In “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell excoriated clichés, writing that “there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.”
He worried about tired phrases such as “axe to grind,” but one cliché Orwell never lived to see was the invocation of his seminal dystopian novel, 1984.
Headlines, politicians, and high school teachers often suggest that the world depicted in 1984 is now a fact rather than fiction, and when President Trump was sworn into office, the novel catapulted onto Amazon’s best-seller list. In a recent New Yorker comic, a woman carries a stack of books from the fiction to nonfiction section. One of them is 1984.
Orwell’s novel was published 70 years ago last month and is now inescapably a prescient narrative and the progenitor of exhausting banality. The federal government under Trump bears as little resemblance to the Ministries of Truth, Love, Peace, and Plenty as did the Obama administration.
Since, pace the resistance, we don’t actually live under brutal and despotic tyranny, there must be a more appropriate fictional dystopia with which to compare our society.
According to some scholars, it’s Brave New World. “The fictional worlds that Huxley and Orwell create in Brave New World and 1984 bear uncanny resemblances to the soft administrative despotism of the modern West and the hard Soviet and Nazi despotisms that have destroyed so many lives in the last century,” wrote Corey Able in Love and Friendship: Rethinking Politics and Affection in Modern Times.
If 1984 seemed to fit Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and communist China, Brave New World has uncomfortable echoes in modern America. It depicts the danger of the soft despotism that Alexis de Tocqueville warned of in Democracy in America.
“The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting,” de Tocqueville wrote. “Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”
Nathan Schlueter, a philosophy professor at Hillsdale College, says Aldous Huxley’s dystopia reflects this soft despotism in modern America.
“It’s easy to see the evils of 1984. They stand out very clearly, it seems for most people: the threats of people exerting domination, cruelty against others,” he said. “But I think the assumption is if people just leave each other alone, then they’ll be happy and free. But Brave New World shows you a picture in which you can be enslaved to the sensitive appetites and ruled by those in a degrading way also, in a way in which your humanity gets sacrificed.”
Classical tradition defines the “sensitive appetites” as passions, the type of natural desires the government in 1984 hopes to quash. In Orwell’s novel, citizens are forbidden from having sex. But in Brave New World, the state encourages them to sleep around. The only thing they can’t do is go out with anyone for too long.
As two female characters chat near the beginning of the novel, one is scandalized that her friend has been seeing the same man for four months. “It’s such horribly bad form to go on and on like this with one man,” she says. Later, she parrots a line of propaganda intended to keep people from creating their own communities: “After all, every one belongs to every one else.”
Characters in Brave New World pass their time going to “feelies,” which are 4-D movies, and taking soma, a drug without side effects that one character calls “Christianity without tears.” They live their lives in a sedated stupor. Their aversion to pain is the sort of thing we saw recently in the college admissions scandal, in which parents ensured their children got the higher education they wanted without any effort or sacrifice.
In Brave New World, characters are encouraged to embrace their passions and pursue comfort as their highest goal. They call it “happiness,” but the word doesn’t mean what they think. One character realizes this near the end of the book and demands the right not to be happy. “I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin,” he says. “I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.”
Schlueter says the character isn’t seeking unhappiness, but a more complete form of happiness. “I think what he’s really saying is, ‘I choose discomfort, insecurity, etc. as a condition for a more noble or humane kind of happiness,” Schlueter said. “That is, ‘I see my dignity as really being realized in a way in which suffering is going to be a part of that happiness.’ What he’s really saying is, ‘I’m going to choose a deeper kind of happiness than the one offered here.’”
Citizens of Huxley’s world state live under a totalitarian regime, but most of them don’t care. It’s too comfortable. They’re not coerced, but coddled. Unlike Orwell’s characters, they’re not just oppressed. They’re also complicit.
Invoking 1984 may be a convenient shorthand for people genuinely concerned about excessive government power and surveillance, or merely deploying the trope cynically to acquire a little ersatz learning to burnish their argument. But they miss the crux of 1984, which is to ask us to look at what type of government we’re enduring. Brave New World, perhaps more importantly, demands we look at ourselves.
