Are We Living in Orwellian Times?

Many people today are comparing our time with the one described in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Like Orwell’s Big Brother state, “Big Tech” companies are actively trying to destroy free speech that is critical of mainstream media and government official approved “news.” For instance, Google has attempted to erase history,¹ is carefully removing legitimate sources of information from its search results because they differ ideologically,² falsely labeling those sources as “fake news”³ or falsely identifying their content as “dangerous and misleading.”⁴ Not only this, but “Big Tech”/”Big Brother” has been increasingly overstepping their boundaries with respect to the personal data of their users. We are all being spied on,⁵ and many of us are changing our behavior to avoid being banned/shunned/judged by others and “Big Tech”/”Big Brother.”⁶

Given all of this, the comparison seems fitting. Yet it isn’t complete.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is concerned with more than the metastasization of the government into an intrusive surveillance state powered by advanced technology. It’s concerned with human psychology. This is not only evident in its assessment of how totalitarian governments manipulate their citizens’ thinking via the deletion of history, redirecting the anger of its citizens toward imaginary enemies rather than the state, encouraging “group think,” and punishing individual, critical thinking. Nineteen Eighty-Four more subtly deals with the psychology of a person who is neither a complete rebel – as was Winston Smith’s lover Julia – nor a complete government lackey – as was Syme, the lexicographer of the novel’s fictional land Oceania.

Winston Smith is somewhere between complete rebellion and complete submission to the state. As the novel progresses, one is struck by the fact that Winston must literally die as a rebel, or figuratively die – i.e. lose his individuality, hopes, aspirations, critical thinking, opinions – as a propagandized, brainwashed, and amorphous cog in the sociopolitical machine that is Big Brother. One cannot stay in the center; he must die one death or the other.

This perhaps explains Nineteen Eighty-Four’s confused ending. For on the one hand, Winston succumbs to the government, snitches on his lover, and becomes a brainwashed ward of the state. Yet, on the other hand, this only occurs after the government spends a lot of time and energy and resources trying to capture him, torture the truth out of him, and “re-educate” him into submission. One can view 1984 as either decrying the hopelessness of a life lived under a totalitarian regime, or as pointing to the key to dismantling a totalitarian regime (viz. Unyielding civil disobedience rooted in an appreciation of one’s humanity and all that comes with it – love, hate, beauty, ugliness, art, creation, destruction, physical pleasure, etc).

Orwell did not seem to know the answer to the question of how one should live under a tyrannical government. The acute reader is left with a sense of horror not at the novel ending with Winston becoming a brainwashed ward of the state, but with the novel leaving one on his own. Winston experienced great things – love, sex, good food, laughter, camaraderie – but this didn’t keep him from folding when tortured by the state. Will the reader do the same under similar circumstances? Will the reader follow a different path, and resist even if it costs him his life?

What else can one expect from Orwell’s atheistic, quasi-existentialist⁷worldview? In such a view, it is the individual’s decision that determines all things. There is no God. Consequently, there is no hope.

Orwell’s Opposition to Roman Catholocism

Sadly, and rather ironically, for an anti-Communist novel⁸ Nineteen Eighty-Four seems to identify religion in general, and Romanism in particular, as a means of suppressing critical thinking and political dissidence. Lindsay Dowty explains –

Orwell confronts the idea that fascist governments dispel religion to keep the people from unifying together behind it, yet they humor the Church as a means of giving the lower class a reason to stay in the lower class. In Animal Farm, Orwell makes minor allusions to his take on religion in the bigger scheme of a totalitarian society, much like he does in his following novel, 1984.

Orwell’s 1984 is as much about an oppressive government as it is about losing faith within a theocracy. Winston’s continual questioning of Big Brother’s existence and his need for validation through others points to a plot in which a man struggles to come to terms with his disbelief in God. Winston is perpetually on the search for some inclination from coworkers or friends that they do not truly believe in the Party, as well.⁹

Orwell’s Marx-esque beliefs about religion arose, in part, from his observation of the Roman Church state’s collaboration with fascism.¹⁰ For Orwell, it seems, the individual stood between two oppressive regimes. This essentially means that the individual doesn’t hope in anyone beyond himself, as he alone is responsible for saving himself.

