orwell and huxley predict
AMERCA'S PLUNGE INTO AUTHORITARIANISM
by
HENRY A. GIROUX
__________________________________________
Henry
A. Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair
Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural
Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship
at Ryerson University. He is the author of more than 50 books
including The Educational Deficit and the War on Youth
and Zombie
Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism.
Many of his essays, including The Spectacle of Illiteracy, appear
on his website at www.henryagiroux.com.
His interview with Bill
Moyers is must viewing.
In
spite of their differing perceptions of the architecture of
the totalitarian superstate and how it exercised power and control
over its residents, George Orwell and Aldus Huxley shared a
fundamental conviction. They both argued that the established
democracies of the West were moving quickly toward an historical
moment when they would willingly relinquish the noble promises
and ideals of liberal democracy and enter that menacing space
where totalitarianism perverts the modern ideals of justice,
freedom and political emancipation. Both believed that Western
democracies were devolving into pathological states in which
politics was recognized in the interest of death over life and
justice. Both were unequivocal in the shared understanding that
the future of civilization was on the verge of total domination
or what Hannah Arendt called “dark times.”
While
Neil Postman and other critical descendants have pitted Orwell
and Huxley against each other because of their distinctively
separate notions of a future dystopian society, I believe that
the dark shadow of authoritarianism that shrouds American society
like a thick veil can be lifted by re-examining Orwell’s
prescient dystopian fable 1984 as well as Huxley’s
Brave New World in light of contemporary neoliberal
ascendancy. Rather than pit their dystopian visions against
each other, it might be more productive to see them as complementing
each other, especially at a time when to quote Antonio Gramsci
“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old
is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great
variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
Both
authors provide insights into the merging of the totalitarian
elements that constitute a new and more hybridized form of authoritarian
control, appearing less as fiction than a threatening portend
of the unfolding 21st century. Consumer fantasies and authoritarian
control, Big Brother intelligence agencies and the voracious
seductions of privatized pleasures, along with the rise of the
punishing state -- which criminalizes an increasing number of
behaviours and invests in institutions that incarcerate and
are organized principally for the production of violence --
and the collapse of democratic public spheres into narrow market-driven
orbits of privatization–these now constitute the new order
of authoritarianism.
Orwell’s
Big Brother found more recently a new incarnation in the revelations
of government lawlessness and corporate spying by whistleblowers
such as Chelsea Manning, Jeremy Hammond and Edward Snowden.
All of these individuals revealed a government that lied about
its intelligence operations, illegally spied on millions of
people who were not considered terrorists or had committed no
crime, and collected data from every conceivable electronic
source to be stored and potentially used to squelch dissent,
blackmail people, or just intimidate those who fight to make
corporate and state power accountable. Orwell offered his readers
an image of the modern state in which privacy was no longer
valued as a civil virtue and a basic human right, nor perceived
as a measure of the robust strength of a healthy and thriving
democracy. In Orwell’s dystopia the right to privacy had
come under egregious assault, but the ruthless transgressions
of privacy pointed to something more sinister than the violation
of individual rights. The claim to privacy, for Orwell, represented
a moral and political principle by which to assess the nature,
power, and severity of an emerging totalitarian state. Orwell’s
warning was intended to shed light on the horrors of totalitarianism,
the corruption of language, the production of a pervasive stupidity,
and the endless regimes of state spying imposed on citizens
in the mid-20th-century.
Orwell
opened a door for all to see a nightmarish future in which everyday
life becomes harsh, an object of state surveillance, and control
-- a society in which the slogan “ignorance becomes strength”
morphs into a guiding principle of mainstream media, education
and the culture of politics. Huxley shared Orwell’s concern
about ignorance as a political tool of the elite, enforced through
surveillance and the banning of books, dissent and critical
thought itself. But Huxley believed that social control and
the propagation of ignorance would be introduced by those in
power through the political tools of pleasure and distraction.
