Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: George Orwell: Beherrschung d. Bewusstseins, Neusprech; der große Bruder = die große Schwester; Beispiele für feministisches Neusprech

Kurzinhalt: Big Brother and the Party operate on a very simple, but very effective principle: "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past." Big Brother realizes that effective control of the past, present, and future ...

Textausschnitt: BIG BROTHER IS REALLY BIG SISTER

58b If the Catholic vision of man is correct, then the present and the immediate future bode ill, for, as one modern idiom puts it, what goes around comes around. And, to mix our idioms here, the chickens are already coming home to roost on this one. We know they are, not only because we have been forewarned by our own faith but also because we have been forewarned from the pen of the secular writer George Orwell. In his brilliant satire on the future, Nineteen Eighty-Four, he tells us just how it is that modern abstractive thought takes its vengeance on us, and today in American society we can see that vengeance already upon us. (Fs)

58c Big Brother and the Party operate on a very simple, but very effective principle: "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past." Big Brother realizes that effective control of the past, present, and future requires total control of language—hence, Newspeak. (Fs)

58c Big Brother's strategy to control language is basically fourfold. First, replace Oldspeak with Newspeak and impose this change on everyone. Second, see to it that Newspeak operates with a much smaller vocabulary than was available in Oldspeak. This strategy is conducted for two purposes, that the range of thought might be narrowed and that whole categories of words might be destroyed. (Fs)

It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought—that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc—should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so construed as to give exact and subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatsoever.1

59a Third, control people's consciousness and memories by mandated hate sessions, lectures, and assorted activities all conducted in the language of Newspeak. Finally, and most ominously, see to it that all records of the past are translated into Newspeak and continually revised, such that the collective memory of the community, contained in its documents, can never contradict Big Brother's current agenda. Orwell's description is chilling:

The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc. Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records, and is equally in full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it.2

59b Big Brother is already present among us, and he is Big Sister. It takes very little effort to discover that what the feminist movement is up to bears an uncanny and fearful resemblance to the machinations of Big Brother. First, feminism would change the "language of the body", as John Paul II calls it, into "sex-neutral" language, and feminism would have this new way of speaking imposed on everyone. Already dictionaries analogous to the various editions of the Newspeak dictionary have appeared in our midst. But that is not all. The language guidelines to which I made reference earlier are explicitly entitled "Guidelines for Non-Sexist Language", and the copy I have of them is one imposed on graduate students in the Yale University Divinity School. These guidelines, among other things, instruct the students to avoid the generic use of man and of male pronouns, to avoid masculine or masculine-only pronouns for God and to avoid the use of feminine pronouns in reference to Israel and the Church. The student is told at the outset that "language reflects, reinforces and creates reality. It is important that language in term papers represent as full an understanding as possible of human reality. For this reason, linguistic sexism ... is to be avoided."3 Clearly only one view of reality is going to be permitted under these circumstances, and that view is not going to be whatever the student happens to bring with him to Yale's Divinity School. (Fs)

60a Second, this new way of talking diminishes vocabulary in order to diminish the range of thought and in order to destroy words and/or their secondary meanings. With regard to this second strategy, let us first note that our society as a whole has already paved the way to such reductionism, because we already operate with a radically restricted vocabulary and neglect to learn the connotations or secondary meanings of words. In our society, Big Sister finds half her task accomplished for her before she even begins. (Fs)

60b With the vocabulary that we continue to use, however, words are already, in nonsexist language, being destroyed. Man and woman are not necessary if person can cover both. Fathering and mothering give way to parenting. And significant other, as previously noted, could half empty our dictionaries in a single stroke. Secondary meanings also go by the board. The Nonsexist Communicator, one of those handbooks mandating how we are to conform ourselves to feminist Newspeak, provides us with an appendix entitled "Alternatives to Sexist Usage" and instructs us therein on how secondary meanings of words, when applied to women, must be "eliminated" (and that is the text's word, not mine). To give you a sample, the following words beginning with the letter "B" are now, in their secondary application to women and in the parlance of Nineteen Eighty-Four, to be regarded as Oldspeak and crimethought: baby, baby doll, bag, ball and chain, bastard, bat, battle-ax, bearcat, beauty pageants, beauty queen, better half, bitch, boy, broad, brood mare, built, and bunny.4 Although the "L" section of this minidictionary does not include ladybug, it does instruct us that the word "lady" ought to be eliminated as a noun. (Fs)

61a Third, the control of people's consciousness in Nineteen Eighty-Four bears an uncanny and chilling resemblance to feminist conscious-raising sessions and Womanchurch liturgies—mandatory activities, it would seem, for those who seek to be truly feminist. Like the inner Party members in Oceania, whose indoctrination in doublethink is absolute, so too those in the inner circles of the feminist movement all share in similar forms of the same feminist consciousness, maintained and reinforced by activities conducted in the language of feminist newspeak. (Fs)

61b Finally, the altering of past documents, the collective memory of the community, is already upon us in the Christian churches, where the translation of the Bible and liturgical texts into the new language is even now well under way. If this process is carried to its logical conclusion, the day could come when nothing in the documents of the past will be found that contradicts what Big Sister says. If you have ever read the feminist revision of the Nicene Creed in use at the Episcopal Divinity School of Cambridge, Massachusetts, you know that God the Father cannot be found anywhere in it. As William Oddie observes, "The resulting document reminds one of nothing so much as a new edition of the Soviet Encyclopaedia, from which all mention of some luminary who has suddenly become a non-person is unaccountably discovered to be eliminated."5 Or, as O'Brien, the Party rep, says to Winston in Nineteen Eighty-Four, "Posterity will never hear of you. You will be lifted clean out of the stream of history."6

62a "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past." Scientific/technological man (Big Brother) and feminist woman (Big Sister) both operate on the same principle and for the same reason: both are in thrall to abstraction, abstraction from the limits of nature, from the limits of history, from the limits of human bodiliness. When O'Brien tells Winston that he, O'Brien, is capable of floating right off the floor like a soap bubble, Winston, now deeply indoctrinated in doublethink, is able to figure out what O'Brien means: "If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens. . . All happenings are in the mind. Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens. "7 Feminism operates along the same lines. If the feminists believe that sexual differentiation is insignificant, and if the rest of us can be persuaded by them that sexual differentiation is insignificant, then the thing happens. Sexual differentiation becomes insignificant—or so the feminists would like to think. (Fs)