of the superstates in the novel, Williams (12) states that this was not what was intended – rather, he did intend this to be an attack on a centralised economy in general. It was a full perversion of the centralised government that went beyond what was happening in the Soviet Union during this time. As with everything else in this novel, he took the concept of centralised government to the utmost extreme to make a point and to show what could happen if there is power unchecked (Orwell 9). This is similar in concept to other novels of the time, including Ayn Rand’s lengthy novel, Atlas Shrugged, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. In each of those novels, there is a powerful central government that controls the lives of the citizens, and,in Rand’s novel, there are entrepreneurs who give up working because they were becoming something that was taken advantage of and not respected, because the central government had taken over too many things and taxed them too much. So, a powerful central government is something that was feared by many writers of the day. In Brave New World, Posner (2) states that Orwell got his ideas from this novel, as well as from We, and that each of these novels are similar, and one way that they are similar is the way that they treat the individual – the individual, the free-thinking individual, is something that is inimical to the central government, and that people should not be left alone – because, if people are left alone, then they have time to foment rebellion. This would be the reason why the central governments in these novels are so powerful and repressive – they cannot allow people to think for themselves. Therefore, the fact that the nation and the government is too powerful is a theme in each of the novels that deal with dystopian futures, and this is a central theme of both 1984 and We as well. This is similar to the novel We. According to the introduction to Zamyatins book, Evgeni Zamyatin was a man, an author, who is somewhat obscure because the Russian government essentially silenced him. The Russian government tried to prosecute him for the first story that he wrote, called “The End of the World,” which was anti-military. We was written as a protest against conformity, and he wrote his story about “the cruelty, the pettiness, and the futility characterizing Russia under the new order” (Zamyatin vi). The Russian government tried to silence him, and the publishers and the theaters in Russia were pressured into ignoring him and the libraries were forbidden from distributing his work. Zamyatins writing career effectively came to an end when Zamyatin sought, and was granted, the permission, to leave Russia (Zamyatain viii). In looking at the similarities between 1984 and We, in We, there are very specific things that people can think and feel. For instance artists and poets were told that “whoever feels capable must consider its duty to write treatises, poems, manifestos, odes, and other compositions on the greatness and the beauty of the United States” (Zamyatin 3). The very notion that a writer has a “duty” to do anything is antithetical to what we believe in now, but this was the world of We. The basics about We is that this story is one in which, in the future, freedom and happiness cannot co-exist together – when men are free, they use their freedom to destructive means and this makes them miserable (Zamyatin viii). The way that the lack of freedom is considered to be beautiful is contained in some of the first passages – upon seeing a working beam and mechanical chisels, the narrator, D-503, finds the movement beautiful because “it is an unfree movement. Because the deep meaning of the dance is contained in its absolute, ecstatic submission, in the ideal non-freedom” (Zamyatin 6). D-503 muses about the time when “human beings still lived in the state of freedom, that is, in an unorganized primitive state. One thing that has always seemed to be most improbable – how could a government, even a primitive government, permit people to live without anything like our Tables – without compulsory walks, without precise regulation of the time to eat, for instance?” (Zamyatin 13). The people must go through, as a mandatory procedure, a method of brainwashing. This is important to the state in We, because, if the people are not brainwashed, then they might start to riot. The imagination and the emotions are removed in a special operation, even if this operation does not necessarily always work on the citizens (for instance, it fails to work on I-330, who refuses to denounce her comrades (Zamyatin 117). In 1984, there is a similar type of brainwashing, as Winston is summoned for rehabilitation, which means brainwashing – he goes through physical and mental torture, and in this he is able to retrain his brain to believe the things that the state wants him to believe – he learns what is expected of him and he learns to understand why the state expects this of him. In the end, Winston no longer rebels against Big Brother, but, rather, has a gratitude and love for Big Brother (Orwell 325). Syme, in 1984, notes that brainwashing is occurring when he states that “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. