Freeing the Mind

Part I

The emergence of Religious Toleration in the West



Book Cover

 

One of the most important features of our modern Western societies is religious tolerance. In fact it is such an intrinsic / organic feature of our societies that it gives the appearance of always being so. Well that is not the case at all.

“Freedom” Under a Tyranny

Isaiah Berlin

One of the most important attributes of tyranny and living under a tyranny is that intelligent people are forced to “trim their sails” in order to survive. Thus they are forced to compromise their intellect in order to stay both safe and alive. The corollary  that goes with that is that the holders of power can dictate what is “reasonable” and “rational” and their holding of power over people enables them to enforce their views against the will and intellect of others.

Ape and Essence
A forgotten Masterpiece

Book Cover

In 1948 inspired by the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi Aldous Huxley, who wrote Brave New World, wrote Ape and Essence1 a thoroughly pessimistic and dark view of humanity.

The first part of the story relates how two Hollywood producers, on the day of Gandhi’s assassination, found a discarded script in the trash and sought out the writer only to find out that the writer, named William Tallis, had died a few weeks earlier. On a white board in front of his house is the following sign:

The Leech’s kiss, the squids embrace,
The prurient ape’s defiling touch:
And do you like the human race?
No, not much.

THIS MEANS YOU, KEEP OUT.2

Sort of indicates what a misanthrope William Tallis is.

After this short introduction the script that Mr. Tallis wrote is printed. It is divided into two sections. One is a collage of images and texts designed to set up the story the other is the story itself.

In this collage of images we see repeatedly the image of an ape / baboon indicating what the author thinks is the essence of humanity that of primitive primal urges that enslave science and learning. Thus:

…we see a bosomy young female baboon, in a shell-pink evening gown, her mouth painted purple, her muzzle powdered mauve, her fiery eyes ringed with mascara.

…

Behind her, on all fours and secured by a light steel chain attached to a dog collar, come Michael Faraday.3

As for science this is what is said:

Today, thanks to that Higher Ignorance which is our knowledge, man’s stature has increased to such an extent that the least among us is now a baboon, the greatest an orang-utan or even, if he ranks as a Saviour of Society, a true Gorilla.4

After some more montage shots and narration about all men being if not apes at least baboons we get the narrator saying:

Surely it’s obvious.
Doesn’t every schoolboy know it?
Ends are ape-chosen; only the means are man’s.
Papio’s procurer, bursar to baboons,
Reason comes running, eager to ratify;
Comes a catch-fart, with philosophy, truckling to
Tyrants;
Comes, a pimp for Prussia, With Hegel's Patent His-
tory;
Comes with Medicine to administer the Ape-King’s
aphrodisiac;
Comes, Rhyming and with Rhetoric, to write his ora-
tions;
Comes with Calculus to aim his rockets
Accurately at the orphanage across the ocean;
Comes, having aimed, with incense to impetrate
Our Lady devoutly for a direct hit.

…

Church and state
Greed and Hate:-
Two Baboon-Persons in one Supreme Gorilla.

Omnes
Amen, amen.5

A couple of Einsteins, slaves to the Apes eventually die in a world wide nuclear war, complete with terrible chemical and biological weapons.

It is now the year 2108 and an expedition sent from New Zealand is approaching Los Angles. New Zealand survived because it was considered not important enough to bomb, chemically asphyxiate or biologically assault. The result is New Zealand sends an expedition to North America to see what happened and investigate now that the radiation levels are down. Our hero is a Dr. Alfred Poole a botanist with an expertise in plants and agriculture.

He is captured by the natives of the area who have reverted to barbarism. They mine libraries for books to burn as fuel. They worship Satan, calling him Belial. They call the war “the thing”. Deformed babies are sacrificed to Belial each year. The war as changed the biology of most humans so that they go into heat once a year and are basically out of control for two weeks.

Dr. Poole meets Loola who becomes his love interest even though she is wearing a costume saying NO NO NO all over it and refers to herself as a “Vessel of the unholy Spirit”.6

Dr. Poole’s nemesis in the book is the Arch-Vicar who is the head of this Satanic Church. Some of the beau-mots of this faith are as follows:

“Question: To what fate is Man predestined? Answer: Belial has, out of his mere good pleasure, from all eternity elected all now living to everlasting perdition.”

…

“Belial has perverted and corrupted us in all the parts of our being. Therefore, we are, merely on account of that corruption, deservedly condemned by Belial”

The Teacher nods approvingly.

