The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 by Dorian Lynskey
I’ve separately written an essay based importantly on this book, summarizing its fundamental message of the need for each of us to stand watch over truth. I wanted to write further here in order to excerpt some of the most salient messages and quotations from the book and take another crack at summarizing its important message as I receive it.
On the fleeting nature of fame, Orwell’s concise review of literature that preceded Orwell’s book in both the late 19th and 20thcenturies vividly documents the fleeting nature of fame. He reviews book after book, popular at the time, that have faded in memory. None more significant than Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward 2000—1887. Published in 1888, it became the most widely read novel in the United States since Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the most imitated since Jane Eyre. The book reframed the turbulence of Bellamy’s time as the painful but necessary precursor to a peaceful, socialist utopia. “Bellamy is the Moses of today,” wrote one commentator. President Roosevelt read and discussed Bellamy. The Atlantic Monthly named Looking Backward the second most important book of the past 50 years. The president of the Book of the Month Club described 1984 as “Bellamy looking backward in reverse.”
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As a self-critic in the months leading up to the publication of 1984, Orwell talked down the novel, calling it “a beastly book, an awful book really, a good idea ruined.”
As one commentator offered on Orwell’s life: “Nobody considered (him) a failure except for the voice in his head, without which perhaps he wouldn’t have achieved what he did.”
Isn’t that true of all of us to one degree or another. I think so.
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Orwell writing on Gandhi. Orwell admired Gandhi’s courage and intellectual honesty but recoiled from his abstinence and religiosity. Who would want to be a saint? “The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.”
Thankfully, while I have encountered disappointments with people, it has been by far the exception.
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It’s helpful to recognize that, at a time of the kind of troubles which we have now, including Brexit, we have been there before and we overcame them. It’s striking to read that, contrary to what I would have expected, the jubilation in Britain following the end of World War II was “short lived.” Rationing, acute housing shortages and the sudden cessation of lend-lease money from the U.S. fostered a widespread sense of anti-climax and gloom. One study showed that only one in seven Londoners was “happy or elated by the year’s end; 40% were worried or depressed.”
Already for some, including Orwell, the challenge of a divided world loomed large in the mid-1940's. In a prescient newspaper column called “You and the Atom Bomb,” Orwell suggested that this weapon might lock the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. (which had not even developed its own bomb yet) into a long and paranoid stalemate. He pictured a state of “permanent Cold War.”
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Orwell's Animal Farm, Lynskey writes, is a scrupulous allegory of Russian history from the Revolution to the Teheran Conference. Each animal represents an individual: Napoleon is Stalin, Snowball is Trotsky, Mr. Frederick is Hitler and so on. The book can be read as a thematic prequel to 1984. First the revolution betrayed (Animal Farm), then tyranny triumphant (1984). The commandments of the revolution are reduced to one famous oxymoron: “All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.”
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Blackballing socialism. The word socialism is being used today by Trump and other Republicans to instantly denigrate the views of several Democratic candidates. Interestingly, no one did the blackballing better than Winston Churchill in 1945 as he sought to retain his premiership versus Clement Attlee in the Labor Party. “There can be no doubt that socialism isn’t separately interwoven with totalitarianism and the abject worship of the state,” Churchill railed. “No socialist government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could allow a free, sharp or violently worded expression of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance.”
Could you imagine anyone saying that today? Hyperbolic expression is not something we’ve invented today!
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On the need to feverishly hold on to reality. Hannah Irendt said it succinctly in 1951: “The stubbornness of reality is relative. Reality needs us to protect it.”
One of the challenges in holding on to reality, more present today than ever, is the ever-present nature of social media. Here is an uncannily prescient excerpt from 1984: “The people are not going to revolt. They will not look up from their screens long enough to notice what’s really happening.”
It gets harder and harder to really know what’s happening when there is such an abundance of exaggerated statements and outright lying before us. It is truly Orwellian, Lynskey writes, that the phrase “fake news,” created by Orwell, has been turned on its head by Trump to describe real news that is not to his liking, while flagrant lies become “alternative news.”
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In conclusion, Lynskey observed that the 70th anniversary of 1984 falls at a dark time for liberal democracy. Yet, he writes, “There is hope to be taken from the reality that millions of people in the ‘reality-based community’ push back against the ‘medium-sized lie’ to reaffirm that facts do matter, to fight for the preservation of honesty and integrity, and to insist that two and two really do make four.”
For folks like me, 1984, and this biography of it by Lenskey, have a lot to offer. As Orwell wrote in his preface to Animal Farm, liberal values “are not indestructible and they have to be kept alive by conscious effort.”
1984 was Orwell’s final, essential contribution to that collective effort. In this statement he dictated from bed during his final months, he emphasized the fundamental reason why he wrote it: not to bind our wills but to strengthen them. “The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one. Don’t let it happen. It depends on you.”
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