• Skip to main content

Rogue Scholar

Just another ModFarm Sites site

  • Home
  • Books
    • Battle Ring Earth
    • Salvage Ops
    • The Blockade
    • NYC Expocalypse
  • About
  • Blog
  • Contact
  • Newsletter

Uncategorized

2017 Isn’t ‘1984’

January 30, 2017 by Rob McClellan Leave a Comment

2017 isn’t ‘1984’ – it’s stranger than Orwell imagined

John Broich, Case Western Reserve University

A week after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, George Orwell’s “1984” is the best-selling book on Amazon.com.

The hearts of a thousand English teachers must be warmed as people flock to a novel published in 1949 for ways to think about their present moment.

Orwell set his story in Oceania, one of three blocs or mega-states fighting over the globe in 1984. There has been a nuclear exchange, and the blocs seem to have agreed to perpetual conventional war, probably because constant warfare serves their shared interests in domestic control.

Oceania demands total subservience. It is a police state, with helicopters monitoring people’s activities, even watching through their windows. But Orwell emphasizes it is the “ThinkPol,” the Thought Police, who really monitor the “Proles,” the lowest 85 percent of the population outside the party elite. The ThinkPol move invisibly among society seeking out, even encouraging, thoughtcrimes so they can make the perpetrators disappear for reprogramming.

The other main way the party elite, symbolized in the mustached figurehead Big Brother, encourage and police correct thought is through the technology of the Telescreen. These “metal plaques” transmit things like frightening video of enemy armies and of course the wisdom of Big Brother. But the Telescreen can see you, too. During mandatory morning exercise, the Telescreen not only shows a young, wiry trainer leading cardio, it can see if you are keeping up. Telescreens are everywhere: They are in every room of people’s homes. At the office, people use them to do their jobs.

The story revolves around Winston Smith and Julia, who try to resist their government’s overwhelming control over facts. Their act of rebellion? Trying to discover “unofficial” truth about the past, and recording unauthorized information in a diary. Winston works at the colossal Ministry of Truth, on which is emblazoned IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. His job is to erase politically inconvenient data from the public record. A party member falls out of favor? She never existed. Big Brother made a promise he could not fulfill? It never happened.

Because his job calls on him to research old newspapers and other records for the facts he has to “unfact,” Winston is especially adept at “doublethink.” Winston calls it being “conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies… consciously to induce unconsciousness.”

Oceania: The product of Orwell’s experience

Orwell’s setting in “1984” is inspired by the way he foresaw the Cold War – a phrase he coined in 1945 – playing out. He wrote it just a few years after watching Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin carve up the world at the Tehran and Yalta conferences. The book is remarkably prescient about aspects of the Stalinist Soviet Union, East Germany and Maoist China.

Orwell was a socialist. “1984” in part describes his fear that the democratic socialism in which he believed would be hijacked by authoritarian Stalinism. The novel grew out of his sharp observations of his world and the fact that Stalinists tried to kill him.

In 1936, a fascist-supported military coup threatened the democratically elected socialist majority in Spain. Orwell and other committed socialists from around the world, including Ernest Hemingway, volunteered to fight against the rightist rebels. Meanwhile, Hitler lent the rightists his air power while Stalin tried to take over the leftist Republican resistance. When Orwell and other volunteers defied these Stalinists, they moved to crush the opposition. Hunted, Orwell and his wife had to flee for their lives from Spain in 1937.

George Orwell at the BBC.

Back in London during World War II, Orwell saw for himself how a liberal democracy and individuals committed to freedom could find themselves on a path toward Big Brother. He worked for the BBC writing what can only be described as “propaganda” aimed at an Indian audience. What he wrote was not exactly doublethink, but it was news and commentary with a slant to serve a political purpose. Orwell sought to convince Indians that their sons and resources were serving the greater good in the war. Having written things he believed were untrue, he quit the job after two years, disgusted with himself.

Imperialism itself disgusted him. As a young man in the 1920s, Orwell had served as a colonial police officer in Burma. In a distant foreshadowing of Big Brother’s world, Orwell reviled the arbitrary and brutish role he took on in a colonial system. “I hated it bitterly,” he wrote. “In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the gray, cowed faces of the long-term convicts…”

Oceania was a prescient product of a particular biography and particular moment when the Cold War was beginning. Naturally, then, today’s world of “alternative facts” is quite different in ways that Orwell could not have imagined.

