Aldous Huxley: the prophet of our brave new digital dystopia
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
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...
"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."
http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/blog/cartoon-blog/amusing-ours... http://www.recombinantrecords.net/docs/2009-05-Amusing-Ourse...
And that's on top of the fact that his comic has probably sold an incalculable number of copies of the book, due to people discovering Neil Postman.
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....
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.
Consider if people had been imaginative about, say, Stalinism.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
I loved BNW when I went through my libertarian phase in college too.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
But we also have instant gratification with cat pics and low cost low value food and low quality disposable trash toys.
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.
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?
In the talk he discusses how the most likely scenario relative to 1984 is that people will come to "love their servitude".
Well worth a listen.
:/
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.
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.