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.