Well, well, well, well, well, well, well. Jimmy and Jadeja,
eh? EH!?!
But before we get back
to live commentary of ‘The Trent Bridge Push and Shove Kerfuffle’ that has
brought two great nations to the brink of war, let’s get the shipping forecast:
“…And finally, Viking, North Utsire, Cromarty, Teacup: there are severe storm
warnings”.
Anyway, as we back politely away from the abject futility of
trying to get to the bottom of what happened – mainly because any independent
governing body or officials thereof have now given up any pretence of being
able to arbitrate the sport – let’s just note the sensual, nay sexual effusion
of all this. In a soporific Test match enlivened only by some sprightly
nine-ten-jackery, Jimmy first larruped several reverse-sweeps off Jadeja,
treating him like a rolling net bowler; later, Jadeja blocked for 37 balls then
decided to treat Jimmy-y like a spinner,
skipping down the track to plonk him over the top. It’s all a bit 5-year-old
boy play-punching the girl he fancies, no?
Nevertheless, it has all come as something of a surprise, this
handbaggery, given that only a few weeks earlier the ICC rubber-stamped its own
restructuring into what’s effectively a private
members club lorded over by India, in the big, diamond-encrusted chair in
the middle, in conjunction with England, in the large-ish gilded chair
alongside, and Australia, in the slightly smaller (+17cm for cricketing
success; –22cm for lack of Barmy Army to bring dollar to other nations) green-and
gold chair on the other side of that. A cosy troika (and also perhaps the
worst thing that has happened to cricket).
And yet Jadeja and Anderson are now embroiled in a brannigan,
a brouhaha, a stoush. ‘Sgoinon?
Not even a cynic (guilty, m’lud) would suggest – regardless
of whether this is a genuine spat or not – that after said Tedium at Trent
Bridge was played out to pockets of empty white seats, a bit of spice cannot
harm things at the ticket office. Not me. But some have. (Not me.)
The charade of war between collusive powers whose conflict
is designed to distract their constituents from the hierarchical, monopolistic
rule they exercise – it’s 1984 all
over again. Specifically, it’s the dissident Emmanuel Goldstein’s The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical
Collectivism, a forbidden three-part political treatise slipped into the
middle of the novel.
Let’s have a read, see what we learn.
Part One: “Ignorance
is strength”
The thrust of the opening segment is to outline the internal
stratification of the three great global powers: Oceania, Eurasia
and Eastasia. It is identitical in all three:
Throughout recorded time, and
probably since the end of the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of
people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low.
They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different
names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude towards one
another, have varied from age to age: but the essential structure of society
has never altered. […] The aim of the High is to remain
where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High.
The aim of the Low, when they have an aim – for it is an abiding
characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more
than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives – is to
abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal.
Thus throughout history a struggle which is the same in its main outlines
recurs over and over again.
In one version of our analogy, the High would be the Big
Three. The Middle is the other great cricket nations: South Africa, Pakistan,
West Indies, Sri
Lanka and New
Zealand. Finally, the Low would be the
remaining pair of what are laughably (if not euphemistically and with a trace
of innuendo) called “ICC full members” (Bang and Zim), as well as all the
Associate and Affiliate nations. The carve-up of world cricket isn’t an exact
analogy – for one, in cricket, the pretence of genuine hostility isn’t so much
for the benefit of a subjugated internal populace as for the eternal hegemony
of the Big 3 over other great nations – but Orwell knew that, whether it’s
India, ICC, MCC or whoever, little will have changed:
[No] advance in wealth, no
softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a
millimetre nearer. From the point of view of the Low, no historic change has
ever meant much more than a change in the name of their masters.
Here’s how the recent convulsion at the top table of cricket
happened, and what was novel about it:
The new movements which appeared in
the middle years of the century, Ingsoc
in Oceania, Neo-Bolshevism in
Eurasia, Death-Worship, as it is
commonly called, in Eastasia, had the conscious aim of perpetuating unfreedom
and inequality. These new movements, of course, grew out of the old ones and
tended to keep their names and pay lip-service to their ideology. But the
purpose of all of them was to arrest progress and freeze history at a chosen
moment. The familiar pendulum swing was to happen once more, and then stop. As
usual, the High were to be turned out by the Middle, who would then become the
High; but this time, by conscious strategy, the High would be able to maintain
their position permanently.
