Since 1984 - 10-7-10

Anderson, South Carolina

As a high school student in the 1960s I was enthralled by the mythos surrounding a small paperback assigned in English class. For sixty years, George Orwell’s dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty Four, has haunted literature students with its portrayal of totalitarian society, where even autonomy of one’s own thoughts is an affront to the State. In the end, the protagonist is arrested, tortured, and converted to the State’s way of thinking. Is it possible society could advance to this level of control over the individual? Has it? In the context of upper class white society in 1960s America, it seemed farfetched we could ever experience such quantum change. Having read the book first in 1965, two decades were given to wondering if Orwell would prove prophetic; 1984 seemed so far in the distant future.

From the vantage point of 2010, the year 1984 seems consigned to the dustbins of ancient history. So much water has passed under our collective bridges as to occlude clear memory of what occurred in those distant days. Quantum change occurred in ways Orwell barely imagined. What remains to be seen is whether individuals can retain autonomy of their own thoughts. In some parts of the world this freedom appears to have been lost. In North America the jury has yet to return a verdict.

A large granite marker fronting a vacant lot near our local hospital declares simply, “Since 1984.” Is culture changing so fast that “Since 1984” constitutes some sort of moniker of timeless stability and durability? Since 1984, two different buildings have occupied this land, now filled with nothing but weeds, piles of waste rock, broken cement, and this marker of time. This land once contained a medical arts building. Ten years later the building was completely reconstructed into an opulent facility for physical rehabilitation. This facility too failed to pass muster. Some years ago a broad spectrum of weeds emerged from the red clay where people once rebuilt their strength.

Robert Ornstein wrote his ambitious book, New World, New Mind, only five years after Orwell’s date of infamy. The thesis of Ornstein’s work is human minds are hard-wired to be responsive to fast-acting stimuli and refractory to slowly-occurring ones. Throughout biological history, excepting the near present, natural dangers were by nature fast acting: bears looking for dinner, flash floods, lightning strikes, earthquakes. Virtually no slowly developing phenomenon with significant danger existed. Ornstein has proposed in his on-going work that slow phenomenon such as global warming, nuclear proliferation, national debt burdens, rising crime rates, urban sprawl, and population increase constitute far greater risk to the human collective than occasional bear attacks, isolated flash floods, or lightning strikes. He proposes we need to develop a new consciousness giving us awareness of our contributions to slow phenomenon that may well put us all in great peril.

The more recent work of Daniel Quinn, Beyond Civilization, describes cultural laws or memes embedded in group think, which in themselves exert powerful influence over the thinking of individuals. Unwritten social rules and preferences can exert as much or more influence over individuals as totalitarian state policy. Slowly changing cultural rules can easily move us to a precipice, unnoticed.

What was enough in 1949 when Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty Four is now considered spartan, even indicative of near-poverty. In 1950 the average American house was 950 square feet, most likely sans garage or car. Families of six to eight members successfully achieved adulthood in tiny three bedroom one bath houses on an eighth of an acre. Slowly increasing sizes of American houses has resulted in a deadly state of affairs, with many houses exceeding ten thousand square feet, millions of them suddenly in foreclosure. In the span of a few hours this slow phenomenon resulted in near collapse of the American banking system. Consumers bought into ever-increasing demands for environmentally and economically unsustainable standards for house size. Millions now have no house. Economic flash floods washed over the land; the waters have yet to recede.

Churches, hospitals, schools, and even operators of medical arts buildings bought into cultural memes declaring, “Bigger is better.” Since Ornstein wrote his seminal work, the local medical community has emigrated from modest brick offices into structures not unlike the Taj Mahal. Hospitals have become the largest landlords in some counties. Structures built on this vacant lot near the hospital failed to conform to ever more demanding cultural memes about size and glitz. Perfectly serviceable structures have been lost to cultural memes demanding ever more from us. Virtually every school in my county is undergoing some kind of major rebuilding, despite fiscal realities causing loss of teaching staff and academic ratings placing school performance near the bottom for all fifty states.

The nearly mythic city of Dubai in the United Arabs Emirates has only recently learned than even copious oil money cannot maintain demands of a cultural meme mandating ever higher building into the sky. A recently completed Dubai reflection pond with fountains cost over $250 million. Failure of the state financing agency has caused major perturbations throughout world security markets.

Slow phenomenon described by Ornstein seem to be subject to rapidly unfolding economic and social consequences. Dubai is having to stop building its towers to heaven. Americans are confronting a new realty of renting rather than owning. Rates of residential abandonment in American cities are more surreal than anything Orwell might have alluded to in his haunting images of oligarchical society. Widespread abandonment of Mayan cities a thousand years ago suddenly seems more understandable.

As an amateur archeologist it’s haunting to realize many great civilizations have left little behind except potsherds or stone rubble. Virtually all written history of the Aztecs, Incas, and Maya has been lost. What we know of these civilizations derives mostly from scratchings found on some of those stones. Ancient writings in Ecclesiasticus offer sobering reminders of great civilizations that are lost entirely to the human memory; it is as if they simply never existed; not even a potsherd is to be found. Perhaps one of the most sobering images of a lost city is that of Jerusalem as found in the ancient writings of Lamentations, dating from the sixth century BC. This once vibrant center of the ancient world was reduced to piles of rock in the desert in the great destruction of 586 BC.

How lonely sits the city that once was full of people! How like a widow she has become, she that was great among the nations! She that was a princess among the provinces has become a vassal. She weeps bitterly in the night, with tears on her cheeks; among all her lovers she has no one to comfort her; all her friends have dealt treacherously with her, they have become her enemies. Judah has gone into exile with suffering and hard servitude; she lives now among the nations, and finds no resting place; her pursuers have all overtaken her in the midst of her distress. The roads to Zion mourn, for no one comes to the festivals; all her gates are desolate, her priests groan; her young girls grieve, and her lot is bitter. Her foes have become the masters, her enemies prosper, because the Lord has made her suffer for the multitude of her transgressions; her children have gone away, captives before the foe. From daughter Zion has departed all her majesty. Her princes have become like stags that find no pasture; they fled without strength before the pursuer. Jerusalem remembers, in the days of her affliction and wandering, all the precious things that were hers in days of old. When her people fell into the hand of the foe, and there was no one to help her, the foe looked on mocking over her downfall.


In AD 79 Roman legions swarmed the city, reducing it to dust. Jerusalem tragically experienced quantum change far exceeding those of Orwell’s predictions. It simply ceased to exist, barely a blemish on the desert. Embedded cultural laws and attitudes as articulated by Quinn led to slowly developing phenomenon as described by Ornstein; leading to the destruction of Jerusalem, twice.

Embedded cultural laws and attitudes have led to the destruction of an increasing number of American cities, from within. The catastrophic collapse of Detroit, once American’s industrial powerhouse, is not unlike the ancient collapse of Jerusalem. The collapse of community in a thousand thousand American neighborhoods has been precipitated by long standing buy-in to the belief that disconnected McMansions are better than vibrant neighborhoods where our kids play with the neighbor’s. Social accountability and safety were frayed by armies of investors flipping houses to achieve the Holy Grail of their own McMansions.

Is it really going to matter how big our houses are if memories of our cities are little more than a blemish on the sands of the desert?

I amassed silver and gold for myself, and the treasure of kings and provinces. I acquired men and women singers and a harem as well—the delights of the heart of man. I became greater by far than anyone in Jerusalem before me. In all this my wisdom stayed with me. I denied myself nothing my eyes desired; I refused my heart no pleasure. My heart took delight in all my work, and this was the reward for all my labor. Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun.