I'm usually not a big fan of infographics, but there's been an infographic that displays the differences between the future that Huxley depicted and the future that Orwells depicted surprisingly well [1].
I always found the world in 'A brave new world' to be better designed than the world in 1984. Orwell installed Big Brother and had tight control structures organize society. I.e. people are forced to not misbehave. Huxley, on the other hand, (at least that's how it felt to me) found solutions to all the small issues that make people misbehave, and just implemented a society around it. In his dystopian future, people don't want to misbehave, they're not interested in it. I think both societies have equal chances of survival, but the Huxley society has a higher chance of coming into existence because it installs itself in line with peoples desires, instead of confronting their desires.
I want to agree with you. 'Brave New World' did seem a better designed vision of a society. But there's no society yet that resembles it quite as closely as North Korea resembles Oceania. As Christopher Hitchens said, 1984 was published in the same year that the Korean war ended. It's almost like Kim Il-Sun read the book and thought, 'I think we can make this work'. And he did.
I think also that a society like Brave New World will outcompete a society like 1984. You can get agricultural labor to perform at the point of a gun, but you can't really develop engineering talent the same way. Though maybe if one stratifies society the right way, it is possible somehow.
A lot of modern Foucault-ish social theory is around how we manufacture/ enculturate the desires of a populace and they basically oppressive themselves with little or no maintenance....
'Amusing Ourselves to Death' is actually the name of a great book by Neil Postman. I'm a little bothered by the author of that infographic stealing it for his title. It's a great book and if you like thinking about this kind of thing you should check it out.
Yeah, I've read the book many a years ago. Another good read in this vein is Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" [1]:
"they proposed that popular culture is akin to a factory producing standardized cultural goods — films, radio programmes, magazines, etc. — that are used to manipulate mass society into passivity. Consumption of the easy pleasures of popular culture, made available by the mass communications media, renders people docile and content, no matter how difficult their economic circumstances."
Orwell based his writings on his first hand experiences with communism. I agree that 1984's world is unrealistic and destined to fail, but it is in fact pretty much identical to the world that the Soviets were attempting to build.
Only unrealistic thing I found there is stability. And half of the book is just torture porn. On the other hand some thing in Brave New World are just plain silly.
Things in fiction have to wear "stage makeup". This is because the subtlety and complexity of the real world is essentially impossible to get across in only a few thousand words, especially if you also want to tell a story. So characters and events have to be a bit more exaggerated, have a bit more definition than they would normally. It's similar to the way an actor on stage in a theatre wears stage makeup. Up close such makeup would appear garish, but from tens or hundreds of meters away it makes the features of a character's face more distinctive, makes people easier to tell apart, makes emotions more obvious, etc.
The same is true of the socio-cultural and political systems in these dystopias. 1984 and Brave New World are both caricatures of ideas about the evolution of society. They are meant to draw people's attentions to the problems inherent in the idea by advancing it to an extreme that would probably never exist in real life.
In reality we've seen that the examples presented in both 1984 and Brave New World provide practical examples of problems that have become very real over time. It turns out that massive government surveillance and incredible state control over everyone's lives is a big deal, and something that is actually far more common and far more easily put in place than we would have ever imagined.
Huxley's world can only function if you remove all capability of imagination from man. At which point it really doesn't matter which dystopia you're shooting for - each and every one would function just as well at governing machines. And given our advances with AI, I'm willing to bet we'll have reliable imaginationless smart robots long before anybody is able to reliably make imaginationless people.
I'm not so sure. I think Brave New World is more about shaping people's desires and expectations of what is possible. If people are brought up to believe that, say, political discourse is not desirable nor ever worth having (because there's no possibility or desire for change), and the same for technology too, but sexual and interpersonal adventures are fascinating, exciting, and interesting, then people might end up like the people in Brave New World.
I think we're already headed down a similar road right now. A lot of people have a very limited view of what is possible in their life. Look at the way that children are protected from the consequences of their own actions, discouraged from being on their own, discouraged from physical activities, discouraged from working with their hands. Think about how much less common it is for middle class kids to have the idea that working in a "trade" is worthwhile compared to earning a 4-year college degree and becoming a "professional". Think about how much less common it is for people to think about running their own (non-software) business. Or about how unusual it is for people to have lab space or a shop in their home.
Fortunately some of those trends are turning around, but it wouldn't be so unusual to imagine a world were technology developed differently and people ended up as sort of the worst caricature of the "facebook generation". Concerned more with trivialities than anything of importance, spending their lives worrying about relationships and sex rather than politics and technology.
>Look at the way that children are protected from the consequences of their own actions, discouraged from being on their own, discouraged from physical activities, discouraged from working with their hands. Think about how much less common it is for middle class kids to have the idea that working in a "trade" is worthwhile compared to earning a 4-year college degree and becoming a "professional".
The very fact that you expect scorn for these memes to be common shows that, "We need to get back to manual-labor values" has itself become a meme.
>Fortunately some of those trends are turning around, but it wouldn't be so unusual to imagine a world were technology developed differently and people ended up as sort of the worst caricature of the "facebook generation". Concerned more with trivialities than anything of importance, spending their lives worrying about relationships and sex rather than politics and technology.
The actual problem with politics and technology is that only tiny minorities of the population can feasibly participate in them, under our current systems.
I mean, hell, I'm in academia, and half the time other academics don't know what academics are publishing. You think of an idea that might be useful and eventually find it was published a decade ago under a name you hadn't thought of.
Can you explain how imagination figures into it? I don't see the link. Sure, if they couldn't imagine an alternative, that would make escape tricky, but just thinking of an alternative doesn't necessarily make it attractive or achievable.
Also, looking at our history, I think we're not that good at thinking of alternatives. We've currently convinced ourselves (for instance) that democracy and capitalism are the one true way, but not too long ago there were people who quite seriously believed in communism. And there are lots of people who live(d) in monarchies, religious fundamentalist states, single-party power, or even dual-party power. What "the others" are doing feels so obviously wrong, the only reason you'd consider the alternative is because you're forced by it's actual existance to consider it - certainly not because of our intrinsic imagination.
And when we do imagine alternatives (such as BNW), they don't really matter much because they aren't serious alternatives, if only because society is so large that it's almost impossible to imagine effecting such change. Also, that kind of thought doesn't come out of a vacuum - Huxley almost certainly built on the ideas of others, and "merely" crystallized it into a novel, including his own twist.
So... I don't think imagination would affect the outcome, and I think the notion that we are very imaginative is deceitfully flattering, but not true. People are good at taking existing ideas and making small changes, and they're good at identifying the important bits of good ideas of others and then making them their own - so that in the end a little bit of imagination goes a long way.
Well admittedly, the search space of possible ideas is too damn large to be very efficient about searching it. Real people search it roughly breadth-first, and that works pretty well for us considering the cost/benefit ratio of depth.
Consider if people had been imaginative about, say, Stalinism.
Brave New World is a nasty reactionary's idea of dystopia. There are genuine horrors there--conditioning, eugenics, erasure of independent thought--but the central themes that it keeps coming back to are that everybody's employed, everybody's happy, nobody's hungry or sick or miserable, there's safe, consequence-free, recreational sex and drugs for everyone, and these are portrayed as bad things.
BNW is fucked up in some serious ways, but--taken as an average across all levels of society--I think it's actually better than the world we live in now.
Huxley, to his credit, eventually came around to the idea that sex, drugs, and communal living could be used for good as well as evil, and actually wrote a utopian response to his own earlier dystopian work. It's telling that Brave New World remains in every high school curriculum, but no one's ever heard of Island. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_(Huxley_novel)
It's not that those things are bad, it's the way they are used by the society.
The drugs are used to avoid confrontation, emotional hurt, and to keep people content with the status quo.
Everybody is employed... Yes, but they are conditioned to be content with their class and job in society. You can't move up or down in class, you are born into your job.
Nobody is hungry because everyone gets enough to survive, but only because everybody is conditioned to enjoy their jobs and be content with their place in society.
Sex is treated in the exact opposite manner of what we have now, sex is only used for recreation and encouraged (even forced) from a young age.
I don't see how you can view any of these ideas as being "good." I would trade our fucked up world over what they have in Brave New World any time.
> I would trade our fucked up world over what they have in Brave New World any time.
That's certainly a valid opinion. Still, I suspect it's easier to see BNW as an utter horrorshow if you've never known real hunger or oppression or torture or watched loved ones die of treatable diseases. I'm in the same boat myself. But there are many millions of people in our world who would be genuinely much better off in the Brave New World. It's hard to know what to think about that.
