What Orwell Saw - and what he missed - about today’s world By THOMAS E. RICKS
While spending the
last three years immersed in the works of George Orwell for a book I was
researching and writing, I often was struck by how often his writing speaks to
the problems of today. That’s especially impressive, given that he died in
1950. The dystopian future
Orwell portrays in 1984 helps illuminate our post-9/11 world.
In the novel, the government of “Big Brother” carries on a perpetual war that,
as in American life today, “involves very small numbers of people, mostly
highly trained specialists, and causes comparatively few casualties. The
fighting, when there is any, takes place on the vague frontiers whose
whereabouts the average man can only guess at.” And just as young Americans
today have lived with that anti-terror campaign all their lives, so too 1984’s
hero, “Winston,” “could not definitely remember a time when his country had not
been at war.”
Orwell would not be surprised that the U.S. government,
prosecuting such a war, officially endorsed the use of torture, for the first
time in its history. Nor would Orwell have
been surprised by President Trump’s limited vocabulary of words like “sad,”
“bad” and “amazing.” In 1984, the government purposely dumbed down
language, with “excellent” and “splendid” replaced by “plusgood” and
“doubleplusgood.” Yet Orwell was hardly
all-seeing. He never visited the United States, and so perhaps as a result did
not grasp the resiliency of capitalism. He wrote in 1943 that “an economy ruled
by the profit motive is simply not equal to re-arming on a modern scale.” That
assertion might have been true of the Britain of the 1930s, which had a
declining economy that had failed to adequately fund innovation. But over the
last eight decades, the United States has proved his assertion to be incorrect
three times- first during World War II, then again during the Eisenhower-era
Cold War buildup, and finally in the post-Vietnam rebuilding of the American
military, when Reaganite defense spending combined with computers to create a powerful
new U.S. military machine built around precision-guided weapons and the swift
transmission of data.
As a consequence,
Orwell also underestimated how intrusive Western states and companies could
become. This was in part because his views on the limitations of capitalism
were formed by what he observed in mid-20th century Britain - that is,
a nation caught in stagnating, late Industrial Age capitalism. The highest goal
of that ageing structure was efficiency, which meant that companies sought
profits by having managers squeeze a little more money out of existing systems
and workers. Hence he thought that industry could only succeed through
ever-greater repression of labor. “Unless there is some unpredictable change in
human nature,” he concluded, “liberty and efficiency must pull in opposite
directions.”
Orwell could not see
that with the dawn of the Information Age several decades later, efficiency
would become far less economically significant than innovation and
adaptiveness. Apple, Microsoft, Google, and myriad other late-twentieth-century
companies did not offer faster typewriters. They created entirely new products,
such as handheld computers and applications for them. They were hardly
efficient in doing so, because innovation is necessarily a wasteful process,
producing many more failures than successes. For example, the extraordinary ups
and downs in the career of Apple’s Steve Jobs of Apple were beyond anything
Orwell witnessed in his own country. Nor were these new companies built on
repressing their employees: They could compete only by lavishing money, stock
options and other benefits on workers capable of imagining and developing
attractive new products.
But Orwell likely
would have been fascinated about the next step these innovative new corporations
took... read more:
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/05/23/george-orwell-1984-modern-day-215177
