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‘Doublethink’ and freedom – Nineteen Eighty-Four in 2024
Against the dreary backdrop of the events of 2024 – think: Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon – and the unsettled and unsettling electoral politics – think: Russia, France, Austria, India, America – the actors chant:
War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.
War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.
War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.
It’s a stage adaptation of George Orwell’s famous 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. I watched the play at Lighthouse in Poole, a splendid performing arts centre on the south coast of England that I’ve had the privilege to serve as a non-executive director for the past six years. Good governance, Lighthouse-style, means standing down after two three-year terms.
Good governance is not an idea that would have bothered Orwell’s Big Brother, the supreme governor of Oceania, a fictional country that happens to have “London” as its capital. Assuming Big Brother even exists. We feel his presence only through the medium of video, and then as a still picture, staring at us. Good governance would not have crossed the minds of some of the rulers and would-be rulers of the political actors in this year of elections in country around the globe.
In my literary Substack, I’ve already probed the ideas about “truth” in the novel and play. Read that for a summary of the play and novel. Let’s turn our attention now to freedom, and what it means for governing.
The chant “War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength” is an expression of what Orwell called “doublethink”,[1] his neologism for the deception involved in declaring a thing to be its opposite. The repetition in the chanting creates validates the claim. That the chanting is a collective activity creates social legitimacy. Both make us want to find the truth in the doublethink. It is not a paradox, the mental paralysis that comes upon us when two contradictory ideas seem both to be true; it is a negation of conventional meaning. And human being, as meaning-making creatures, need to make sense of it.
Maybe it’s this: Being free from the state, from the governing party, leaves one adrift, enslaved to the randomness of nature.
Or this: It is only in enslavement to the conventions of society that one can be free to enjoy the benefits of society.
If we’re not simply lulled into submission through the chanting, as Big Brother and O’Brien want, we might nonetheless seek out a theory that could explain how freedom might indeed be slavery, which at least gives Big Brother and O’Brien what they require. How about this: The institutions of society, the rules of law and culture, enable even as they constrain. They open certain paths by making the alternatives difficult. Slavery is freedom. Q.E.D. And yet …
In it’s stark phrasing, the chant “Freedom is slavery” resonated with the audience the novel reached on its publication is 1949. It was an audience that had just experienced the horrors of the Holocaust and lived through one or both World Wars. It was the audience that felt geopolitical upheaval viscerally, the toppling of the old order. A version of that context, albeit milder, greets the 2024 stage adaptation.
Orwell’s novel could thus be read as a rebuttal to the sloppy thinking of the decades that led up to the Second World War that gave legitimacy to relativism, a stance that questioned the traditional order of religion and the morality it fostered. And yet …
Philosophy, and indeed physics, in the early twentieth century had turned against simplicity when considering concepts like truth and freedom. Truth was contingent on historical context. Perception held sway in phenomenology, not the “forms” in Plato or the noumena in Kant. Einstein articulated relativity, Heisenberg uncertainty. The novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald had valorised the embrace of such thinking in his 1936 essay “The Crack-Up”, writing that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function”. Was that too the target of Orwell’s scorn? Or might, in some way, freedom too be relative?
Freedom is much on the minds of prominent thinkers again. For example, the historian
’s new book, On Freedom, joins a chorus of concern about the erosion of democratic principles in recent years and the rise of autocratic regimes in several countries. His Substack gives a flavour of the thinking.The book comes with an endorsement from the Ukrainian president, Vladimir Zelensky: “In these hard times for liberty, On Freedom makes the case that freedom, once explored and understood, is the way forward.” In an interview, Snyder discusses his encounter with Zelensky, an impromptu, two-hour discussion in which Zelensky responded from his own experiences – of freedom and the threat of enslavement – of his country under siege from its neighbour Russia. Zelensky spoke for two hours, Snyder said, in detail and without preparation, analysing Snyder’s philosophical framework.
In the book’s preface, Snyder writes of the trip he took to Ukraine while he was writing the book, to a place where the concept of freedom was palpable. “When asked what they meant by freedom,” he writes, “not a single person with whom I spoke specified freedom from the Russians. One Ukrainian told me, ‘When we say freedom, we do not mean “freedom from something”.’ Another defined freedom as being ‘for something, not against something’.”
Snyder thus distinguishes between negative and positive freedom. It’s a direct echo of Isaiah Berlin’s “freedom from” and “freedom to” in his book Two Concepts of Liberty (Berlin, 1958), a source Snyder frequently cites. But for both authors, freedom is definitively not slavery, not even what politicians and ethicists call “modern slavery”, “when an individual is exploited by others, for personal or commercial gain”. (Modern slavery includes “but is not limited to human trafficking, forced labour and debt bondage”. It underpins much of the commercial basis in the waves of migration to rich countries that we have seen in recent years. It’s perhaps the prime factor that has unsettled politics in those countries. But it is not the only cause.)
Isaiah Berlin was a philosopher I’ve written about before. In his writing, “freedom from” is the base condition, what we usually speak about. Others – including the state – should get out of our way. It’s the basis not just for selfishness, but also for neoliberal economic thought, the ethical egoism of libertarians, and the simpler versions of philosophical liberalism. But Berlin thought that was too simple. By contrast, “freedom to” permits positive action, and it might bring with it activities of the state and others to make such individual action possible. Like a system of education for all. Like a welfare safety net. Like industrial standards: adherence to them keeps workers safe. “Freedom to” requires considerable solidarity. Moreover, “freedom to” underpins what thinkers including Martha Nussbaum (2011) and Amartya Sen (2009) call the “capabilities approach” to public policy. These ideas seek to enable people to live better lives, not merely to free them from the state so they can suffer on their own.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the protagonist Winston Smith undergoes torture – what today some political actors call “re-education” – so he too can come to chant “Freedom is Slavery” without irony. If it is chanted with irony – and at the end of this stage version, it might have been, just – it would be an expression of hope, the hope that “freedom to” might one day come to supplement the mere “freedom from” he has sought from the start of the play and novel. But if it is ironic, in Smith’s case, it is not comic irony. Far from it.
Let’s then agree: Good governance, whatever that means, is not the same thing as bad governance. And this: “Freedom to” is not the same thing as “freedom from”. But the first pair want nothing to do with each other. The second pair need each other.
Let’s hope, then, that good governance prevails, that ‘doublethink’ is vanquished, and that 2024 doesn’t end up being like Nineteen Eight-Four.
Berlin, I. (1958). Two Concepts of Liberty Text delivered to Clarendon Press. Retrieved from http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/published_works/tcl/tcl-e.pdf
Nussbaum, M. C. (2011). Creating Capabilities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Sen, A. (2009). The Idea of Justice. London: Penguin.
[1] https://cfa.gmu.edu/news/2019-10/big-brother-and-other-terms-1984