"A long line of trucks, with wooden-faced guards armed with sub-machine guns standing upright in each corner, was passing slowly down the street. In the trucks little yellow men in shabby greenish uniforms were squatting, jammed close together. Their sad, Mongolian faces gazed out over the sides of the trucks utterly incurious. Occasionally when a truck jolted there was a clank-clank of metal: all the prisoners were wearing leg-irons. Truck-load after truck-load of the sad faces passed."
The reason there are no private cars in Orwell's dystopia is the same reason there are none in North Korea, for the same mix of ideological and economic factors.
And Orwell was an Englishman writing in bombed-out, austerity-ridden, digging-itself-out-from-an-apocalypse England. Even today, they don't have the car culture that we have here, and I've seen a lot of pictures of horse and carts wending their way around the ruins of post-war London. I'm sure there were plenty of cars around, driven by dignitaries and princes and whatsorts, but I don't think they were used daily to get to work by your typical file clerk, or your typical village farmer, etc.
It wouldn't even have occurred to him to write about a character's relationship with their car, or their even owning a personal car that wasn't tied to their profession (milk truck, taxicab, chauffeur), anymore than he would write about their tractor if the characters were agrarians; as much as the industrial revolution was in the distant past, the age of ubiquitous personal technology and obscene consumption had yet to be born.
I am reminded of something from way deep in my brain's cellar, some sort of quasi-fascist screed by a Futurist artist or writer from the 30s about a marvelous "race-automobile" or something, but it was something completely different from the 50s-diner drive-in-movie car culture that is the background mythology we live with. More of a "let it all burn and bring the future forth!" kind of nihilist thing. I tried to google it but this was literally a class I took in high school in the 80s, sorry.
Anyways, 1984 is an incredibly pessimistic novel about the future he saw coming, so any of his characters enjoying the sort of expansive freedom that I have, where I could literally walk out my door right now and be thousands of miles from here in a couple of days with nobody saying boo about it... even if it was a story of a personal struggle against a totalitarian state, it would be a different story than one where he runs the risk of being denounced by name in front of his entire society if he doesn't work hard enough at his morning exercise under the state's watchful eye. One that it would have been fairly magically prescient on his part to be able to extrapolate from his lived experience.
So Orwell was very aware of the increasing use and interest in cars and he was certainly aware of his fellow Englishmen owning cars and driving them for fun. The more likely source for his exclusion of personal vehicles from 1984 is his vision of the world of 1984 as one of permanent war and rationing with everything being controlled by the state and individuals only receiving the barest of necessities. That world has such a paucity of personal property that Winston must make due with a nub of a pencil to write with. The chances of anybody in that world having a car are very slim, even for their ruling class. All their remaining manufacturing would be devoted solely to their war effort.
Neither illuminates the truth but act as a reflection of each of our biases.
Remember "Grapes of Wrath" or even that famous great depression era photo with the "World's highest standard of living" billboard. Following the Model T a lot of Americans had a car.
Big difference I think between the US where my grandmother was driving to high school during WWI and Britain. Even now I think Europeans drive half as many miles a year as Americans.
Course another quote from a middle class British writer of the first half of the 20th century. About her families situation after WWII. We never imagined being wealthy enough to own a car and at the same time too poor to have servants.
Offhand thought of mine is there always was some sort of prudishness about commies/fascista that looked down on any trappings of wealth.
...which definitely included motorized vehicles to carry troops, cannons, etc. It's the same world as ours with the same technology in existence. Winston and Julia did ride a train to the country, if I recall correctly, at one point.
Cars were, as you say, both recreational and utilitarian in 1948, and yes, of course they existed, I am aware of the Model T and so forth. What they were not, though, was culturally central.
Driving was still (aside from professional use, as I said) a recreational activity practiced by the affluent - look at Mr. Toad in The Wind In The Willows, for instance, a rich dilletante given to manias who has discovered motorcars, to his near financial ruination, at the start of the novel. They were personal thrill rides, more like owning a speedboat, or else a means to some end, like feeding one's family by trading in heavy goods. A middle class family living in London would buy a car so they could drive to the country every weekend, but not to practically get Mr. Londonman to work on time.
That's 1908, but I would argue that the place cars occupied in the public imagination forty years later in 1948 would still look a lot more like that, with the car (for those able to access one at all) a central family asset like the radio or the dining table, rather than an individual's personal accoutrement that served to signal their attitude and affluence.
Not that that paradigm didn't exist at all - hot rod culture had already started also, as had biker culture. There were already people who had taken on automobilia as their raison d'etre all over the world, without a doubt. But they were outliers: fringe groups, 1%ers, speed-obsessed engineers and dangerous (to themselves, mostly) amateurs. If we were talking about computers, things were at the Homebrew Computer Club stage of things.
