Brave New World vs 1984 in 2022
Ninety years ago, Aldous Huxley foresaw what was going to happen to established democracies, while George Orwell’s later nightmare vision remains as true as ever in totalitarian regimes
In a white heat, between May and August 1931, the novelist Aldous Huxley wrote his classic novel Brave New World, with its dystopian vision of the future, the keys of his typewriter hammering out the work in less than nine weeks, in a rented villa in Sanary-sur-Mer in the South of France.
It would appear in print the following year, 1932, ninety years ago. Sixteen years later, in 1948, the ailing and tubercular George Orwell penned his own masterpiece, 1984, in the far less salubrious and sunny surroundings of a farmhouse on the Isle of Jura, off Scotland.
But the two books offered quite different nightmare interpretations of what was to come. Both Brave New World and 1984 were prescient and frighteningly accurate in their own ways, coming from Huxley’s forensically scientific and Orwell’s deeply humanistic and political minds respectively, and both have come true.
To quote the insightful reading of the novels by the late eminent critic of dystopian fiction Neil Postman posited 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 egotism.’
Postman understood that Huxley was warning that we would be ‘drowned in a sea of irrelevance’ in the future, while Orwell saw that ‘the truth would be concealed from us.’ Huxley was a keen spectator of mechanisation and the mass production process which was on the way to reaching its later full capacity in the early 1930s, and he had spent time in factories in both Britain and America, observing the homogeny, profitability, and efficiency those methods provided, but to the detriment of individual expression and feeling as those values were absorbed in societies.
Huxley saw the impact that the internet and social media would have on the world, without predicting the actual tools of the worldwide web, Facebook, and Twitter and all the other platforms. But ninety years ago, he could see that the world was heading that way, and that the danger to our intellectual and socialised culture lay there.
To simplify Postman’s reading of Huxley: we are saturated by information, not deprived of it, but the quality of the information is so poor that we increasingly live in a trivialised society. That was what Huxley's nightmare vision imparted to us, and what makes Brave New World one of the most important novels- or books- of the twentieth century.
Huxley predicted the future plight of many democracies, where free speech allows everyone a voice to a criminal or libel charge threshold, although some would argue that the recent burgeoning ‘cancel culture’ is more 1984 than Brave New World.
Orwell was afraid that we wouldn’t have access to the information we truly needed, as Postman says, that ‘the truth would be concealed from us.’ This runs all through 1984 of course, which has become an infamous description of any totalitarian regime’s grip on its population.
As reported last year in the Washington Post, on 15 March 2021 the reportedly recently-poisoned-with-Novichok Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny got out a message from where he was being held in the Kafkaesque Penal Colony No.2, just over a hundred kilometres east of Moscow, on a trumped-up charge, according to the European Court of Human Rights. Observing the conditions in which he is being held, constantly under surveillance and woken up every hour at night to break him, Navalny said that if ‘somebody upstairs’ read 1984, they might have seen it as a template for Penal Colony No.2 and said, “Yeah, cool. Let’s do this.”’
Surely there can be no greater recognition of Orwell’s vision than that? And with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine since and the blanket stifling of all news about Russia’s true motive and losses, at the risk of imprisonment, joining Navalny, 1984 currently wins the topical literary visionary war.
But both books have been extraordinarily prescient. Huxley's vision of the future in Brave New World is far truer for most of us living in the increasingly trivialised, homogenous, and sheepish democracies of today, whereas Orwell's vision is still a truly relevant and powerful warning against the brutal tentacles of totalitarian regimes still so active in today’s unstable world.
Neil Root is the author of Focus on: Brave New World, a critical study of Huxley’s novel, available from Greenwich Exchange Publishing. Please see: https://greenex.co.uk/home/p/brave-new-world-aldous-huxley
*