After Thomas More s day, though, and especially from the time of the Enlightenment, thinkers began writing of the future and of ideal societies as though they really believed such things would be possible. In a more secular world where thinkers believed in progress based on reason, science, and technology, not religion, it was possible to believe that man could master himself and his environment and could create heaven on earth, not in the next world of Christians such as Augustine. Marx based his optimistic view of the future partly on his belief in science and technology and proclaimed that people had to stop believing in the next world before they could achieve the ideal society in this world. By the time Marx wrote his Manifesto , though, other visions of science and technology had appeared. In a way, her novel was a modern version of the story of Adam and Eve, in which forbidden knowledge is the work of the devil.
Western culture believes in progress, but it fears knowledge and science at the same time.
In writing 1984, George Orwell drew directly and indirectly on tradition, on his own experience, and on his observations of the world around him. Oceania was an extension of the United States which in his imagination had conquered Britain. It was not difficult to imagine the United States becoming the dictatorship that Orwell described because nations often become like their enemies. During the depression years of the 1930s, he, like a number of middle and upper class intellectuals, became a socialist out of anger at the injustices of capitalist society. In real life, Orwell tried to make contact with workers and frequented working class pubs as his character Winston Smith would do in the book.