A poor person working a job classified as "unskilled" in North America today is just as likely to own a car as a computer programmer, by necessity rather than inclination, which is what makes the absence of them in 1984 feel strange to a modern reader like OP. This is a thing that my urbanist friends get very hot under the collar when we start talking about it, and it's a cultural shift/ripoff that took effect long after Orwell wrote 1984.
I think his non-mentioning of cars in 1984 merely illuminates the mindset and world from which Orwell was writing, rather than representing a conscious choice to say to the reader, "these poor wretches don't even have their own motorcars!"
Yes, I'm not saying cars or motor vehicles didn't exist. I'm saying they were not available to anyone except the most elite and so they don't appear on the streets in the book. Orwell was painting a picture of a world so impoverished by useless and anti-human totalitarian bureaucracy that common things of his time were practically non-existent.
> I am aware of the Model T
I think you're confusing decades here.
Model T was 1908 to 1927. By 1948 you already had pretty much all of the big names in car manufacturing established. Just take a look at the 1948 London Motor Show[0] if you want proof that car production and culture were in full swing.
> That's 1908, but I would argue that the place cars occupied in the public imagination forty years later in 1948 would still look a lot more like that
You're flat out wrong with the above. That's like saying "that was 1983 but I would argue that the place computers occupied in the public imagination forty years later in 2023 would still look a lot more like that". It's just absurd and easily proven wrong by just looking at any media from that decade. It's 40 years for crying out loud!
> I think his non-mentioning of cars in 1984 merely illuminates the mindset and world from which Orwell was writing, rather than representing a conscious choice to say to the reader, "these poor wretches don't even have their own motorcars!"
This just makes it plainly obvious that you haven't even bothered to skim the book. I'll refer you to Chapter 9 where Winston reads from Goldstein's book.
"But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction—indeed, in some sense was the destruction—of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motorcar or even an airplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared." [1]
It's actually quite worrying how much you seem to be attempting to rewrite history given the context in which we are speaking.
[0] https://www.curbsideclassic.com/curbside-classics-european/c...
[1] https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/orwellg-nineteeneightyfour/orwel...
Yep that sounds exactly like the Futurist movement[0]. It basically was Fascist (or at least, intentionally intended to be highly compatible with Fascism). Fillipo Marinetti wrote both the Manifesto of Futurism and the Fadcist Manifesto and wanted Futurism to be the official art style of Mussolini’s Fascist Italy (though Mussolini really didn’t care much for art in general and Fascist Germany was far more interested in “traditional” German and “classical” art than Futurism). The Futurist Manifesto states:
“We affirm that the beauty of the world has been enriched by a new form of beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car . . . is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.”
I haven't read it yet, but what you are saying made me think of this. I don't think the travel restrictions within the soviet union are that well known.
I've read even international passports date only to WW1.
Ah yes, the well-known wagen of the German volk.
Winston Smith would be in a similar social class.
In his 20s he lived and worked in Burma for 5 1/2 years as an Imperial police officer. He was fluent in Burmese.
That doesn't change your conclusion, as 1920s British India wasn't a car-oriented culture either. Rather, I wish to point out that his life in Burma were a big influence on his views, in a way I think would have been harder for someone living only in England, or staying in the British ex-pat bubble as most his countrymen did.
The dolar shops had the luxury stuff. Normal people didn't shop there. Corruption was the normal and you had to have money and a bribe to get something.
Great post on this: “Why Agatha Christie could afford a maid and a nanny but not a car”
https://www.fullstackeconomics.com/p/why-agatha-christie-cou...
“In 1919, Ford’s Model T cost £170—around $12,000 in 2022 dollars. So a car was worth about three months of income for the Christie family—but almost five years of income for their maid!”
3 months salary was clearly an affordable if major expenses, so this was more a question of prioritization. A maid making the equivalent of 200$/month sounds incredibly low a mere 100 years ago, but would actually be a competitive salary in many cities today.
But it was being brought up right after mention of the 1940s, implying some explanatory power for that decade.
However, if 1984 was written in say 1900 the lack of cars wouldn’t have signified anything.
Amazing. In real terms, entry-level cars have doubled in price. We could use a new Henry Ford.
In Japan you can get a brand new Suzuki Alto for $8000. And it even has a 7-inch touch screen with CarPlay support. But you wouldn't want to get into a crash with one of those on a U.S. highway.
Ultra cheap new cars do show up in emerging markets where decent used cars are in short supply.
Option 1: In a world of severe rationing, cars are such a luxury item that they're rare or nonexistent.
Option 2: Personal transportation represents a level of freedom and autonomy that is not supportive of the goals of The Party, where employment and living space are centrally planned anyway. Thus they aren't part of the world. Trucks, rail, and so on serve the Party's interest, so they do exist.
He also mentions trucks when Winston was young and had to scrounge for food and would get some grain that fell off a truck driving on bumpy roads.