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meaning rubbed out and forgotten” (Orwell 52). What is important to note, however, in this novel is that it is a caution against what happens when there is rigid ideology and everybody believes that they have the absolute right answer, and everybody else is wrong. This occurs when the state is too powerful. This is a malaise that happens too often in this country, for instance, as the government is paralyzed by gridlock because one party feels that it has all the answers, and the other party is simply wrong. This attitude can be exemplified by the Tea Party movement, which is a particular wing of the Republic Party that has caused political gridlock because they refuse to compromise and they have a set of ideological ideas that must be implemented in their entirety (Goldstein 842). The issue with the Tea Party is that it, as a movement, feels that America is on the wrong track with taxation in general, and that taxation represents an unconstitutional redistribution of wealth (Goldstein 842). They also feel that there is a Utopian future that they might get to if they simply dig in their heels and use their force to try to change America to the vision that they see fit for the country – which is an America that is based upon individualism, not collectivism, and that the government would either be nonexistent, or would only be functional for extremely limited means, such as building roads and bridges, which are activities that would not be undertaken by the private sector, because the only way to pay for roads and bridges would be through taxes or tolls (Goldstein 843). Their view of the world would seem to be that of Ayn Rand, whose tome Atlas Shrugged was one that espoused the virtues of individualism and the evils of collectivism. Like the Tea Party, Rand espoused a philosophy that was based upon the principles and precepts of social darwinism, which means that only the strong survive in the land, and, if one is not strong, and not able to prosper without help, there is just nothing for them to lean on. Government would be the total enemy. As further parallels between 1984 and the Tea Party, one notes that the government in Orwells future has an view of the past, which it is trying to force upon the people of those days, is something that is not accurate. For instance, the government in Orwells future believes that there is a lords privilege in deflowering virgins, bu this was something that was never meant to be condoned. It was just how the government viewed the past (Orwell 34). Goldstein (843) states that the Tea Party has a similar view of the past which is not necessarily based upon reality – they believe that it was the destiny of the United States to be exceptional in the world, which would mean that the values and the beliefs of the United States would be what the rest of the world must aspire to. But they have a certain view of the country that is based upon a very limited perspective, and does not take into account the diversity of the country, both in thought, beliefs and creeds. That is the problem, in general, with the Tea Party – it is based upon very limited information and does not tolerate diversity (Goldstein 843). This is like Orwells future – there is one set of beliefs, that is based upon a very limited set of circumstances, and does not take into account individual differences and diversity in backgrounds and thoughts. So, ironically enough, the Tea Party has much more in common with George Orwells dystopian future than it does with the freedom that it supposedly espouses. Another caution in Orwells 1984 is a warning against tyranny (Williams 12). Lowenthal (161) sees the novel as a kind of political pessimism because it centered upon a world in the future that Big Brother and the Inner Party, that controls everything in a human life. But Orwells actual purpose in writing this tome, according to Lowenthal (165), was not that he actually believed that this future was destiny, but, rather, he wanted to warn the people of the world that this is what could happen if we are on the path that we are on. At the time that Orwell wrote 1984, the Cold War was not yet in force, but there was the sense that Nazism, which had just been defeated, would somehow return. And Orwell saw that there would be a coming atomic war and that totalitarianism would become widespread in the future. This is something that Orwell truly believed, as Lowenthal (165) examined Orwells writings during the periods between 1940 and 1949. This would have been an especially acute observation during this period, of course, as this was during the rise of Nazism, and, although he might not have known the extent to the atrocities that the Nazis were perpetuating in 1940, there is the sense that he knew that totalitarianism