Affordable Housing Institute : US

[Continued from yesterday's Part 1].

 

Yesterday’s exploration of 1984 (a devastating movie, by the way) developed the poverty of slums: how Winston Smith and all his like were ground into subservience by squalid living conditions, deliberate under-maintenance, and oppressive overt surveillance – where both work and home are merely a low-grade prison.

 

Big Brother is watching you

 

Early in the novel Winston Smith writes, I understand the how, I do not understand the WHY.  He comes to.

 

Just as a slum is the proof of poverty, poverty itself makes all of existence into a slum – and it is no coincidence that Winston’s seminal act, the one crimethink from which flows the entire novel, is nothing more dangerous than writing in a book, and not just any book but an opulent, luxurious, sensual book:

 

He went back to the living room and sat down at a small table that stood to the left of the telescreen.  From the table drawer he took out a penholder, a bottle of ink, and a thick, quarto-size blank book with a red back and a marbled color. 

 

By a quirk of the room’s layout (housing again), Winston has a tiny sanctuary of invisibility, where he may quietly commit apostasy to Big Brother:

 

For some reason the telescreen in the living room was in an unusual position.  Instead of being placed, as was normal, in the end wall, where it could command the whole room, it was in the longer wall, opposite the window.  To one side of it there was a shallow alcove in which Winston was now sitting and which, when the flats were built, had probably been intended to hold bookshelves.  By sitting in the alcove, and keeping well back, Winston was able to remain outside the range of the telescreen, so far as sight went.  He could be heard, of course, but so long as he stayed in his present position he could not be seen. 

 

It was partly the unusual geography of the room that had suggested to him the thing that he was now about to do. 

 

 

In his corner, Winston may do the most erotic thing George Orwell could imagine:

 

But it had also been suggested by the book that he had just taken out of the drawer.  It was a particularly beautiful book.  Its smooth creamy paper, a little yellowed by age, was of a kind that had not been manufactured for at least forty years past.  He could guess, however that the book was much older than that.  Page 9.

 

With that, he begins to write his own words in this luscious book.

 

 

To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone – to a time when truth exists and what has been done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the day of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink – greetings!  Page 27

 

Winston understands – it is his first insight – that poverty is itself a prison, one that subjugates and destroys the human spirit.  First he writes:

 

Until they [the poor] become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.  That, he reflected, might almost have been a transcription from one of the Party textbooks.  Page 61.

 

Later this goal is explicitly said back to him, with the most chilling earnestness:

 

In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement.  Everything else we shall destroy – everything.  We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman.  No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer.  Page 220.

 

 

Winston’s confessor might have been describing a place where there is no law, where the state is absent.

 

But in the future there will be no wives and no friends.  Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen.  The sex instinct will be eradicated.  Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card.  We shall abolish the orgasm.  Our neurologists are at work upon it now.  Page 220.

 

You are the last man, Winston

 

Throughout the story, Winston’s spirits are mirrored in his surrounding, and in particular the man-made objects of his surroundings.  Enjoyment of the simplest pleasures is itself a rebellious act:

 

Even before he had taken it he knew by the smell that it was very unusual chocolate.  It was dark and shiny, and was wrapped in silver paper.  Chocolate normally was dull-brown crumbly stuff that tasted, as nearly as one could describe it, like the smoke of a rubbish fire.  But at some time or another he had tasted chocolate like the piece she had given him.  The first whiff of its scent had stirred up some memory which he could not pin down, but which was powerful and troubling.  Page 101

 

It burns like fire

 

Again and again, the tool of oppression is poverty, and the tiniest wealth is represented as freedom:

 

The first packet that she passed to Winston had a strange and yet vaguely familiar feeling.  It was filled with some kind of heavy, sandlike stuff which yielded where you touched it.

“It isn’t sugar?” he said.  Page 117.

 

Coffee smells of sex:

 

The smell that rose from the saucepan was so powerful and exciting that they shut the window lest anybody outside should notice it and become inquisitive.  What was even better than the taste of the coffee was the silky texture given to it by the sugar, a thing Winston had almost forgotten after years of saccharine.  Page 120.

 

Oceania’s leaders did not so much create this grinding poverty as they recognized how its manifestation could become a tool of their own self-perpetuation:

 

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.  War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking into the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.  Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labor power without producing anything that can be consumed.  Page 157.

