Fiona wrote:
Frankly, once you get
>down to the areas of biology that culture cannot reach, reason doesn't enter
>into it.
No, but maybe your instincts or feelings can give some feedback to your
reason, when your reason cannot help or when you just don't have enough data
to quarrel with your culture efficiently.
This is why I like the story about Blake so much. Blake was brainwashed and
his knowledge, his political philosophy, his past experience - everything
that could rationally suggest to him that the Federation was wrong and that
it should be opposed - was gone. But he was still human. The conditioning
couldn't get that far. He still loved his family and was ready to transgress
the law, go outside the dome, because of them. This was the standpoint from
which he was able to resist his conditioning.
Pure bodily resistance to a culture is I think also possible - like in the
novel 'Life and Times of Michael K.', where the hero, a retarded African,
throws up all the food he is given in the prison camp. The only food he can
eat are the pumpkins he grows on his farm and which he calls 'the food of
freedom'. (You can compare this to Blake who, because of his conditioning,
does not recognize 'the food of freedom' and spits the water he's tasted
outside the dome. This is the first sign to us that something is wrong with
him.)
>> Winston's mother conveys a very important notion in the book. The
>governing
>> ideology of Winston's world claims that one's greatest loyalties should
>lie
>> with the state, Party and Big Brother. Winston's mother was able to resist
>> this system, not because she was well educated in history or politics, but
>> because she gave supremacy to her private loyalties - her family and
>> children. This is a very primitive, un-intellectual notion, but it
>actually
>> implies a way to remain human.
>
>OK, but I wouldn't call that resistance. Again, this is *withdrawal*--
>Winston's mother refuses to engage with her society, withdrawing into her
>family, rather than resisting it.
OK, so she isn't a Blakish-style revolutionary. But I wasn't talking about
that. Before you try with revolutions, reforms, concrete attempts to change
your culture, you have to be aware that something is wrong with it in the
first place. If you are completely trapped within your social and cultural
role, completely blinded by your culture's ideology, then you can't even see
what you ought to fight against. Winston's mother found a successful way of
resisting such complete brainwashing, such complete submergence into the
system. By 'resistance' I mean resisting the attempts of your culture to
possess you completely.
Winston is, however, incapable of resisting his
>> culture by resorting to this same instinctive, emotional core of his
>being,
>> because the inhuman society in which he lives has conditioned him too
>> thoroughly: when, after a bombing, he sees a human hand in the street, he
>> simply kicks it aside.
>
>The idea, IIRC, is that it is beaten out of him, but reawakens when he meets
>Julia-- but is then beaten out of him again. Orwell's point seems to be that
>even love cannot withstand the type of brutality which the state is using.
Not exactly. Winston fails as a human being even before he's arrested.
Remember when he declares he is ready to do anything to bring down the Party
- kill hundreds of innocent people, distribute habit-forming drugs, spread
venereal diseases, throw acid in a child's face, if need be? He wants to
fight the system, but the system has already transformed him and defeated
him completely.
Proles, on the other hand, are incapable of starting an effective rebellion,
but they keep the human heritage alive. For Orwell, this is a very important
notion and therein lies the only hope in the book.
N.