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- [00:10]
A
Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast. I'm Jeremiah Regan.
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And I'm Juan Davalos. We are going to a new course today, totalitarian novels. Lecture one today is on 1984, pain.
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Yeah.
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A
And this is a course with Hillsdale College President Larry Arne. It's a course he teaches to undergraduates on campus.
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And.
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And so we tried a little bit different format. With this course, Dr. Arn teaches us four different books. 1984, Brave New World, Darkness at Noon, and that Hideous Strength. And he provides us an analysis of each book on its own, and then has a conversation with his students from that course for each book. So you'll get Dr. Arne, and then the next lecture will be a conversation with his students about 1984, then a lecture on Brave New World, conversation with students about Brave New World, and so on.
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B
I really like this format, especially with Dr. Arne, because I think that's where he teaches best. I remember sitting down in his seminars as a graduate student, and the conversation with him was always rich. And I think learning novels, sometimes that's when you learn best. When you sit down, you think about the themes that are being discussed in the course, and you ground them. Of course, you have to ground your answers into text, because I think sometimes in conversation formats, you miss that. But it's when you get to really bring out all the elements in the story, when you get to talk about it with other people.
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A
Yeah, that's right. Dr. Arn is very good at describing the events and especially the importance of the themes in these books. And he does that in the analysis lectures. But he really comes alive when he gets to guide someone through learning, as he does with these students. And I'll note that these students are bright. We didn't give them any scripting. We encouraged them to select passages from the books that they had questions about. But then the questions they ask are their own questions. They're things they really wanted to know, and you get to hear them get the answers on the episode.
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I like that you bring that up, because I remember when we did the Aristotle's Ethics course, which is also a conversation with students.
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D
We.
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We were asked many times if it was a script, and it was not. It was just like having class and we have cameras on and having a discussion live, essentially.
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That's right. Now, the students have the advantage of being assigned the books. Dr. Arn told them to read them for their class, and so they knew what was going on. If you would like to prepare yourself or to read these books along with Dr. Arne as he teaches them to you. You can go to Hillsdale Edu course. That's Hillsdale Edu course. That will take you to our website for the course and click the shop link and you will see. We have this four pack of books for the totalitarian Novels course available for sale.
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So now let's turn to lecture one of totalitarian novels 1984 Pain.
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D
Hello. Welcome to this online course by Hillsdale College on totalitarian novels. My name is Lynn Larry Arne. I work at the college. I'm going to teach the course. It's a grim subject, but it's also delightful in some important ways. I'm going to explain what totalitarianism is. I'm going to draw a map where it fits in human knowledge and I'm going to summarize the plot of the novel and then we'll have discussion with the students. Katie, Luke, Addie and Jack are going to join us. They're pretty smart and delightful and very excited to be in this course. I urge you to read these novels. The people who wrote them. They are Aldous Huxley, Arthur Koestler, C.S. lewis and George Orwell. They're different kinds of people, but they live in a time where the word stolitarian was substituted for a word known to the ancient world. The worst form of government called tyranny. Something changed. In fact, two things. I'll tell you what they are changed that turned tyranny into totalitarianism and this phenomenon. These two changes are characteristic of our time. Their prime characteristics are not the only characteristics, happily, but they're prime. So where does this fit in human knowledge? One of our ambitions here at Hillsdale College. We love to teach and we want to teach anybody who wants to learn. And we want to find a way to do that. These online courses are part of that. And if you were a freshman, imagine yourself as a freshman showing up at Hillsdale College. You'd be nervous, you'd be almost certainly 18 years old and you'd be wondering, what's this going to be? They come with a fair amount of knowledge. It's not easy to get into this college in the capacity as a student. And they show up with some knowledge, but we try to orient them, we try to give them a map of what they're going to learn. And there are just three things to learn. Everybody needs these three things. The first is you need to