It has been awhile since I read George Orwell’s novel 1984. I have never read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World until just recently. I ended up signing both books out of the library, although for some reason 1984 was only a three-day loan, so I mostly just scanned it to remind myself what I had previously read. What I remembered most about it is that it is a seriously depressing book. The similarities between the totalitarianism of the Party control of Oceania and the Nazi Party control over Germany is staggering, something I don’t think I quite picked up in high school when I first read it.
Coincidently, a Media Structure and Policy class discussion I had recently was about how propaganda was not considered a “dirty” word until post-World War II. While I’m sure the conduct of the Nazi Party during their reign over Germany was the primary reason, I have to think novels like 1984, with its newspeak mottos of “Peace is War” and “Freedom is Slavery” also probably impacted that turn of opinion.
Whereas 1984 has the government oppressing its people, monitoring them, torturing them, re-educating them, Brave New World’s totalitarianism is in many ways scarier, largely because it takes social ideas or values that we consider to be good and turns them into a negative. Any subject that has opinion, dissent or conflict at its root is banned, controlled or simply sedated in this society. Religion, politics, birth, sex, all of it is modified to ensure standardization. This society is peaceful, but only because it takes away all discussion.
However, reading Brave New World did provide me with a better understanding of Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death and his assertions that western society in particular is trivializing public discourse through television. “Huxley grasped, as Orwell did not, that it is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcoticized by technological diversions. Although Huxley did not specify that television would be our main line to the drug, he would have no difficulty accepting Robert MacNeil’s observation that “Television is the soma of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.” Big Brother turns out to be Howdy Doody.” (111)
Postman concludes his argument by stating that education is at least a partial answer to the triviality of the electronic age. But, is it? As discussed in class by Professor Lipton education and religion is an “ideological state apparatus.” As a citizen I pay taxes, some of which ends up at the local school board, while the curriculum is set by the Ministry of Education, which has incorporated standardized tests in Grades 3, 6 and 9 and a literary test in Grade 10. None of which existed when I attended school. While school offers part of the solution, ensuring involvement in public discourse, taking a stand, being involved, is a mandatory requirement of a good government. When the public en masse chooses to “opt out” of public discourse, they give governments and bureaucracies free reign to rule as they want. And, the first decisions made under this “free reign” will severely limit or eliminate freedoms taken for granted.
Certainly, all three of these novels help make more clear Professor Lipton’s encouragement of the class that we vote (which I did), and his constant assertions that because we are university students “ignorance is no longer an option.”
I think ignorance becomes an easier choice to make not because people do not care about the societies that they live in, but because people are inundated with information that they can not really do anything with. It is a form, perhaps a consequence, of information overload. It serves to immobilize people rather than to mobilize them, which is also a thought that Postman expresses in Amusing Ourselves to Death. A thought with which I am finally beginning to agree.
Work Cited
Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death. New York: Penguin Books, 1985.
Tags: Communications, education, literature, media