Big Brother not required

Orwell described a single-party system in which a tiny core of oligarchs, Oceania’s “inner party,” control all information. This is their chief means of controlling power. In the U.S. today, information is wide open to those who can access the internet, at least 84 percent of Americans. And while the U.S. arguably might be an oligarchy, power exists somewhere in a scrum including the electorate, constitution, the courts, bureaucracies and, inevitably, money. In other words, unlike in Oceania, both information and power are diffuse in 2017 America.

Those who study the decline in standards of evidence and reasoning in the U.S. electorate chiefly blame politicians’ concerted efforts from the 1970s to discredit expertise, degrade trust in Congress and its members, even question the legitimacy of government itself. With those leaders, institutions and expertise delegitimized, the strategy has been to replace them with alternative authorities and realities.

In 2004, a senior White House adviser suggested a reporter belonged to the “reality-based community,” a sort of quaint minority of people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.… That’s not the way the world really works anymore.”

Orwell could not have imagined the internet and its role in distributing alternative facts, nor that people would carry around Telescreens in their pockets in the form of smartphones. There is no Ministry of Truth distributing and policing information, and in a way everyone is Big Brother.

It seems less a situation that people are incapable of seeing through Big Brother’s big lies, than they embrace “alternative facts.” Some researchers have found that when some people begin with a certain worldview – for example, that scientific experts and public officials are untrustworthy – they believe their misperceptions more strongly when given accurate conflicting information. In other words, arguing with facts can backfire. Having already decided what is more essentially true than the facts reported by experts or journalists, they seek confirmation in alternative facts and distribute them themselves via Facebook, no Big Brother required.

In Orwell’s Oceania, there is no freedom to speak facts except those that are official. In 2017 America, at least among many of the powerful minority who selected its president, the more official the fact, the more dubious. For Winston, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.” For this powerful minority, freedom is the freedom to say two plus two make five.

The Conversation

John Broich, Associate Professor, Case Western Reserve University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Filed Under: Banned Books, Books, Politics, Still True Today, Uncategorized Tagged With: 1984, Orwell, politics

The Smartest Ones in the Room: A Review of Hidden Figures

January 16, 2017 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

In 1961, America was all about the mission. A directive that sounds simple was but was anything but. The Space Race between the USA and the USSR was on. Both sides were engaged in a game of technological Can You Top This? and the Russians were winning. Cold War America was held in the grip of a simple fear. The Russians had already proved five years earlier that they could built a rocket capable of pushing an artificial satellite into orbit. The logic from there told us a simple story: If a satellite could be pushed that far that fast, then what was to prevent them from putting a nuclear bomb on the top of that rocket and flying it over to the US? World War II was only a decade and a half into history and the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were fresh in American minds.

Into this setting we meet Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson (played by Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monae respectively), three black women who work as “computers” at NASA, calculating the trajectories for Project Mercury. They are part of the West Area Computers Group at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. Despite their clear experience, talent, and proficiency with the work–and the ambition to improve their skills and experience–1961 Virginia is not an encouraging place. Despite making use of her skills, Johnson’s supervisor won’t allow her to put her name on the report she writes or attend briefings on mission updates. The local librarian would rather throw Vaughan out of the building than allow her to borrow a book on FORTRAN so she can learn about the newly installed IBM mainframe. And while she contributes to figuring out how to improve the quality of the Mercury capsule’s heat shield, Jackson can’t be trained or hired as an engineer without taking the advanced classes that are only available at a whites-only institution.

Hidden Figures is a movie about achievement and racism. History, until relatively recently, has tended to forget or ignore the stories of individuals who contributed significantly to our national success if they didn’t fit the narrative. It makes its point without being high-handed or manufacturing drama for the sake of a conflict. The setting provides conflict enough. 1961 Virginia was was a time and place where segregation was considered utterly normal, even banal. We’re shown this in a series of small but essential scenes on the NASA campus: Johnson’s most annoying problem isn’t her work load or her co-workers, it’s the fact to just going to the toilet entails a 40 minute trip from her office to the colored-only rest room on the other end of the compound. It’s not until her boss is made aware of this that he realizes just how insane the law is. His solution is to tear down the white-only signs from the building. Segregation doesn’t fit the Mission, so out it goes. Time is precious. Get back to work.

That’s really the point of the film: segregation doesn’t fit the national mission. It’s an archaic, emotional reaction to a shallow need to feel superior to those around us based on superficial differences. The decision to do away with it is one we never really made.

