The Class of ’64
George Orwell
Tribune, 2 February 1945
[“As I Please” was a regular column in Tribune from December 1943 to February 1945 and again from November 1946 to April 1947. This article is the third part of Orwell’s 2 February 1945 “As I Please” column. The present title was not Orwell’s, but was rather applied to the article by Alexander S. Peak.]
A NOT-TOO-DISTANT explosion shakes the house, the windows rattle in their sockets, and in the next room the 1964 class wakes up and lets out a yell or two. Each time this happens I find myself thinking, ‘Is it possible that human beings can continue with this lunacy very much longer?’ You know the answer, of course. Indeed, the difficulty nowadays is to find anyone who thinks that there will not be another war in the fairly near future.
A map of the world in George Orwell’s 1984 (1949)
Germany, I suppose, will be defeated this year, and when Germany is out of the way Japan will not be able to stand up to the combined power of Britain and the U.S.A. Then there will be a peace of exhaustion, with only minor and unofficial wars raging all over the place, and perhaps this so-called peace may last for decades. But after that, by the way the world is actually shaping, it may well be that war will become permanent. Already, quite visibly and more or less with the acquiescence of all of us, the world is splitting up into the two or three huge super-states forecast in James Burnham’s Managerial Revolution. One cannot draw their exact boundaries as yet, but one can see more or less what areas they will comprise. And if the world does settle down into this pattern, it is likely that these vast states will be permanently at war with one another, though it will not necessarily be a very intensive or bloody kind of war. Their problems, both economic and psychological, will be a lot simpler if the doodlebugs are more or less constantly whizzing to and fro.
If these two or three super-states do establish themselves, not only will each of them be too big to be conquered, but they will be under no necessity to trade with one another, and in a position to prevent all contact between their nationals. Already, for a dozen years or so, large areas of the earth have been cut off from one another, although technically at peace.
Some months ago, in this column, I pointed out that modern scientific inventions have tended to prevent rather than increase international communication. This brought me several angry letters from readers, but none of them were able to show that what I had said was false. They merely retorted that if we had Socialism, the aeroplane, the radio, etc. would not be perverted to wrong uses. Very true, but then we haven’t Socialism. As it is, the aeroplane is primarily a thing for dropping bombs and the radio primarily a thing for whipping up nationalism. Even before the war there was enormously less contact between the peoples of the earth than there had been thirty years earlier, and education was perverted, history rewritten and freedom of thought suppressed to an extent undreamed of in earlier ages. And there is no sign whatever of these tendencies being reversed.
Maybe I am pessimistic. But, at any rate, those are the thoughts that cross my mind (and a lot of other people’s too, I believe) every time the explosion of a V bomb booms through the mist.
A Couple Comments (2011) by Alexander S. Peak
Orwell writes that scientific inventions such as the airplane, the radio, &c., have been perverted to wrong uses and that, perhaps, if we had socialism, they would not be perverted to such wrong uses. He then adds that we haven’t socialism.
Whether we have or haven’t socialism depends upon how one chooses to define socialism. But, either way, the comments seem oddly similar to something I would say—with a minor alteration, of course. I, for example, would say that these inventions would not be perverted to wrong uses if we were to have a stateless society or a purely free market. I would then add that we do not have a purely free market. (I needn’t point out that we haven’t a stateless society as that, at least, is widely recognised.)
I want to also note that I do not regard autarkism in as benign a light as Orwell. While it may be true that a megastate with the land mass of Oceania (see 1984) may be able to survive while restricting all outside trade, it would still yield a poorer existence for the inhabitants of said megastate than they would enjoy under a régime of unregulated trade. See The Choice by Dr. Russell Roberts.
Orwell’s article copyright © The Estate of Eric Blair
Peak’s comments copyleft 2011