> Everybody is employed... Yes, but they are conditioned to be content with their class and job in society.
I'm not sure that's a downside. The opposite is that people would only be content if they're at the top (CEO/rockstar/movie star/billionarie), creating a rat race. That's at least as harmful as BNW, if not more.
Basically, what kind of person has such a petty, nasty view of the human species that he honestly believes, if left to our own devices, we'll turn into that?
When you read Brave New World in high school it's a little difficult to recognize there's multiple layers of satire there.
There was a reason why Huxley picked an insecure religious fundamentalist with a fondness for self-flagellation and fear of his own sexuality to contrast with the Brave New World. And it wasn't because he identified with him.
The satire is of the relentless drive towards excess, which Huxley saw epitomised in America's nascent consumerist culture and the drive to industrialization it was serving. The reason why it keeps coming back to the relentless sex and drugs isn't because Huxley then thought sex and drugs were bad, it's because he though any sane authoritarian regime would give the people the distractions they wanted most.
I don't think it's that 'telling'. I'm a big fan of Huxley and I realize what he tried to do, but BNW is frankly a much better novel than The Island.
On another note, The Machine Stops and The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas are also pretty good.
I think your overthinking things here. Who's portraying them as bad things? I think the point isn't that they're bad, it's that they're used by a society to keep itself in a coma.
A society that has killed itself isn't a good thing, but what you read into that is your own perspective. You see happiness as being the problem itself here; but you might also see the means of pursuit as being problematic. Or you might see that happiness may be an insufficient precondition for a healthy society. Or an indictment of mankind in that we're a literally happy to sell our souls for contentment. Or that we don't value the ability to make up our own minds enough.
In short: it's thought provoking, and by all means draw your own conclusions - but even if you think that a happy society is necessarily good and that huxley's full of it, maybe there's still something in another perspective.
For example, it reminds me of how when you optimize for a particular benchmark, you may well succeed while losing sight of the big picture; and you might end up doing more harm than good.
It is probably the only completely untarnished utopia in all of literature. Or possibly one of the only, and I simply haven't heard of a few of the rest. I'm told Le Guin's The Dispossessed deals with similar issues.
Certainly it's one of the only cases where, if someone said they were buying real-estate there, I wouldn't actually look at them funny.
While I feel that every student should read a Brave New World, it is not included in every high school cirriculum. In the US at least, it is actually pretty rare for a school to include it.
I don't think BNW has anything to do with libertarianism. I read it to be primarily a criticism of Western apathy. People in BNW are so obsessed with their empty lives, chasing pleasure after pleasure, that they are completely uninterested in (and therefore removed from) the big picture. They are basically animals, and are governed and manipulated as such.
I find it particularly telling that, however much this author rages against "the machine", he still is a willing participant; facebook, twitter, google and linkedin all have neat little javascript "links" at the bottom of his page which are tracking all the blog's readers.
I've always been really interested in a claim made in the foreword of Brave New World by Huxley that sexual freedom is inversely correlated with economic and political freedom:
> As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase. And the dictator (unless he needs cannon fodder and families with which to colonize empty or conquered territories) will do well to encourage that freedom.
I'm not aware of what historical (as of 1946, when it was written) examples this was premised on, and I've never seen it expanded on anywhere else (though I have looked).
I'm curious if anyone who cares to defend Huxley's dystopia has any actual rational basis for this claim, since it forms a core component of the world he builds.
More generally, I am not terribly sympathetic to the overall world built in Brave New World as a possible future. It definitely seems to me as if the 1984 predictions are much closer to reality than BNW's.
We live in a constant state of readiness for wars that have unclear purposes and the governments we have seem much more interested in tearing down ideas like full employment or sexual or narcotic freedoms. So it's surprising to see people think that Huxley got it right and Orwell didn't.
It's not really an either or: they both identified bad habits modern society is falling into. But whereas Orwell may have more recognizable details, the in the broader strokes it's Huxley that seems more apropos: people are choosing for this life. In Orwell's world dissent and choice were suppressed; in Huxleys they were voluntarily discarded.
No matter how nasty the scandals surrounding the NSA are or how overblown the rhetoric in the neverending "war on terror", I don't think anybody (sane) is suggesting we cannot end them. Sure, some dissent is punished harshly (manning, snowden), but for society at large the current state of affairs is entirely by choice.