They do talk about tubes and Winston takes the train to the country.
So I'd say the world Orwell imagined didn't have many cars
(Edit, I see when I was typing, idlewords also remembered another passage about trucks)
1.) George Orwell didn’t think private cars would catch on in any significant way. He did write this in the 1940s so that’s a possibility.
2.) He wanted to convey that the government controlled everything, even transportation.
3.) The government wants to control attention so they can broadcast propaganda (and expect rapt attention) at will.
4.) George Orwell wrote scenes with cars, they were poorly written and didn’t make an edited manuscript.
https://youtu.be/8uK5y8YjJTM?t=309
One from 1952, less of a big overview though.
In fact, that type of mobility would have been considered a threat to "national security". Everyone would live near where they work, and the food would be rationed and delivered to where it was needed. Everyone would provide only the necessary things in service to the state.
Fun fact, for the majority of the year I don't travel further than 5km from where I live. And I don't own a car. Yet, I live in a democratic society. I have all the basic necessities within 2km, and everything else can be "delivered". We're only halfway there!
For the majority of the world, a car is a luxury and not always necessary. In the US, they built their infrastructure around having a car and thus, a car is necessary.
In 1949, a society where everyone has their own car would have been seen as a utopian vision of the future. We see it differently today, of course.
At one level I agree. At an individual level, you can go places you previously couldn't, at previously-unheard-of speeds, without asking anyone.
At another level though -- the automobile depends on the collective to maintain roads, particularly highways, and it constrains motion to one dimension. A world in which the State didn't build roads and in which automobiles were consequently much less useful would in some ways be more free. Less legible, less accessible, more dangerous probably (since harder to transmit state power and police law), but more free, like the interior of the Amazon or the Congo or Papua. A more wild place.
But you have, I suspect, thought of all this:
> We see it differently today, of course.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
(pornel is mistaken in what he implies, however, by citing Wikipedia. Had he actually read the cited the article as opposed to just relying on the title and half-remembered bits of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, the article explains in detail why there was no actual conspiracy. Even if the conspiracy were real, it would only have applied to the US when, as I said, the dismantling occurred outside the US as well.)
I think O'Brien says every member of the inner party has either a car or a helicopter. It's also stated that Oceania has a deliberate policy of discouraging technological advancement, except in the fields of military arms and mind control.
The "generally envisioned future[s] of the 40's," were optimistic, 1984 is an extremely pessimistic dystopia. Once down to deliberately engineer grinding poverty for its population.
At least that’s my interpretation.
This isn't necessarily an inherent property of cars. Cars are "freedom" to teenagers in most places in the US as a consequence of the fact that it's impossible for them to get around on their own without a car. They aren't "freedom" to teenagers in places where it is possible for kids/teenagers to already get around on their own without a car due to having a functional transit system. They probably weren't "freedom" to Orwell when 1984 was written, either.
Socialization can happen online to a great extent. Clubs are 21 and up. Restaurants are too expensive. Underground clubs and parties are rare to nonexistent, killed by a mix of helicopter parenting and disengagement driven by being online. Concerts are a bit of a thing but also expensive.
It’s just such a different world.
I was really into BBSes as a teen so I guess I was among the early adopters. I didn’t go out much until senior year of HS and college.
I was weird. So wild that I would be normal today.
But I guess to answer the question we’d have to explore it from the frame of when it was written. So… in the late 40s did teens get access to cars? I feel like that was an American 60s-00s thing. Was it big in the UK? Now I have to research this because I’m very curious.
In the US there were millions of cars from the 20s and 30s to be had for next to nothing.
Buy an old jalopy, fix it up a bit and you have yourself a hotrod to cause the old people to clutch their pearls.
By the 50s this was fully established in American culture.
—edit—
Should say that the returning servicemen were the pioneers here, hard to go from being a fighter pilot to just being a serious citizen so they took to motorcycles and fast cars like ducks to water.
Communist countries like the Soviet Union or Poland were at $3K. The level of Kenya, Syria, and Nepal today. $1K poorer than Bangladesh now which comes in at $4k per person.
Just soviet union: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1073160/ussr-gdp-per-cap...
The rest: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-maddison-2...
Unless you are talking about 1948, when the country was a burnt-out desert recovering from 30 million war dead.
Cited in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_in_the_Soviet_Union#...
there was never a ban or stigma on private cars, it's simply a very expensive and wasteful way to move people, especially in 1948 when it was one big smoldering ruin. And when everything is walkable, and there is plentiful public transport. But if you really really wanted a car, you could eventually get it and people had millions of them.
Never in my life have I ever seen the word 'eventually' doing so much work.
but hey, if you want to keep believing that there was a crazy dictatorship ban on cars, help yourself.
The part about the farmer having his own truck seeming like a luxury to soviet citizens is true, but it's a bit unfair to say it was banned when the book was so well regarded.
