BOOK CLUB: Our Orwellian -- or Blairian --times
Join the Book Club when we talk with Orwell scholar Laura Beers about rejecting doublethink and the machinations of the Ministry of Truth
In an afterword to the 75th anniversary edition of George Orwell’s 1984, novelist Sandra Newman writes that Orwell’s classic dystopian saga is actually an expression of “negative utopia,” a response to the traumas of the world wars, the prospect of nuclear destruction, and the ensuing “mood of hopelessness which pervades our age.” Would dehumanization — the mechanism by which “the Party” maintains absolute power — win the day, or could people throw off despair and the erosion of integrity and spirit, and reclaim their empathy, their ability to freely think, create, and love? Those are Orwell’s central questions in 1984 and in much of his other writings, which today feel urgent and prescient.
As I reread 1984, I was reminded of how many terms he coined that continue to pervade our culture: “thought police,” “doublethink,” “Big Brother is watching you,” “Ministry of Truth,” “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” There is also the “Two Minutes Hate,” the daily ritual during which Party members are required to gather around a screen and watch a film depicting the “Enemy of the People,” programmed to incite “compulsory rage” in its audience. Orwell apparently envisioned the rise of certain podcasts and the likes of Fox News.
Later today, Friday, March 20, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, the Ink Book Club will sit down with American University professor Laura Beers, the author of Orwell’s Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-First Century and a leading expert on the subject of what Orwell has to teach us. If you’ve felt as I have these last weeks, perhaps you, too, need that lifeline.
Beers writes that “many of the core problems that Orwell identified in his own time continue to haunt us in the twenty-first century. Most crucially, the tension between individual liberty and social solidarity… 1984 was, in a sense, an exercise in truth-telling, in that it was an effort to open the readers’ eyes to the existential threats to truth, and thereby to freedom, posed by all-powerful states.” Those threats have materialized in the Trump era.
In the course of rereading 1984, there were a few times when I had the TV news playing in the background. Our own “Ministry of Truth” had leader Trump contradicting his own statements about the status of the war in Iran, if, indeed, he could admit that the assaults underway constitute a war. Trump lackeys parrot and parse his words, and tell us what we are seeing and hearing with our own eyes and ears isn’t what is actually happening. Our institutions are being decimated, often gleefully. The mysteries of the Epstein files deepen, redactions spreading like oil spills. Heroes we thought were above reproach turn out to be monsters.
It’s all positively Orwellian.
Though it’s startling to remember that George Orwell was really Eric Arthur Blair, lifelong anti-fascist, and 1984 a warning. And, perhaps, that these are also Blairian times?
There will be much to unpack with Professor Beers tomorrow. Hope you’ll join us for some “Thoughtcrime.”
Below, you’ll find some thoughts to consider in advance of Friday’s conversation. The Ink Book Club’s events are open to all paid subscribers to The Ink. If you haven’t yet become part of our community, join today. And if you’re already a member, consider giving a gift or group subscription.