get good at the human skills, reading, writing and arithmetic. Only human beings do those things. We are made to do them. We learn them by nature. We learn Them better if we have help and if we work at it. These are written in human nature, by the way. And once we get these skills, then we can use them to get knowledge. And knowledge comes into two parts. One part is of the natural world. Physics, chemistry, biology, things like that. And the other is of the human world. That's history and politics and literature and philosophy and theology and such. The reason those worlds are divided is that human beings are not the same as other things in nature. We can be causes in nature because we have the gift of choice. We can decide or not to decide to do things. We can do things that are good, or we can do things that are evil. Human history is different from natural history because of that. Now, if you get that in your mind that there are these three kinds of things to know to learn. First, get good at learning, talking, communicating, getting on with people, computing, all that, reading, writing, arithmetic. Then use it to understand the world around you, which the classics teach us, we long to do. Now, this course is about a political form, tyranny or totalitarianism. And politics is important in the study of human things because the classics argue that we are made for politics, because we can talk. In a course on the ethics that I taught, an online course, I define the implications of this ability to speak, that is our characteristic ability. It's the same thing as the way we think. And it means that whatever we can think, we could say, and vice versa. And that draws us closer together than other beings, other creatures. It also gives us our knowledge of the good. I won't explain that right now, but that's very important phenomenon. And to understand people, you have to think about this word good. We are given then to make laws and form communities. And. And these laws come in forms. There's more than one kind. Aristotle divides them according to two categories. How many people rule and whether they rule badly or well. Monarchy is one rule. Aristocracy is the rule of a few. Democracy is the rule of many. And if the rule of the one is good, it's monarchy. And if it's bad, it's tyranny. Tyranny is the worst kind of human association. Aristotle gives a chilling explanation of it. He says tyrants can't sustain themselves very well because people don't like it. And so if they're to do it, they basically have to diminish the people. He can't let them be friends, he can't let them have privacy. He can't let them learn a lot. He has to do everything in his power to discourage high thoughts that's toward the end of book five of Aristotle's Politics. And it is very chilling to read that in Aristotle's Politics. These modern books about totalitarianism are more chilling, much more. And the reason is these two things have been added to what the ancient tyrannies knew. Aristotle says that the ancient tyrannies, they really aim basically for the pleasure and satisfaction of the tyrant at the expense of the people. The modern tyrannies, they do that too. But they have an account of themselves that's different. They have a universal ideology, which is a terrible word, actually. I try not to use it except to describe this specific thing. An ideology is a set of ideas meant to perfect the world. And the ideas are understood to be our own creation. Philosophy is knowing things that last forever. We don't make those things, we try to apprehend them. Ideology is us trying to think up a bunch of ideas and impose it on the world. And in the modern world, we have a lot of universal ideologies. The evil ones. They aim at a kind of perfection utopia. They want to make everything according to a certain way and call it perfection. And that means that the tyrant who runs, Joe Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong, he can say that everybody's being asked to sacrifice Prince for all mankind. And the second thing is this ideology is coupled to the tools of modern science. In describing ancient tyranny. Aristotle says that tyrants like to have lots of spies. They like to keep tabs on everybody all the time. Now, with technology, we can have the surveillance state. We can watch a lot. We can have algorithms, which are mathematical formulas to analyze what people say. You don't even have to have a human listening. And if you happen to live in communist China, or, I fear, in America sometimes, or any Western country, They'll be recording what you say all the time. Email, phone, there's a lot of that in America. And then they have it analyzed by mathematical formulas. And if you say something questionable, somebody will approach you. That means that this ideology being pursued now by scientific means can go very far. It can attempt to control everything. And extensive control can be achieved. Maybe not everything, but very much. The first of these novels we're going to read is 1984. It's the grimmest. In some ways, it's the clearest because it's so willing to be entirely grim. This novel was written by George Orwell. The plot of the novel is pretty simple. There's a future society. It's divided between Eurasia, East Asia, Oceania. Winston Smith is the hero. He's actually named For Winston Churchill, whom Orwell admired, among other things, for his resistance to Hitler. And he's watched all the time. Everybody is. There's a surveillance thing in his TV screen. Not just in his room, but everywhere he goes. It's interesting. He has to get up