And to some extent, he was right. Secular and religious authoritarianism are anti-Christian and, therefore, anti-human. Thus, in Orwell’s Oceania enjoying the divinely bestowed pleasures of human existence – food, sex, art, love, conversation – is illegal. Engaging in free thinking, free trade, free enterprise – these are all illegal as well. In the place of the Sovereign God, secular and religious authoritarians set up a representative who believes himself to be, in some sense, divine. And such authoritarianism was truly definitive of the Christian faith, then our situation would be as hopeless as that of Winston, Julia, and Orwell himself.

Christians Have Hope

Despite having experienced much of what the state had deemed illegal, and having thereby come to experience the good gifts of God given to all of his creatures, Winston is broken by Ingsoc, the ruling party of Oceania. The threat of death seems to drive him to abandon whatever vestiges of hope he had in his ability to successfully revolt – even if only in his mind – against Ingsoc.

Could Winston have continued to rebel? Could he have brought about the eventual revolution of Oceania’s scattered hidden dissenters?

That is unanswerable.

What we do know is that Winston’s plight is that of every man outside of Christ. Fallen man rightly sees many injustices, but seems to forget about all God has given to him that is good. What is good is taken for granted, while what is not good is amplified and used as an excuse for fallen man to continue on in his life of rebellion against God. And nothing temporal, material, physical, or social brings relief to him as he contemplates his hopeless existence. As Solomon declared –

…I saw all the oppressions that are done under the sun. And behold, the tears of the oppressed, and they had no one to comfort them! On the side of their oppressors there was power, and there was no one to comfort them. And I thought the dead who are already dead more fortunate than the living who are still alive. But better than both is he who has not yet been and has not seen the evil deeds that are done under the sun.¹¹

The answer is not in a reformed government. The answer is not in a new government formed by fallible statesmen. The answer is not found in institutional religion.

The answer is found in Christ alone.

For in Christ, one can come to understand the world properly. Christ is at the center of all things, upholding the universe by the Word of his power,12 seated and sovereignly reigning over the whole of existence and all of its parts,¹³ directing the course of history to this one end: The glorification of the Triune God through the gracious salvation of his people, the just condemnation of his enemies, and the renewing of all of creation.¹⁴ The apostle Paul declares –

…we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. For we who live are always being given over to death for Jesus' sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us, but life in you.

[ . . .]

So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.¹⁵

We strive to honor God by being salt and light in every corner of this sin-darkened planet, but we ultimately know that there is only King who will usher in a righteousness that will fill the earth – Christ Jesus the King of kings and Lord of lords. We know that Christ will judge the living and the dead, and that we, Christians, have escaped judgment not because God has turned a blind eye to our sins, but because he has placed our sins on his Son on the tree of Calvary. Before the eyes of our understanding, in real time, we see that God did not spare his own Son from the penalty for sin due to us. Therefore, we are assured that the God of all the earth will not spare the unjust tyrants.We a have a living hope, one of which we have been given a forestaste time and again throughout history.

Unlike Orwell, Winston, and Julia, Christians have hope.

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¹ See Bokhari, Allum, “Google Is Still Erasing Breitbart Stories About Joe Biden from Search,” Breitbart, https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2020/11/03/google-is-still-erasing-breitbart-stories-about-joe-biden-from-search, Nov 3, 2020; Widburg, Andrea, “Google/YouTube is erasing all evidence of election fraud,” American Thinker, Dec 10, 2020, [https://www.americanthinker.com/ blog/2020/12/googleyoutube_is_erasing_all_evidence_of_election_fraud.html][1]; Parker, Tom, “Google Play deletes over 150,000 Robinhood app reviews after frustrated users leave one-star ratings,” Reclaim the Net, Jan 28, 2021, https://reclaimthenet.org/google-play-removes-robinhood-reviews/.

[1]: https://www.americanthinker.com/ blog/2020/12/googleyoutube_is_erasing_all_evidence_of_election_fraud.html

²See Huff, Ethan, “Google executive admits search engine suppresses “right-wing” advertising,” CyberWar, Oct 22, 2020, https://cyberwar.news/2020-10-22-google-executive-says-search-engine-suppresses-right-wing-advertising.html#; Epstein, Robert, “The New Censorship,” U.S. News, Jun 22, 2016, https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-06-22/google-is-the-worlds-biggest-censor-and-its-power-must-be-regulated; See Keach, Sean, “NOT RIGHT Google accused of ‘left-wing bias’ as study finds JUST 11% of ‘Top Stories’ are from right-leaning news sites,” The Sun, May 13, 2019, https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/9062348/google-left-wing-bias-right-leaning-news/.

