How to Disarm a Nuclear Book

When it comes to dark dystopian visions of the future, George Orwell's 1984 is the standard-bearer, the prototype.  It's not a subtle work, by any means, but it is an extremely powerful one.  It's a dire warning about totalitarian government, an indictment of censorship, a defense of the nuances of language, and a text book on brainwashing, all rolled into one.  It relentlessly follows the logic of its premise to its most extreme conclusion.  It makes no compromises; it takes no prisoners.  It drives its point home like a railroad spike through the skull, and it achieves a sort of strange ruthless beauty as a result.  When I first read the book nearly twenty years ago, if someone would have asked me if there was one thing in this world where people could not possibly miss the point, I would have said, 1984.

But alas!  Time and experience have shown me otherwise.  I've seen quite a number of misinterpretations, misapprehensions, and misapplications of the book and it's ideas over the years.  Some read the book as a political novel, specifically a roman a clef' of Soviet Russia.  This is a strictly journalistic reading, as if the book were simply a magnification of newspaper headlines and historical events.  Although the story operates in a political milieu and the landscape has a certain Soviet touch to it, there are much more universal themes at work.  It's about the group mentality, mass hysteria, blind devotion, obedience driven by fear, the corruption of absolute power, the boot stomping on the human face forever.  It's about the individual vs. the state, reality vs. consensus, freedom vs. control.

To look at Big Brother and see only Stalin is to miss the forest for the sake of one mustachioed tree.  Big Brother is the archetypical figurehead.  In the story he serves at a galvanizing point of focus.  He consolidates the power of the party in a single individual, serving as an object of unquestioning loyalty for the people and a point of reference for the agendas of the party as a whole.  It's a mistake to look for any one person in Big Brother.  Even in the book itself, it's not entirely clear if Big Brother is a real person, and it's strongly hinted that he isn't.  It's the principle at work that matters, the people's response to Big Brother.  In fact, you could even go through and replace every instance of the name "Big Brother" with the word "God", and I think you'd be quite surprised and more than a little disturbed at the result.  In the end, Big Brother isn't nearly as important as the atrocities committed in his name.

On the other hand, the term "Big Brother" has recently developed into a sort of short-hand for surveillance of any kind.  While I can certainly appreciate the term becoming a sort of watchword reminding people of their right to privacy, such a reading of the term is a gross over-simplification.  As a result, some people fail to see the difference between the U.S. Patriot Act and a store's closed-circuit security camera.  They focus so much on the surveillance, that they forget that the issue is really about rights.  Big Brother isn't about cameras, it's about the attitude behind the cameras that says, "If they've got nothing to hide, then they shouldn't mind if we have a look."  It's about inferring suspicion, making crimes out of thoughts, and building prosecution out of pure speculation about your intentions.

And then, as with any work which has become such an iconic part of the culture, you have people who come out of the woodwork to apply their own pet theories to it.  Robert Pirsig, in Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (a book which deserves some consideration of it's own one of these days), applies a particularly misguided interpretation.  In addition to his heap of other missteps in his quest for "Quality" with a capital Q, he declares that 1984 represents a rationally efficient society.  Well, I don't know what book he was reading, but there doesn't seem to be anything particularly rational about Oceanic society, and as for efficiency...well, as Goldstein himself says in "The Book", "Nothing is efficient in Oceania except the Thought Police."  But I suppose if you imagine a world like 1984 when you think of reason, then you're going to see a reasonable world when you look at 1984.

But it wasn't supposed to end up like this.  "1984" wasn't supposed to become a pointless buzzword of paranoia that people stopped taking seriously a long-time ago, something indiscriminately applied to anyone's vague dis-satisfaction with their government, another bogeyman, another internet Hitler.  "Big Brother" wasn't supposed to be become a casual joke and the title of a reality TV show.  1984 was supposed to be the guardian, the antidote against the very world that it was warning us about.  Don't let them disarm the book.  Don't let them relieve the guard from his post.  1984 is just the sort of thing we need to keep 1984 from happening.

                   

The Liberal Conceit

First of all, if it seems like I'm picking exclusively on liberals in this post, rest assured that conservatives will get their day in my nuclear court sooner or later.  I don't consider myself to be clearly one or the other.  I'm just a guy, looking for the truth, and I don't believe that the truth can be neatly packaged within any particular ideology.  But if I had to say which way I leaned, it would definitely be towards the liberal side.  I tend to think that their positions are more thought out, more sensitive to the issues involved, more sympathetic and open minded, and they don't tend to use religion as the final word in every argument like their own literal Deus Ex Machina.  However, there is a point where liberals and I definitely part ways.  I call this point "the liberal conceit."

If I had to sum up the liberal conceit in one sentence, it would be, "If you come off as an asshole saying it, it can't be the truth."  You see, the liberals have taken a diverse number of disenfranchised groups, causes, ailments, oddities, underdogs, classes, and special cases under their wing.  They're very protective of these things and these people.  They're very touchy and quick to go on the defensive where they are concerned.  So if you have anything to say about them which isn't 100% glowing positivity, full of smiley face suns and singing marshmallows, then you'll quickly find the liberals shaking an accusing finger in your direction like you're the next Adolf Hitler.