Huxley thought this might take place through drugs and genetic
engineering, but the real drugs and social planning of late
modernity lies in the presence of an entertainment and public
pedagogy industry that trades in pleasure and idiocy, most evident
in the merging of neoliberalism, celebrity culture, and the
control of commanding cultural apparatuses extending from Hollywood
movies and video games to mainstream television, news and the
social media.
Orwell’s
Big Brother of 1984 has been upgraded in the 2015 edition. As
Zygmunt Bauman points out, if the older Big Brother presided
over traditional enclosures such as military barracks, prisons,
schools and “countless other big and small panopticons,
the updated Big Brother is not only concerned with inclusion
and the death of privacy, but also the suppression of dissent
and the widening of the politics of exclusion. Keeping people
out is the extended face of Big Brother who now patrols borders,
hospitals, and other public spaces in order to spot “the
people who do not fit in the places they are in, banishing them
from the place and departing them ‘where they belong,’
or better still never allowing them to come anywhere near in
the first place.”
This
is the Big Brother that pushes youthful protests out of the
public spaces they attempt to occupy. This is the hyper-nationalistic
Big Brother clinging to notions of racial purity and American
exceptionalism as a driving force in creating a country that
has come to resemble an open air prison for the dispossessed.
This is the Big Brother whose split personality portends the
dark authoritarian universe of the one percent with their control
over the economy and use of paramilitarized police forces, on
the one hand, and, on the other, their retreat into gated communities
manned by SWAT-like security forces.
The
increasing militarization of local police forces who are now
armed with weapons from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan
has transformed how the police respond to dealing with the public.
Cops have been transformed into soldiers just as dialogue and
community policing have been replaced by military-style practices
that are way out of proportion to the crimes the police are
trained to address. For instance, The Economist reported
that “SWAT teams were deployed about 3,000 times in 1980
but are now used around 50,000 times a year. Some cities use
them for routine patrols in high-crime areas. Baltimore and
Dallas have used them to break up poker games.
In
the advent of the recent display of police force in Ferguson,
Missouri and Baltimore, Maryland it is unfair to view the impact
of the rapid militarization of local police on poor black communities
as nothing short of terrifying and symptomatic of the violence
that takes place in authoritarian societies. For instance, according
to a recent report produced by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement
entitled Operation Ghetto Storm, “police officers, security
guards, or self-appointed vigilantes extra judicially killed
at least 313 African-Americans in 2012 . . . This means a black
person was killed by a security officer every 28 hours.”
Michelle Alexander adds to the racist nature of the punishing
state by pointing out that “There are more African American
adults under correctional control today -- in prison or jail,
on probation or parole -- than were enslaved in 1850, a decade
before the Civil War began.” Meanwhile the real violence
used by the state against poor minorities of color, women, immigrants
and low income adults barely gets mentioned, except when it
is so spectacularly visible that it cannot be ignored as in
the cases of Eric Garner who was choked to death by a New York
City policeman after he was confronted for illegally selling
untaxed cigarettes. Or the case of Freddie Gray who had his
spine severed and voice box crushed for making eye contact with
a cop. These cases are not exceptional. For too many blacks,
the police have turned their neighbourhoods into war zones where
cops parading as soldiers act with impunity.
Fear
and isolation constitute an updated version of Big Brother.
Fear is managed and is buttressed by a neoliberal logic that
embraces the notion that while fear be accepted as a general
condition of society, how it is dealt with by members of the
American public be relegated to the realm of the private, dealt
with exclusively as an individual consideration, largely removed
from the collapse of authoritarian control and democratic rule,
and posited onto the individual’s fear of the other. In
the surveillance state, fear is misplaced from the political
sphere and emergence of an authoritarian government to the personal
concern with the fear of surviving, not getting ahead, unemployment,
and the danger posed by the growing legions of the interminable
others. As the older order dies, a new one struggles to be born,
one that often produces a liminal space that gives rise to monsters,
all too willing to kidnap, torture and spy on law abiding citizens
while violating civil liberties. As Antonio Gramsci once suggested,
such an interregnum offers no political guarantees, but it does
provide or at least gestures towards the conditions to reimagine
“what is to be done,” how it might be done, and
who is going to do it.
