[Mb-civic] A "Brave New World"?

[Ian]

All:

Much has been noted and said recently about the "Orwellian" times we seem to be living in.  Orwell and 1984 are cited often.  [N.B.  Actually, Animal Farm is more applicable to the U.S. at this moment; I strongly suggest reading it anew.]

However, for all the talk that "1984 is just 20 years late," little attention is being paid to the possibly even more prescient nature of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.  Because while we are not really that close to either the globally repressive totalitarian society of 1984 or the genetically-created world-state of Brave New World, certain aspects of the latter are far more applicable to our current society.  For example, in BNW, the society is almost constantly "medicated" in some way, as well as being kept "docile" (among other ways) by the free distribution of "soma," an opiate-like drug.  When we consider that, currently, we start kids on Ritalin by 5 or 6, and they then "trade up" to Prozac and other anti-depressants by 15 or 16 (and stay on them for years, if not for life); that one in three adults is taking some form of anti-depressant or other therapeutic medication; and that the U.S. permits a certain amount of drugs (marijuana etc.) to get to the streets for the very purpose of keeping the "lower classes" "docile" - we cannot deny the similarity.  And there are other eerily prescient aspects.

In Brave New World Revisited - written in 1958, about 27 years after BNW - Huxley looks back at his dire predictions and makes the following remark:

"In 1931, when Brave New World was being written, I was convinced that there was still plenty of time.  The completely organized society, the scientific caste system, the abolition of free will by methodical conditioning, the servitude made acceptable by regular doses of chemically induced happiness, the orthodoxies drummed in by nightly courses of sleep-teaching - these things were coming all right, but not in my time, not even in the time of my grandchildren...Twenty-seven years later...I feel a good deal less optimistic than I did when I was writing Brave New World.  The prophecies made in 1931 are coming true much sooner than I thought them would."

Herewith are some excerpts from two of the chapters of Brave New World Revisited (including an occasional comment from me).  They show Huxley to be in every way as prescient - if not moreso - than Orwell.  Although you may find it hard to do so, try to keep in mind as you read, that this was written in 1958 - over 45 years ago.

Peace.

------------------

"Over-Organization" and "Propaganda in a Democratic Society"

Excerpts from Brave New World Revisited by Aldous Huxley

 

Organization is indispensable; for liberty arises and has meaning only within a self-regulating community of freely cooperating individuals.  But, though indispensable, organization can also be fatal.  Too much organization transforms men and women into automata, suffocates the creative spirit, and abolishes the very possibility of freedom.

 

City life is anonymous and, as it were, abstract.  People are related to one another, not as total personalities, but as the embodiments of economic functions or, when they are not at work, irresponsible seekers of entertainment.  Subjected to this kind of life, individuals tend to feel lonely and insignificant.  Their existence ceases to have any point or meaning.

 

Civilization is, among other things, the process by which primitive packs are transformed into an analogue, crude and mechanical, of the social insects' organic communities...[Yet] [h]owever hard they try, men cannot create a social organism, they can only create an organization.  In the process of trying to create an organism they will merely create a totalitarian despotism.

 

The current Social Ethic [Ian's note: reminder; 1958]...is merely a justification after the fact of the less desirable consequences of over-organization.  It represents a pathetic attempt to make a virtue of necessity, to extract a positive value from an unpleasant datum.  It is a very unrealistic, and therefore very dangerous, system of morality.  The social whole, whose value is assumed to be greater than that of its component parts, is not an organism in the sense that a hive or a termitary may be thought of as an organism.  It is merely an organization, a piece of social machinery.  There can be no value except in relation to life and awareness.  An organization is neither conscious nor alive.  Its value is instrumental and derivative.  It is not good in itself; it is good only to the extent that it promotes the good of the individuals who are the parts of the collective whole.  To give organizations precedence over persons is to subordinate ends to means.  What happens when ends are subordinated to means was clearly demonstrated by Hitler and Stalin.

 

Democratic institutions are devices for reconciling social order with individual freedom and initiative, and for making the immediate power of a country's rulers subject to the ultimate power of the ruled.

 

No people that passes abruptly from a state of subservience under the rule of a despot to the completely unfamiliar state of political independence can be said to have a fair chance of making democratic institutions work.  [Ian's note: think Iraq]  Again, no people in a precarious economic condition has a fair chance of being able to govern democratically.  Liberalism flourishes in an atmosphere of prosperity, and declines as declining prosperity makes it necessary for the government to intervene ever more frequently and drastically in the affairs of its subjects.  [Ian's note: think the U.S.]  Over-population and over-organization are two conditions which deprive a society of a fair chance or making democratic institutions work effectively.