and do calisthenics in the morning. It doesn't feel like it. Healthcare is not very good. People drink all the time, which is very characteristic of the Soviet Union, by the way. The joke was the one shop that might have something in it to buy is a vodka shop. And they drink all the time. Bad liquor. It's a gray world. Winston Smith has private thoughts. He understands that they're criminal, these thoughts. Big Brother, who's the name for the despot, is watching all the time. You see images of them all the time. The society is arranged into three parts. There's the Inner Party. That's the really great Poobahs. They wear black. There's the Outer Party. That's what Winston Smith is in. There's a good film of this, starring John Hurt, that's worth watching. They all wear blue. And then there's the proles. And they are relatively left alone. They're not educated much. They live in some squalor, but they have certain amount of latitude. One learns in the course of the novel that the functioning of the society is that the Inner Party works constantly upon the Outer Party. The Outer Party. They're the most miserable people. They're not allowed to say that, hardly even to think that their facial expressions are watched all the time. The worst crime is thought crime. And they think that they can divine that there's Thought Police, the most fearsome police. They can divine your thoughts. And you can be something much worse than killed if you have bad thoughts. Winston meets two most significant people. One of them is o', Brien, who's a member of the Inner Party. And Winston has hopes for him and therefore reveals himself to him in ways that are tragic. And then there's a woman named Julia. Julia is another member of the Outer Party. She too is unorthodox. And they have an affair which is forbidden. They even end up in a little private room in the proletarian areas. And they have a little kind of family life there for a while. That's a terrible unorthodoxy. They think they're alone. Winston and Julianne are caught. And then they go to the place where there is no darkness. There are four ministries named in the novel. There's the Ministry of Truth, which is the Ministry of Falsehood. There's the Ministry of Love, which is the Ministry of torture or hate. There's the Ministry of Plenty, and that's the Ministry of Rationing, because there is no plenty and there's the Ministry of Peace. This is a world in perpetual war. You find out that the populace is constantly whipped up against the enemy of the state. These are contradictory names, but everything is a contradiction. For example, they will sometimes decide that we're at war with somebody else now. Hard to know if they're really at war. At the end of the book, they say they keep the wars going so that there's not enough stuff. Aristotle says of tyranny, that it's important for the people to be poor because if they have leisure, luxury, extra time, they'll get up to mischief. They have to be scrabbling all the time. This society is very like that. The worst crime is thought crime. And to prevent it, you have to achieve what's called double think. That is, you have to believe two contradictory things at the same time. If you think about it for a minute, that is a repeal of the law of contradiction upon which all human reasoning hinges. You know, you know that A is taller than B and B is taller than C. A must be taller than C. But doublethink is thinking that that's true. And it's also true that C is taller than A. And you have to learn to hold those opposites contradictions in your mind at the same time and believe them both. One of the achievements of the tyranny at the end of the novel is that they teach Winston Smith to do that.
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On the new episode of the Larry Arn Show, Hillsdale College president Larry P. Arn sits down with pastor, professor and author Kevin DeYoung for a one on one conversation. A lot of political theory has to start, you know, as a Christian with Jesus saying, give me the coin whose face is on Caesar's. Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God's the things that are God's. Well, that gives some kind of. To use our language, separation of churches says that it's not identical. And it says not just that you need to give taxes to Caesar because Caesar has a certain realm, but in saying, render to God the things that are God's, it says Caesar doesn't have. Doesn't have everything. Caesar doesn't have control over your life. Listen to this exclusive interview with Kevin DeYoung right now, only available on the Larry Arn Show. Find it on the Hillsdale College Podcast Network at podcast. Hillsdale. Edu also at Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube and subscribe to receive new episodes delivered right to your device. That's Podcast Hillsdale Eduardo.
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Great books, great people, great ideas. Learning about these things is critical to being a well educated human being, and we can help with the Hillsdale Dialogues. Each week, Hillsdale College President Larry Arne joins radio veteran Hugh Hewitt to discuss topics of enduring relevance. And from time to time, they also talk about current events, but always with an eye toward more fundamental truths. And they want you to tune in to a conversation like no other. The Hillsdale Dialogues are posted every Monday on the Hillsdale College Podcast Network at podcast hillsdale.edu. that's podcast hillsdale edu. Or listen via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you find your audio.
