Aldous Huxley: Prophet of our brave new digital dystopia

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http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/11/22/aldous-huxley-prophet-of-our-brave-new-digital-dystopia/


CS Lewis may be getting a plaque. But Huxley, for his foretelling of a society that loves servitude, is the true visionary

On 22 November 1963 the world was too preoccupied with the Kennedy assassination to pay much attention to the passing of two writers from the other side of the Atlantic: CS Lewis and Aldous Huxley. Fifty years on, Lewis is being honored with a plaque in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey, to be unveiled in a ceremony on Friday. The fanfare for Huxley has been more muted.

There are various reasons for this: The Chronicles of Narnia propelled their author into the Tolkien league; Shadowlands, the film about his life starring Anthony Hopkins, moved millions; and his writings on religious topics made him a global figure in more spiritual circles. There is a CS Lewis Society of California, for example; plus a CS Lewis Review and a Centre for the Study of CS Lewis & Friends at a university in Indiana.

Aldous Huxley never attracted that kind of attention. And yet there are good reasons for regarding him as the more visionary of the two. For one of the ironies of history is that visions of our networked future can be bracketed by the imaginative nightmares of Huxley and his fellow Etonian George Orwell. Orwell feared that we would be destroyed by the things we fear – the state surveillance apparatus so vividly evoked in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Huxley’s nightmare, set out in Brave New World, his great dystopian novel, was that we would be undone by the things that delight us.

Huxley was a child of England’s intellectual aristocracy. His grandfather was Thomas Henry Huxley, the Victorian biologist who was the most effective evangelist for Darwin’s theory of evolution. (He was colloquially known as “Darwin’s Bulldog”.) His mother was Matthew Arnold‘s niece. His brother, Julian and half-brother Andrew both became distinguished biologists. In the circumstances it’s not surprising that Aldous turned out to be a writer who ranged far beyond the usual preoccupations of literary folk – into history, philosophy, science, politics, mysticism and psychic exploration. His biographer wrote: “He offered as his personal motto the legend hung around the neck of a ragged scarecrow of a man in a painting by Goya: Aún aprendo. I am still learning.” He was, in that sense, a modern Voltaire.

[cali]

1. I agree with that article, but I think EM Forster gets even less credit

for being a visionary in same vein- and it wasn't apparent just in his rather lousy science fiction which doesn't even begin to measure up to Huxley's.

Forster was, I think, even more prophetic and his grasp of human nature is a big part of that.

http://www.abebooks.com/blog/index.php/2012/02/21/e-m-forster-science-fiction-visionary/

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2. +1

[bemildred]

3. Alduous Huxley:

"Morality is always the product of terror; its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others, because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty." - Aldous Huxley, author of the required-reading-list classic, Brave New World.

One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfils our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous. Sweet and decorous to murder, lie, torture, for the sake of the fatherland.
Eyeless in Gaza -- Aldous Huxley 1936

Faith's just organized and directed stupidity. It may remove a mountain or two by dint of mere obstinate butting; but it's blinkered, it can't see that if you move mountains, you don't destroy them, you merely shove them from one place to another. -- A.H. Eyeless in Gaza

Means determine ends; and must be like the ends proposed. Means intrinsically different from the ends proposed achieve ends like themselves, not like those they were meant to achieve. Violence and war will produce a peace and an social organization having the potentialities for more violence and war. -- A.H. Eyeless in Gaza

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4. excellent. nt

[bemildred]

5. A brilliant mind.

There was a period long ago when I read everything of his I could find.

In retrospect, considering the likes so Huxley, Orwell, and Turing, to name a few, I am led to wonder what they might have done in a less corrupt, puritanical, and reactionary society than the tail end of the British empire.

Of course the same thoughts apply to what has been done here in the USA, my home, these last 50 years.

[xchrom]

6. i can never turn things over in my mind -- the way those guys could.

so nimble -- turn the thing this way - turn it that -- and wow see what it revealed.

[bemildred]

7. It's a mystery all right. But then everything is, when you get down to it.

Like that first orgasm. Wow! Who knew there was something that cool about life?

Who knew you could have that much fun just sitting there thinking, playing with things in your head?

[xchrom]

8. LOL! i thought i had broken something. nt

[MisterP]

9. Lewis and Huxley were quite opposite--but they couldn't help but describe the same world,

and the same future--under the NICE face of technocracy and the smiling guise of advertising and consumerism, they descried the unbeating heart of a totally meritocratic system that'd end up in an oligarchy putting 19th-century East European serfdom to shame, of a conformism that made the Inquisition look hippie, of people manipulated most perfectly by freedom but that removed any drive from without or within

it's a world that reduced everything to a number value and enforced a fundamental sameness to every unique thing and being

and it's our world