>No matter how nasty the scandals surrounding the NSA are or how overblown the rhetoric in the neverending "war on terror", I don't think anybody (sane) is suggesting we cannot end them.
Yes we are. There are large mass movements calling for revolution precisely because we don't want neverending war, don't want a surveillance state, and don't want neoliberalism.
> We live in a constant state of readiness for wars that have unclear purposes and the governments we have seem much more interested in tearing down ideas like full employment or sexual or narcotic freedoms.
But we also have instant gratification with cat pics and low cost low value food and low quality disposable trash toys.
Every time I read or hear about the dystopian futures laid out by Huxley, Orwell and in fact, many others, I can't help but think of the future imagined by Banks. In the Culture, people are free to do pretty much whatever they want, which eventually brings crime within the Culture to a near-zero. Even the most atrocious crimes, albeit rare, are punished (if ever) by a slap on the wrist. What I find particularly interesting about this is that Culture people being free to do whatever they want, whenever they want, they in fact end up in a state of lassitude and ultimately, a form of self-servitude and meaninglessness (hence the expansion of the Culture and so on).
This shares Huxley's view of servitude through content, but it brings the interesting point of whether the Culture could be qualified as a Dystopia or a Utopia. It's funny to see that the majority of Culture people (as written by Banks) think of the Culture as the closest thing to a Utopia, yet Banks himself has pointed out on a number of occasions that he would not like living in such a society. It also brings up the question of whether a Utopia is really defined by (at least near-) complete freedom, or by individual comfort.
I very much enjoy my freedom (or whatever it is I think I have) and I do have a tendency to reject (or rather circumvent) authority, but the more I think about it the more I realize this view isn't shared by everybody. A lot of people don't want to have to make decisions, question things and whatnot, their comfort lies in the absence of having to do so, a view I can understand (though do not share). I don't know if it's right, or wrong, and I'm certainly not in a place to decide for others, but it does show the subjectivity and flimsiness of the concepts of u/dys-topian societies.
The problem is that the definition of freedom has some assumptions most of Enlightenment philosophy (being so bizarrely focused around thought experiments dealing with yeoman farmers on homesteads) has direly neglected, namely: relationships with other people.
What is freedom? Freedom, we're told, is when you can make decisions for yourself. Therefore, are we in servitude to the laws of physics? Well no, those are impersonal. Yet are we told that we can be in servitude by force, by deprivation, or even by manipulation of our own desires? Yes.
So what's freedom? Freedom really means having our own actions unconstrained by the values or goals of other people (for a large value of "people", including institutions, the State, and in the limit God Himself). There the problem emerges: the only way to be completely unconstrained by other people, to be totally free, is to have no actual relations with other people whatsoever.
Total freedom, therefore, is total isolation, but this fact is never acknowledged because so much of our philosophical tradition assumes that freedom proceeds from the individual alone and precedes social relationships entirely. It assumes that everyone is a yeoman farmer on a plot of land who should always be able to retreat to his property and do exactly as he pleases -- which never happens in real life.
Then, are people really so stupid for choosing "less freedom", or are they just finding more meaning in the presence of voluntary relationships than the absence of compulsory ones?
Anyone who appreciates Brave New World and 1984 should really take a look at Yevgeny Zamyatin's novel, We.
It was the first book banned after the Russian revolution and according to Orwell it was his inspiration for 1984. I found it a lot more amusing and poetic than 1984 however.
Brave new world is a surprisingly benign place. You could do whatever you like there if only you had the idea to. Compare that to 1984 or "We".
I can totally see them accepted into galactic equivalent of EU having only to replace lower castes with robots (what they totally could). Not so fast with the current messy state of Earth.
I always found the world in 'A brave new world' to be better designed than the world in 1984. Orwell installed Big Brother and had tight control structures organize society. I.e. people are forced to not misbehave. Huxley, on the other hand, (at least that's how it felt to me) found solutions to all the small issues that make people misbehave, and just implemented a society around it. In his dystopian future, people don't want to misbehave, they're not interested in it. I think both societies have equal chances of survival, but the Huxley society has a higher chance of coming into existence because it installs itself in line with peoples desires, instead of confronting their desires.
[1] http://thesleepymoose.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/huxvor-2.p...