Today is the birthday of English author Aldous Huxley (books by this author), born in Godalming, Surrey (1894). He was the grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, a scientist and man of letters who was known as “Darwin’s bulldog” for his defense of the theory of evolution. Huxley wrote a few novels that satirized English literary society, and these established him as a writer; it was his fifth book, Brave New World (1932), which arose out of his distrust of 20th-century politics and technology, for which he is most remembered. Huxley started out intending to write a parody of H.G. Wells’ utopian novel Men Like Gods (1923). He ended by envisioning a future where society functions like one of Henry Ford’s assembly lines: a mass-produced culture in which people are fed a steady diet of bland amusements and take an antidepressant called soma to keep themselves from feeling anything negative.
Brave New World is often compared with George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948), since they each offer a view of a dystopian future. Cultural critic Neil Postman spelled out the difference in his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death:
“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture. … In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.” WA
"He's best known to us today as the author of the novel Brave New World (1932), about a future in which genetically engineered people take drugs to keep them happy, have sex all the time, and never fall in love." WA
==Aldous Huxley, writer, was born #OnThisDay 1894 https://t.co/kfEoEj6gxf— In Our Time (@BBCInOurTime) July 26, 2019
Reviewed in last Sunday's NYT Book Review:
The Making of ‘1984,’ George Orwell’s Nightmare Vision of a World Without Truth
THE MINISTRY OF TRUTHThe Biography of George Orwell’s “1984”
By Dorian Lynskey
By Lev Mendes
June 5, 2019
Shortly after the presidential inauguration of Donald Drumpf and his counselor’s invocation of “alternative facts,” anxious readers, bracing themselves for the worst, propelled George Orwell’s “1984” back to the top of the best-seller lists. Published in 1949, under the shadow of Hitler and Stalin, the novel projects a nightmare vision of a future in which truth has been eclipsed. Its inventive vocabulary of state power and deception — Big Brother, Hate Week, Newspeak, doublethink, the Thought Police — clearly resonated with the despair of present-day Americans. As does the very term “Orwellian,” used increasingly to describe any number of troubling developments: from Drumpf’s habitual lying to the toxic politicization of the news media; from the expansion of campus speech codes to Silicon Valley’s hijacking of our data and attention (the citizens of “1984” are monitored continuously by “telescreens”).
Orwell’s novel is the subject of Dorian Lynskey’s wide-ranging and sharply written new study, “The Ministry of Truth.” Lynskey, a British journalist and music critic, believes that “1984” — one of the 20th century’s most examined artifacts — is actually “more known about than truly known” and sets out to reground it in Orwell’s personal and literary development. This is just as well, since Orwell, ever suspicious of armchair intellectualism, made a practice of writing directly from experience, to the point of plunging himself into many of the crises of his day.
In 1936, he joined a coalition of left-wing forces opposing Franco in Spain. Intending to fight fascism, Orwell discovered its diabolical twin, Soviet communism, and became, in Lynskey’s words, acutely aware of how “political expediency corrupts moral integrity, language and truth itself.” He left Spain a committed anti-communist — and lifelong adversary of Stalin’s defenders — and spent the World War II years back home in England. In 1946, Orwell moved to the island of Jura, where, at the age of 45, he completed “1984” shortly before succumbing to tuberculosis...
...the meaning of Orwell’s novel has shifted over the decades along with the preoccupations of its readers; and that in our low, dishonest moment, it is “most of all a defense of truth.” Reflecting back on the Spanish Civil War and the falsification of its record, Orwell worried that the “very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world.” Yet he never seems to have resigned himself completely to hopelessness.
Winston Smith, the doomed protagonist of “1984,” inhabits a world in which individuality has been made almost obsolete, history is daily rewritten and reality is fabricated according to the whims of the state. Winston attempts, despairingly and bravely, to rediscover what life was like before the rise of Big Brother. He is shocked that his lover, Julia, is indifferent to the state’s assault on truth — the unreality of the present is all she has known and all she believes ever was or will be. Her complacency is the counterpart to Winston’s energizing despair. In this way, “1984” elevates despair into a sort of necessary condition of truth-seeking. It is here if nowhere else, Orwell suggests, that hope for humanity may lie. nyt
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