It's a trait of the midriff of Mexico and Canada to blindly conflate Soviet Authoritarianism, Communism, Socialism, the Nazi NDP, etc with near zero understanding of the differences .. which leads to a region wide confusion between their system and free market capitalism.
Political education and civics in the US could use a shake up.
the midriff of Mexico and Canada
Keep hating.
Bemused .. and you've essentially confirmed why.
Enjoy your personal myopic bicameral Stockholm.
https://www.newsweek.com/will-why-liberals-love-trains-68597
As a whole the world is more primitive today than it was fifty years ago. Certain backward areas have advanced, and various devices, always in some way connected with warfare and police espionage, have been developed, but experiment and invention have largely stopped, and the ravages of the atomic war of the nineteen-fifties have never been fully repaired. Nevertheless the dangers inherent in the machine are still there. […] In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. […] For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.
[…]
By the standards of the early twentieth century, even a member of the Inner Party lives an austere, laborious kind of life. Nevertheless, the few luxuries that he does enjoy his large, well-appointed flat, the better texture of his clothes, the better quality of his food and drink and tobacco, his two or three servants, his private motor-car or helicopter—set him in a different world from a member of the Outer Party, and the members of the Outer Party have a similar advantage in comparison with the submerged masses whom we call ‘the proles’.
[…]
The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the principles of DOUBLETHINK, this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by the directing brains of the Inner Party) is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living.
———
This implies that only member of the Inner Party have cars, and that inequality is seen as beneficial, and general access to technology as detrimental. This would explain why there are only few cars.
There are two more mentions of cars with reference to the past:
———
His [Big Brother's] exploits had been gradually pushed backwards in time until already they extended into the fabulous world of the forties and the thirties, when the capitalists in their strange cylindrical hats still rode through the streets of London in great gleaming motor-cars or horse carriages with glass sides.
[…]
And at the same time [before the Revolution] there were a very few people, only a few thousands—the capitalists, they were called—who were rich and powerful. They owned everything that there was to own. They lived in great gorgeous houses with thirty servants, they rode about in motor-cars and four-horse carriages, they drank champagne, they wore top hats——’
That said, it makes sense a Stalinist regime would permit its ordinary subjects neither the private ownership of property nor the liberty of physical movement embodied in having a car. As in the USSR, the nomenklatura would have limousines and drivers, and everyone else would take the train or walk.
Seems very obvious to me that it is ubiquitously used as a symbol to refer to particular aspects of dystopia/society. So I cannot see how anyone would claim it is useless.
>not at all ahead of its time, but rather quite a bit behind it.
What literature do you think is older, better and/or more effectively communicates the same ideas?
It's funny because contrary to you I don't find Orwell's style very compelling but the content of his writing is brilliant.
Are you sure? I thought Labour came to power right after the war, Churchill was famously kicked to the curb, and Orwell anticipated and wrote about why it was necessary and political upheaval was only temporarily delayed during the external threat.
I know everything changed quickly after the war, but Orwell died before long anyway.
If Oxford really wanted to restrict your movement they wouldn't be making it easier to cycle.
A car as a choice is. A car as a requirement for affording a place, or perceived desirable place, to live, isn't, it's part of the tax of dwelling. Further, cars can be seen, and often act, as means to separate one's self from, again perceived, mixing in or exposure to undesirable society. I think car ownership could have been used to good effect in 1984.
“Why aren’t there any pringles references in Star Wars?”
It’s fiction, the author does what they want, and it doesn’t matter beyond supporting the story. It’s not like Orwell was after a “hard world-build”. You get that, right? He was trying to express opinions on the danger of allowing too much power to be centralized with one entity.
Luke’s family had one and they seemed pretty poor.
In some ways the last 60 years of freedom of motorized personal travel in the western world have been a brief anomaly. The aggressive elites actions to control everyone and everything by electrification only plus digital centralized controls is greatly helped by people experiencing climate change anxiety urging every faster restriction, ironically highly Orwellian.
https://www.autoweek.com/news/a2091351/under-hood-big-brothe...
- Who are the elites you’re discussing? Characterize them however you prefer, but please do characterize them so we understand what you mean.
- In what ways does fueling personal automobiles with electricity and batteries impact freedom of movement versus other fuels?
- How is this aggressive given efforts to mainstream electric vehicles have gone on for a majority of the decades you call an anomaly?
- Sincerely, when you say “digital centralized controls”, I don’t understand whether you mean the trend of replacing physical buttons with touchscreens, or some implied more nefarious plot. Can you clarify that?
- You acknowledge people are experiencing climate change right? I’m sure I’m not misinterpreting this, but giving you an opportunity to clarify that as well in case I’ve misunderstood.
- Given climate change, assuming I got you right, how would you prefer they react versus the problems you’ve identified?