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D
Time is important. In the novel, Aristotle writes, this alone is denied even to God, to make what has been, not to have been. In other words, something that happened in the past is fixed. It's one reason it's easier to study the past than the present, which is fleeting, or the future, which is not here yet. No, they don't do that. Winston's Job There are many thousands at least, of people who do this job when the party changes its mind. For reasons that are never explained about a historical event, every document or video or record of that historical event is rewritten so that the whole account of the past, that means whole libraries of information are rewritten and republished, and the whole past is made to conform to to the will of the present. And it might be different again tomorrow. They're trying to repeal this idea that the past is known. If you look at the writing of contemporary civics, for example, today a lot of it is being rewritten and taught. The 1619 Project to the New York Times is a famous example where they say that the purpose of the colonies was to perpetuate slavery. Gordon Wood, the dean of historians these days, a very distinguished man, said no colonist wrote that that was the purpose of the colonies. And of course if they didn't write it, we can't know it. But never mind that this eminent historian said that, and I don't know him, but I imagine he's no conservative. The New York Times is still busy putting that into the schools right now. So this modification of the past is important in this novel. Another thing that's important is the family in the novel. If you think about the family for a minute, it is the first and the decisive source of our lives, but also of our scope in the world, our chance to serve and be served by others you have children. Takes a long time to raise them. They're kind of a pain. You love them. In most cases, you would die for them. You love them enough to let them go. They're your own children. You prefer them, but it isn't hard. I think in 1984, this is one of the terrible things in it that's plausible to me. The children are conscripted into a. They have to go to school. There's no choice. And they're conscripted into an organization called the Spies. It's the equivalent of the Hitler Youth or the Red Guard in China. And one of the things they're taught to do is to spy on their parents. And the parents actually live in terror of the children. That means that their dinner conversations can be reported in the school the next day and they can be arrested. Now, the reason that's plausible to me is because kids, you see, they're driven by the wish to grow up. They're like plants. And their parents can easily be made to seem a legacy of their childhood. And they have to break away from their parents. Kids do get to wanting to do that, and you can exploit that. And so in 1984, the kids are welcomed into a world where they get to be agents of the state against their parents. And the parents live in terror of their children. It's possible that the most compliant man in 1984 is a man named Parsons, who you get to meet his family. They threaten Winston Smith with denouncing him as a thought criminal. And as the plot of the novel goes along, they do denounce their daddy, Parsons. And he is subjected to the terrors of the Ministry of Love, where there is no darkness, it's just fluorescent light all the time. This invasion of the family is an invasion of nature. The word nature comes from the Latin word for birth. It means that if you could re engineer the family, you would re engineer everything about people. And they are actively about that in the regime of 1984. Also in Brave New World. We will see in the plot of the novel Winston and Julia. And many of the parts about their relationship are touching. Many of them are confusing, too. At one point, Winston says he hates goodness to Julia. And my reading of that is they're preached at so much by the regime about compliance, about goodness all the time, that they rebel against the conception of goodness. Which, of course, if you think about it for a minute, won't work out for them. But the truth is, they do pledge their love to each other. And the love is touching, and they're prepared to sacrifice for each other. They will make us, if they arrest us, confess to crimes, meaning any crime they want. What they can't make us do is betray each other, and that is what they do. After they're arrested, o', Brien, whom they had believed might be a friend, at one point he even recruits them into what they think is a resistance that's running. And after they're arrested, they find out that o' Brien is high functionary of the Inner Party. And he's been watching them and. And he's waiting to get hold of them, and he does. And then there's this long period where Winston, you know, weeks, is under torture. As he's being tortured, he's put on a rack. O' Brien says to him he'll turn up the dial to excruciating agony, and then he'll tell Winston where it is on the dial. There's a lot more to go. And while he's torturing him, he conducts a philosophic seminar. You should read that part. It's revealing of the real meaning of the novel. And what he wants to do is persuade Winston to really believe that, first of all, Winston does not exist and has never existed. That the law of contradiction does not exist and has never existed. How many fingers am I holding up, Winston? Winston says, four. And he says, and if the Party says there are five, how many are there? And Winston's under torture, and he says, four. O' Brien turns up the dial and says, no, you have to believe it. Not good enough to just say it. You have to believe it. And you, Winston, do not exist. You've never existed. If it's true, remember Winston's job. Winston is clinging on to something he observed in his job. He's got a telescreen in front of him. He's watched all the time. There's