is something that might be on the horizon. Tyranny is something that is on every page, as the citizens in 1984 lived in fear of the thought police coming for them - “It was night that they came for you, always at night. The proper thing was to kill yourself before they got you. Undoubtedly some people did so. Many of the disappearances were actually suicides. But it needed desperate courage to kill yourself in a world where firearms, or any quick and certain poison, were completely unprocurable” (Orwell 102). Orwells other great novel, Animal Farm, is also about this tyranny, as that novel was considered to be an allegory for the Russian Revolution, as the pigs take over the farm, after overthrowing the farmer, then the pigs become more ruthless and tyrannical than the farmer ever was. There is further parallel in the danger of tyranny when compared to the Tea Party. The Tea Party wants total control over the government, and they are willing to use any means possible, including threatening to not raise the debt ceiling and shutting down the government, to do it. The problem with the Tea Party is that it has one vision for America, one of many. There are many, many Americans who feel that collectivism, at least on some level, is essential to the American way of life. There are many Americans who believe in government for the greater good, and there are many different interpretations of the Constitution – if there was only one interpretation of the Constitution, then America would not have the need for a Supreme Court, whose only job is to interpret the Constitution for the American people (Goldstein 843). By tyrannically threatening that they will get their way by any means possible, the Tea Party is affecting an Orwellian dystopia upon America. In 1984, there is a real “us” verses “them” mentality – that one group feels that they have the answers, and they are willing to summarily execute anybody who doesnt believe in their ideology. This might be an advocation of celibacy, which is what the totalitarian state in Orwells 1984 enforces, and it might be that the government is correct in all things (Orwell 20). The third caution is a warning against repression and censorship, and the possibility that every thought could be controlled (Williams 12). “Thoughtcrime does not equal death. Thoughtcrime is death” (Orwell 28). This is an element in both Orwell and Zamyatin. Orwell has the thought police, who spy on the citizens by looking in their windows and apparently bugging their flats – the citizens dont really know what is going on, because it is arbitrary as to who gets bugged and who doesnt, but the government needs to control what the citizens are thinking, and, most importantly, the government has to make sure that the citizens do not act upon what they are thinking. To prevent the people from acting upon seditious thoughts, the people can be executed for merely believing in certain things (Orwell 85). “’You’re a traitor!’ yelled the boy. ‘You’re a thought criminal! You’re a Eurasian spy! I’ll shoot you, I’ll vaporize you, I’ll send you to the salt mines!’” (Orwell 23). Likewise, in We, there is a secret police who watches all the citizens. There are things which are highly illegal in this society, and the secret police know about all of them – for instance, it is illegal to smoke or drink, or to have meaningless sex or even flirt (Zamyatin 100). Freedom , in We, is something that is not welcome or wanted - “Liberation! It is remarkable how persistent human criminal instincts are! I use deliberately the word criminal, for freedom and crime are as closely related as – well, as the movement of an aero and its speed....the way to rid man of criminality is to rid him of freedom. No sooner did we rid ourselves of freedom than suddenly some unknown pitiful degenerates...” (Zamyatin 34). As with the Orwell future, in the future of Zamyatin, there is no freedom to pursue interests that the people long for. Perhaps the future is already here in some parts of the world, even though, as of yet, no countries have quite resorted to the tyranny of having thought police where having certain kinds of thought crimes would mean instant execution (Orwell 8). For instance, China is notorious for censoring what their citizens can and cannot access. They do this by censoring the Internet, for instance. They filter the citizens ISPs to block traffic to sites that is considered by the Chinese government to contain information that it does not want its citizens to know about (Qiu 3). The Chinese government also obstructs access to websites by introducing a deliberate error in its Domain Name System, which means that the users get blocked when they try to connect to their DNS servers elsewhere on the Internet, and the ISP had changed the addresses for the blocked sites (Qiu 4). China also monitors outgoing and incoming Internet traffic, and they cut off the interception on the Internet if they see certain keywords (Qiu 5). And, while China certainly is not alone in its censorship