Orwell's essay is starting to get questionable here:
The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim -- for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives -- is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal.
I would argue that most middle class people are happy to remain middle class, or maybe slightly move up to a more comfortable middle class, not to become high class. I have no idea where his idea that a common aim for the low class is to abolish a class system at all comes from.
Likewise, his claim that mechanization removes the need for social levels, even if people still have different jobs. Even if we're entirely post scarcity, some jobs, hobbies, etc. will still be more prestigious than others.
Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.
This part is spot on though. Along with:
To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies—all this is indispensably necessary.
Alternative facts!
But remember, 1984 is a book by a socialist about bad socialists, so:
Thus, the Party rejects and vilifies every principle for which the Socialist movement originally stood, and it chooses to do this in the name of Socialism.
Julia dozes through the whole thing and tells Winston he's good at reading, because of course.
Summary: Nobody does stuff together anymore, and that's causing the downfall of society!
Commentary:
I'm going bowling with Rotary tomorrow, so a brief break from 1984 for an essay that I think I've referenced on here a few times before.
As the summary above notes, the basic idea of the book is that, after peaking somewhere around the mid twentieth century (depending on what exact activity you're measuring) Americans are less engaged in doing things together. Something that I think Putnam kind of buries the lede on is that active "doing."
His focus is mostly on groups that have an expectation of active participation. Volunteering, playing a sport, etc. Just mailing in a check and maybe flipping through the magazine (ala a lot of charity clubs) is "more like the bond between any two Red Sox fans (or perhaps any two devoted Honda owners)."
I think the Honda analogy is probably more accurate. The Red Sox fans are more likely to go hang out at the same sports bar or go to the game together and stuff.
You have to actually go play softball together or volunteer at the same soup kitchen or whatever.
He makes a similar distinction about self help groups like AA, which I feel less strongly about. Everyone I know who does AA is very involved, and helps run meetings, organizes DDs, runs mocktail mixers, etc. I suspect this might just be "loudness" bias, that the very AA people are the ones you know are in AA. I might know ten times as many "quiet" AA guys who just show up to a meeting once a month, eats a donut, and bounces.
People doing less stuff together reduces social capital, which leads to two main issues:
1. People don't meet other people who are "similarish." To use Putnam's bowling example, say a Republican and a Democrat are both on the same bowling team. In a vacuum, the Republican thinks that the Democrat goes around ritually aborting babies to help communist immigrants come in, while the Democrat thinks the Republican ritually enslaves women to generate capital and enslave third-worlders.
Then they bowl together, find out they're both decent people who mostly agree on a lot of stuff, and don't want to kill each other anymore. (Hey, that's almost in 1984!)
2. People don't work together in ways that benefit their community. In a town with a thriving bowling league, Lions club, and CCD, if the basketball nets at the park needs replaced, there's a good chance they can fundraise it and get it done. In a town without one, the town council can maybe raise taxes and probably not actually do anything. "WHY ARE THEY RAISING MY TAXES? WHO USES THOSE STUPID NETS?" (Answer, Luis and Luke's kids, who you should've met at the bowling team Christmas party that no longer exists!)
Moving from a less-connected neighborhood to a more-connected one, it's great to see the whole community come out to support stuff like library fundraisers or the town Halloween parade. The Masons and the high school music boosters and the local contracting company all get floats, and even the people who aren't in the parade still go sit with their neighbors and wave at the kids.
Putnam puts forward a number of theories for the decline, including: longer commutes, more working, and more "nonsocial" activities like TV. I advance that there's also some amount of self-reinforcement and a needed "critical mass" for organizations to succeed. When I officially joined my rotary a couple months ago, the woman I joined with an I both mentioned family members in clubs (her mom in Rotary, my grandfather in Kiwanis). Most of my friends in clubs are in the same ones as their dads, aunts, etc. Even if you're aware of their existence, I think people only actively want to join if a close friend or family member is in one.