What!?  You deny that there was a gender bias in those test scores??  How dare you!

You know you've reached the liberal conceit in a conversation when you start hearing phrases like, "How would you like it if someone said..." or "How would you feel if someone..."  or "Well, I happen to know a...."  The debate shifts from facts and arguments, and boils down instead to a discussion of hurt feelings and offended sensibilities.  You find yourself facing a wall where scientific study and evidence mean nothing to the person you're talking to if what you're saying isn't "nice."

Now, I had to proceed cautiously when trying to come up with an example to use here.  We're talking about a veritable mine-field of liberal outrage.  So I had to tread carefully.  I'm not looking to pick any fights that will obscure the point I'm trying to make.  I've been down that road before and it's not fun.  However, I think I've found a fairly innocuous example, and it just so happens that it has the added benefit that I am a member of the group under consideration.  That should at least buy me a little leeway as far as the "asshole" factor is concerned, since I'll be talking about myself as well.  The group in question is left-handed people.

I won a contest with this!

Many years ago I read a book called The Left-Hander Syndrome.  The book took a more sober and scientific approach to the subject than most I've read, almost to the point of dryness.  They got into a statistical analysis of left-handedness, the fact that left-handed people tend to die younger, go insane more easily, more geniuses and more mentally handicapped as well, ect.  They showed how left-handedness was connected to other rare traits.  They dispelled several popular myths about left-handedness.  All fairly interesting stuff.  

But then they got into the fact that left- handedness is a result of brain damage or at least brain trauma usually experienced in the womb.  They stated that right-handedness is actually the default option for all human beings, and that left-handedness only occurs because of a trauma to the left hemisphere of the brain (which controls the right side of the body.)  All cases of left-handedness, they claimed, were a result of the right hemisphere of the brain and the left side of the body compensating for this damage.  Well, this was a bit of a blow to me.  I had been told all my life that left-handed people were "unique" and "holistic" and "creative."  While all of that could arguably still be true, this book was telling me that left-handed people weren't a special minority of different people who just used our other hand.  The book was telling me that we were actually damaged right-handers, implying in a sense that we were actually inferior to normal right-handers, merely compensating for this infirmity by favoring a hand nature had never intended.

Now this is the point where the liberal conceit would be going off like an air raid siren.  The whole thing sounds like something dreamed up by Nazi intellectuals, and it smacks of old tales of the one room school houses where they used to smack kids hands with a ruler if they used the "wrong" one.  I can almost hear the itchy fingers of someone waiting to leave a scathing comment.  Only the latitude I've bought by throwing myself into the mix is keeping them at bay, but even that latitude is limited.  It's almost inevitable that someone below will say something like, "Well, my daughter is left-handed and I'm incredibly offended by what you said."  To that hypothetical comment I can only reply, "Frankly my dear, the truth doesn't give a damn."

But that's far-fetched, right?  No one would leave a comment like that, right?  No one gets that worked up over handedness, right?  Well, consider this screen cap of a review for the book off of Amazon:

Click to Enlarge

Now, I don't know how valid the conclusions in that book are.  That's not my point here.  If someone wants to pick apart the author's scientific findings, that's one thing, but people take this immense umbrage to things like this simply because they don't like what they are hearing.  They find it "offensive."  We live in this cushy culture of entitlement where people think that being "offended" is like some kind of trump card that supersedes facts and reality.  This is a precedent set by the liberal conceit.  Well folks, the fact of the matter is that the truth isn't always the nice cuddly fairy-tale that the liberals want it to be, where everyone gets a trophy just for participating in the human race.  Sometimes the truth is downright ugly and unpleasant.

Sometimes liberals try to sidestep this unpleasantness by trying to bend reality to this warm little fantasy of theirs.  There used to be a few liberal ideas floating around out there that nearly stated this in explicit, philosophical terms.  You don't hear as much about them nowadays, but I'm sure they're out there: multiculturalism and moral relativism.  Now, don't get me wrong.  I'm all for embracing other cultures and keeping an open mind, but these ideas went far beyond that.  Their explicit positions were 1.) that all moralities were a group phenomenon and equally valid; what was wrong in one society, was right in another, and it was all just a matter of perspective and opinion 2.) that all cultures were of equal value, and no one could claim that any society was in any way better than another.  The purpose of both these ideas was to sterilize any objective standard of judgement.  It was the liberal conceit incarnate.  It was deliberately calculated to disarm any ideas which might seem negative, and instead promote an image of the world where everyone is wonderful, everyone wins, and everything is a huge love fest from sea to shining sea.

Well, I'm not buying it.  It's a nice idea, but it's not the truth.  Right is right, wrong is wrong, and it doesn't come down to a matter of geography.  Human sacrifices aren't suddenly acceptable because we happened to be hanging with such and such a tribe and we happen to be at certain degrees latitude and longitude.  As far as better or worse, I admit these are vague terms, and yes, all cultures have a mixture of good points and bad, but on a case by case basis considering different aspects, you can't deny objective standards.  You can't deny that the life expectancy might be higher here, the crime rate lower there, and so on.  No, none of this will do.  The truth exists beyond us, and beyond what we would like it to be, beyond what offends our sensibilities.  We need to face it with open eyes if we're going to get anywhere as a species.