-------

 

There are two kinds of propaganda - rational propaganda in favor of action that is consonant with the enlightened self-interest of those who make it and those to whom it is addressed, and non-rational propaganda that is not consonant with anybody's enlightened self-interest, but is dictated by, and appeals to, passion.  Where the actions of individuals are concerned, there are motives more exalted than enlightened self-interest, but where collective action has to be taken in fields of politics and economics, enlightened self-interest is probably the highest of effective motives.  If politicians and their constituents always acted to promote their own or their country's long-range self-interest, this world would be an earthly paradise.  As it is, they often act against their own interests, merely to gratify their least creditable passions; the world, in consequence, is a place of misery.  Propaganda in favor of an action dictated by the impulses that are below self-interest offers false, garbled or incomplete evidence, avoids logical argument, and seeks to influence its victims by mere repetition of catchwords, by the furious denunciation of foreign or domestic scapegoats, and by cunningly associating the lowest passions with the highest ideals, so that atrocities come to be perpetrated in the name of God and the most cynical kind of realpolitik is treated as a matter of religious principle and patriotic duty.  [Ian's note: he could be talking about the U.S. currently]

 

Mass communication, in a word, is neither good nor bad; it is simply a force and, like any other force, it can be used either well or ill.  Used in one way, the press, the radio and the cinema are indispensable to the survival of democracy.  Used in another way, they are among the most powerful weapons in the dictator's armory.  In the field of mass communications, as in almost every other field of enterprise, technological progress has hurt the Little Man and helped the Big Man.  As lately as fifty years ago [Ian's Note: i.e., 1908], every democratic country could boast of a great number of small journals and local newspapers.  Thousands of country editors expressed thousands of independent opinions.  Somewhere or other almost anybody could get almost anything printed.  Today the press is still legally free, but most of the little papers have disappeared.  The cost of wood-pulp, of modern printing machinery, and of syndicated news is too high for the Little Man.  In the totalitarian East there is political censorship, and the media of mass communication are controlled by the State.  In the democratic West there is economic censorship and the media of mass communication are controlled by members of the Power Elite.  [Ian's note: as true as this was back then, he could not know how prescient this would be vis-a-vis the agglomeration of media in the hands of a few]  Censorship by rising costs and the concentration of communication in the hands of a few big concerns is less objectionable than State ownership and government propaganda; but certainly it is not something of which a Jeffersonian democrat could possibly approve.

 

In regard to propaganda, the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false.  They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies - the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant.  In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.  [Ian's note: this seem eerily prescient re "reality television" et al]

 

In the past, most people never got a chance to fully satisfy this appetite.  They might long for distractions, but the distractions were not provided.  Christmas came but once a year, feasts were "solemn and rare," there were few readers and very little to read, and the nearest approach to a neighborhood movie theater was the parish church, where the performances, though frequent, were somewhat monotonous.  For conditions even remotely comparable to those now prevailing [Ian's note: again, keep in mind he is talking about 1958, though "now" could indeed be now], we must return to imperial Rome, where the populace was kept in good humor by frequent, gratuitous doses of many kinds of entertainment - from poetical dramas to gladiator fights, from recitations of Virgil to all-out boxing, from concerts to military reviews to public executions.  But even in Rome there was nothing like the non-stop distraction now provided by newspapers and magazines, by radio, television and the cinema.  In Brave New World, non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature.are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation.  [Ian's note: the same could be said today]



The other world of religion is different from the other world of entertainment; but they resemble one another in being most decidedly "not of this world."  Both are distractions and, if lived in too continuously, both can become, in Marx's phrase, "the opium of the people" and so a threat to freedom.  Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently "on the spot" can hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures.  A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time not on the spot, not here and now and in the calculable future, but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sports and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those who would manipulate and control it.  [Ian's note: this is flat-out prescient re current Western society]

 

In their propaganda, today's dictators rely for the most part on repetition, suppression and rationalization - the repetition of catchwords which they wish to be accepted as true, the suppression of facts which they wish to be ignored, and the arousal and rationalization of passions which may be used in the interests of the Party or the State.  As the art and science of manipulation come to be better understood, the dictators of the future will doubtless learn to combine these techniques with the non-stop distractions which, in the West, are now threatening to drown in a sea of irrelevance the rational propaganda essential to the maintenance of individual liberty and the survival of democratic institutions.  [Ian's note: If this paragraph is not a perfect description of Bush et al, I don't know what is]
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20041014/057927bf/attachment.html