On that note, we could do worse than to encourage women and girls to get involved in determining our national mission.

So, be the smartest one in the room.

Be essential to the mission.

Demonstrate your ability, skill, and competence to the world.

And if the existing mission is detrimental to the country, then let’s create a new mission that isn’t.

In the meantime, make noise. Make them notice you. Make it clear to those who don’t value you that you must be valued. More importantly, show them why. Show them what you have done. Demonstrate your vision to anyone who will listen. Do it now.

Happy MLK Day. Go see this movie. Now.

 

Filed Under: Articles, Film, Science, Still True Today, Tech Stuff, Uncategorized

We’re Back!

November 14, 2014 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

So you’ll remember a few weeks ago when this site disappeared for a few days, then a few days ago when it returned with nothing more current than 2008 posted on it. The short story is that ThirdScribe had a major problem with its ISP, and many of their sites (including mine) were sacrificed to save the rest of the network. Due to the tireless efforts of founder Rob McClellan, much of this site’s data and functionality have returned (Hooray!) I’ll be filling in the bits and pieces as we go forward but hey, posting again!

Filed Under: Uncategorized

The Day After Publishing

September 23, 2014 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

As you’ll remember in our last exciting episode of The Rogue Scholar, I pushed the Publish button on Article 9, my first proper SciFi novel.

Since then, I’ve pushed the button on the Print-On-Demand version of the book as well, so if you shun electronics in favor of printed copy, you now have an option.

As you can imagine, the last few days have been most instructive.What have I learned so far from my experiment in self-publishing? Let’s make a list:

1. You do not know who your readers are. I have a reader in France, another in Canada, and two more in Denmark. The rest are from the US. I know who a few of them are  because they basically told me, “Dude, I bought your book.” I can make an educated guess about a few more. Who are the rest? No idea. But I hope they enjoy the book.

2. Your followers are not your readers. Between all my social media accounts and my blog I have around 700 followers. I do not have 700 readers. Ironically, I have many more tools available to figure out who my followers are. This is a problem from a sales point of view.

3. Amazon reports sales numbers in real time. This is incredibly useful, but I can see how this can become an addiction, as one hits all the rounds of social media and then comes back to the reports portion of the Kindle Direct Publishing site. Each sale gets instantly translated to a new value, so it’s no hard thing to keep hitting that report button: how many have I sold now? How about now? How about now?

4. As vendors go, Amazon.com can be a royal pain. As publishers go, they can be a nightmare to deal with. Amazon is indeed a one-stop shopping site for self-publishers. But they don’t make it easy. The Kindle Direct Publishing account and CreateSpace accounts are different animals. They are not connected to one’s Amazon.com Author Central account unless you go through the process of making them that way. The good news is that there are plenty of resources available to walk you through the steps needed. But don’t think it’s just matter of hitting that publishing button and watching the machine roll on. You need to be a hands-on manager.

5. Amazon sets prices. The POD is sizable–about 500 pages worth of sizable–and while I wanted to set the price around $10 Amazon flat-out refused to do that. The price tag for the print book is a hefty $17.99, above the minimum but way more than I’d like. The truth is that I don’t foresee selling more than a handful of these items, but I thought the option should exist for folks who just don’t want an electronic version.

Those are the immediate lessons. There will be more. Stay tuned . . .

Next hurdle: review copies!

Get Article 9!

[book size=”150″ slug=”article-9″ purchase=”0″]

Filed Under: Uncategorized

My Unkillable City

September 11, 2014 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

 

Look at it.  Just look.

South_Street_Seaport_NYC

Remember.

Remember . . .

We are still here.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Creating Canon: When Book Lists Attack

April 3, 2014 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

 

We had a bit of an outpouring of literary geekery the other night when I found this comment on a friend’s Facebook feed:

Ok most of list I agree with however not being a fan of C.S. Lewis I can say I didn’t get beyond The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. I can even agree with The Da Vinci Code being on here, and don’t anyone get all crazy calling me a heretic, The Da Vinci Code was decent fiction regardless of the topic especially when read with Angels and Demons. But check out the very last book #100 I am sorry but there is no way that book can even be considered decently written.

Book #100 is Fifty Shades of Gray.

Learning that tidbit compelled me to look at the list in its entirety, which you can see here. I won’t re-post it here because it’s long and kind of tedious, and frankly unnecessary.

