A good book club is hard to find, especially in Macau. I am fortunate to have joined a book club organized by local writer Eric Chau and cultural critic Lei Chin Pang, with British author George Orwell’s two classics – 1984 and Animal Farm – as the reading materials. We related the two classics with the current affairs and tried to interpret the books in today’s context. This was a rare occasion when friends could gather in the name of literature, and I look forward to more of this in the future.
George Orwell finished 1984 in the late stage of his life. The book, alongside The Brave New World by Aldous Huxley from the UK and Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, are three representative works of dystopia. Orwell began to write 1984 in 1945 and published it in 1949. He died a year later due to illness. At first, the book was named The Last Man in Europe, but the title was later changed to 1984 on the advice of the publisher.
Orwell lived in the generation that witnessed the end of the Second World War. As people were departing from the valley of war and chaos, the world soon faced the dawning of another new war – the Cold War – a prolonged contest between the Capitalist camp led by the United States and the Communist bloc with the Soviet Union as its principal. Despite the contest between the two, world peace was maintained.
Later, trade and dialogue replaced war and conflict and took centre stage of global politics. The barriers between nations also gradually diminished. The world economy took off in the 1960s and 70s, and prosperity and development were brought about in the 1980s and 90s by the escalation of trade activities. After the Millennia, globalization and the popularization of information technology seemed to send human beings towards a world of peace, openness and prosperity. It looks like we are far away from the totalitarian world of poverty, hypocrisy and terror painted in 1984. But is this really the case?
From US whistleblower Edward Snowden to the Great Firewall of China, we can see that the concerns Orwell had in 1984 about human society have not vanished, but have become even more pressing. These include the tampering with history and memory, filtering of news and facts, as well as the manipulation of language. If we compare the 1984 universe where “Big Brother” is everywhere with today’s reality, we will find that the former is not foreign at all. Instead of describing the novel as a futuristic fiction, we might as well categorize it as a political prediction about totalitarianism.
What is dreadful about totalitarianism is the way it treats the pursuit of power as the ultimate goal, regardless of the means required. One of those is to deprive individuals of their freedoms – freedom of thought, freedom of speech and freedom of choice. Even if you are in a small place like Macau, you still cannot shake this gloom out of your head.
An individual’s yearning for freedom and their resistance of totalitarianism is a battle that transcends time and space. This is why 1984 can transcend time and continues to radiate a great force of life. Therefore, the purpose of re-reading 1984 is not to find out how many of the predictions in the book have been realized, but to comb out today’s social fabric, so that we can observe the past and re-imagine the future in order to find another way out for human society.