WS 2005/2006                Preuß Texterschließung           Staatsexamen Frühjahr 1981: Text 6

The Orwellian world is one that could have a strong initial appeal to the young. It has a striking anarchic feature - a complete absence of laws. It treats the past as a void to be filled with whatever myths the present cares to contrive. It sets up, as a group to be despised, a vast body outside the pale, devoted to past traditions, reactionary and conservative, essentially old. Oldspeak* is rejected as having no power to express that eternal present which is youth's province as well as the Party's; Newspeak* has the laconic thrust of the tongue of youth. The programme, if not the eventual reality, would find its most energetic supporters initially among the young, all happily ready to destroy the past because it is the past, and to accept the Ingsoc* revolution as it has already accepted the mixed mythology of Mao, Che Guevara, Castro and Bakunin himself. It is the prospect of revolution that counts, with its connotation of the liquidation of the outdated and the glory of the fresh start. What comes after the revolution is another matter.

If, on the other hand, the new strikes even the innocent and ignorant young as somehow suspect, it can only be scrutinized in the light of standards derived from the past. I mean, of course, those sifted nuggets that add up to what we vaguely call a tradition, meaning a view of humanity that extols values other than those of pure bestial subsistence. The view is, alas, theocentric and rests on an assumption that cannot be proved - namely, that God made man to cherish as the most valuable of his creatures, being the most like himself. It is not the aggregate of humanity that approaches the divine condition but the individual human being. God is one and single and separate, and so is a man or a woman. God is free, and so is man, but man's freedom only begins to operate when he understands the nature of the gift.

Human freedom is the hoariest of all topics for debate: it still animates student gatherings, though it is often discussed without definition, theological knowledge or metaphysical insight. Augustine and Pelagius confront each other on the issue of whether man is or is not free; Calvinists and Catholics shout each other down; even in Milton's hell the diabolic princes debate free will and predestination. The pundits of predestination affirm that, since God is omniscient, he knows everything that a man can ever do, that a man's every future act has already been determined for him, and therefore he cannot be free. The opposition gets over this problem by stating that God validates the gift of free will by deliberately refusing to foresee the future. When a man performs an act that God has refused to foresee, God switches on the memory of his foreknowledge. God, in other words, is omniscient by definition, but he will not take advantage of his omniscience.

*Die unterstrichenen Wörter werden unübersetzt übernommen.   from: Anthony Burgess, 1985, London 1980

ORWELL THAT ENDS WELL

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