“Such” he squeaks unctuously, “is the inscrutable justice of the Lord of the Flies.”7

In the book there is a long section about the ceremony by which the deformed children are sacrificed with the following being chanted.

Semichorus I

Whence, after much wallowing,

Semichorus II

After many long draughts of the swill,

Semichorus I

Mother emerging nine months later,

Semichorus II

Bears this mockery of a man.

Semichorus I

How then shall there be atonement?

Semichorus II

By Blood.

Semichorus I

How shall Belial be propitiated?

Semichorus II

Only by blood.8

Our hero, Dr. Poole faints from seeing the rather bloody sacrifices of infants. When he wakes up he meets the Arch-Vicar who explains how things got to this in which Belial overturned the order of things and created this hell:

The overcrowding of the planet. Five hundred, eight hundred, sometimes as many as two thousand people to a square mile of food-producing land –and the land in the process of being ruined by bad farming. Everywhere erosion, everywhere the leaching out of minerals. And the deserts spreading, the forests dwindling.

…

-And remember this," he adds: "even without synthetic glanders, even without the atomic bomb, Belial could have achieved all His purposes. A little more slowly, perhaps, but just as surely, men would have destroyed themselves by destroying the world they lived in. They couldn't escape. He had them skewered on both His horns. If they managed to wriggle off the horn of total war, they would find themselves impaled on starvation. And if they were starving, they would be tempted to resort to war. And just in case they should try to find a peaceful and rational way out of their dilemma, He had another subtler horn of self-destruction all ready for them. From the very beginning of the industrial revolution He foresaw -that men would be made so over-weeningly bumptious by the miracles of their own technology that they would soon lose all sense of reality. And that's precisely what happened. These wretched slaves of wheels and ledgers began to congratulate themselves on being the Conquerors of Nature. Conquerors of Nature, indeed! In actual fact, of course, they had. merely upset the equilibrium of Nature and were about to suffer the-consequences. just consider what they were up to during the century and a half before the Thing. Fouling —the rivers, killing off the wild animals, destroying the forests, washing the topsoil into the sea, burning up an ocean of petroleum, squandering the minerals it had taken the whole of geological time to deposit. An orgy of criminal imbecility. And they called it Progress. Progress," he repeats, "Progress! I tell you, that was to rare an invention to have been the product of any merely human mind-too fiendishly ironical!9.

After discussing the ideas of progress and nationalism. The Arch-Vicar concludes that these two notions, both absurd and fatal where adopted because humanity allowed itself to be possessed by Belial.

He wanted [Belial] forced migrations and mass pauperization. He wanted concentration camps and gas chambers and cremation ovens.10

The Arch-Vicar concludes:

“you’d hardly think he[Belial] could have produced us without a miracle,” the Arch-Vicar thoughtfully continues, “But He did, He did. By purely natural means, using human beings and their science as His instruments, he created an entirely new race of men, with deformity in their blood, with squalor all around them and ahead in the future, no prospects but of more squalor, worse deformity and finally complete extinction. Yes, it’s a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living evil.”11

Then the Church takes over for the time period of when humans mate during their “heat” which was another “gift” of the atomic bomb.

Our hero Dr. Poole and Loola find that they are in love and what is worst that they are both “Hots” and are not tied to a hormonal cycle like the rest.

Further our Dr. Poole is enlisted by the locals to try to improve crop yields and he speedily finds out that virtually all crops have been attacked by a whole legion of biological weapons that significantly reduce yields and make raising crops very difficult.

The Arch-Vicar comments that this further indicates how possessed by Belial all these people were before the war to design such weapons.

Because Dr. Poole sexual urges might get him into trouble the Arch-Vicar suggests that he join the Satanic Church and get castrated. Because of that and because he is in love with Loola both of them flee to San Francisco.

On the way there Dr. Poole and Loola pass by William Tallis’ grave and read the inscription.12

This is in many respects a savage novel. Its contempt for politicians and human self satisfaction is almost suffocating but that is at least partially balanced by a positive view of the virtues of human love.

In many respects Huxley’s vision of a possible future wreaked by human devastation of the planet is rather prophetic and certainly his predictions that in a nuclear war that the devastation wrought by chemical and biological weapons might be even worse than that of the bombs is unsettling to say the least. Certainly it is not surprising that a film was not made in the 40’s with this script.

In the end Ape and Essence is a savage attack on humanity or at least our less positive attributes.