 

Berlin, 1945

 

No matter how many pictures we see of those times, those of us my age and younger cannot conceive just how desperately poor was Western Europe in 1945, particularly Britain, which had been at war for six solid years, bombed beginning and end.  Meat rationing was not eliminated in England until 1952.  His Winston Smith, born in 1945 (in 1984 he’s 39), personifies the era:

 

He remembered better the rackety, uneasy circumstances of the time [1955]: the periodical panics about air raids and the sheltering inn Tube stations, the piles of rubble everywhere, the unintelligible proclamations posted at street corners, the gangs of youths in shirts all the same color, the enormous queues outside the bakeries, the intermittent machine-gun fire in the distance – above all, the fact that there was never enough to eat. 

 

Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me

 

Orwell knew what he was talking about: his Down and Out in Paris and London chronicled his year living as a hobo.

 

He remembered long afternoons spent with other boys in scavenging around dustbins and rubbish heaps, picking out the ribs of cabbage leaves, potato peelings, sometimes even scraps of stale breadcrust from which they carefully scraped away the cinders; and also in waiting for the passage of trucks which traveled over a certain route and were known to carry cattle feed and which, when they jolted over the bad patches in the road, sometimes spilt a few fragments of oatcake.  Page 133.

 

In Oceania, people area controlled with the simplest, cheapest of means.  Let them fight desperately, miserably for shoelaces, razor blades, proper soap, and keep coffee or chocolate as half-remembered ecstasies. 

 

In all his travels, Winston meets one kindred soul – O’Brien, and it is O’Brien who proves to be Winston’s interlocutor, Winston’s torturer, Winston’s confessor, and in the end, his spiritual guide. 

 

We are kindred spirits, Winston thought

 

Unique among 1984’s characters, O’Brien lives well, for he is part of Oceania’s rulers: the Inner Party:

 

It was only on very rare occasions that one saw inside the dwelling places of the Inner Party, or even penetrated into the quarter of the town where they lived.  The whole atmosphere of the huge block of flats, the richness and spaciousness of everything, the unfamiliar smells of good food and good tobacco, the silent and incredibly rapid lifts sliding up and down, the white-jacketed servants hurrying to and fro – everything was intimidating.  139.

 

No one dares trust

 

Reading 1984 again, as a science fiction author, I have found an economic flaw in his horror: Orwell’s Oceania cannot survive, because it is living on borrowed time economically.  Oceania’s buildings are falling down, and when they collapse, nothing will replace them … and Oceania’s bureaucracy will collapse.

 

In my amateur political diagnosis, that’s why South Africa ended apartheid.  All the sanctions, all the approbation, all the editorials played their tiny part.  When four-fifths (the blacks) were held in intellectual and economic subservience, half of the population (women) were sidelined as spouse, and a solid third of the remainder were engaged either in policing their own country or trying to police their neighbors’ – well, there was simply not enough labor to sustain a productive economy.  The Law of Economic Gravity took hold, and the nation went bankrupt – and to their credit, the whites had the good sense to see this before it happened, and to make a gift of what they would have had to surrender in any event.

 

Finance too plays a role.  As we’ve seen, cities require infrastructure, and infrastructure costs so much money it takes financial markets.  Dictatorships can command forced labor into vast civic works projects, but that is all.  They tend to run catastrophic macroeconomic policy, which leads to ruinous inflation, and chokes off capital investment.

 

Dictatorships that commit so much of their state’s wealth to policing eventually implode on themselves – they cannot generate enough wealth, and they cannot invest.  As we have seen – in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe –

 

2007: Starvation in Zimbabwe

 

– and in Kim Jong Il’s North Korea – the collapse can go one and on and on, the poor being reduced to starvation as an ever-dwindling elite circles ever-shrinking wagons. 

 

It matters not how many die, if I am surrounded by loyal troops

 

In 1984, there is no hope – because there are no economics.  In Zimbabwe, there must be hope, as there must be in North Korea.  The hope comes not from institutions, not from their disgusting and evil leadership, not alas from the people inside those wretched countries, but from the law of economic gravity.  A dictatorship can impoverish its own people, it can grind them into passivity with a combination of force, prisons, slums, and poverty.  Doing so writes its own death warrant – and so our hope, a hope Winston Smith never had, is that those states go bankrupt, as soon as possible. 

 

“If that is granted, all else follows.”

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