The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [47]
Unlike Orwell, Huxley wasn’t convinced that men were rational creatures who were always acting in their best interest. As he put it in Brave New World Revisited, what was often missing from the social analysis of Orwell and other civil libertarians was any awareness of “man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” Huxley was being unfair to Orwell, however. Orwell did not entirely discount the power of distraction: The Proles, the lowest class in 1984’s three-class social hierarchy, are kept at bay with the help of cheap beer, pornography, and even a national lottery. Still, it was readers’ fear of the omnipotent and all-seeing figure of Big Brother that helped to make Orwell’s arguments famous.
Ever since the fall of the Soviet Union, it has been something of a cliché to claim that Orwell failed to anticipate the rise of the consumer society and how closely technology would come to fulfill its desires. Huxley, too, was chided for underestimating the power of human agency to create spaces of dissent even within consumerist and hedonistic lifestyles, but it is widely assumed that he was the most prescient of the two (particularly on the subject of genetics). “Brave New World is a far shrewder guess at the likely shape of a future tyranny than Orwell’s vision of Stalinist terror in Nineteen Eighty-Four. ... Nineteen Eighty-Four has never really arrived, but Brave New World is around us everywhere,” wrote the British dystopian novelist J. G. Ballard in reviewing a Huxley biography for the Guardian in 2002. “Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right,” is how Neil Postman chose to describe the theme of his best-selling Amusing Ourselves to Death. “[In contrast to Brave New World], the political predictions of ... 1984 were entirely wrong,” writes Francis Fukuyama in Our Posthuman Future. Maybe, but what many critics often fail to grasp is that both texts were written as sharp social critiques of contemporary problems rather than prophecies of the future.
Orwell’s work was an attack on Stalinism and the stifling practices of the British censors, while Huxley’s was an attack on the then-popular philosophy of utilitarianism. In other words, those books probably tell us more about the intellectual debates that were prevalent in Britain at the time than about the authors’ visions of the future. In any case, both works have earned prominent places in the pantheon of twentieth-century literature, albeit in different sections. It’s in criticizing contemporary democratic societies—with their cult of entertainment, sex, and advertising—that Brave New World succeeded most brilliantly. Orwell’s 1984, on the other hand, is to this day seen as a guide to understanding modern authoritarianism, with its pervasive surveillance, thought control through propaganda, and brutal censorship. Both Huxley’s and Orwell’s books have been pigeonholed to serve a particular political purpose: one to attack the foundations of modern capitalism, the other the basis of modern authoritarianism. Huxley, offspring of a prominent British family, was concerned with the increased commercialization of life in the West (he found his eventual solace in hallucinogenic drugs, penning The Doors of Perception, a book that later inspired Jim Morrison to name his rock band The Doors). Orwell, a committed socialist, emerged as a favorite thinker of the Ronald Reagan right; he was “the patron saint of the Cold War,” as the writer Michael Scammell dubbed him. (The Committee for the Free World, the leading neoconservative outfit of the 1980s, even called its publishing unit “the Orwell Press.”)
But two decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, the dichotomy between Orwell and Huxley’s visions for the nature of political control seems outdated, if not false. It, too, is a product of the Cold War era and the propensity to engage in one-sided