School starts on Monday and I’m excited to say that I’m going to be teaching the course, ‘Animals, Ethics, and Food: Deconstructing Dominant Discourses’ again. I’ve tweaked the syllabus from last time and I hope it’s an improvement. Last winter’s teaching adventure was one of the best experiences I’ve had at the University of Washington and the Comparative History of Ideas Department (CHID) is amazing for being open to including courses of this nature in their course roster. Last time, we ended up with a class of 16 super smart, thoughtful undergrads, which was a great number because it allowed lots of time for everyone to talk during our 2 hour seminars twice a week. This time, 25 people are registered so far! Usually, you lose some students once the quarter starts, so we’ll see how many end up sticking with it. I’ve asked them to come to the first day of class having read George Orwell’s 1984. Last time, I framed the course/syllabus with the notion of ‘doublethink.’ This was originally my dad’s idea–he has taught 1984 in college classes for oh, maybe 30 years, so he knows a thing or two about the book. When I first started thinking about the meat industry and the mental and emotional energy in our society that goes into NOT knowing what goes on to produce meat and dairy, my dad immediately said, “Oh! That’s doublethink!”
Doublethink is a tough concept to understand because it’s a bit complicated. Orwell defines doublethink in the novel as:
Doublethink means the power of holding contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which directions 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. Even in using the word “doublethink” it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth. Ultimately, it is by means of doublethink that the Party has been able–and may, for all we know, continue to be able for thousands of years–to arrest the course of history. ~Orwell 176-177
And my dad, Peter Gillespie writes:
Indispensable to Winston’s work is double-think, which allows him to change the past, replacing existing reports with invented stories, and then to forget that he has done so. As Orwell puts is, “The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth” (64). Double thinking is what it says it is: thinking twice. To think once (or at all) is to focus on the thing one thinks, thereby acknowledging its existence, perhaps observing its character. In double thinking, this acknowledging observation is followed by a second thought which conceals and replaces the original thought with another, even turning the original thing into something else, so that it vanishes from sight and is erased from the mind and memory. When this maneuver is performed under the auspices of the Inner Party, the thing ceases to exist and is understood never to have existed. Perhaps the most dramatic example of doublethink in the book is the scene at a rally in a great square in which thousands of people, whipped into a frenzy of hatred against the official enemy, are able, in the midst of the frenzy, to accept a sudden change in the identity of the enemy. And in a few moments to go from believing they are and have always been at war with Eurasia to believing that Eurasia has always been an ally and that the enemy is and has always been Eastasia. And after that, for six days the entire staff of the Ministry of Truth is engaged round the clock in feverish activity to revise all the political propaganda, in effect to propagate the lies that they have never been at war with Eurasia or been allied with Eastasia, lies which are converted to the new truth in the mere act of telling them, lies the conversion of which is itself doublethought, therewith forgotten and thus accepted.
This revision of the truth, converting lies to new truths, may seem fantastic, unbelievable, unlikely to work in the actual world. But in fact this process of “reality control” is familiar to us in the practices of being in denial of an inconvenient or uncomfortable truth, whereby we choose to believe something about ourselves or our situation which is not objectively true but which is preferable to what is true. We can make the inconvenient truth vanish behind deliberate, more flattering delusions. And by the familiar process of interpretation–taking something as something, usually as something else–we can take one thing to be another thing altogether. We do this constantly. ~Peter Gillespie 2011
And indeed, we do this all the time when we continue to eat meat. Few people are truly in the dark about what is required to produce meat and dairy in this country. If they’re not fully informed, most people at least have some idea that there’s something unsavory about this process. Doublethink is employed when a person thinks about what is required to produce meat—the suffering of the animal, the UN-necessity of eating meat, the industrialization of the violent system, etc. These truths are denied quickly, replaced by more pleasant fictions—the myth of “Happy Cows” and “humane slaughter,” fictions about the healthfulness of meat and dairy contrived by the U.S. government, the now-fictional image of the small family farm where cows graze and live to old age and die “when the time comes”. These are all preferable ‘truths’ to the inconvenient truth of what really goes on to produce meat. And in order to complete the process—in order to truly believe these fictions—we have to forget that this process of doublethink has occurred. The process itself has to be erased.
I’ve asked the students to come to class having read 1984 because, well, everyone should read it, and because I think they need to read the book to understand how doublethink operates in it. I’m so looking forward to talking about this next week! More updates on teaching to come, I’m sure. But for now, here’s the syllabus for this fall if you’re interested in reading it.
CHID480AnimalsEthicsFood_Syllabus_FALL2012
NOTE: for those of you receiving email updates, this morning you probably got two extra. When I went back to look for my syllabus post from last year, I found that it had been made private along with another post. Whoops! When I republished them publicly, they sent out new alerts. Sorry about that!
P.S. Don’t forget to vote for Pigs Peace, if you haven’t already. Today is the last day! Thanks!
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