![]() This is, in effect, what every one of us does (albeit to varying degrees) by living off of fossil fuel and other low entropy resources, with no thought of what is to befall either the rest of the biosphere or those to come after us. While state tyranny is the overt focus of the novel, there is a deeper and darker core, a sense in which it is a meditation on Shakespeare, Darwin and Nietzsche: where no assumptions about the benignity of human nature are made, where everyone has their breaking point, where everyone, no matter what their pain threshold, will under some circumstances seek to throw off their own suffering onto someone else. ![]() We are therefore unlikely to witness the specific institutional features of 1984.īut this is to confine oneself to a sanitised left/right or liberal/conservative reading of the text, where basically decent people are oppressed and corrupted by a fascist/communist state. Whether or not the environmental debacle and the scramble for resources will lead to generalised warfare is a uncertain, but energy-hungry totalitarianism (like any other form of large-scale social organisation) will not survive the collapse. Orwell was perhaps more of a cornucopian than an ecological pessimist: the material deprivations of 1984 are the product of nuclear devastation and the subsequent perpetual war footing maintained in Oceania by the Party (and mirrored in the two other super-states) rather than of underlying scarcity. Without wishing to belabour the obvious, it is perhaps worth just considering the second of these two short sentences, especially in relation to the unfolding catastrophe. The point is not that only these few words of (English) discourse are necessary, but rather that, as the great and largely moribund mass of our civilisations' verbiage falls away, these words should, as far as possible, be preserved – at least if we or any other conscious entity is to have a hope of understanding itself. To be or not to be (that is the question)Īdmittedly, reducing the whole of non-technical English discourse to these few words may be slightly tendentious: even from our own vantage point, the first quotation is incomplete when removed from the rest of Hamlet's soliloquy, which itself is seated within a Christian and Classical tradition, while the second phrase only acquires its full force in the depths of Ministry of Love – whose workings, while intuitively accessible to an honestly introspecting consciousness, are only fully to be appreciated within a broad (and thus verbally mediated) understanding of psychology, philosophy and civilisation. A curtailment of the energy input will inevitably lead to a reduction in loquacity, and in this context one might wish to consider what should, if at all possible, be preserved.Īs far as English is concerned, and leaving aside technical and genuinely scientific speech, such as that concerning crop rotation, forestry management, electricity generation, the long-term storage of radioactive isotopes and such like, only ten (or perhaps fourteen words) are truly essential: While the energy demanded by our linguistic productions is relatively low in comparison with other activities (flying, driving, shopping, warfare, space exploration etc) – the sheer quantity of the speech and text we produce leads to a not inconsiderable energy consumption (whether this be for hard copy, virtual creation and storage, or even just to generate the ATP to drive our neocortices). Just as the alcoholic, the junkie, the gambler or the gamer will (provided their own needs have been met) insist on sharing their pastimes with those around them, so too does the talker or the writer seek to elicit more speech and more writing. As with other addictions, there is a tendency for prolixity to engender more of the same. ![]() We are talkative creatures – and our loquaciousness obviously extends to our writing.
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