Orwell Lives

Not surprisingly, there has been a resurgence of interest in George Orwell. But actually it began long before the release of the NSA documents. My favorite provocateur Christopher Hitchens, who never really lost interest in George, wrote a book, Why Orwell Matters, in which he sets up Orwell as the bulwark against postmodern relativism. Adam Hochschild wrote a homage to Homage to Catalonia in the New York Review of Books, reexamining Orwell’s participation in the Spanish Civil War and his commitment to the social revolution in Catalonia, crushed by the Soviet Union.

And then there’s Edward Snowden. In a Christmas message recorded in Russia he says the massive spying by the NSA was far beyond the thought police described in Orwell’s 1984: “The types of collection in the book — microphones and video cameras, TVs that watch us — are nothing compared to what we have available today. . . . A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They'll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves, an unrecorded, unanalysed thought. And that's a problem because privacy matters, privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be." Read more here. 

Coincidentally, I was rereading 1984 and the day after I heard Snowden on the Internet I read this passage in the book:

“By comparison with that existing today, all the tyrannies of the past were half-hearted and inefficient. The ruling groups were always infected to some extent by liberal ideas, and were content to leave loose ends everywhere, to regard only the overt act, and to be uninterested in what their subjects were thinking. Even the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages was tolerant by modern standards. Part of the reason for this was that in the past no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance. The invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process further. With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end. Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed. The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for the first time.”

While the methods have become more efficient, both Orwell and Snowden decry the “watching,” which translates into the loss of privacy and the manipulation of public opinion. But who exactly is doing the watching? Is Orwell’s Big Brother the same as the NSA? According to the French philosopher Saint-Simon, any differences are negligible as they’re both members of the technocratic elite who must govern the rest of the masses (there’s some Nietzsche here, too), the low class illiterates, incapable of improving their lot. This “double morality” of Utopian socialism is the only way to progress, to be well governed. While Orwell’s rendering of this kind of governing in 1984 is truly chilling, the NSA’s gross surveillance is also Saint-Simon’s philosophy in action, just other form: corporations, the military industrial complex, and the state using technology to protect us, not from terrorists, but from ourselves.

Knowing what happens to Winston when he rebels against the Party in 1984 it’s no wonder Snowden fled the U.S. once he released the documents revealing the extent of the NSA surveillance. Ironically sequestered in Russia, Snowden asserted individual liberty in defense of the “greater good”, addressing the age-old dilemma of personal freedom versus the “social contract,” as Rousseau named it. Obama and cohort, who have prosecuted more whistleblowers than all previous administrations, profess belief that the American definition of the “greater good” justifies unrestricted access to our personal lives and retribution against those like Snowden who question how that greater good is achieved.

Institutionally defined, then, it doesn’t allow much room for individual interpretation. Big Brother knows best.