The Random Walk

Isaac Asimov on Nineteen Eighty-Four

Could Nineteen Eighty-Four be misunderstood? In, presumably, 1979 Isaac Asimov was approached by his editor at Fields News Service, for whom he wrote a syndicated column, to write about the relevance of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four as the year 1984 was approaching. Asimov said that he initially declined as he had forgotten the book, but his editor persisted, sent him a new copy, and Asimov began to read. He quickly realised that most people had the wrong idea of book, consequently Asimov said “I felt I would have to write the critique if only to set people straight” (headnote, p.275)

Perhaps it was Asimov’s haste in reading that lead him to misunderstand or misinterpret what Orwell had written. There are, though, in his critique a number of errors, some of which are egregious because they should involve a scientific understanding of Orwell’s text.

Asimov’s attitude shows itself in his discussion of a surveillance society. Extraordinarily, he does not used Orwell’s term “telescreen” but talks of a “television set”. He then goes to give an accounting for the workload involved in surveillance:

“The great Orwellian contribution to future technology is that the television set is two-way, and that the people who are forced to hear and see the television screen can themselves be heard and seen at all times and are under constant supervision even while sleeping or in the bathroom. Hence, the meaning of the phrase ‘Big Brother is watching you’. This is an extraordinarily inefficient system of keeping everyone under control. To have a person being watched at all times means that some other person must be doing the watching at all times (at least in the Orwellian society) and must be doing so very narrowly, for there is a great development of the art of interpreting gesture and facial expression.

“One person cannot watch more than one person in full concentration, and can only do so for a comparatively short time before attention begins to wander. I should guess, in short, that there may have to be five watchers for every person watched. And then, of course, the watchers must themselves be watched since no one in the Orwellian world is suspicion-free. Consequently, the system of oppression by two-way television simply will not work.” (p.280)

Asimov has to use 200 words to outline ideas that Orwell expressed in a couple of sentences. (There is actually another paragraph in which Asimov condemns Orwell’s “British-upper-class contempt” for mentioning the existence of the proles, who are not surveilled). In his few sentences, though, Orwell said the observation system was stochastic (that is, randomised):

“There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment.”

and did not say that humans did the observing:

“How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork.”.

It would fit computers and facial-ID systems of today exactly. For his purposes, and like H G Wells describing a time machine, Orwell did not have to make the machinery work, only make it credible. Which he did perfectly. Bizarrely, Asimov himself had done this as early as the 1940s when he predicated his robot stories on the invention of positronic brains. We have surveillance technology today, but we do not have positronic brains. The study of stochastic processes seems to have begun in its own right in the 1930s (other versions of a stochastic process are called the Random or Drunkard’s Walk), but it had become another science fiction trope by the time Asimov was writing his critique of Nineteen Eighty-Four: his fellow author Robert Silverberg had published The Stochastic Man in 1975, and titled a 1970 short story collection The Cube Root of Uncertainty. Asimov, who was a professor of chemistry with a PhD, should have picked up Orwell’s allusions – Orwell was ahead of his time.

Orwell’s memoir “Such, Such Were The Joys”, on which he seems to have been working while simultaneously writing Nineteen Eighty-Four carries the evidence of surveillance as a stochastic practice. In the second part Orwell writes, using the language of mathematics:

“… one has to remember that the child has little sense of proportion or probability. A child may be a mass of egoism and rebelliousness, but it has no accumulated experience to give it confidence in its own judgements. On the whole it will accept what it is told, and it will believe in the most fantastic way in the knowledge and powers of the adults surrounding it.”

A society such as that of Airstrip One in which even Party members are infantilised by being regimented to the degree that the telescreen tells them when to rise and when to exercise would be in the same mental state as Orwell’s child with “little sense of proportion or probability”. Winston and his ilk would not need to be surveilled continuously – the surveillance would have been internalised. Orwell’s own experience, he tells us in “Such, Such Were The Joys” was exactly that:

“One day when I had been sent on an errand I went into a sweetshop a mile or more from the school and bought some chocolates. As I came out of the shop I saw on the opposite pavement a small sharp-faced man who seemed to be staring very hard at my school cap. Instantly a horrible fear went through me. There could be no doubt as to who the man was. He was a spy placed there by Sambo!”

And Orwell goes to explain his thinking:

“It did not seem to me strange that the headmaster of a private school should dispose of an army of informers, and I did not even imagine that he would have to pay them. I assumed that any adult, inside the school or outside, would collaborate voluntarily in preventing us from breaking the rules. Sambo was all-powerful, and it was natural that his agents should be everywhere.”

As adults we know that some members of the public might have commented on the behaviour of school children out of school and reported it, but we also know that most adults cannot be bothered or even fail to notice misbehaviour. The school powers had so internalised themselves in the schoolboy that every observation became an act of surveillance. Observation and surveillance, though, need not be the same thing, but only we adults know.

One can see the similarities of Sambo and Big Brother, but also Sambo and the Thought Police. “Thought Police” clearly refers not just to the members but to the system itself in which those members work. It is difficult not to think that Orwell’s considerations of his childhood, and his analysis of his child psychology would not have influenced his recognition of how a totalitarian society would be organised, and the human failings on which it could depend to maintain its power.

Moving from the names of people to general vocabulary, one notices the difference between the novel and Orwell’s memoir is in specificity: in the novel Orwell uses general terms such as “whether you were being watched” and “guesswork”, while in his memoir he uses more technical terms, “proportion or probability” and “judgements”.

Not everyone will have had an experience such as Orwell’s, but most people if they have not had it themselves will know someone who has been caught in such a way. If Asimov had lived so perfectly that he was never in fear of a higher authority, even in school, he must have cut himself off from others later that he did not hear of those others’ experiences either. And so, for some reason or another, he appears to have cut himself off from understanding one of the most important books written since the Second World War.

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“1984” in Asimov on Science Fiction, by Isaac Asimov (London: Grafton, 1981), pages 275-289. The article was first published in 1980, while the headnote was added for this edition.

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