NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR
JUNE 8, 2019 marked the 70th anniversary of the publication of 1984, George Orwell’s famous novel of life in the future. The novel was written in 1948 and became an instant success. Since then it has sold more than 30 million copies and has also been translated into many languages.
The year 1984 had also become, in the words of Peter Jenkins of The Guardian, “an almost mythical date in human history”. When the year 1984 arrived, people took to comparing the situation postulated by Orwell, with that which existed in the real world. Mrs. Thatcher, for instance, was reported as saying that “Orwell was wrong”. We do not, she asserted, have a totalitarian state of the kind that Orwell predicted. But the picture that Orwell depicted for 1984 was not meant to be taken literally. It is a symbolic expression of the course that evil in the world of man might take. George Orwell saw ominous trends in the political system of 1948; he projected those trends to 1984, and described the society that might result. 70 years later the novel still resonates with modern society and political consciousness and human freedom. 1984, the novel has become an essential part of the modern consciousness.
The world of nature, in all its beauty, proclaims that there is a path to perfection that man too can follow.
Orwell saw that man is in the middle of a perfect world. Everything in nature is exactly as it ought to be. There is no exploitation, prejudice, tyranny or corruption in the world around man. His own world, however, is fraught with evil. The world of nature, in all its beauty, proclaims that there is a path to perfection that man too can follow. The world of man, in all its corruption, cries out that man has failed to follow that path. The purpose of 1984 is to warn man off from cultivating his potential for evil, and cultivate instead the good that is latent in him.
But the pessimistic tone of 1984 shows that Orwell did not see human society reaching a state of perfection in this world. “It is quite possible that man’s major problems will never be solved,” he wrote in 1944, “but it is also unthinkable who is there who dares to look at the world of today and say to himself, ‘It will always be like this’.”
Indeed, if one looks at the world of man, there seems to be no end to the evil that he perpetrates. Yet if one looks at the world around man, its perfection tells one that there must come a time when man also merges with the perfect world around him.
The only way out of this paradox is to accept the coming of another world when reality will be enforced on man, as it is already enforced on the world of nature; when God’s Will shall prevail in the world of man, as is already the case in the rest of the world. The only ones who will be fit to inhabit that perfect world will be those who had consciously become a part of it in this world; those who bowed to the Will of God when they had the power to rebel.