To quote the baboon-girl:

Love, Love, love-
Love’s the very essence
Of everything I think, of everything I do.
Give me, Give me,
Give me detumescence.
That means you.13

Aldous Huxley

1. Huxley, Aldous, Ape and Essence, Harper and Row Pub., 1948.

2. IBID. p. 15.

3. IBID. pp. 26-27.

4. IBID. p. 27.

5. IBID. p. 34.

6. IBID. p. 63.

7. IBID. pp. 69-70.

8. IBID. p. 85.

9. IBID. pp. 93-94.

10. IBID. p. 97.

11. IBID. p. 99.

12. I won’t quote it I will let you find it in the novel, pp. 151-152.

13. IBID. pp. 27-28.

Pierre Cloutier

Notes on 1984

1984 is more of a cultural phenomena than a work of great literature, but since a generation has past since the actual 1984 perhaps it can be examined without political / mythological blinders.

I can remember that when 1984, the year, arrived we were treated to a deluge of books and articles, TV specials etc., about the book and the phenomena, and it had been steadily growing for years. I can remember when 1984 references were much more common than they are now. The year has come and gone and it lost its “cachet” so to speak. In fact I took the novel in High School, (Grade 12)!

Still from 1954 BBC Film of 1984

There are not very many critiques of 1984 from the point of view of Science Fiction, but there are a myriad of critiques from a political point of view.

To get this out of the way first. It is a wearying, but basically an omnipresent view that Orwell’s novel is an attack on Socialism. This view is of course has been and is very “Politically Correct”, and depends on a studied, deliberate and willful effort to ignore what Orwell said about his novel. The mental discipline required to hold this opinion is quite formidable and depends on a carefully cultivated ignorance into which contrary facts may not intrude. For example:

1984, like Animal Farm, was a deep embarrassment to
leftists. Orwell, a socialist disgusted and disillusioned by the excesses of Stalin's regime, wrote both works in protest. Despite many attempts to re-spin 1984 as being "really about the alienation in all modern societies," the references to socialism in 1984 are pervasive. Oceania (the Americas and British Empire) is ruled by a system called Ingsoc (English Socialism), and Eurasia (Russia and Europe) is ruled by Neo-Bolshevism. The lessons of 1984 might be applicable to any totalitarian system, but the novel is first, last, and foremost about socialism.1

No doubt what Orwell had to say is irrelevant since our quoted writer “knows” that the “the novel is first, last, and foremost about socialism”. No doubt hoping that by repeated emphatic, statements to convince himself and his readers. Our author forgets that Orwell died a convinced Socialist. Would it not be more accurate to say that “the novel is first, last, and foremost about Stalinism”? One of the reasons that the novel is a “deep embarrassment to leftists” is that certain intellectuals insisted and still insist that it is a deep embarrassment to the entire left of the political spectrum, but of course deny that Nazism and such novels as The Iron Heel are a “deep embarrassment” to the right of the political spectrum, or to capitalism. This is obviously pure polemics, and its use is to score debating points.

Orwell’s comments in the novel about systems of exploitation and ruling classes in the past are of course ignored, including the rather frightening idea that to Orwell the society of 1984 is the “perfect” class rule, in which the ruling class has apparently found a “perfect” way to stay in power forever. O’Brien seems to be almost frighteningly clear eyed about what this new society is actually trying to do. Just how is that “Socialist”?

I’m referring to all that stuff about staying in power, the endless crushing of people; boot in the face forever stuff. Sounds not very “Socialist”, but has certain affinities to Fascist ideas about endless struggle, and only struggle making life worth while.

In 1949 in a letter to the New York Times about his novel Orwell said:

"My recent novel [1984] is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labour Party (of which I am a supporter) but as a show-up of the perversions ... which have already been partly realized in Communism and Fascism. ...The scene of the book is laid in Britain in order to emphasize that the English-speaking races are not innately better than anyone else and that totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere.”2

But then Orwell’s novel, like his work Animal Farm, served an extremely useful purpose in the Cold War of being used not just to attack Stalinism but the “left” in general, (which could include anyone to the left of extreme conservatives). That Orwell was less than enamored with capitalism was of course forgotten down the memory hole. (How Orwellian!)3

A side issue is why Orwell named the novel 1984. One story is that Orwell originally was going to call it 1948 but was talked into calling it 1984 to give it an less immediate and more prophetic tone. Another story was that Orwell was debating whether to call the novel The Last Man in Europe or 1984 and was told to go with what was then considered a more marketable title. Its also possible that the title was a tribute to the Jack London novel The Iron Heel, which is about a Fascist like movement taking power, in 1984!, and delaying the onset of a Socialist world for centuries. Which casts an interesting light on the supposed anti-socialism of Orwell’s novel.4

Regarding the prophetic value of 1984. Well let’s just say 1984 is not very prophetic. The society described in 1984, with its run down buildings, shortages of everything, like razor blades, shoelaces, and its dreadful gin and tobacco is obviously modeled on a view of Stalinist Russia, although it also carries more than a small resemblance to ration ridden Britain of the war and post war period. So much for seeing what the real 1984 would be like.