Orwell’s
1984 continues to serve as a brilliant and important
metaphor for mapping the expansive trajectory of global surveillance,
authoritarianism and the suppression of dissent that has characterized
the first decades of the new millennium. The older modes of
surveillance to which Orwell pointed, including his warnings
regarding the dangers of microphones and giant telescreens that
watch and listen are surprisingly limited when compared with
the varied means now available for spying on people. Orwell
would be astonished by this contemporary, refashioned Big Brother
given the threat the new surveillance state poses because of
its reach and the alleged advance of technologies that far outstretch
anything he could have imagined -- technologies that pose a
much greater threat to both the personal privacy of citizens
and the control exercised by sovereign power.
In
spite of his vivid imagination, “Orwell never could have
imagined that the National Security Agency (NSA) would amass
metadata on billions of our phone calls and 200 million of our
text messages every day. Orwell could not have foreseen that
our government would read the content of our emails, file transfers,
and live chats from the social media we use.” Edward Snowden
and other critics are correct about the dangers of the state’s
infringement of privacy rights, but their analysis should be
taken further by linking the issue of citizen surveillance with
the rise of networked societies, global flows of power, and
the emergence of a totalitarian ethos that defies even state-based
control. For Orwell, domination was state imposed and bore the
heavy hand of unremitting repression and a smothering language
that eviscerated any appearance of dissent, erased historical
memory, and turned the truth into its opposite. For Orwell,
individual freedom was at risk under the heavy hand of state
terrorism.
In
Orwell’s world, individual freedom and privacy were under
attack from outside forces. For Huxley, in contrast, freedom
and privacy were willingly given up as part of the seductions
of a soft authoritarianism, with its vast machinery of manufactured
needs, desires and identities. This new mode of persuasion seduced
people into chasing commodities, and infantilized them through
the mass production of easily digestible entertainment, disposable
goods, and new scientific advances in which any viable sense
of agency was undermined. The conditions for critical thought
dissolved into the limited pleasures instant gratification wrought
through the use of technologies and consuming practices that
dampened, if not obliterated, the very possibility of thinking
itself. Orwell’s dark image is the stuff of government
oppression whereas Huxley’s is the stuff of distractions,
diversions and the transformation of privacy into a cheap and
sensational performance for public display. Neil Postman, writing
in a different time and worried about the destructive anti-intellectual
influence of television sided with Huxley and believed that
repression was now on the side of entertainment and the propensity
of the American public to amuse themselves to death. His attempt
to differentiate Huxley’s dystopian vision from Orwell’s
is worth noting. He writes:
Echoes
of Huxley’s insights play out in the willingness of millions
of people who voluntarily hand over personal information whether
in the service of the strange sociality prompted by social media
or in homage to the new surveillance state. New surveillance
technologies employed by major servers providers now focus on
diverse consumer populations who are targeted in the collection
of endless amounts of personal information as they move from
one site to the next, one geopolitical region to the next, and
across multiple screens and digital apparatuses. As Ariel Dorfman
points out, “social media users gladly give up their liberty
and privacy, invariably for the most benevolent of platitudes
and reasons,” all the while endlessly shopping online,
updating Facebook and texting. Indeed, surveillance technologies
are now present in virtually every public and private space
-- such as video cameras in streets, commercial establishments,
workplaces, and even schools as well as the myriad scanners
at entry points of airports, retail stores, sporting events,
and so on -- and function as control mechanisms that become
normalized through their heightened visibility. In addition,
the all-encompassing world of corporate and state surveillance
is aided by our endless array of personal devices that chart,
via GPS tracking, our every move, our every choice, and every
pleasure.
