1984 is back in the news. Orwell’s estate recently authorized a 75th anniversary edition of the timeless classic, with a new introduction by literature professor Dolen Perkins-Valdez.
Perkins-Valdez’ introduction spends little time talking about authoritarianism, and a lot of time talking about race and gender in the story. She complains about Winston’s misogyny. She bemoans the fact that the story doesn’t focus on matters of race, writing that “a sliver of connection can be difficult for someone like me [Perkins-Valdez is black] to find in a novel that does not speak much to race and ethnicity.”
Perkins-Valdez’ introduction has sparked a firestorm. Novelist and essayist Walter Kirn calls it a “trigger warning” and blasts the imposed “permission structure” of an introduction designed to tell readers how they should feel about Winston’s sexism and Orwell’s statement that racism didn’t exist in Oceania.
I actually disagree with Kirn’s characterization. Perkins-Valdez does grapple with Winston’s sexism and the lack of nonwhite characters, but in both cases she chooses to press on and gives her reasons for doing so. If that’s a trigger warning, it’s a very strange one. But nonetheless, Perkins-Valdez’ introduction represents an enormous missed opportunity.
The past several years of American life have been some of the most authoritarian in living memory. Online life created a digital panopticon not unlike the two-way televisions in every home in Oceania: everyone is being surveilled, all of the time. Many people, especially on the far left, used this surveillance and the new power of the online mob to silence their political opponents. People were fired for supporting J.K. Rowling or for dissenting from the Black Lives Matter agenda or even for not knowing what a bodega is. Yelp flagged businesses that disagreed with BLM, and PayPal and Etsy froze the accounts of center-right authors. Like the Inner Party, this new online movement punished people for Thoughtcrime. It found and made examples of its own Winstons and Julias, over and over and over again.
And like the citizens of Oceania, most of us were cowed into silence. In 2020, 62 percent of Americans agreed that “the political climate these days prevents me from saying things I believe because others might find them offensive.”
In an example eerily reminiscent of the Party’s rewriting of history, academic papers were unpublished and memory-holed, not because they were academically flawed, but because they violated certain left-wing shibboleths.
It’s not just culture; top government officials have acted in increasing Orwellian ways. The Biden administration and its allies in the media spent years gaslighting Americans about Biden’s deteriorating health. They dismissed videos of Biden acting his age as “cheap fakes” and mocked first-hand accounts of Biden’s decreasing cognitive ability as right-wing propaganda. Why? There were several reasons, but a big stated one was the fear that, if voters knew the truth, then Trump would get reelected in 2024. In Wisdom of Crowds, political philosopher Samuel Kimbriel reported that, right after Biden’s disastrous debate performance, “Mike Madrid, co-founder of the Lincoln Project, gave a hot-in-the face two minute rant about how anyone made uncomfortable by what they’d seen on the debate stage was ignoring the actual danger to democracy.” This was Orwellian doublespeak at its finest: in order to save democracy, we have to lie to the American people. Saving democracy requires not letting the democratic process function.
And then there was the previous administration’s attacks on free speech. The Biden administration leaned on social media companies to blacklist or shadowban prominent opponents of its lockdown policy. The same administration sought to create a Disinformation Governance Board so that the government could decide what was true and what was false. What is that but an American version of Oceania’s Ministry of Truth?
And then there’s the Orwellian behavior on the right. Trump, who ran against political correctness run amok and who put out an executive order proclaiming his support for freedom of speech, has sued news outlets and law firms for the supposed crime of supporting his political opponents. As the right reacquires political and social power, it’s rediscovering the utility of cancel culture and of using the power of government to punish Wrongthink.
And of course there’s the behavior of Trump himself. Orwell describes doublespeak this way: “to know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them.”
That’s a good description of many of Trump’s antics. As Jonathan Rauch writes in The Constitution of Knowledge:
One day he said his impeachment was hurting the stock market, then the very next day he bragged that the market was reaching new heights. He called government statistics showing unemployment declining under Obama ‘phony,’ but said the statistics showing unemployment declining in his own tenure were ‘very real.’
Believing all of Trump’s contradictory statements at the same time requires the same self-hypnosis as believing that Freedom is Slavery or that 2+2=5.
On the left and right, in government and in our popular culture, we are starting to manifest disturbing echoes of the world of 1984.
A better introduction to Orwell’s masterpiece might try to grapple with our recent lurch towards authoritarianism. It might ask us questions: what causes a rise in authoritarianism? What psychological conditions led the people of Oceania into totalitarianism, and what psychological conditions kept them there? If we want to curtail so-called “hate speech” (as many Americans do), where’s the line between that and the government persecuting people for Thoughtcrime—or is there a line?
Such an introduction might prompt us to reflect on our own tendency towards authoritarianism. It might talk about the importance of courage, and whether Winston and Julia’s rebellion was wise or ultimately foolish. It might wrestle with that peculiar feature of American exceptionalism, the idea that we and we alone could never fall into authoritarianism; and prompt us to see that for the comforting lie that it is. Such an introduction might prompt us to be more on our guard against authoritarianism, both from the online mob and from the government. It might tie the story’s eternal themes to our current circumstances, so that the novel can help inculcate us against authoritarianism in the way that Orwell intended.
Instead, Perkins-Valdez chose to focus on the novel’s depiction (or lack thereof) of minorities and the main character’s (temporary) sexism. It focused on minutiae that Orwell himself seemed to consider unimportant, rather than on the enduring need to heed Orwell’s warnings and protect ourselves from falling into an authoritarian regime. That’s an enormous missed opportunity.