one of those pneumatic tube systems that are kind of cool things come down a chute in a tube and you open them up, and it's an instruction to him to change something in a magazine or a newspaper or a book, and that comes up on his screen, and he dictates a change. And then he puts what came in the tube down a memory hole where it is instantly burned, and then it doesn't exist anymore. But Winston remembers a photograph about some people who become non people, and he remembers that they were in a place at a certain time, and he rewrites an article that changes that record, but he remembers it, and that's what he thinks proves that there's a reality Outside the will of the Party, in his own mind, in his memory, it comes down to the crux. For a while, Winston is broken and happy and perfectly compliant. But that won't do, because he wakes in a dream, and he had cried out for Julia an unorthodoxy. And of course, they hear that, and that means he knows, and they know that he's not cured yet. That's what they say. You're to be cured. And so then he gets to go to the last place, and the last place is called room 101. What is in room 101, Winston? The answer is the worst thing in the world. And they expose him to rats, and they don't tell him what they want him to do. They're going to let the rats eat into his face. And so then, at that moment, he understands what to do. He calls out, don't do it to me. Do it to Julia. That's his completion of his cure, because there's nothing left to him now. He has discarded everything, the most precious thing. It's very grim. Why would they do that? O' Brien explains. This is an explicit theme toward the end in this philosophic seminar. The Party wants to be God, and God is only power. And so they want the cycle of Winston's life to recur eternally. They want constantly to be forcing people to discard the things they think are most worthy, the things they love the most. Why do they want that? Winston says to o' Brien at one point, but you're going to die. O', Brien, by the way, in this seminar, seems to know what Winston is thinking. In other words, he has some kind of a divine power. He's like God. And o' Brien knows that Winston's thinking that, and he says, you're thinking that I'm old and I will die, but I, too, am nothing. It's the Party that's eternal, and the Party is perfect power. And for it to be perfect power, it must rule only through pain. If you obey because you want to, that is not an expression of our power. If you obey because it's pleasant or worthy, that is not an expression of our power. It's only if you're in pain and obeying in pain that we can be sure it's we making you obey. And the most famous line in the novel, when you think of the future, Winston think of a boot stamping on a human face forever. That's that novel. If you go back to your Aristotle and see that his account of the tyrant, I actually think by the way. There's nothing new under the sun. I don't think there's much that we know that the classics didn't know. Aristotle says that it's the pleasure and satisfaction of the tyrant, that it is the whole point of the regime. That's all he thinks about, and he has all the power. But of course he is the sort of person, because we all seek our satisfaction and our pleasure, he is the sort of person who gets it through power over others. Orwell is just taking that argument from Aristotle, written in the 5th century BC and intensifying it, maybe perfecting it or purifying it. It's just this idea that if we want to be like God, we actually have to become the devil. I guess you can't be omniscient. The way o' Brien and the inner party seek to become omniscient is to destroy all knowledge except the knowledge that they make. The knowledge of the world is just what they're thinking right now. In that way they can know everything. And to be sure that they know everything, they have to destroy everything else. Then they want to emulate the omnipotence of God, and that means they have to diminish everything around to the point where their will alone is the only thing that can influence. In other words, just as Aristotle said, they have to confine the world to a tiny compass in order to be God in it. I think what Orwell attempts in the novel, it is, in my opinion, a great novel. What he attempts in the novel is to show that this force is irresistible, but also not that, because this is not an attractive world. And Winston Smith is a better man in the beginning of the novel and in the moments of his resistance than he is later. And the only thing the novel proves about him is that he can be broken. It's probable that every human being can be broken. It doesn't mean that it's not tragic when they are, and it doesn't mean that they were not better before they were broken. Winston Smith is broken in the novel, but the effort to break him reveals a contradiction, because this extinction of the human being is a necessity. To make the tyranny perfect does carry the overwhelming lesson that we are not made to live under tyranny and can't be subjected to it except by our destruction.
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Thank you for listening to this episode of the Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast. If you want to go continue learning, please visit Hillsdale. Edu course. There you will find over 40 free online courses, including Ancient Christianity, the Genesis Story, classic children's literature and many more. The courses include additional readings, study guides, fully produced videos, and you can chat with your fellow students on a dedicated forum. Upon completing a course, you will also get a certificate. All our courses are free because we believe that what you'll learn will enrich your life and that a virtuous citizen is the best defense for liberty. So pursue the education necessary for freedom and happiness at Hillsdale. Edu course today. That's Hillsdale Edu Course. Thanks for listening.