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Date Published: 22/10/00
Author: Kirkpartick Sale 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. |
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‘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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