At
the same time, Orwell’s warning about Big Brother applies
not simply to an authoritarian-surveillance state but also to
commanding financial institutions and corporations who have
made diverse modes of surveillance a ubiquitous feature of daily
life. Corporations use the new technologies to track spending
habits and collect data points from social media so as to provide
us with consumer goods that match our desires, employ face recognition
technologies to alert store salesperson to our credit ratings,
and so it goes. Heidi Boghosian points out that if omniscient
state control in Orwell’s 1984 is embodied by
the two-way television sets present in each home, then in “our
own modern adaptation, it is symbolized by the location-tracking
cell phones we willingly carry in our pockets and the microchip-embedded
clothes we wear on our bodies.” In this instance, the
surveillance state is one that not only listens, watches and
gathers massive amounts of information through data mining,
allegedly for the purpose of identifying security threats. It
also acculturates the public into accepting the intrusion of
commercial surveillance technologies -- and, perhaps more vitally,
the acceptance of privatized, commodified values -- into all
aspects of their lives. In other words, the most dangerous repercussions
of a near total loss of privacy involve more than the unwarranted
collecting of information by the government: we must also be
attentive to the ways in which being spied on has become not
only normalized, but even enticing, as corporations up the pleasure
quotient for consumers who use new digital technologies and
social networks--– not least of all by and for simulating
experiences of community.
Many
individuals, especially young people, now run from privacy and
increasingly demand services in which they can share every personal
facet of their lives. While Orwell’s vision touches upon
this type of control, there is a notable difference that he
did not foresee. According to Pete Cashmore, while Orwell’s
“Thought Police tracked you without permission, some consumers
are now comfortable with sharing their every move online.”
The state and corporate cultural apparatuses now collude to
socialize everyone -- especially young people -- into a regime
of security and commodification in which their identities, values,
and desires are inextricably tied to a culture of commodified
addictions, self-help, therapy and social indifference. Intelligence
networks now inhabit the world of major corporations such as
Disney and the Bank of America as well as the secret domains
of the NSA, FBI and fifteen other intelligence agencies. As
Edward Snowden’s revelations about the PRISM program revealed,
the NSA also collected personal data from all of the major high
tech giant service providers who according to a senior lawyer
for the NSA, “were fully aware of the surveillance agency’s
widespread collection of data.”
The
fact is that Orwell’s and Huxley’s ironic representations
of the modern totalitarian state -- along with their implied
defense of a democratic ideal rooted in the right to privacy
and the right to be educated in the capacity to be autonomous
and critical thinkers -- has been transformed and mutilated
almost beyond recognition by the material and ideological registers
of a worldwide neoliberal order. Just as we can envision Orwell’s
and Huxley’s dystopian fables morphing over time from
realistic novels into a real life documentary, and now into
a form of reality TV, privacy and freedom have been radically
altered in an age of permanent, non-stop global exchange and
circulation. That is, in the current moment, the right to privacy
and freedom have been usurped by the seductions of a narcissistic
culture and casino capitalism’s unending desire to turn
every relationship into an act of commerce and to make all aspects
of daily life subject to market forces under watchful eyes of
both government and corporate regimes of surveillance.
In
a world devoid of care, compassion and protection, personal
privacy and freedom are no longer connected and resuscitated
through its connection to public life, the common good, or a
vulnerability born of the recognition of the frailty of human
life. Culture loses its power as the bearer of public memory,
and of the lessons of history in a social order where the worst
excesses of capitalism are left unchecked and a consumerist
ethic “makes impossible any shared recognition of common
interests or goals.” With the rise of the punishing state
along with a kind of willful amnesia taking hold of the larger
culture, we see little more than a paralyzing fear and apathy
in response the increasing exposure of formerly private spheres
to data mining and manipulation, while the concept of privacy
itself has all but expired under a “broad set of panoptic
practices.” With individuals more or less succumbing to
this insidious cultural shift in their daily lives, there is
nothing to prevent widespread collective indifference to the
growth of a surveillance culture, let alone an authoritarian
state.
![Canadian Tire Repair Scam [2211 boul Roland-Therrien, Longueuil] = documents-proofs](../2010_v9_n5/images/mapleleaf.jpg)