At the same time, no one wants to be on the bowling team that never has enough people for a match, so as organizations get smaller they not only lose the ability to recruit, but also start losing members faster.
This is getting kind of long (my wife says I write "essays" for fun), but I want to share a quick series of linked anecdotes that I think show the difference in point of view between citizens most club members and civilians people who aren't.
A citizen accepts personal responsibility for the safety of the body politic, defending it with his life. A civilian does not.
Masonry is the "default" model of a club for most people who aren't in one. When I talk to someone about Rotary, they usually wind up asking me awkwardly about the secret handshake or if I'm allowed to tell them stuff. Rotary, Kiwanis, Lions, etc. don't do any of that, but that's the baked in assumption.
Likewise (obviously it varies across organizations) I think people overstate the networking focus of most clubs vs the volunteer and community focus. Yes, the realtor in my club gives me a magnet every year with a calendar and her business phone number. Yes, the guy who does my taxes helps sponsor our club and I go to him because someone from the club recommends him. But (most people) aren't in clubs just to hopefully round up a couple more clients, they're there to make friends and help make sure the park is in good shape. I sometimes see people talking about getting strong armed into it by their boss at work "to make connections" or talking about how it'd be easier to just write a check to repaint that bench instead of going and doing it. In a good club, the networking is 10%, the bench is 50%, and meeting new people is 40%. As some guy on reddit (sort of, I'm paraphrasing since I saw the post years ago) put it once, "One night a week, instead of playing Skyrim, I go meet in an old building, say a funny prayer, and help people." That doesn't mean that your Lions club is going to save as many lives as malaria nets, but it does mean that your town will still have a parade every year and a little league team. That's worth something.
In principle it would be quite simple to waste the surplus labour of the world by building temples and pyramids, [...] But this would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a hierarchical society.
I feel like if you can get people to build temples and pyramids, you could make up a religion that manipulates people the way you want without (or at least with a lot less) endless war. Also, not sure about his claim that:
In past ages, a war, almost by definition, was something that sooner or later came to an end, usually in unmistakable victory or defeat
There were wars that lasted for literal hundreds of years. The current war has been going on for a few dozen years. That's peanuts.
After a couple pages of Hate Week (and Winston and the rest of his department having to swap Eurasia and East Asia again) this chapter is mostly Winston reading Goldstein's book. It's the longest chapter so far by quite a bit, and has a bit of a "I just wanted to write this essay, but no one would publish it so I hid it in a novel."
I'm going to ramble about fonts in web writing some next week. For today, I'm just going to make fun of Orwell:
A heavy black volume, amateurishly bound, with no name or title on the cover. The print also looked slightly irregular. The pages were worn at the edges, and fell apart easily, as though the book had passed through many hands. The inscription on the title page ran:
THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM
by
Emmanuel Goldstein
[Winston began reading.]
Chapter 1.
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude toward one another, have varied from age to age; but the essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other.
The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable....
The font isn't actually Courier, but he does switch font for the Goldstein excerpts. I really feel like:
1. Primary font
2. Secondary font
3. ALL CAPS
4. Italics
is a lot for one page.
Add in that awkward bracketentical and the period ellipse and I'm over it.
Long story short, Goldstein's book says that the war doesn't actually matter. It's just a way of diverting resources so that the class order is maintained. We finally get the boundaries of Oceania (it's America, British Isles, Australia, and a smidge of Africa). How the other two countries can't pick off Australia and the Isles is beyond me. He goes on about it for quite a while, but I want to pull one sentence.
For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away.
I think this is probably the most wrong part of Orwell's thesis. Most people just don't want to think. It's too much work. You could argue that people are trained not to or whatever, and that might be true, but it's clear that you can have a majority literate population and they can still choose to remain ignorant. He kind of gives himself cover with the "leisure and security" line, but there's a lot of secure and leisurely unthinkers out there. (Huxley is probably right that providing leisure and security is an effective means of preventing thought for most people.)
