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PARTISAN REVIEW
rioration goes beyond intellectual life.
In
the past ten years there
has been a terrible loss of moral energy in arts, in politics, in social
expectations. . . ."
The year of 1984 provided new opportunities for launching cri–
tiques of American society. A host of commentators averred that the
insights and predictions Orwell incorporated into
1984
are applicable
foremost to American society today. Walter Cronkite wrote:
Would Smith [of the novel] recognize the origins of his world in
a democracy such as ours where . . . educational performance is
on the decline; where the result is a growing number of functional
illiterates. ..
?
Could Smith see the seeds of his Oceania in our
society, in which the Federal Government tries to shroud more
alld more of its activities with 'security' classifications; in which
scientists keep the Government informed of their research...
?
. .. in our world, where a Vietnam village can be destroyed so it
can be saved; where the President names the latest thing in nu–
clear missiles the 'Peacekeeper' - in such a world can the Orwellian
vision be far away?
A. M. Eckstein observed in the
Chronicle ojHigher Education
that
at an academic conference on
1984
(financed in part by the National
Endowment for the Humanities)"... the basic theme of most of the
papers ... was that the totalitarian nightmare of
1984
has been, or
at least is about to be, most fully realized in America.... Paper after
paper attacked the United States for the highly oppressive character
of its culture, society and government ... there was not a single pre–
sentation on Eastern Europe, 'Socialist' Asia or the Soviet Union."
Similar themes were sounded at another scholarly gathering organized
by the Modern Language Association in New York City. According
to Professor Gene Bell-Villada of Williams College, "... Orwell's
vision ... could already be seen in such phenomena as Watergate,
urban slums, multinational conglomerates and sophisticated tech–
niques of surveillance."
In
the opinion of Professor Cripsin Miller of
Johns Hopkins University"... the United States bore deep similari–
ties to the totalitarian 'Oceanic State' of Orwell's imagination."
The increasingly popular idea of a moral equivalence between
the "superpowers" has been yet another vehicle for expressing criti–
cism of the United States. While on the surface this doctrine equates
the two political systems in a seemingly neutral way stressing areas
of symmetry or similarity, more often than not it combines aversion
