George Orwell

Big Brother isn't watching us, but we're certainly watching Big Brother. And as another batch of fame-hungry goons enter the house, nobody even mentions Nineteen Eighty-Four, the novel from which the concept came.


Yet Big Brother, the totalitarian figurehead of that book, is still the namesake of the reality television show. Paul Merton consigns celebrity peeves to 'Room 101' (the feared room at the heart of the Ministry of Love in the same novel); government surveillance is deemed "Orwellian"; politically incorrect columnists bemoan the "thought police"; hypocritical politicians are found guilty of "doublethink" (the contradiction-friendly political philosophy espoused by party members in Orwell's Oceania); and the dumbing-down of political discourse is often likened to "Newspeak", the language designed by Orwell for maximum functionality and minimal free thought. ("The only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year.") In terms of its cultural impact, Nineteen Eighty-Four punches well above its slender weight. It was written by a dying man on the windswept Scottish island of Jura, who never knew that its concepts and themes would be the stuff of light entertainment and political punditry 60 years later.


George Orwell (real name Eric Blair) was an Eton-educated socialist, a former Burmese police officer, a Spanish civil war veteran, a novelist, a journalist, and even a propagandist for the British government during World War Two. The subject matter of his sixth novel began to develop after the Spanish civil war, where he had been shot in the throat by a fascist bullet, and where he saw the communists imprison and sideline their allies and rewrite history as they went. (He fought for the repressed Trotskyite POUM and wrote about it in Homage to Catalonia.) The science-fiction idiom possibly struck him in 1944 when reading Yevgeny Zamyatin's totalitarian dystopia We. He wrote the bulk of the novel in 1947 and 1948 in a race to get his manuscript typed in the cold damp atmosphere of Jura, before TB killed him.


The resulting novel is about a world divided into three super-continents: Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, and a totalitarian system in which citizens are made up of heavily-policed party members, an uneducated and dispensable proletariat, and an upper party governing through surveillance and ideological brainwashing, and led by the possibly fictional Big Brother.


Orwell's anti-hero is Winston Smith, a varicose-veined, middle-aged party member from Airstrip One (Britain), an eastern outpost of Oceania (America), whose job it is to rewrite old newspaper articles to fit the needs of the regime's Ministry of Information. (Its motto: "He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future.") Over the course of the novel he starts an illegal journal, begins an illicit affair, attempts to join the resistance, and ultimately learns to "love" Big Brother. (As rebellions go, Winston's is grubby, ignoble and doomed, but it's filled with dark humanity.)


What made this simple plot live was the understanding of realpolitik Orwell brought from his own life experiences. Much of the ruined
landscape of Airstrip One is informed by the bombed landscape of London, the squalor of the proles' existence was derived from the research he'd done for his non-fiction books The Road to Wigan Pier and Down and Out in Paris and London, and his division of the world into Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia was inspired by the wartime Tehran Conference of 1944, attended by Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin.


And although the book describes an oppressive surveillance-heavy regime not dissimilar to Stalin's Russia, it has much more resonance as a treatise on totalitarian thinking rather than as a critique of one historical regime. There are "Orwellian" echoes everywhere. The "perpetual war" between Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia is like the potentially endless war on terror. Smith's job rewriting history ("we were always at war with Eurasia") is recalled in how allies and enemies quickly switched places in the early '90s (Saddam Hussein, the USSR). Newspeak, in which concepts are reduced to unemotional, reality-distorting words (like "ungood" for "bad"), is in use every time a politician refers to deaths as
"collateral damage", or the firing of hundreds is called "downsizing".


Some say the world we live in today looks nothing like that depicted by Orwell, as though he had some Mystic Meg-style obligation to get it right. So no, Nineteen Eighty-Four doesn't predict the spread of global capitalism, mass media, the death of class-consciousness, or the erosion of the superpowers. And despite the accuracy with which Orwell predicted the growth of surveillance technology, he never foresaw that people would clamour to monitor one another and that the privacy craved by Winston Smith would be wilfully discarded across a bewildering array of Facebook, Twitter and Bebo pages.


As for programmes like Big Brother, it's tempting to think that today Orwell would stride into Endemol and sue the bejasus out of them. On the other hand, he was always a bit of a thoughtful contrarian, so he might also have declared the programme a wonderful paean to the lives of ordinary English people. Indeed, now that I think of it, George Orwell may have learned to love Big Brother.