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OPINION Time to return to dystopia

We're now living though the scenarios predicted in novels like 1984 and Brave New World. What can we learn from them about the world today, asks JOHN GREEN

GEORGE ORWELL’S 1984 has been the Bible of anti-communist crusaders for generations and it’s  a permanent fixture on reading lists in schools and colleges.

Yet other dystopian novels like Brave New World, written in 1931 by Aldous Huxley — 17 years before Orwell’s work — or Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano (1952) are largely unknown today. Why would that be?

1984 was used not only to vilify the Soviet Union but communist and socialist ideas in general. Everyone is aware of the concepts of Big Brother, Newspeak and Doublethink. It’s not really surprising that Huxley’s fiction, probably inspired by the Soviet writer Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel We, is not better known because its premise that it is capitalism taking us down the road to uniformity and loss of individualism is not one the ruling elite wish to see promoted.

Huxley began writing it as a riposte to HG Wells, whose writing he detested, and he used the setting and characters in his novel to express the widely held fear of people losing their individual identities in a fast-paced world.

Many of his ideas were based on his experiences in the US, where he was outraged by the targeted cultivation of a hedonistic youth culture, manufactured happiness and the sexualisation of life, as well as its conservative provincialism. He was also perturbed by Henry Ford’s concept of human beings as virtual robots in the mass-production process.

Unlike Orwell, he describes a world of harmony and conformity within a united totalitarian state and Brave New World is in many ways more subtle than 1984. Kurt Vonnegut paints a similar picture in Player Piano.

Many of Huxley’s ideas have been overtaken as technological change has accelerated since he was writing in the early 1930s but the principal thrust of his arguments are as valid as ever. The centralisation of capitalist power, its global reach and the sophistication of advertising and communication are even more pernicious today.

Bertram Gross’s 1980 book Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America is in many ways the non-fictional mirror image of Huxley’s novel, portraying a country drifting into a fascist-like state by default.

Provocative and original, it explored current trends in the US and presented a grim forecast of a possible totalitarian future. Gross shows how the chronic problems faced by the US during the late 20th century would require increasing collusion between big business and big government in order to “manage” society in the interests of the rich and powerful.

Much of what Gross demonstrates was predicted by Huxley. And we can see it still unfolding in our increasingly dystopian real world today.

Our technology is controlled by only one or two key individuals and organisations, all US-based, and their power to manipulate our thinking is almost limitless. Whereas Brave New World depicted wall-to-wall television in people’s homes, offering a steady stream of soporific entertainment, today’s technology gives us continuous entertainment on mobile phones, tablets and laptops.

Comparing Orwell with Huxley, US educator and media theorist Neil Postman writes that Huxley “foresaw a world that included space travel; private helicopters; genetically engineered test tube babies; enhanced birth control; an immensely popular drug, Soma, that appears to combine the best features of Valium and Ecstasy; hormone-laced chewing gum that seems to work the way Viagra does.

“We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Whatever else had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.”

But Postman points out that while Orwell feared those who would ban books, Huxley predicted  that there would be no reason to ban a book because no-one would want to read one.

Teachers of English today say that children are not interested in reading books anymore because they are too fixated on their phones, a situation compounded by the closure of public libraries and the loss of bookshops, with those that are left stocking only the most hyped celebrity fodder and escapist novels.

Orwell feared that those in  power would deprive us of information and that truth would be concealed from us but Huxley predicted that we’d be inundated with an overload of information and reduced to passivity and egoism — the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.

The 1984 author was concerned that we would become a captive culture, Huxley that we would become a trivial one and that fear is evidenced in the death of the musician Andre Previn. His main claim to fame, it would appear, is that he appeared on the Morecambe and Wise show. That fits with the endless pages of celebrity gossip in the tabloids.

In 1984, Orwell argues that people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. The object of our fear will ruin us, according to Orwell but for Huxley it is desire that will destroy us. Today, a combination of those two factors are instrumentalised through fear — of immigration, of Russia, of terrorism — complemented by an eternal stream of easily digestible “entertainment” on TV, radio, the cinema, the press and online.

Kurt Vonnegut’s dystopia in Player Piano is an excellent depiction of  the logical developments of capitalism and it could almost be a description of Britain today, with its affluent caste of managers, engineers and professionals in thrall to a corporate and faceless elite — think the south-east enclave of England.

Outside their cosy ghetto live the discarded remnants of the proletariat, the former manual workers who are no longer needed — think the de-industrialised north of England. But who knows this book today?

Time to get reading — both Huxley and Orwell were upper-class writers and this coloured their attitudes to the working classes and to the idea of socialism.

But that shouldn’t deter us from recognising the valid arguments and warnings that both made.

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