And Here Comes 1984

By Roger Rosenblatt

At last, the dreaded year is at hand

The brilliance of George Orwell's decision to invert the last two digits of 1948 (the year he was completing 1984) is that it gave his readers a point to watch for in their own time. So they have watched, with trepidation and titillation, up to the present when the fatal year is about to make its entrance. For those who trusted Orwell's gloomy vision the results may seem disappointing. Some Soviet bloc countries and several scattered dictatorships may be living close to the "Freedom Is Slavery" of Orwell's imagination, but among the democracies one has to stretch a good deal to find equally condemning evidence. Observers will continue to play intellectual games comparing Big Brother to Big Government, but when Orwell was describing the destruction of human will, the Department of Agriculture was not exactly what he had in mind. Unexciting though it may be to concede, the upcoming year will produce no mass telescreen surveillance, no Ministry of Truth, no 1984.

Such news may be greeted with utmost reluctance. The 1984 view of things has been almost spiritually important to recent generations because the book cooperated perfectly with this age's picture of the future. Besides 1984, the two main Utopian--indeed, antiutopian--texts of the time have been Yevgeny Zamyatin's We and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. They stand in stark contrast to the visions of past ages: Plato's Republic, Augustine's City of God, Dante's Paradise, More's Utopia, Rousseau, Kant, Marx and the American Dream, which saw the millennium in everything new. No longer. Our antiutopian visions do not presume new discoveries so much as the perversion of things already known, the bleakness of these images due less to a mistrust of science than of basic human nature.

Antiutopianism may also be traced to the Bomb, of course.

Or it may have grown from the awareness that a Utopia can no longer be isolated, as it was with Plato and More, and that any future view must by necessity account for a universe of differences on an interconnected planet. Or perhaps we have come to dissociate knowledge from progress--a faith in progress being essential to Utopian thought--seeing instead every recent advance of the mind as merely one step, neither forward nor backward, along a huge, pitiless circle.

So presented, this all sounds terribly pessimistic. A loss of extravagant dreams, one is told, entails a forfeiture of beauty, morals, of humanity itself. The presumption is that one finds happiness in looking forward to being happy, a rock on which many churches have built their following, but one which has often opened an unbridgeable chasm between hope and reality, thus assuring that anyone who lives in the future languishes in the present. Of all the reasons for antiutopianism, perhaps the strongest has been that former Utopian visions offered nothing but momentary heart leaps, that in hard-nosed modern terms, Utopias did not work.

But what happens now, when it seems equally clear that antiutopias do not work either? It may be that the world will give up on futuristic visions. That seems unlikely. The mind, inquisitive to the end, seems to leap forward by reflex. Still, after several centuries of

envisioning both the best and the worst, it probably will not leap too far forward these days. We may have come to a point where people will be looking not to new machines but to repairs.

Is there anything really wrong, however, in a more limited, pragmatic, undazzling idealism? Einstein said, "I never think of the future. It comes soon enough." How would the grand seers answer the questions one faces in late 1983: How to maintain the balance of world powers without sacrificing principle or national safety? How to adjust a heavy-industry economy down to the size of a microchip? How to feed the starving, to educate the ignorant? How to reconcile majority rule with minority rights, individualism and democracy, higher law and popular sovereignty? How to create an art of human values in a world of mass culture? None of these questions is posed without a certain amount of idealism, yet none can begin to be answered without staring long and hard at exactly where we are.

As for Orwell and his monstrous doublethink, how is one to live responsibly in this world without a certain amount of doublethinking? Orwell described doublethink as accepting "two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously." Is there no doublethinking required about abortion, school prayer, foreign policy, nuclear weapons? What would be the advantage of singlethinking on such issues, unless one thrives on zealotry and has a deep-seated passion to be wrong?

In a sense, the antiutopian tendencies of our time may merely have been a reaction against the extreme utopianism of the past and thus a statement of the deepest disappointment: the best of all worlds was not possible, therefore the worst must be probable. But if most people find it unhealthy to dwell in dreamland, very few people wish to believe in wholly dark visions either, not only because such visions run counter to human buoyancy, bul because one cannot stare indefinitely at broken objects without feeling an urge to mend them. History encompasses neither utopia nor hell. It squats like a bear and dares the world to move it No visions of light or darkness are necessary. Only a steady concentration on the world we made, and will make again--this year, next year and the year after.

--By Roger Rosenblatt This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.