Hans Boersma on George Orwell's 1984

Reading 1984 is medicine for souls like mine that have, perhaps unwittingly, accommodated to the militant secularism that engulfs today’s world—whether the conformity takes the shape of sipping hot chocolate in a Gothic apse or some other form. Here are some reasons why we might read 1984 as an act of penance. Among the salutary reminders that Orwell’s classic novel offers are the following:

• The past is not the object of our own construction. Totalitarian regimes attempt to alter the past, changing lies into truths by means of newspeak and doublethink. “All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and re-inscribed exactly as often as was necessary.”
• Language is closely tied to our most basic beliefs. Change or eliminate vocabulary, and you change the cultural mindset: “In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.”
• We dare not give up on objective reality. After much torture and self-examination, Winston, the protagonist, genuinely admits that two plus two make five. A key axiom, which our culture is in danger of eradicating, is Orwell’s conviction that “freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
• Nominalism has totalitarianism as its logical end point. If universals do not exist, we are thrown back upon ourselves, which means that truth equals power. As Winston’s interrogator puts it: “You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable.” Even our inmost thoughts and convictions are subject to totalitarian control. Winston doesn’t initially believe this (“the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable”), but in the end, he submits every aspect of his will and intellect to the Party’s control.

-- Hans Boersma, First Things 12/31/21.