----- Original Message ----- From: "Richard Alexander" <rick.blackchip at virgin.net> To: "Freedom Anarchist Fortnightly" <FreedomAnarchistFortnightly at yahoogroups.com> Sent: Saturday, June 29, 2002 6:48 AM Subject: [anarchysf] brave new world
> forwarded fyi
> (personally i see more of 1984 than BNW - ra)
> richard
>
>
> The Future Bought to Book: the frightening reality of George Orwell's vision of
> the future
>
> Date Published: 22/10/00
> Author: Kirkpartick Sale
>
> (ripped from The ecologist web-site)
> (www.theecologist.co)
>
>
> Many people see Orwell's 1984 as the ultimate dystopian future to fear. It is
> not, says Kirkpatrick Sale, who believes Huxley's Brave New World to be far more
> threatening. partly because we're already beginning to live it.
>
>
> 'Whatever its artistic or philosophical qualities,' wrote Aldous Huxley in a
> 1946 foreword to his 1932 novel, Brave New World, 'a book about the future can
> interest us only if its prophecies look as though they might conceivably come
> true.'
>
> Not quite: also if its prophecies either have come true, or at least resonate
> within us today in some eerily accurate way, capturing the deep spirit of our
> present world if not entirely the substance. By those criteria, Brave New
> World - whose artistic and philosophical qualities I must say I find limited -
> is an extremely interesting and relevant book, 68 years later. Another dystopian
> novel of roughly the same era, however - George Orwell's 1984 - generally fails
> to evoke the same sense of resonant recognition.
>
> And the provocative reason for the prophetic success of Brave New World, and the
> comparative lack of success of 1984, is that the US and not the Soviet Union won
> the Cold War.
>
> CUX OF HUXLEY
>
> Brave New World, you will recall, depicts a society some 600 years into the
> future in which all children are produced by batches of test tubes in huge
> hatchery systems and are conditioned in their embryos to become adults somewhere
> in the spectrum from intelligent, dominant Alphas to moronic, servile Epsilons.
> Further conditioning in childhood, largely through night-time 'sleep-teaching'
> recordings, assures that everyone will accept their lot in life without
> rebellion or resentment, and will concern themselves, beyond the jobs they are
> programmed to perform, with happiness and self-contentment, through sports,
> entertainment, and the benign feel-good drug, 'soma'.
>
> In a number of specifics Huxley's prophecies are tellingly accurate - the
> ubiquity of sports, television in hotel and hospital rooms, a general ignorance
> of history, psychology and chemistry as important change agents - but of course
> in the broader sense nothing like BNW (the society has no name, so I will use
> the abbreviation instead) has come true. exactly. It is not until you start to
> think about the true nature of our society today, the deeper and most
> fundamental underpinnings of the present system of global corporate capitalism
> now reigning, that the resemblance to Huxley's world become apparent.
>
> Happiness as the guiding principle of economic and social life. In BNW, the
> World controllers have divided up the globe and make sure the populations do not
> 'lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing,
> instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human
> sphere. some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of
> knowledge'. That may not be so overtly planned in our world today, but certainly
> the underlying goal of most of industrial society in recent decades is to
> maximise happiness, human happiness, and it is to this end that any enlargement
> of knowledge or amplification of power is largely dedicated. Survey after survey
> indicates that, increasingly, people are frank to acknowledge that, as one
> Japanese survey put it, they are less interested in wanting to 'live a pure and
> just life' than in wanting to 'live a life that suits your own taste' - ie
> hedonism.
>
> That happiness is to be achieved primarily through consumption and amassment of
> material possessions. In Huxley's world, there was a 'conscription of
> consumption', making it the highest social duty, and underconsumption was in
> fact a crime against society: 'Ending is better than mending' went the
> thought-conditioning, 'the more stitches, the less riches'. In our world,
> consumerism is a huge and pathological problem, wild and unrestrained in the
> richer countries but common and increasingly intemperate everywhere, encouraged
> in a thousand ways from advertising and films to tax laws and public policy; the
> growth in global per-capita consumption in the last 50 years is, according to
> Worldwatch researcher Alan Durning, 'the most rapid and most fundamental change
> in day-to-day existence the human species has ever experienced'.