By conscious strategy.
Henceforth, the lapping waves of history would be replaced by a frozen sea.
The cyclical movement of history
was now intelligible, or appeared to be so; and if it was intelligible, then it
was alterable. But the principal, underlying cause was that, as early as the beginning
of the twentieth century, human equality had become technically possible […]
Even if it was still necessary for human beings to do different kinds of work,
it was no longer necessary for them to live at different social or economic
levels. Therefore, from the point of view of the new groups who were on the
point of seizing power, human equality was no longer an ideal to be striven
after, but a danger to be averted.
Of course, another version of our analogy would be that
India, Australia and England correspond to the three powers of Eurasia,
Eastasia and Oceania (the other cricketing nations would be “the disputed
territories”), each of which is internally stratified as outlined (and to have
two versions of the same analogy in play at the same time is exemplary doublethink. And of course, it isn’t).
So, looking for cricket’s parallels to the hierarchical structure of Ingsoc,
Big Brother would perhaps be English cricket as an idea (only ideas really
inspire men to terror), encompassing everything from the Spirit of Cricket, Lord’s,
the MCC and suchlike, to Team England (again an idea, but one including the
beaming supporters invested in it
all). The Inner Party would be the ECB executive, while the Outer Party would correspond
to the players and the county administrators. The Proles would be cricket
supporters en masse.
Anyway, the new ideology, aiming at permanent domination,
demanded a new ruling class, Orwell tells us:
The new aristocracy was made up for
the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organizers,
publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional
politicians. These people, whose origins lay in the salaried middle class and
the upper grades of the working class, had been shaped and brought together by
the barren world of monopoly industry and centralized government. As compared
with their opposite numbers in past ages, they were less avaricious, less
tempted by luxury, hungrier for pure power, and, above all, more conscious of
what they were doing and more intent on crushing opposition.
Giles, Wally, N.
But what would be their plan?
The new High group, unlike all its
forerunners, did not act upon instinct but knew what was needed to safeguard
its position. It had long been realized that the only secure basis for
oligarchy is collectivism. Wealth and privilege are most easily defended when
they are possessed jointly.
Whence the ICC’s Finance and Governance ‘Position Paper’ and
its rubber-stamping in Malaysia,
just as with Ingsoc the Party expropriates all private property (viz. the Big
Three take effective ownership of all countries’ international calendars) and
permanent equality is established.
But the problems of perpetuating a
hierarchical society go deeper than this. There are only four ways in which a
ruling group can fall from power. Either it is conquered from without, or it
governs so inefficiently that the masses are stirred to revolt, or it allows a
strong and discontented Middle group to come into being, or it loses its own self-confidence
and willingness to govern. These causes do not operate singly, and as a rule
all four of them are present in some degree. A ruling class which could guard
against all of them would remain in power permanently. Ultimately the
determining factor is the mental attitude of the ruling class itself.
The first threat has been removed by hyper-armament and
permanent war [see below], while the second is only “theoretical”. The existing
dangers are that strong and discontented middle group – the painful long-game
of the Not-So-Big Five aligning itself against the Big Three, either denying
their best players the cachet of international cricket or perhaps creating
their own parallel to IPL, tapping into the Indian population via online pay
sites – and a lurch toward magnanimity and holistic husbandry of the game by
the Big Three (and, of course, England and Australia might well be our
discontented middle group).
The problem, that is to say, is
educational. It is a problem of continuously moulding the consciousness both of
the directing group and of the larger executive group that lies immediately
below it. The consciousness of the masses needs only to be influenced in a
negative way.
And after a few passages outlining the stratifications and
potential movement between the social strata…
Between the two branches of the
Party there is a certain amount of interchange, but only so much as will ensure
that weaklings are excluded from the Inner Party and that ambitious members of
the Outer Party are made harmless by allowing them to rise. Proletarians, in
practice, are not allowed to graduate into the Party. The most gifted among
them, who might possibly become nuclei of discontent, are simply marked down by
the Thought Police and eliminated.
