270
PARTISAN REVIEW
Two times two makes four is, after all, something insufferable. Two
times two makes four seems to me simply a piece of insolence.. ..
Once you have two times two makes four, there is nothing left to
do or understand .. .
.I
admit that two times two makes four is an
excellent thing, but if we are going
to
praise everything, two times
two makes five is sometimes also a very charming little thing.
This mocking rejection, however capricious and exaggerated, of the
simplest mathematical formula serves as Dostoevsky's metaphor for the
claims of the imaginative and the spiritual in an increasingly positivistic
world that would deny them any reality. Like his artistic mentor Dick–
ens, for instance, with McChokumchild's school in
Hard Times,
Dosto–
evsky viewed the stress on
facts-on
objective knowledge and the
scientific method that validated it-as dangerously reductive and defor–
mative of the complexity of our existence.
In the century that separated
Nineteen Eighty-Four
from
Notes from
Underground,
an enormous historical irony, however, had transpired.
The ideological heirs of the
raznochintzy,
the Bolsheviks, had come to
power in Russia: the millennium of "scientific socialism," soi-disant,
supposedly had arrived. But instead of the veneration for scientific
truth, for objective knowledge, for facts that should have accompanied
the advent of the Revolution, Russia by the
1930S
was systematically
persecuting scientists and replacing results discovered in their labs with
obiter dicta formulated by the Politburo. In the Soviet Union-as in its
contemporaneous totalitarian alter-ego, Nazi Germany- ideological
orthodoxy became the criterion of truth, even of scientific truth. Nazi
ideology, Orwell noted in a
1942
essay, "Looking Backward on the
Spanish Civil War,"
specifically denies that such a thing as "the truth" exists. There is,
for instance, no such thing as "science." There is only "German sci–
ence," "Jewish science" etc....
If
[the Leader] says that two and
two are five-well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens
me much more than bombs-and after our experiences of the last
few years that is not a frivolous statement.
When the threat of Nazism had waned but the power of Commu–
nism was waxing, Orwell made this observation about the ideological
determination of truth the cornerstone of
Nineteen Eighty-Four,
his
nightmare image of a completely totalitarian future. "The persecution
of scientists in Russia," he contended, was one of "the intellectual