activities, in that other countries also censor, they are considered to be particularly egregious by anti-censorship activists because they fail to tell their citizens they are being blocked and why. Restrictions on sex is another danger, and this is evident in both We and 1984. D-503 states how absurd it was that there was a time when sex was not regulated - “is it not absurd that their State left sexual life absolutely without control? On the contrary, whenever and as much as they wanted...absolutely scientific, like beasts! And like beasts they blindly gave birth to children! Is it not strange to understand gardening, chicken farming, fishery, and not be able to reach the last step in this logical scale, namely, production of children – not to be able to discover such things as Maternal and Paternal norms?” (Zamyatin 14). Both Zamyatin and Orwell envision a world where sex is seen as something that is somehow forbidden, even though, without sex, there would be no more society and no more people in the world at all. There also is a restriction upon procreation – for instance, in We, 0-90, who is considered by some to be the embodiment of Eve in The Bible has to plead with D-503 to illegally impregnate her (Zamyatin 105). To have sex in We, one must go through invasive procedures - “you are carefully examined in the laboratory of the Sexual Department, where they find the content of the sexual hormones in your blood, and they accordingly make out for you a Table of sexual days. Then you file an application to enjoy the services of a Number so and so, or Numbers so and so. You get for that purpose a checkbook (pink). That is all” (Zamyatin 22). This means that there is a restriction on procreation in the future, and the babies have to be turned over to the state, anyhow (Zamyatin 106). In 1984, there is a similar proscription, in that sexual expression is taboo, and regulated, and Winston sees his lovemaking with Julia to be an open act of defiance against the state. Birth control is something that is forced upon people, and is put into the drinking water, for there was a fear that the proles would multiply and become too powerful, and this was one way of ensuring that this could never happen (Djerassi 942). This goes to the heart of our society as it is today, in that sex is so often something that is taboo in this society. For instance, witness all the hewing and crying about a breast that is shown for a split second on television (Mason 180). It seems ridiculous that the showing of Janet Jacksons breast for a split second on television could cause such a reaction among so many people. Moreover, examine the fact that there are so many abstinence only views of sex education for students (Santelli 73). These are just two examples of the fact that sex is seen as somehow dirty in this society – we cannot teach our children about how to protect themselves against STDs and pregnancy, because they arent supposed to know about such things. We have a collective case of looking for our vapors after fainting after seeing a breast for a split second on television. The tyranny of these novels with regards to sexual freedom still has many parallels to todays society. After all, it was only in 2003 that Americans could feel safe performing oral sex on one another without being thrown in jail for it – the Supreme Court case in Lawrence v. Texas actually had to overturn a sodomy law, stating that this was unconstitutional (Tribe 2004). But the thing of this was that the state had felt, up until 2004, that it could peek in the bedrooms of the American people and have them arrested for performing sexual acts that it, the state, feels is somehow indecent. This is very similar to the world in both We and 1984. Conclusion There is much to be said about We and 1984, and there is much that these two novels, and many other novels of the day, warned our society about. The most important thing to take away from these two novels, as well as other novels, such as Atlas Shrugged, Animal Farm, and Brave New World, is that there is something that is evil about big government. Big government is something that seeks to control people in a variety of ways. Big government controls our thoughts, our money, our reproduction, etc. In We, freedom is equal to a lot of things, none of them good – people become criminals if there is too much freedom. If a man is given freedom, then he uses it to the detriment of society and the people immediately around him. There is, in both of these novels, the sense that there is spying, and repression and censorship. In other words, the central theme is that the people cannot move around and do and be as they please. This is what all the other warning stem from – Orwell warned about tyranny, about censorship, about the perils of allowing there to be limits of reproduction – but what he really was warning about was big government. What is striking is that, with the possible exception of Huxley’s tome, and We, these novels were written during the Cold