Novel Threat

Does Orwell's 1984 Foreshadow a New Danger?

One of the greatest of old books, in my view, is George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. This 1949 novel presents, in lean yet compelling English prose, a gripping tale of the world's possible totalitarian future. Yet it is much more than a gripping tale; for woven into the story of Winston Smith, a man struggling to hold onto his humanity in a technologically policed one-party state, is an analysis of the nature of political regimes, of the connection between language and thought, and of the relation between information and liberty that would do any philosopher or political scientist proud.

In the space of a single column, it would be impossible to present a comprehensive account of the thought, or even the storyline, of this masterpiece. Instead, I want to focus on a single aspect of Orwell's future world: the relationship between the state's totalitarian power and its control of "history." The possibility of the control of history by the state is, I believe, nearer in time than we imagine. I will try to show this through an analysis of some particularly clear passages from the novel, followed by a discussion of trends in the way our own society manages its information about the past.

History as Palimpsest

In the state headed by the physically elusive but visually omnipresent leader known only as "Big Brother," the contents and delivery of all forms of communication—entertainment, education, news, the arts, and propaganda—rest with the "Ministry of Truth." The protagonist of the story, Winston Smith, works in the Records Department of this Ministry; his job is to correct erroneous records, particularly in printed media such as newspapers. Early on in the novel (Part One, Chapter IV), we see Winston doing a typical day's work:

[I]t appeared from the Times of the seventeenth of March that Big Brother, in his speech of the previous day, had predicted that the South Indian front would remain quiet but that a Eurasian offensive would shortly be launched in North Africa. As it happened, the Eurasian Higher Command had launched its offensive in South India and left North Africa alone. It was therefore necessary to rewrite a paragraph of Big Brother's speech, in such a way as to make him predict the thing that had actually happened. Or again, The Times of the nineteenth of December had published the official forecasts of the output of . . . consumption goods in the fourth quarter of 1983. . . . Today's issue contained a statement of the actual output, from which it appeared that the forecasts were in every instance grossly wrong. Winston's job was to rectify the original figures by making them agree with the later ones. . . .

As soon as all the corrections . . . necessary in any particular number of the Times had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead. This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs—to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct, nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.

In this system, no "paper trail" could establish the willful alteration of any past document:

In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place. . . . Even the written instructions which Winston received, and which he invariably got rid of as soon as he had dealt with them, never stated or implied that an act of forgery was to be committed: always the reference was to slips, errors, misprints, or misquotations which it was necessary to put right in the interests of accuracy.

In the absence of documentary evidence, the only possible challenge to falsified documents was from human memory, e.g., the memory of people like Winston, who had done the falsification. But Ministry staff were trained in a mental technique called "doublethink," a kind of self-brainwashing. After each job was done, they moved on to the next one, retaining no memory of having done any tampering. Winston's problem—which provides the motor of the story—is that he has never mastered doublethink; he remembers facts that should be forgotten, and therefore is a danger to the state. It is his desire for an objective history that brings him into conflict with Big Brother.

Toward a Unitary Database?

How close are we to a world such as Orwell describes? Perhaps not yet very close, but there are signs pointing in that direction. Already publishers, government agencies, etc., guided by political correctness, routinely alter language in documents produced by their authors and staff. But the most threatening development, it seems to me, lies in the new technologies of information storage and dissemination.

In 2009 the Cushing Academy in Ashburnham, Massachusetts, made news by announcing its plans to dump its 20,000 books and replace them with electronic resources. This appears to be the wave of the future. For the past decade, major university libraries have been converting printed texts into electronic files; and while, at the moment, most such libraries keep at least a single copy of each work somewhere in compact storage, the long-term trend (dictated by storage cost) is toward the discarding of the original paper media.

Let us imagine a time when all libraries have trashed their books and journals, and only electronic copies of past texts remain. There will surely be a tendency, for economic reasons, toward creating a unitary national database, from which any reader can obtain an official electronic text of any writing; and surely the texts will be stored in forms that allow for digital manipulation. This means that, in principle, the contents of any philosophical treatise, or historical journal, or book on American history, could be altered on a single database, so that the altered version would henceforth be the only one available to American readers. The alterations might include the removal of older language now deemed offensive, the modification of the expressions of an influential philosopher, or the suppression of certain sentences in a primary source for the American Revolution. Without any existing print copies to check the fidelity of the electronic database, history could be changed, and no one could prove the alteration had taken place.

If such events ever came to pass, the possibility of scholarship would be gone; all historical truth would be in the hands of those who controlled the malleable national or global electronic databases. Thus, the old question, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?—"Who will guard the guardians?" (in this case, the guardians of the electronic history of human thought and action)—retains its urgency.

A world without old printed records will need powerful democratic control of all institutional databases, to make sure that history never falls into the hands of ideologues or special-interest groups. It seems to me that the time to establish such democratic control over information is now, long before the last book is shredded.