³See Hirsen, James, “Mainstream Media Uses 'Fake News' to Censor Conservative Views,” Newsmax, Nov 21, 2016, https://www.newsmax.com/JamesHirsen/facebook-fake-news-social-media-zuckerberg/2016/11/21/id/759946/.

⁴See Maas, Christina, “YouTube deletes videos of doctors testifying in Senate Homeland Committee as ‘coronavirus misinformation’”, Jan 29, 2021, https://reclaimthenet.org/youtube-deletes-videos-of-doctors-testifying-in-senate-homeland-committee/.

⁵See Rathnam, Lavanya, “PRISM, Snowden and Government Surveillance: 6 Things You Need To Know,” CloudWards, July 6, 2020, https://www.cloudwards.net/prism-snowden-and-government-surveillance/.

⁶See Belanger, Lydia, “10 Ways Technology Hijacks Your Behavior,” Entrepreneur, April 3, 2018, https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/311284.

⁷Orwell opposed Sartrean existentialism, but expressed a form of individualism reminiscent of Albert Camus’ iteration of existentialism. As Douglas Burnham explains –

…in The Rebel, reminiscent of Orwell’s Animal Farm, one of the first points he makes is the following: “The slave starts by begging for justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown. He too wants to dominate” (Camus 2000b:31). The problem is that while man genuinely rebels against both unfair social conditions and, as Camus says, against the whole of creation, nevertheless in the practical administration of such revolution, man comes to deny the humanity of the other in an attempt to impose his own individuality.

(“Existenialism,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://iep.utm.edu/existent, Accessed Feb 1, 2021.)

The two, however, were not without their notable differences. For more on this, see Brunskill, Ian, “The Gallic Orwell,” The American Interest, Vol. 6 No. 1, Sept 1, 2010, https://www.the-american-interest.com/2010/09/01/the-gallic-orwell/.

⁸See Morris, Shawnna, “Orwell’s “1984”: How to Misread a Classic,” Foundation for Economic Education, June 8, 2019, https://fee.org/articles/orwell-s-1984-how-to-misread-a-classic/.

⁹“1984 as a Religious Critique,” Trinity College: The First Year Papers (2010-Present), (Hartford: Trinity Publications, 2017), 2-3.

¹⁰ Dowty explains –

At the time, the Catholic Church was collaborating with the fascist governments of Italy and Spain due to its vehement opposition to socialism and democratic ideology. As an advocate for democratic socialism and a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, Orwell began to view the Church as its own authoritarian regimen…the same way, he believed those worshipping the Church were succumbing to a fad of “power worshipping” – or, idolizing those with power opposed to the morals and ethics of the institution wielding that power…

(1984 as a Religious Critique, 1.)

¹¹ Ecc 4:1-3.

¹² cf. Heb 1:3.

¹³ cf. Eph 1:20-22.

¹⁴ cf. Rom 8:18-25; 1st Cor 15:20-28; Phil 2:4-11.

¹⁵2 Cor 4:7-18.

In his book A Genealogy of Morals, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche makes a distinction between what he calls noble morality and slave morality. Morality, he argues, began with superior men marking out traits and abilities that were not common to all but only the smaller class of kings, warriors, artists, musicians. Inferior men, however, were mentally and physically incapable of what the nobles were capable of doing. Consequently, they resented their superiors and sought revenge against them. They enacted revenge by inverting good and evil, thereby condemning all that they were incapable of being and doing as evil. As Nietzsche explains –

The slave-revolt in morality begins by resentment itself becoming creative and giving birth to values — the resentment of such beings, as real reaction, the reaction of deeds, is impossible to, and as nothing but an imaginary vengeance will serve to indemnify. Whereas, on the one hand, all noble morality takes its rise from a triumphant Yea-saying to one's self, slave-morality will, on the other hand, from the very beginning, say No to something “exterior,” “different,” “not-self;” this No being its creative deed. This re-version of the value-positing eye — this necessary glance outwards instead of backwards upon itself —is part of resentment. Slave-morality, in order to arise, needs, in the first place, an opposite and outer world; it needs, physiologically speaking, external irritants, in order to act at all; — its action is, throughout, reaction.1