>
> Concomitant with consumption is self-indulgence and pleasure-seeking, a life
> without limits or denials. One of the cardinal rules of BNW is that 'industrial
> civilisation is only possible when there's no self-denial,' so self-indulgence
> is carried 'up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics'; hence sex
> is frequent and casual, soma is taken freely, and sports and 'feely' movies
> (with scents, sounds, sights, and sensation) are daily passions. It is true in
> our world, of course, that not everyone even in the richer nations is able to be
> self-indulgent up to their 'very limits', but the aim is certainly encouraged by
> culture and conditioning in all capitalist societies. The celebrity status held
> up for the world to admire, the sexual revolution, the overconsumption of not
> only legal but also illegal drugs, and the preoccupation with games and sports
> are measures of how far it has gone.
>
> Not everyone is thought to be able to achieve the highest levels of happiness,
> or have the money for continual self-indulgence, but both the rich and poor
> accept the fact of inequality and the failure of all schemes to alleviate it. In
> BNW, the lower strata are so conditioned to accept their lot that they are happy
> with the menial tasks they are assigned to perform (there are no machines for
> these jobs because unemployment would provide time for discontent) and given
> soma after work for night-time oblivion. Meanwhile, the higher strata are given
> privileges and perks in return for keeping everything running smoothly, and
> asking no questions. Not quite the same in our world, but the inequality is
> certainly there and just as glaring - the richest fifth of the world's
> population in 1998 had a combined income 82 times greater than the poorest
> fifth, and the 200 richest people had assets equal to the income of the world's
> poorest 2.5 billion.
>
> Stability in society requires a narrow range of thinking, seriously indulged in
> by only a few, within a fairly confined set of political, economic, and cultural
> givens defined by academia and the major media. For most of the citizens of BNW
> there is 'not a moment to sit down and think' - 'no leisure from pleasure,' as a
> World Controller puts it - and no realm of thinking possible beyond a carefully
> monitored orthodoxy, for 'no offence is as heinous as unorthodoxy of behaviour,'
> worse than murder, say, because 'it strikes at society itself'. The orthodoxy of
> contemporary capitalism is subtle indeed, even pervasive and powerful enough to
> permit unorthodoxies at the fringes, but it similarly confines political thought
> and practice to a narrow gamut of unthreatening palliatives, economic thought to
> variations on 'free market' licence and corporate power, and social thought to
> conventions set by churches, universities, foundations, and similar
> establishmentarian institutions; with the collapse of Soviet socialism, and the
> increasing spread of capitalist influence and such capitalist ideologies as
> globalism, human rights, and 'democracy', the orthodoxy seems now almost as
> unchallengeable as BNW's.
>
> FORD FORWARD
>
> Huxley, in other words, seems to have based his dystopia largely on the ideas of
> 20th century capitalism, especially the American version that produced Frederick
> Taylor's 'scientific management' and Henry Ford's production lines (hence the
> BNW dating system: AF standing for 'After Ford'). As this has more or less
> triumphed in the second half of the 20th century and given shape to the basic
> governmental international institutions we have today, its society inevitably
> takes on Huxleyan over- and undertones and provides the arena where the
> prophecies of Brave New World seem so close to the mark.
>
> It is in this light that it is particularly interesting to compare Huxley's
> dystopia with George Orwell's, because Orwell based his version largely on some
> kind of Stalinist Soviet Union writ large and perfected with methods of
> surveillance and mental conditioning. And since that is the kind of society that
> has largely lost out today (even in its Chinese form), the Orwellian predictions
> do not stand up particularly well.
>
> There are certain similarities in both versions, for they were written only 16
> years apart: authoritarian governments, advanced technologies of control and
> conditioning, low-caste humans for menial work, lack of privacy, limited range
> of thought, manipulation of memory. But the crucial difference is that in 1984
> life for all but a few under totalitarian socialism is grim indeed, a mixture of
> perpetual fear and perpetual want, without comfort or joy or easy pleasure (even
> sex is discouraged). 'The truly characteristic thing about modern life,' Orwell'
> s hero declares, 'was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness,
> its dinginess, its listlessness. decaying, dingy cities, where underfed people
> shuffled to and fro in leaky shoes.' Not only is happiness not the goal of
> society, it is not even a desirable by-product.
