Abstract
You may remember that Winston Smith, the hero of George Orwell's novel, 1984, lived in London, which was then in Oceania, one of three super states locked in a formless, endless war. Oceania had fought Eurasia as an ally of Eastasia's, and vice versa. When it suddenly switched sides again, Winston and his colleagues in the Records Office had to erase the past, expunging all references to the wrong enemy.
Although war news was omnipresent, it was impossible to tell what was happening. All Winston knew was that when good news was announced, it usually signaled the impending report of a disastrous defeat. In the meantime, he drank vile-tasting Victory Gin or ersatz Victory Coffee and smoked badly made Victory Cigarettes. He lived in Victory Mansions, a run-down tenement.
When not actively destroying information, Oceania's government withheld it. But its citizens could not do the same. Winston concealed his diary from the Thought Police: Although “nothing was illegal,” if his writing had been spotted, “it was reasonably certain that it would be punished.”
At least Winston's world had got past a nuclear exchange. Now the three existing powers “merely continued to produce atomic bombs and store them up against the decisive opportunity which they all believe will come sooner or later.”
As psychoanalyst Erich Fromm noted in 1961, 2984 laid bare the seeds of disaster that seemed to be germinating in the post-war West as well as in the communist East that some preferred to believe was Orwell's singular target. So when 1984 came, the West congratulated itself for having escaped a future that once seemed frighteningly believable.
By the beginning of the twenty-first century, we had not only avoided nuclear conflict, we had pledged to disarm. We could revert to the image of the future that was popular at the dawn of the twentieth. This future promised more peace, more wealth, more democracy, more technological and scientific advance–and corresponding levels of human happiness.
Still, after September 11, reasonable people may question whether the upward trajectory of peace and democracy will remain unbroken. They might describe the U.S. government as less than open and honest. They might complain that little real information about the war in Afghanistan has been conveyed, despite lengthy Defense Department news briefings. They might point to Attorney General John Ashcroft's urging government agencies to resist Freedom of Information requests, as well as his insistence that questioning his actions is the equivalent of aiding and abetting the enemy. They might mention the passage of the Patriot Act, which allows government agents to secretly search private homes, or they might question the long-term detention of foreign citizens. They might also complain that so-called security cameras are everywhere, and that Congress wants libraries to be censors for the federal government.
But none of these things should remind anyone of Winston Smith's travails in 1984.