Where we are

I have started buying up old history books I find in independent bookstores. They now fill a shelf in the attic and someday it will be subversive to read them.

An assemblyman from Marin County, Calif., has introduced a bill that would require the state’s school history texts to say that Russia interfered to influence the 2016 presidential election. It does not appear he wants to include in his revised curriculum the fact that discoveries obtained by the hacking of the Democratic National Committee emails uncovered the depths of Hillary Clinton and her party’s own corruption.

Winston Smith, protagonist of George Orwell’s 1984 (published in 1949), sits in the alcove of his apartment out of sight of the telescreen, risking all to write in a diary the truth about his times. He asks himself the same question I find myself asking these days: “How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossible. Either the future would resemble the present, in which case it would not listen to him, or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.”

The novel is about a totalitarian tomorrow but it is mainly about brainwashing. What is disturbing for the reader is that Smith begins in clear-eyed conviction, but by the end of the story he is preaching to us the opposite of what he once knew. The transformation is so thorough that there is a total denial—and even amnesia—about ever having known things otherwise.

At first you see the lie, you hate the lie, you resist the lie. Then, when there is success associated with the lie, you choose to believe it. Eventually, you forget you chose to believe the lie. The final stage has you loving and being grateful for the lie. Brainwashing, in its end triumph, is not resignation but adoration. Smith’s last thoughts before they put a bullet in him are that he has finally won the victory over himself. He loves Big Brother.

I have never seen the Great Wall of China, but I have it on good authority it exists. People I trust told me when I was a child, and there are the photos. Now it is possible that the wall does not exist and those who told me were either lying or were lied to. But as C.S. Lewis observed in Mere Christianity, “Ninety-nine percent of the things you believe are believed on authority.”

But what if authority goes bad? And how would you know? The future is not equipped to evaluate Orwell’s warning because we have already drunk the Kool-Aid. That’s the problem—it’s the frog in the pot. We have the fake news such as Smith churned out at his job at the Ministry of Truth. We have the ubiquitous surveillance that made him remark, “You had to live … from habit that became instinct, in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard … and every movement scrutinized.” We have the “spontaneous demonstrations.” We have children reporting to their teachers their parents’ lack of party orthodoxy, just like 1984’s Parsons kids in the Youth League and the spies.

But what if authority goes bad? And how would you know?

Is all this mere civilizational drift or is it perfectly intentional and orchestrated? One fears to whisper the latter possibility. (Even Dick Cheney, when asked if the Obama administration was deliberately taking down America, dared not be blunt: “You know, if you had somebody as president who wanted to take America down, who wanted to fundamentally weaken our position in the world and reduce our capacity to influence events, turn our back on our allies, and encourage our adversaries, it would look exactly like what Barack Obama is doing.”)

May we agree that the devil, at least, is intentional and deliberate? God calls him the “father of lies” (John 8:44) and supremely “crafty” (Genesis 3:1). And whereas I care about corruption in the civil sphere, I care not as much as I do about corruption within the family of God. I see churches that once opposed sexual perversion, then fell silent on it, then slowly accepted it, and in the end celebrated it. This is where we are. And the Word of God is still the only light in a dark place.

But when the future is upon us what was monstrous prompts a yawn.