The list is titled “From Zero to Well-read in 100 Books.” I applaud the ideal and the effort that went into it. There’s a lot of extremely high-quality stuff (Twain, Conan Doyle, Chaucer, Orwell, Huxley, Plath, Voltaire, Poe, Dickens, Dickinson, Flaubert) in it. I have some question over the results, specifically the selection process.

The post, written by “Jeff,” is an attempt to define the term “well-read”:

“Well-read” […] has a number of connotations: a familiarity with the monuments of Western literature, an at least passing interest in the high-points of world literature, a willingness to experience a breadth of genres, a special interest in the work of one’s immediate culture, a desire to share in the same reading experiences of many other readers, and an emphasis on the writing of the current day.

The following 100 books (of fiction, poetry, and drama) is an attempt to satisfy those competing requirements. After going through several iterations of the list, one thing surprised me: there are not as many “classic” books that I associate with the moniker well-read, and many more current books than I would have thought. Conversely, to be conversant in the literature of the day turned out to be quite a bit more important than I would have thought.

That’s fine. But to my eyes the list is a jumbled compilation of established canonical literature, non-canon literature, and popular writing. That’s actually what our exchange was about: trying to figure out what the blogger was thinking when he created the list.

I can see C.S. Lewis, because even if Narnia is not your thing, The Screwtape Letters is canon. But Screwtape is not on the list while Narnia is.  The whole list is like that. A few quick examples that got our attention include:

Edith Wharton: Age of Innocence is there but House of Mirth is not.

Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights is there but Jane Eyre is not.

And why Cloud Atlas? I get that it’s an incredibly well structured book but not exactly taught in college lit courses.

Jeff also split up the Bible into The Gospels and The Pentateuch and then assigned them different slots on the list. (#43 and #77 respectively). Yes, it’s alphabetically ordered, but I have yet to find a literary bible study course where the professor makes that distinction. If it’s a study course taught at a religious institution it might make more sense, but it’s still confusing.

More bits: Inferno, but not Purgatorio or Paradiso? The Divine Comedy is a three-book set. It’s not like Dante just sat on the field of ice when he got to the Ninth Circle of Hell. Without redemption and bliss being attainable facets of spiritual life, there can be no value in punishment. Granted, Inferno is the volume most people have heard of, but . . .

Dracula made the list but Frankenstein did not. Neither did Stevenson’s Jekyll & Hyde or anything by Oscar Wilde or H.G Wells.

Toni Morrison’s Beloved made the list but The Bluest Eye did not.

The Illiad and The Odyssey made the list but The Aeneid did not. Yes, I know the Greeks remain more popular than the Romans, but you needed a familiarity with both to consider yourself well-read when I was an undergrad.

Ulysses by Joyce is there but Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is not, which I think is a mistake. Finnegan’s Wake isn’t there either, but to be honest, I’m okay with that.

No William Faulkner. That’s just wrong. No Truman Capote, either. Yes, Capote is an acquired taste, but In Cold Blood is totally canon.

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston is there (if mistitled), but nothing by Alice Walker is. Has Jeff never read The Color Purple? Spielberg made a surprisingly good film about it and everything.

One of our thread’s contributors figured out early in the exchange that it seemed as if Jeff fostered a desire to be thought well-read by people he imagined to be educated, but didn’t actually know what knowledge that sort of education called for or what the American canon contained. So he put down canonical authors that he remembered hearing about, and maybe read some of their work. And he put down books that he and his social circle liked:

Ayn Ran: Atlas Shrugged. No.

Douglas Adams: The Hitckhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Works for me.

Doris Lessing: The Golden Notebook: Not my favorite, but not a bad choice.

Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale. Excellent choice.

And of course, E.L. James: Fifty Shades of Gray. I would rather read Atlas Shrugged. Yes, I am serious. At least the sex scenes in that book are interesting.

So, Jeff, if you’re reading this, please pop a reply and defend #100 or any other of your choices. I’d really be interested in hearing how you came up with this list.

My Books

[author_books amount=”3″ size=”150″ type=”random” name=”jonfrater”]

Filed Under: Uncategorized

  • « Go to Previous Page
  • Go to page 1
  • Go to page 2
  • Go to page 3
  • Go to page 4
  • Interim pages omitted …
  • Go to page 6
  • Go to Next Page »

Copyright © 2023 · Powered by ModFarm Design · Log in

We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it.Accept