>
> Of course Orwell is concerned to show how terrible Russian communism is, and
> would be if it took over the world, and there is no capitalism in his society,
> no consumerism, and it has very few parallels with what exists today even in the
> last lingering communist states. A few touches, to be sure, do ring true. The
> ubiquity of the television set, for example, although it hasn't quite reached
> the point of receiving as well as transmitting as it does in 1984. It plays in
> the novel no role in stupefying populations, promoting violence, degrading
> politics, or programming materialism as it actually does today. Another
> similarity is the prevalence of what psychologists call 'cognitive dissonance',
> or the ability to hold two opposite beliefs at the same time - what Orwell calls
> 'doublethink'. This is a high priority in Orwell's world and one we are familiar
> with today. It appears in the apparent contradiction that we believe modern
> technology to be benevolent, yet have the knowledge that it can be dangerous,
> destabilising, and toxic; similarly, we maintain the belief that democratic
> governments are produced by recurrent ballot-box voting, yet know deep down that
> elections are rigged, bought, marginalised exercises having little to do with
> the rule of the people.
>
> BY GEORGE
>
> But the most telling of Orwell's predictions has to do with 'Newspeak', the
> language of his totalitarian country, based on English but incorporating the
> ideological principles of the ruling party and designed to narrow vocabulary, by
> eliminating some words and making others meaningless, so that contrary and
> deviant modes of thought are impossible. This is not of course strictly what has
> happened to our language in the last half-century, but it's near enough in many
> unsettling ways. Advertising, of course, sucks meanings from words (the smallest
> olive size, for example, is 'giant', and french fry portions in fast food
> outlets are graded 'large', 'medium' and 'regular'), and the dumbing-down of
> schooling and mass entertainment has severely limited vocabulary, but it is in
> the realm of political thought, especially, that language has become distorted
> and constrained. 'Community', for example, is now a word used in such gibberish
> phrases as 'the international community', while 'democracy', as noted above, has
> come to be synonymous with intermittent voting, no matter how distorted the
> process or product, and 'liberal democracies', as defined by the Clinton
> Administration, are those nations that allow free-market capitalism full sway.
> It is still not possible to inject 'Nature' into serious political discourse -
> much less 'Gaia', 'deep ecology', or 'bioregionalism' - without being regarded
> as a flake.
>
> And as always, the process continues in subtle, persistent, unnoticed ways, as
> with so many of the other schemes and ideologies and thought-systems by which
> capitalism maintains its hold. That's where Huxley and Orwell, like many with
> authoritarian dystopias, got it wrong - it doesn't take a centralised political
> elite, like the Inner Party of 1984 or the World Controllers of BNW, with
> Thought Police or human hatcheries, to manipulate society so that regimes
> maintain power. That can be done in much less overt, much quieter, more cunning
> ways by creating a culture that is embedded in society and pervasively spreads
> the dominant ideologies through all its benign and innocent tentacles.
>
> The culture of capitalism, for example, whose principles (progress, say, and
> humanism) and practices (for example, 'free' markets and the corporation) have
> been ingrained in industrial societies for centuries now, seems to be so eternal
> and inevitable as almost to defy challenge. Against that, the strivings of
> totalitarian apparata seem almost simplistic and contorted, doomed to result in
> failure in the long run.
>
> It might be argued, then, that capitalism will triumph six centuries from now
> not because of the complex technologies and systems of BNW but because of the
> success of those principles of happiness and consumption and self-indulgence
> that operate in the background and are the inspiration of its culture, allowing
> it to seduce and manipulate its millions.
>
> There is one rider, however, an ominous affliction that works at the very heart
> of capitalism and seems certain to reduce it to rubble, in the near if not
> immediate future: it is the depletion and despoliation of the resources of the
> natural world that capitalism demands, and the ruination of Nature that adds up
> to ecocide.
>
> Imagining a future without having Nature as a player is like trying to have a
> symphony without music, a house without a foundation. There is no future -
> dystopian, utopian, or anything in between - that can exist, or be imagined,
> without the imperative presence of the natural, brave or otherwise, world.
>
> Kirkpatrick Sale is the author of nine books, including 'Rebels against the
> Future: the Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution; Lessons for the
> Computer Age.' His latest book, 'The Fire of his Genius: Robert Fulton and the
> American Dream' will appear next year.
>
>
>
>
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