…the way in which power is passed down is discussed:
A ruling group is a ruling group so
long as it can nominate its successors. The Party is not concerned with
perpetuating its blood but with perpetuating itself. Who wields power is not
important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same.
All the beliefs, habits, tastes, emotions, mental attitudes that characterize
our time are really designed to sustain the mystique of the Party and prevent
the true nature of present-day society from being perceived.
It is part-brainwashing, part-terror. Even the ambitious
cricketers in the Outer Party – which Orwell calls the “hands” to the Inner
Party’s “brain” – such as KP are rigorously monitored.
The Inner Party, too. The
individuals may come and go, but the structure must be preserved at all costs.
No deviations, no dissent.
A Party member lives from birth to
death under the eye of the Thought Police. Even when he is alone he can never
be sure that he is alone. Wherever he may be, asleep or awake, working or
resting, in his bath or in bed, he can be inspected without warning and without
knowing that he is being inspected. Nothing that he does is indifferent. His
friendships, his relaxations, his behaviour towards his wife and children, the
expression of his face when he is alone, the words he mutters in sleep, even
the characteristic movements of his body, are all jealously scrutinized. Not
only any actual misdemeanour, but any eccentricity, however small, any change
of habits, any nervous mannerism that could possibly be the symptom of an inner
struggle, is certain to be detected. He has no freedom of choice in any
direction whatever. On the other hand his actions are not regulated by law or
by any clearly formulated code of behaviour. […] The endless purges, arrests,
tortures, imprisonments, and vaporizations are not inflicted as punishment for
crimes which have actually been committed, but are merely the wiping-out of
persons who might perhaps commit a crime at some time in the future. A Party
member is required to have not only the right opinions, but the right
instincts. Many of the beliefs and attitudes demanded of him are never plainly
stated, and could not be stated without laying bare the contradictions inherent
in Ingsoc.
Thus, clear-the-air meetings might take place, the results
of which are used against the participants. And what about the grey
functionaries shuffling papers, scanning Michael Carberry interviews, signing
non-disclosure agreements, controlling official history?
A Party member is expected to have
no private emotions and no respites from enthusiasm. He is supposed to live in
a continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors, triumph
over victories, and self-abasement before the power and wisdom of the Party.
Crimestop, blackwhite, doublethink – everything ensures the
correct postures and attitudes.
Crimestop means the faculty of
stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous
thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to
perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are
inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought
which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.
And among those heretical lines is a yen to puncture the
officially documented history and get back to the facts:
By far the more important reason
for the readjustment of the past is the need to safeguard the infallibility of
the Party. It is not merely that speeches, statistics, and records of every
kind must be constantly brought up to date in order to show that the
predictions of the Party were in all cases right. It is also that no change in
doctrine or in political alignment can ever be admitted. For to change one's
mind, or even one's policy, is a confession of weakness. If, for example, Eurasia or Eastasia (whichever it may be) is the enemy
today, then that country must always have been the enemy. And if the facts say
otherwise then the facts must be altered. Thus history is continuously
rewritten. This day-to-day falsification of the past, carried out by the
Ministry of Truth, is as necessary to the stability of the regime as the work
of repression and espionage carried out by the Ministry of Love.
And so Test cricket is ‘saved’, at the probable cost of its
permanent domination by three countries; at the cost of any expansion of the
game; at the cost of any wider representativity on decision-making bodies. Protect
the game by killing the game: classic doublethink.
Doublethink means the power of
holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting
both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must
be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by
the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not
violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with
sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with
it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt. Doublethink lies at the very heart
of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception
while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To
tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that
has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it
back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of
objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one
denies – all this is indispensably necessary.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Paul Downton. It is
depressing, suffocating, a collective madness:
In our society, those who have the
best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest from seeing
the world as it is. In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the
delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane. One clear illustration of this
is the fact that war hysteria increases in intensity as one rises in the social
scale.
