Both men foresaw the future as totalitarian rather
than democratic and free
George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, two of England’s foremost literary figures of
the last century, each wrote a compelling description of a future dystopia,
both of them nightmare visions of society totally under the control of a ruling
clique whose only purpose is the enjoyment of power. In Orwell’s 1984 the
ruling tyrant is named Big Brother and is clearly modelled on Stalin, whilst in
Huxley’s Brave New World the ruler is known as the Director, a
character somewhat less sinister and brutal than Orwell’s Big Brother. The two
books are of course very different. Brave New World is a black
comedy, which does actually make us laugh, whereas there is absolutely nothing
funny about 1984. Nonetheless, there are similarities between the
two, and both men can be said to have accurately predicted certain specific
features of the world we now inhabit.
The most striking
parallel of course is that both men foresaw the future as totalitarian rather
than democratic and free. Neither presumably believed their vision of the
future to be inevitable, though it is equally clear that each saw aspects of
mid-twentieth century life which clearly pointed in the totalitarian direction.
Thus 1984 and Brave New World may be seen as
warnings against what might be if the trends identified by the two authors
persisted. What these trends were and why the authors saw them leading towards
totalitarianism is an important question and one that will be addressed
presently.
The totalitarian
states described by Orwell and Huxley differed in most details, though there
were also many correspondences. Both Big Brother’s world and the Brave New
World are ruled by authoritarian elites of a basically socialist/communist
nature, whose only real purpose is the maintenance of their own power and
privileges. Both worlds are materialist to the core and religion has been
effectively excised from the consciousness of the populace. Furthermore, in
both dystopias the family has virtually ceased to exist. A remnant of it
survives in Orwell’s world, though even here the true loyalty of children (and
spouses) is to the state. In Huxley’s Brave New World however
the family does not exist at all, and children are conceived in hatcheries and
raised in factory-farm conditions. Indeed, in Huxley’s dystopia science has
been utilized by the elite to facilitate its control, and special types of
humans, ranging from intelligent alphas to epsilon “semi-morons” are bred in
test-tubes to perform specific functions. Marriage does not exist and
promiscuous and even perverted sexual activity is encouraged by the state.
Both the
differences and the parallels between the two visions are of great interest.
Orwell’s nightmare future is based squarely on the reality of Stalin’s brutal
regime in the Soviet Union, and tends thus to look backward rather than
forward. He does not, for example, on the whole, foresee the importance of
technology in the repertoire of the future dictatorship, though his
“telescreens,” by which Big Brother keeps an eye on everyone, is rightly viewed
as stunningly prophetic of our age of massive electronic surveillance.
Huxley, by
contrast, has science and technology right at the heart of his dystopia. The
Directors use technology to control everything – including the genetic makeup
of each citizen’s body. And for this reason the heroes of technology and
industry – such as Henry Ford – are as much honoured in the Brave New World as
Marx and Lenin, the heroes of socialism. This is a crucial clue to Huxley’s
world-view and central to his idea that the future could well be totalitarian.
For Huxley, the materialism of the socialists is in essence no different from
the materialism of the technocrats and capitalists; they are simply two
different sides of the same materialist coin.
Several aspects of
modern life seem to have been very accurately predicted by both Orwell and
Huxley. Orwell’s idea of “New Speak,” for example, the deliberate remoulding
and distortion of the English language by Big Brother, has been rightly
compared to the politically correct manipulation of language that has become
all too familiar in western societies over the past twenty to thirty years. The
political purpose of “New Speak” is to control the thinking of the populace –
not too different in aim from the new terms and words coined by political
correctness. Huxley does not go into the language issue in the same way as
Orwell, though we note too that in the Brave New World certain “offensive”
words – such as “cross” – have been eliminated from public use. Thus for
example Charing Cross Station in London has been renamed “Charing T Station” –
after Henry Ford’s Model T automobile.
Related to the
question of language, both writers foresaw the rewriting of history, or rather
the complete elimination of history in any meaningful sense of the word, in the
totalitarian future. Thus in Big Brother’s world there exists a whole
government department, the Ministry of Truth, whose purpose is the falsification
of history. The Ministry’s task is to destroy real historical documents and
forge others more pleasing to Big Brother. The destruction of historical
consciousness is so complete that even traditional songs and nursery rhymes are
all but forgotten by the populace. A similar situation prevails in the Brave
New World. Here too there is no historical consciousness amongst the people and
in fact all “education” is simply conditioning by the state.
How frighteningly
reminiscent of modern norms, where the “history” curricula in western schools
is increasingly little more than politically correct conditioning!
Another area of
agreement between the two writers centres round the attitude of the elites to
what might be termed the “lower classes.” In Big Brother’s world the lower
classes are described as the “proles,” a vast section of society deliberately
kept in ignorance by the state. In the “prole” areas the state permits a kind
of chaos to reign. Drunkenness and crime are tolerated and even encouraged.
Similarly, in Huxley’s Brave New World the lower classes, from the gammas down
to the epsilons, are actually genetically engineered to be stupid, and they are
furthermore provided with a mind-altering drug, named “soma,” to keep them
thoroughly stupefied and malleable.
Again, we note the
striking correspondence with the norms in many western societies – especially
in the English-speaking world – where a de-educated and essentially feral
“underclass” has been permitted to develop over the past thirty to forty years.
Not only is this underclass utterly ignorant, it is malnourished on a diet of
“pop” culture, drugs and alcohol, and is utterly incapable of breaking free of
the welfare addiction which saps the very life out of it.
Who then was most
right: Orwell or Huxley, and more importantly, why did these two see the future
as totalitarian?
Of the two
dystopian visions, it has to be admitted that, so far, Huxley seems more
correct. This statement is made on the qualification that we understand his
Brave New World to be a comedy and therefore an exaggeration and parody of
reality. Taking this into account, we can see that the emerging totalitarianism
appears in many areas to be very much in conformity with Huxley’s vision. The
hedonism and ignorance encouraged by the modern elites is truly mirrored in the
Brave New World, and the soma consumed by the brain-dead masses is quite
literally paralleled in the mind-altering drugs which plague the working-class
areas of the modern cities. And, so far, the “soft power” exercised by the
Director is more in conformity with the type of totalitarian control exerted by
the western elites than the brutal control exercised by Big Brother. As yet,
there are no concentration camps or Room 101s. Having said that, it needs to be
emphasized that the situation is fluid, and the possibility of a much more
oppressive form of totalitarianism, in the image of Big Brother’s 1984, is one
that cannot be discounted. Over the past twenty years we have witnessed, in
most western societies, a progressive closing down of freedom of speech and
disenfranchisement of the populace. It would take very little, I suggest, to
transform the “soft power” of Huxley’s Director into the “hard power” of Orwell’s
Big Brother.
How then did these
authors, in the 1940s and ‘50s, realize the totalitarian direction of western
societies?
The answer, I
think, is fairly straightforward: They saw in their own time the drift to the
left of the intellectual elites of the West and they simply imagined the
consequences if this drift continued. The deceptive and apparent
“humanitarianism” of socialism made the continuation of this trend highly
likely, particularly in the aftermath of World War II, when the world woke to
the horrors of fascism. (That fascism was itself originally an outgrowth of
socialism was of course all too easily forgotten). The very utopianism of
socialism, particularly in its Marxist guise, is bound to lead to
totalitarianism, as any system which believes itself involved in a project to
“perfect” the world will tend to brook no disagreement.
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