Why Orwell was Wrong

Well, that's a bit harsh. He was pretty much on the money regarding some things; in her book Wild Swans, Jung Chang talks about reading 1984 while she was living in Maoist China and being surprised that an English author who had no way of experiencing first-hand the realities of totalitarianism, was able to write so accurately and insightfully about a totalitarian state. Fortunately, however, we do not live in a totalitarian state. We don't even really live in a state that's anywhere near as Socialist as Britain was in 1948; the Berlin Wall came down before just about every member of ENG301 was born, and ENG301 is one of the first 300s to lack even an infant memory of Boris Yeltsin's coup. So we can't really relate as well to Orwell's novel as a warning or a damning portrait of Stalinist Russia; at best, it functions as a historical curiosity.

Huxley's lurid alternative to the altogether more austere (and, let's face it, there's less drugs and orgies in Orwell) equivalent of 1984 is much more believable, but only just. It was written in America on the tail end of the birth of consumer culture (terms like conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure first appeared in Thortstein Veblen's 1899 treatise Theory of the Lesiure Class), and the deification of Henry Ford doesn't feel so much like terrifying futurism in 2010 as it did in 1932. But both novels, with hindsight, suffer from a highly dramatised sense of the obscene: in Huxley, it's sexual and eugenic obscenity, and in Orwell, it's the sheer nastiness of Ingsoc.

One thing neither dramatises too overtly, though, are the propaganda images and slogans that recur throughout. In Brave New World, they remind us of idiotic radio jingles (still around, and ubiquitous in 1932, before the wide availability of television or even movie reels) and corporate slogans; in 1984 they consciously ape the melodramatic and moralistic tone of wartime (particularly Soviet) propaganda. If we're to compare them to modern-day propaganda, however, which has become much more sophisticated and is no longer directly handled by government, we run into some stark differences.

Firstly, we have to consider what is meant by propaganda. Wiktionary has this to say on the subject:

[edit] Etymology

From Modern Latin propaganda, short for Congregatio de Propaganda Fide "congregation for propagating the faith", a committee of cardinals established 1622 by Gregory XV to supervise foreign missions, prop. ablative female gerundive of Latin propagare (see propagation). Modern political sense dates from World War I, not originally pejorative.

[edit] Noun

Singular propaganda

Plural uncountable

propaganda (uncountable)

1. A concerted set of messages aimed at influencing the opinions or behavior of large numbers of people.

Since propaganda is no longer dished out by the state in such a direct way as it is in 1984, or was in Soviet Russia, we must conclude that its character has changed somewhat. We're no longer told, for example, that Big Brother is watching us - instead dramatised cops use dramatised CCTV to catch deranged and dangerous criminals; we're not told that the enemies of the state are inhuman monsters that eat babies, but rather the BBC until very recently informed us candidly that terrorists were killed in attacks on government forces, and Israeli soldiers were killed in clashes with Islamic militants, if not more of the selfsame terrorists. Attacks on civilians by the good guys are tragedies; attacks on civilians by the bad guys are calculated acts of terror. (Thanks, Robert Fisk).

Propaganda is largely, in the modern era, confined to advertising and the corporate interest in maintaining a status quo, in which business can propser. That's not to say that peace and a stable economy aren't preferable to war and economic turmoil, but certainly it's impossible to deny that the most common models of capitalism are hardly enacted with the most democratic and fraternalistic ideals in mind. Social norms are distributed by cinema, television, radio; consumer culture is not extensively justified or explained, as the simple appeal of acquisition is enough to keep people happy. Much of the alternative to conspicuous consumption are portrayed by mass media - even academic consensus - as backward or ugly, and generally that's the view that's taken. People are not coerced into consuming, or fearing destruction of a way of life; they're simply not presented with a credible alternative. Dissemination of ignorance is still the backbone of propaganda, but the modern era proves it can be done much more subtly than the dysptopian writers ofnearly a century ago imagined.