[…]

...let people ask themselves, from the standpoint of resentment morality as to who is “evil?” Answering in all severity: just the “good” one of the opposite morality, even the noble man, the powerful and the ruling one, —but reversely colored, reversely interpreted, reversely looked at through the venom-eye of resentment.2

Ironically, however, Dave Robinson notes it is also the case that –

…Nietzsche has often been adopted as the great-grandfather of…recent postmodern beliefs. Indeed, many postmodernist philosophers, like Derrida and Foucault, have written essays that forcefully make this claim.3

This is ironic because it is precisely the work of Derrida and Foucault that serves as the philosophical foundation for critical race theory, a theoretical framework that, essentially, inverts Nietzsche’s theory of morality. Rather than being “supermen” of a “higher” and “nobler spirit” than what Nietzsche kindly referred to as “the nonbred human being[s], the mishmash human being[s], the chandala [i.e. “untouchables”],”4 Nietzsche’s children have dedicated themselves to condemning the ideas and behaviors of privileged and non-oppressed social groups. They have sought to obtain power by the very means Nietzsche identifies as decadent and vile – condemning the ideas and actions of those in power precisely because one is incapable of producing them.

Foucault’s Emblem: Sympathy for the “Oppressed”

As Foucault scholar Johanna Oksala explains, “Foucault began from a relentless hatred of bourgeois society and culture and with a spontaneous sympathy for marginal groups such as the mad, homosexuals, and prisoners.”5 Hence Gary Gutting, in part, characterizes Michel Foucault as

…fiercely independent and committed from the beginning to his own and others’ freedom. His hatred of oppression flared out in the midst of the most complex and erudite discussions. He saw even his most esoteric intellectual work as contributing to a ‘toolbox’ for those opposing various tyrannies. And he had the effect he desired: he was a hero of the anti-psychiatry movement, of prison reform, of gay liberation…6

This sympathy for “the oppressed” in the history of Western Civilization also extended into flesh and blood political activism for a period of time in his life, further distancing himself from his philosophical forefather Nietzsche. For as Guy Eglat informs us –

Nietzsche’s attack on the idea of equality and its political manifestations in democratic ideology was relentless. Throughout his corpus, Nietzsche can be found attacking, again and again, the notion of “human dignity,” the idea that all human beings enjoy equal rights (“a symptom of a disease”), and the basic idea and value of the moral equality of all.7

How, then, could Foucault – a radical defender of what Nietzsche despised (viz. the unwashed masses) – be inspired by Nietzsche? Eglat argues that Foucault was influenced by the critical methodologies created and employed by Nietzsche throughout his writing.

Foucault was greatly taken by Nietzsche’s emphasis on the historical nature of human existence and on how central notions of how we think about and relate to ourselves and others—notions such as sanity and madness, sexuality, normality and abnormality—are constructed by various social institutions at different times and under different conditions. He was also arguably influenced by Nietzsche’s emphasis on power as a central explanatory concept by means of which we can conceptualize the working of the various institutional elements that in any given historical context produce the practices and theories that shape our self-understandings (though Nietzsche was more focused on the psychology, rather than the sociology, of power).8

Thus, Foucault abstracted these ways of reading and analyzing ideas from Nietzsche, while rejecting the German philosopher’s anti-democratic, anti-equality, anti-advocacy-on-behalf-of-the-weak ideas.

Derrida’s Departure

Derrida was not an activist, but he shares in common with Foucault the same desire to, at the very least, problematize the distinction between a number of binary concepts employed freely and repeatedly in Nietzsche’s writing. Nietzsche’s corpus is rife with binary oppositions that form the basis of his thinking. In his earliest major publication, The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche argued that all of life is a struggle between two primal forces – the Dionysian and the Apollonian. The Dionysian was irrational, disordered, chaotic, sensuous, earthly; the Apollonian was rational, ordered, harmonious, intellectual, cerebral. Similarly, in his book A Genealogy of Morals, as has been mentioned above, Nietzsche argued that moral thinking occurs between two irreconcilable personality types – the master and the slave, or the nobleman and the plebeian. These distinctions, we must note, were not divorced from their concrete political forms.