And what, then, of this war hysteria, and its function?
Part Two: “Freedom is
Slavery”
As is well known, this part of Goldstein’s proscribed tract
doesn’t make it into 1984.
Part Three: “War is Peace”
Once the nature of the internal stratification has been
explained (Part One), Part Three is designed to show how these societies relate
to each other. What is the nature of the “war” between the Big Three – Ashes,
Border-Gavaskar, Pataudi?
In one combination or another,
these three super-states are permanently at war […] War, however, is no longer
the desperate, annihilating struggle that it was in the early decades of the
twentieth century. It is a warfare of limited aims between combatants who are
unable to destroy one another, have no material cause for fighting and are not
divided by any genuine ideological difference. This is not to say that either
the conduct of war, or the prevailing attitude towards it, has become less
bloodthirsty or more chivalrous. On the contrary, war hysteria is continuous
and universal in all countries
So, India
cannot annex England and Australia, for
instance, and the fear of the BCCI withdrawing from the ICC was just
scaremongering…? They may have the population, and the eyes for the
advertisers, but they can’t go it alone – is that what the point is?
To understand the nature of the
present war – for in spite of the regrouping which occurs every few years, it
is always the same war – one must realize in the first place that it is
impossible for it to be decisive. None of the three super-states could be
definitively conquered, even by the other two in combination. They are too
evenly matched, and their natural defenses are too formidable. […] Secondly,
there is no longer, in a material sense, anything to fight about. With the
establishment of self-contained economies, in which production and consumption
are geared to one another, the scramble for markets which was a main cause of
previous wars has come to an end, while the competition for raw materials is no
longer a matter of life and death.
So, it’s war for the prolongation of a war without purpose.
Now, how might that analogy work with cricket’s powers keeping the wealth of
the game in their hands on the basis of historical contingency (the size of
India’s population, the fact that cricket was first played between England and
Australia)?
The essential act of war is
destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human
labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere,
or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to
make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.
[…] In principle the war effort is always so planned as to eat up any surplus
that might exist after meeting the bare needs of the population. In practice
the needs of the population are always underestimated, with the result that
there is a chronic shortage of half the necessities of life; but this is looked
on as an advantage. It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups
somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity
increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction
between one group and another. […] The social atmosphere is that of a besieged
city, where the possession of a lump of horseflesh makes the difference between
wealth and poverty. And at the same time the consciousness of being at war, and
therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem
the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.
And all the rivalry – which in cricket does reach down to
the ‘proles’ who watch it, with their overheated partisanship, their mood
indexed to results – what is its function?
War, it will be seen, accomplishes
the necessary destruction, but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable
way. In principle it would be quite simple to waste the surplus labour of the
world by building temples and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up
again, or even by producing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to
them. But this would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for
a hierarchical society. […] Even the humblest Party member is expected to be
competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is
also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose
prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other
words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state
of war. It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no
decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well
or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist. […] It is
precisely in the Inner Party that war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are
strongest. In his capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a
member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item of war news is
untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire war is spurious and is
either not happening or is being waged for purposes quite other than the
declared ones: but such knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of
doublethink. Meanwhile no Inner Party member wavers for an instant in his mystical
belief that the war is real, and that it is bound to end victoriously, with Oceania the undisputed master of the entire world.
Although the analogy is imprecise – the ICC, as India,
England and Australia’s tool, is aiming for monetary inequality, whereas the
super-states of 1984 are geared toward power for power’s sake – Orwell
nevertheless adumbrates the nature of the control that the national boards (and
the international mechanism of the ICC) hope to exercise over their own
populations, both cricketers and spectators alike:
The war, therefore, if we judge it
by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture. It is like the
battles between certain ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an angle
that they are incapable of hurting one another. But though it is unreal it is
not meaningless. It eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to
preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs. War,
it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling
groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest
and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another,
and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not
fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group
against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent
conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact.
Take heed, West Indies.
Listen up, Pakistan.
Hear ye, South Africa.
War is peace.