As Isaac Asimov said in a review of 1984:

Orwell had no feel for the future, and the displacement of the story is so much more geographical than temporal. The London in which the story is placed is not so much moved 35 years forward in time, from 1949 to 1984, as it is moved a thousand miles east in space to Moscow.5

The story in the novel is a repeat of the Russian Revolution, with Big Brother having a moustache like Stalin, and Emmanuel Goldstein not just being a version of Leon Trotsky but looking like him complete with goatee. In fact Orwell has a real difficulty imagining a realistic future, in this case everything is always breaking down and everything including electricity is intermittent and rationed. And there is an omnipresent black market, shades of not just Stalinist Russia but wartime and post war Britain. In other words it is indeed 1948 and its Stalin’s Russia.

A classic example of that is this from 1984:

Winston fitted the nib into the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off. The pen was an archaic instrument, seldom used even for signatures, and he had procured one, furtively and with some difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead of being scratched with an ink pencil.6

This is of course the exact reverse of the truth. Old style pens scratch and the “ink pencil”, probably a ball point pen, does not! This passage does of course indicate a sort of nostalgia for the “good old days”.

Certain criticisms by Asimov do not work for example Asimov’s statement that no can be observing everyone through the two way telescreen at all times is irrelevant. The point is that at any one time someone COULD be observing you doing whatever and you can not be sure when you are being viewed or not viewed. So you would not need to be viewed all the time. So the argument that you would need c. five people to view each person and hence the system would be unworkable doesn't wash. All you would need is each person thinking that they might be being watched at any time. This would require a small group of watchers watching people randomly so that no one could be sure they wern't being watched at any particular time. Orwell was perfectly aware of this. This could potentially be very effective has a means of oppression.

As for Asimov’s criticism that having a system of volunteer spies not working because everyone would eventually report everyone is beside the point. The fact is Stalinist Russia had such a system and so did Nazi Germany and also the Stasi of former East Germany had something similar; so it can work. Asimov is right though in all those cases the system had a tendency to create an overwhelming amount of paperwork and files that tended to bog down the work of the secret police.

As for prophecy Orwell seems to be unable to conceive of computers for record keeping and the writing machines he does conceive of are rather crude for the real 1984. Orwell’s people use razor blades for example: electric razors don’t seem to exist.

Orwell doesn't seem to have been aware that such systems that he described in 1984 are by their very nature self destructive. For example it appears that corruption is rampant and everything either doesn't work or breaks down. Yet amazingly the telescreens work perfectly and the Thought Police and various ministries work without corruption. We now know that corruption, nepotism was very common and got increasingly common over time in the Communist party of Russia; indeed it got common in all Communist one party states to say nothing of regimes like Nazi Germany.

Orwell’s idea about Newspeak, a language that constricts meaning to the point of making heretical thought impossible is of interest. It is also extremely unlikely. Just how do you prevent the meaning of words being modified or changed over time? How would you for example prevent the technical vocabulary of Newspeak from bleeding into everyday words? Just how would you enforce rigid definitions of words and prevent modification through everyday use? It won’t work.

Then there is of course O’Brien’s fulminations. We are supposed to be awed by O’Brien’s statements and be terrified by their “awesome” implications.

For example:

When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will.7

This after O’Brien has began to torture him and of course Winston afterwards “freely” converts after extensive hideous physical and mental torture. O’Brien thus proves that the possession of virtually unlimited power over someone provides an ample scope to inflict these sorts of intellectual stupidities on helpless victims.

Or another example:

O’Brien silenced him by a movement of the hand. “We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston. here is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation – anything. I could float off this floor like soap bubble if I wished to. I do not wish to, because the Party does not wish it. You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about laws of nature. We make the laws of nature."

...

“Nonsense. The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be older? Nothing exists except through human consciousness”8

O’Brien has a whole string of similar stupidities all dependent on the fact that Winston is his helpless victim. Of course O’Brien cannot really believe his idiocies otherwise he would be insane with monomania. It is to be wondered at, if O’Brien really believes this nonsense why is he torturing Winston? If reality is all in the head, why bother?

