A Vision of the Future
by Alan Cartwringht
I read Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ (published 1932) and George Orwell’s ‘1984’ (published 1949) in school. You may have done the same but, if you’re as old as me, you’re likely to have forgotten most of the detail in them, however deep an impression they may have made at the time.
Briefly, ‘Brave New World’ tells the story of a global society where human engineering has created five levels of human from Alphas (who are the elite) down to Epsilons (who do all the drudge work) and where religion has been replaced by worship of ‘Our Ford’. Most of the people are ‘happy’ most of the time (either because they are conditioned to know no better or because they consume a pleasure drug called soma) until the arrival of an unconditioned ‘savage’ (i.e. normal human) amongst them causes both sides to re-assess their world and its respective values. In the end the ‘savage’ succumbs to the mass mentality and the novel finishes with his ashamed suicide.
The most interesting comparisons between the Brave New World and our own in 2008 are those around human engineering, consumerism and the sanitisation of everyday life.
Through genetic research we are apparently on the verge of eradicating genetically-carried diseases – but have we given sufficient thought to the flip side of manufacturing clones who are no longer unique creations and who can be bred as sub-humans like Huxley’s Epsilons? In the book, society can only function if there is constant consumption of new products: the oft-repeated slogan “Ending is better than mending. The more stitches, the less riches” echoes our capitalist consumerism. It has taken a long time for us to learn the harsh lesson that we are dealing with finite resources and that we therefore do have to recycle, ‘mend’ and ‘stitch’ what we already have.
The central theme of ‘Brave New World’ is the relative value of lives lived under free will and those that have been sanitised through a combination of constant social conditioning and use of drugs. In the book, whenever anyone is faced with an unpleasant situation, the simple recourse is to take a dosage of soma (cynically known as “Christianity without tears”) and the problem ‘disappears’. This contrived happiness is at the expense of choice – the choice to experience such essential facets of humanity as love, individualism, families - even deprivation and pain.
Orwell’s ‘1984’ is probably a better known novel and deals with a similar theme of the individual against society – but in this case, a brutal, totalitarian society where Big Brother watches over everyone’s every move and history is constantly being re-written to bolster the state’s power. Once again, the hero of the novel is finally defeated by the system and accepts the insignificance of his role in the context of the all-powerful state.
It is perhaps too easy for us in the West, who live in stable democracies, to feel distanced from a novel dealing with a totalitarian state – and certainly, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the raising of the Iron Curtain, Orwell’s vision of a future Britain is far further from us than it was when the book was written. The great irony of this for me is how truly chilling instruments of Orwell’s Oceania such as ‘Big Brother’ and ‘Room 101’ have become part of our current language not with their original, intended significance but in the form of bland TV shows that need an arresting title to market them.
Remarkably, though, here in Britain we have chosen to use one of the chief weapons of Orwell’s repressive state – the CCTV camera – to a degree unmatched anywhere else in the world (the UK has 1% of world’s population but 20% of its CCTV cameras… Britain is now being watched by 4.2 million cameras - one for every 14 people in the country).
It is difficult to draw neat conclusions around how right or wrong Huxley and Orwell’s visions of the future have proved. However, what re-reading the novels has reinforced to me is this; we in Britain in 2008 have too little appreciation of the freedom we enjoy, and know far better how to use it to our own personal benefit rather than for the greater good.
Return to Table of Contents