War. The Soviet Union was in the ascendency, and, in We, it was Russia, before the Soviet Union. Russia or the Soviet Union seemed to be at the heart of these novels, because Russia and the Soviet Union apparently were the reason why these novels were written. Zamyatin had a good reason to protest the Soviet Union, as he was a novelist who was oppressed by them. He wrote seditious novels that protested the way that Russia was treating its citizens, and this is what he based the dystopian world of the future upon. 1949, which is when Orwell wrote 1984, was also a time when the Soviet Union was in the ascendency, and communism seemed to be a way for the government to become huge and take over the lives of the citizens. This is what happened in Animal Farm as well, as the pigs take over the farm and oppress all the other animals on the farm – and the sheep, which is what was the citizens who just let this happen, could only say that “four legs good, two legs bad” (Orwell 86). Perhaps these novels were timely, as they looked at what would happen if communism really did rule the world. The government had to keep the people down with brainwashing and by limits on their reproduction – the limits on the reproduction were in place to ensure that the people did not multiply to the point that they would outnumber the people in the government. There was always the fear that there soon would be people who would be looking in the windows of the citizens, listening to their thoughts, putting them in prison for these thoughts, and brainwashing them out of these thoughts. If these fears were not necessarily enough, there was the fear that the government would take everything away from the producers and the earners and give it to people who didn’t want to work, as what happens in Atlas Shrugged, the ultimate novel about social darwinism. These novels are no doubt at the basis of what people fear the most about the government – that it really is not there to do good, but to force us to be sheep and do the bidding without question. Perhaps there is the fear that government really would spy on its citizens and put them into prison for thinking certain things. Of course, in America, this could not really happen, nor could that really happen in most civilized countries that have a constitution – there is freedom of speech and thought in America, and this is something that is the bedrock. So, there is little chance tha that the world of Orwell and Zamyatin would happen in this country anytime soon. Still, there is always a degree of lingering paranoia about the government in certain pockets of any country, and it is probably these novels that foment this. Therefore, these novels, while serving as cautionary tales, might not be the best thing for people to base their lives around. References Bambauer, D. “Cybersieves,” Duke Law Journal, vol. 59 (2009): 2-60 (2009) Retrieved from the Albin O. Kuhn database. Djerassi, Carl. "Birth control after 1984." Science 169.3949 (1970): 941-951. Retrieved from the Albin O. Kuhn database. DeNavas-Walt, Carmen. Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States (2005). DIANE Publishing, 2010. Retrieved from the Project Muse database. Goldstein, Jared A. "Tea Party Movement and the Perils of Popular Originalism, The." Ariz. L. Rev. 53 (2011): 827. Retrieved from the Project Muse database Huxley, A. Brave New World. London: Chatto and Windus, 1931. Lowenthal, David. "Orwells Political Pessimism in1984." Polity 2.2 (1969): 160-175. Retrieved from the Project Muse database. Mason, Jeffrey D. "‘Affront or Alarm’: Performance, the Law and the‘Female Breast’ from Janet Jackson to Crazy Girls." New Theatre Quarterly 21.2 (2005): 178-194. Retrieved from the Albin O. Kuhn database. Orwell, G. 1984. New York: Signet Classics, 1949. Orwell, G. Animal Farm. New York: Random House, 1945. Posner, Richard A. "Orwell versus Huxley: economics, technology, privacy, and satire." Philosophy and Literature 24.1 (2000): 1-33. Retrieved from the Project Muse database. Qiu, Jack Linchuan. "Virtual censorship in China: Keeping the gate between the cyberspaces." International Journal of Communications Law and Policy 4.Winter (1999): 1-25. Retrieved from the Project Muse database. Rand, A. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Random House, 1957. Santelli, John, et al. "Abstinence and abstinence-only education: a review of US policies and programs." Journal of Adolescent Health 38.1 (2006): 72-81. Retrieved from the Project Muse database. Williams, Raymond. "Afterword: Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1984." Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations (2007): 9. Retrieved from the Project Muse database. Zamiatin, E. We. New York: EP Dutton, 1924. Outline I Introduction II Analysis III States should not be powerful. IV Tyranny must be avoided. V Censorship is something that is a danger in a powerful government. VI Reproduction that is restricted is yet another danger in a powerful government. VII Conclusion Read More