Further proof that I have the greatest boss ever: we found ourselves enjoying a political sidebar which got even more interesting when he asked me whether I had heard of Neil Postman. I wished I could say yes, but I am a poor bluffer, so I admitted the truth. He went on to describe the reason for his inquiry: Postman's juxtaposition of Huxley and Orwell. I did confess some awareness of these great authors and their most famous works: A Brave New World and 1984, respectively.
So who got it right, Huxley or Orwell? Whose vision of the future was most accurate? My knee-jerk reaction: Orwell. Think of the regulation, the control, the standards, and the conformance. Ironically, tellingly, even non-conformists complain about the same things using the same techniques. Huxley's vision was, comparatively speaking, a Utopia.
Not so fast, says my boss.
Postman's book is called Amusing ourselves to death: Public discourse in the age of show business. Given the title (PhilosFX) and purpose (philosophical musings about life with special effects) of this blog, I can scarcely imagine a more intriguing book title. Postman argues in his book that it was Huxley, not Orwell, who actually got it right, at least for this country. Orwell's post-Soviet world best describes the Taliban at this point in time. And I admit--I am not likely to suffer from a dearth of information in this country. I am far more likely to suffer from the opposite, a flood of information and a gradual dulling of the senses brought about by overexposure. Many people spend too much time watching TV and surfing the net. People can be exposed to so much information that the next bit has no marginal value. It's not censorship or propaganda that will do us in. It's the moment we stop caring whether what we hear or see it true or not.
For more information, I refer the reader to a cartoon based on Postman's work, which can be found at this link: Amusing-Ourselves-to-Death. The same site also offers links to related tid-bits. For example, you can read the foreword from Postman's thought-provoking book. You can watch a 60-minute lecture by Neil Postman on technology and society.
What do you think? Huxley, or Orwell?
Postman's book is available here: http://www.amazon.com/Amusing-Ourselves-Death-Discourse-Business/dp/0140094385
ReplyDeleteLet me say this before I sit down for the hour lecture.
ReplyDeleteIn our post-9/11 America of terrorist witch hunts, there are a lot of similarities to Stalin's regime, upon which Orwell modeled Ingsoc. It takes no stretches of the imagination to find parallels between the evening talk shows and the 2-minute Hate. The "non-fiction prose" that Orwell inserts in the form of The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism (i.e., "The Book") rather accurately describes the political climate of the country (world?) we live in. However, Orwell does not go far enough with the Ignorance is Strength section. This is where Huxley comes out in front.
The government functions as it does because the people let it do so. The TSA can rape us on the way onto our planes, just so long as our Budweiser, Hollister, and Jersey Shore remain untouched. You can convince people to endure and love any level of invasion, humiliation, and deprivation (as Orwell so poignantly displays), but you have to activate their pleasure sensors so that they don't care about the invasion, humiliation, and deprivation. The multi-million dollar distraction industries have their claws in us very deeply, from Palin's blind sloganeering to first-person shooter Army games to movies that we know are going to be horrible (but waste our money on anyway). This is the element of human nature, if there is such a thing, that Orwell underestimates and Huxley emphasizes. As long as people can keep their phones in their pockets, then The Man can do anything he wants.
Orwell may have painted the final picture- "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot crushing a human face forever" (I hope I quoted that correctly) -But we won't get there without Huxley.
Now to find time to watch the lecture...
--Jayson
Jayson,
ReplyDeleteI appreciate the comments! I am especially interested in the desensitizing effect of information overload, and the tendency for people to escape a dreary reality through glitzy entertainment and gratuitous violence. Political discourse during the recent election reflected the values of our society--more like Roman gladiator fights in the Coliseum than Greek debates in the Agora.
I hope you like the lecture as well, and am glad to hear that you are pursuing it. Of course, I am eager to hear your reaction to it.
If the gap between what we pay entertainers and educators is any indicator, humanity is surely doomed. As I see it, the challenge is to come up with a way to extend our run long enough for the next generation to have a decent quality of life. In other words, if we accept that the future is bleak, how do we delay the inevitable? Move to a hidden enclave in the Colorado mountains, a la Ayn Rand's John Galt?
Dave