O’Brien’s philosophical justification for his stupidities is the notion of doublethink the idea of holding two contradictory notions in your head at the same time. Of course people do that sort of thing all the time. But in extreme cases such contradictory thinking would produce disordered thinking even insanity. In O’Brien’s case he uses the notion of doublethink to excuse extreme disordered thinking i.e., willful stupidity. The fact that he has to torture Winston to make Winston accept his insane pontifications is proof that O’Brien’s idea of reality being all in your head is wrong. O’Brien is able to inflict such nonsense on Winston only because he has extreme coercive power over him, if O’Brien was the victim would he magically be able to wish the torture away has being all in his head? I think not! Of course O’Brien never explains how doublethink enables you to not just have two contradictory notions in your head at the same time; but how do you avoid tension between them? How do you avoid situations about having to choose one idea over the other?

O’Brien’s verbal vomit is only terrifying because he has power over another human being and is able to terrorize that human if he refuses to accept his ravings. Otherwise it is intellectually empty.

At the end after torturing Winston most hideously O’Brien breaks him, which is hardly surprising. O’Brien makes some idiot comment about Winston no longer being human because of the way he, Winston, looks physically. This is of course shoddy nonsense. It is O’Brien who has done this to Winston which of course means that O’Brien is less than human. It is fascinating that O’Brien continually says that Winston is responsible for what is happening to himself and that he, O’Brien, is carrying out the "Party's" will. What a fascinating evasion of responsibility. Why such cowardice? After all this is from a man who claims reality is all in the head.

It is curious that Orwell in his novel seemed to be unable to conceive of people being able to resist the tortures of the Thought Police even though the techniques used are very similar to techniques attributed to the NKVD and Gestapo,9 which some people were able to resist. Orwell seems to have a pretty negative view of people.

The aim of the Thought Police torture to convert the unbeliever seems to be similar to the arguments and ideas of the Moscow Show trials of the 30’s where the accused confessed their guilt and admitted their crimes and at the same time said they believed that the Party / Stalin was always right. Once again Orwell does not predict the future but recapitulates the recent past.

Of course Orwell didn't anticipate that after Stalin died the whole system would thaw. It appears that O’Brien’s vision of a boot stamping into a human face forever could not be maintained without tearing everything apart and generating to much instability. The systems rulers decided to turn down the pressure by several notches in order to have some stability instead of risking an explosion.

Its of interest that in Orwell’s novel the “Proles” are looked upon with barely disguised contempt by everyone including the author, yet they are left relatively, (at least compared to party members), “free”. This is obviously going to be a source of future conflict because given the continual terror in the “Party”, the rampant shortages and corruption to say nothing of the overall general decay just how is the emergence of some sort of “middle layer” to be avoided that would eventually challenge the “Party”. Despite O’Brien’s philosophical idiocies nothing he says indicates that the “Party” is immune to decay or that it can avoid presiding over a decaying and failing regime.

Regarding the idea that the regime needs war to burn up surplus production? Well building pyramids would do the same thing, to say nothing of a simple steady increase in population or another of a myriad of substitutes that are more easily controlled.

The idea that a society would need to endlessly rewrite history and spend enormous effort to do so is a simple waste of resources. It is of course simply not necessary people simply don’t require that degree of manipulation to be convinced. This of course owes itself to the Stalinist Russian practice of writing people out of history. For example removing Trotsky from photographs. However the massive continual effort portrayed in 1984 to rewrite history is a simple waste of time.

The fact is has Asimov says:

He [Orwell] did not have the science fictional knack of foreseeing a plausible future and, in actual fact, in almost all cases; the world of 1984 bears no relation to the real world of the 1980’s.10

1. Two Literary Non-Mysteries, Steven Dutch, Here

2. 1984, Wikipedia, Here

3. See The Cruel Peace, Fred Inglis, HarperCollins Pub., New York, 1991, pp. 103-106, for a overview of the Cold War uses of 1984.

4. Ibid. Footnote 2.

5. Asimov on Science Fiction, Isaac Asimov, Avon Books, New York, 1981, p. 249.

6. 1984, George Orwell, The New American Library, New York, 1949, pp. 9-10.

7. Ibid., p. 210.

8. Ibid., p. 218.

9. The Russian and German Secret Police during the Stalinist and Nazi eras.

10. Asimov, p. 259.

Pierre Cloutier