As Paul Patton explains, Derrida thought “that philosophy is by nature a form of political activity.”9 Yet he did not begin writing about politics explicitly until much later in his career as an academic. Patton writes –

Derrida’s overtly political philosophy developed alongside his involvement in the campaign against apartheid, his defence of imprisoned intellectuals and writers and his increasingly forceful public positions on issues such as the treatment of illegal immigrants, the politics of reconciliation, the death penalty, terrorism and the behaviour of rogue states. He developed detailed analyses of ethico-political concepts such as hospitality, forgiveness, friendship, justice, democracy, equality and sovereignty. He collaborated with his former critic Jürgen Habermas in defence of a certain idea of Europe. He affirmed his support for Enlightenment ideal of equality and the rule of law, as well as for changes to the international political system aimed at diminishing the power of state sovereignty in favour of a more cosmopolitan global order.10

Thus, while indebted to Nietzsche and his progeny (in particular, the Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger11), Derrida nonetheless did not follow “the Madman’s”12 thinking in its entirety. Rather, he departed from his predecessor in search of a radical form of democracy of the kind that Nietzsche utterly despised.13

Resentful Offspring are, Nonetheless, Offspring

It seems to be that like the prodigal son, the postmodernists took their father’s inheritance, ran off with it, and wasted it on riotous philosophizing. They wound up in the same pen as the utilitarian hedonists feeding on the “pig philosophy” of democracy and liberalism, and subsequently inspiring the radicalism of the critical race theorists, social justice warriors, and neo-Marxists now advocating for the deconstruction of the very social concepts that Nietzsche sought to valorize, viz. individualism, freedom, responsibility, meritocracy, and so on. Have they, then, lost all connection to their father?

In a word, no. Their surface level concerns are, of course, diametrically opposed to one another. This much is obvious. However, their underlying presupposition is the same. Irrespective of the postmodernists’ attempts to rid themselves of anything vaguely resembling the Logos of God, an omnipotent and omnipresent and omniscient and transcendent mind responsible for the unity of all creation and its history, they nevertheless consistently wound up affirming with Nietzsche that all human relations are reducible to inter- and intra-human relations of power. For these children of the madman, what drives the history of the universe is not a divinely orchestrated concatenation of interrelated events that will culminate in the glorification of the Triune God as he exerts his perfect and just rule over all that he has made, but an indefatigable “will to power” that has only one goal in mind – its own perpetuation.

Is it any wonder we are seeing these offspring doing all that they can — from irrationally arguing their case to setting buildings ablaze and toppling national monuments — to exercise, and thereby obtain even more, power?

Were Nietzsche around to see the antics of his resentful children, he would likely chastise them for trying to exercise power over their superiors via an inversion of all that Nietzsche thought was noble, good, and superior. His resentful offspring have made a cottage industry of identifying themselves as oppressed for the sake of obtaining socio-economic-political power. But Nietzsche could not honestly deny that they are, in many ways, his spitting image

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1 A Genealogy of Morals, Trans. William A. Hausemann (New York: Macmillan, 1897), 35.

2 ibid., 40.

3 Nietzsche and Postmodern Philosophy (Cambridge: Icon Books, 1999), 34.

4 Twilight of the Idols, Trans. Richard Polt (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1997), 40.

5 “Michel Foucault,” Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Apr. 02, 2003, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/foucault/, Accessed June 15, 2020.

6 Foucault: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2.

7 “Why Friedrich Nietzsche Is the Darling of the Far Left and the Far Right,” Tablet Magazine, May 07, 2017, https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/nietzsche-left-right, Accessed June 15, 2020.

8 ibid.

9 “Derrida, Politics and Democracy to Come,” in Philosophy Compass 2/6 (2007), 766.

10 ibid. (emphasis added)

11 See Faye, Emmanuel. “Nazi Foundations in Heidegger’s Work,” in South Central Review Volume 23, Number 1 (Spring: 2006), 55-66.

12 This was Nietzsche’s description of himself.

13 As Daniel W. Conway explains in his book Nietzsche and the Political:

Nietzsche is no champion of democracy, but he believes that demotic interests are best served in hierarchical political regimes devoted to the breeding and production of exemplary human beings. All members of a thriving community are, and should be, elevated by the “immoral” exploits of its highest exemplars. While this elevation is least visible (and least appreciated) within the demotic stratum of a hierarchical society, he nevertheless insists, like J.S.Mill, that some attenuated benefits of perfectionism trickle down to everyone.

– Nietzsche & the Political (New York: Routledge, 1997), 36.