In February 1932, a novel by Aldous Huxley was published, whose title derived from this passage in Shakespeare's The Tempest, Act V:
Miranda: "O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't!
BTW, what's less remembered is the next line from Miranda's father:
Prospero: "'Tis new to thee."
2007 marks the 75th anniversary of Huxley's novel Brave New World, which was diaried earlier this year on DK here. Margaret Atwood had a recent essay on BNW here from The Guardian. So, just barely in time before the end of 2007, here's self's minor ramblings....
Brave New World is, of course, commonly and justly paired with George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four as one of the two great English-language literary satires of totalitarian futuristic society from the first half of the 20th century. In fact, in recent paperback printings of BNW, a 1949 letter from Huxley to Orwell after the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four is reproduced, where Huxley praised Orwell's book as "fine" and "profoundly important", a further illustration of the link between the two works in the literary imagination.
Yet the two works treat their societies in very different "dystopian" manners:
- Orwell's world is a very fearful, paranoid world, where the powers that be rely on perpetual war and demonizing of the "enemy" to keep the people cowed.
- Huxley's world is more subtle, where the society is engineered, in every way possible, to keep the people diverted and entertained, so that they would have no apparent reason to rebel against the state of society.
Whenever an anniversary of either book passes, the literary-inclined folk feel compelled to comment, as Atwood has done, on what from each work is present in our contemporary world. This is with good reason, since both authors projected into the future with the subliminal intent of warning their contemporaries of what could happen to them if they didn't watch it.
In a 1943 letter to a reader of the UK publication Tribune, several years before Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell commented on BNW:
"I think you overestimate the danger of a 'Brave New World' - i.e. a completely materialistic vulgar civilisation based on hedonism. I would say that the danger of that kind of thing is past and that we are in danger of quite a different kind of world, the centralised slave state, ruled over by a small clique who are in effect a new ruling class, though they might be adoptive rather than hereditary. Such a state would not be hedonistic, on the contrary its dynamic would come from some kind of rabid nationalism and leadership kept going by literally continuous war....I see no safeguard against this except (a) war-weariness and distate for authoritarianism which may follow the present war, and (b) the survival of democratic values among the intelligentsia."
George Orwell, quoted in Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life, pp. 322-323 (Little, Brown and Company, 1980)
In that 1949 letter, Huxley commented to Orwell:
"My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and that these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World...Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience. In other words, I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World.
Aldous Huxley to George Orwell, October 21, 1949 (from Letters of Aldous Huxley, edited by Grover Smith (Harper & Row, 1969))"
Both comments have valid points, to be sure. With respect to the USA, however, self's own feeling is that our world reflects more Huxley than Orwell. This is, if for no other reason, than that the US is such an "entertainment-driven" civilization ("TV nation", "fast food nation", what have you). We're all about "eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die(t)" in our economy, our consumer habits, how we conduct ourselves. Find a given strip mall anywhere in America, and the Blockbuster Movies, Borders Books, Whole Foods, Linens'n'Things, all the corporate chains, the cookie-cutter format is pretty set, all dedicated to conspicuous consumption. In that sense, and granted with hindsight, Orwell's first part was off, at least in an American context. But his second part, especially with regard to the neocon-inspired insanity that reigns in the Middle East, is all too accurate.
This isn't to be some sort of killjoy puritan and say that entertainment and diversion are totally unnecessary, not at all. We all need a break from worldly stresses and cares (even the DK loser-in-chief here), and we all need to have some fun in life. The question then becomes how to balance between the big stuff and the small stuff. I wish that I had an easy answer.
OK, it's Saturday night, literary babble done for the night. You know the usual ritual to observe....