When men do what is right in their own eyes without a sense of accountability, they can fall prey to utopian thinking.
Aldous Huxley, to his credit, recoiled at the confident acquiescence of the intelligentsia of his time to the mechanistic, inhuman future envisioned by Wells and Russell and the like. His reaction became Brave New World, a satirical warning against trying to impose perfection in an imperfect way on imperfect people.
Not that Huxley ever abandoned his own particular utopian impulses; rather, he refined them in the light of historical experience. (The Second World War changed a lot of minds.) He wrote about what he had learned during the intervening quarter century in a lengthy essay called Brave New World Revisited.
According to Wikipedia:
‘Brave New World Revisited’ (1958), written by Huxley almost thirty years after ‘Brave New World,’ was a non-fiction work in which Huxley considered whether the world had moved toward or away from his vision of the future from the 1930s. He believed when he wrote the original novel that it was a reasonable guess as to where the world might go in the future. In ‘Brave New World Revisited,’ he concluded that the world was becoming like ‘Brave New World’ much faster than he originally thought.
Huxley analysed the causes of this, such as overpopulation as well as all the means by which populations can be controlled. He was particularly interested in the effects of drugs and subliminal suggestion. ‘Brave New World Revisited’ is different in tone because of Huxley’s evolving thought, as well as his conversion to Hindu Vedanta in the interim between the two books.
The last chapter of the book aims to propose action which could be taken in order to prevent a democracy from turning into the totalitarian world described in ‘Brave New World.’ In Huxley’s last novel, ‘Island,’ he again expounds similar ideas to describe a utopian nation, which is generally known as a counterpart to his most famous work.
Unfortunately, democracies are fragile things (a historical datum Huxley should have been aware of), while representative republics are much sturdier and enduring — that is, as long as they’re able to resist being democratized — but Huxley ignores them in favor of some sort of undefined “democracy.”
Huxley devotes two chapters in Revisited to propaganda, one describing how it’s used in a dictatorship and the other in a “democracy.” Here are a few excerpts from the latter (any passage in [brackets] is our own editorial comment):
Chapter 4: Propaganda in a Democratic Society
Democratic institutions are devices for reconciling social order with individual freedom and initiative, and for making the immediate power of a country’s rulers subject to the ultimate power of the ruled [in theory, at least].
There are two kinds of propaganda — rational propaganda in favor of action that is consonant with the enlightened self-interest of those who make it and those to whom it is addressed, and non-rational propaganda that is not consonant with anybody’s enlightened self-interest, but is dictated by, and appeals to, passion.
Propaganda in favor of action that is consonant with enlightened self-interest appeals to reason by means of logical arguments based upon the best available evidence fully and honestly set forth. Propaganda in favor of action dictated by the impulses that are below self-interest offers false, garbled or incomplete evidence, avoids logical argument and seeks to influence its victims by the mere repetition of catchwords, by the furious denunciation of foreign or domestic scapegoats, and by cunningly associating the lowest passions with the highest ideals, so that atrocities come to be perpetrated in the name of God and the most cynical kind of Realpolitik is treated as a matter of religious principle and patriotic duty ….
The power to respond to reason and truth exists in all of us. But so, unfortunately, does the tendency to respond to unreason and falsehood — particularly in those cases where the falsehood evokes some enjoyable emotion, or where the appeal to unreason strikes some answering chord in the primitive, subhuman depths of our being …. In certain fields of activity men have learned to respond to reason and truth pretty consistently. The authors of learned articles do not appeal to the passions of their fellow scientists and technologists [unless, of course, it concerns “global warming,” nuclear radiation, or red meat]. They set forth what, to the best of their knowledge, is the truth about some particular aspect of reality [true enough, as long as you ignore Climategate]….
“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free,” said Jefferson, “it expects what never was and never will be …. The people cannot be safe without information. Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe.”
Jefferson, it is true, was a realist as well as an optimist. He knew by bitter experience that the freedom of the press can be shamefully abused. “Nothing,” he declared, “can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper.”
Mass communication, in a word, is neither good nor bad; it is simply a force and, like any other force, it can be used either well or ill. Used in one way, the press, the radio and the cinema are indispensable to the survival of democracy. Used in another way, they are among the most powerful weapons in the dictator’s armory [as recent experience, the utter loss of critical objectivity by the media, attests]….
In the totalitarian East there is political censorship, and the media of mass communication are controlled by the State. In the democratic West there is economic censorship and the media of mass communication are controlled by members of the Power Elite [and who would they be?]. Censorship by rising costs and the concentration of communication power in the hands of a few big concerns is less objectionable than State ownership [but only relatively so, since both situations are thoroughly deplorable, with a movement underway these days for them to merge with each other] ….
… the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies — the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.
In the past most people never got a chance of fully satisfying this appetite. They might long for distractions, but the distractions were not provided …. For conditions even remotely comparable to those now prevailing we must return to imperial Rome, where the populace was kept in good humor by frequent, gratuitous doses of many kinds of entertainment — from poetical dramas to gladiatorial fights … and public executions. But even in Rome there was nothing like the non-stop distraction now provided by newspapers and magazines, by radio, television and the cinema [so says Huxley, the old fuddy-duddy].
In ‘Brave New World’ non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature (the feelies, orgy-porgy, centrifugal bumble-puppy) are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation. [How well both major American political parties have understood and encouraged that! If there isn’t a real crisis underway, one will be manufactured shortly as a weapon of mass distraction.]
The other world of religion is different from the other world of entertainment; but they resemble one another in being most decidedly “not of this world.” Both are distractions and, if lived in too continuously, both can become, in Marx’s phrase, “the opium of the people” and so a threat to freedom [implying that faith is unrealistic, undemocratic, and unwelcome to worldly reformers] ….
Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties … A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time … in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those who would manipulate and control it.
In their propaganda today’s dictators rely for the most part on repetition, suppression and rationalization — the repetition of catchwords which they wish to be accepted as true, the suppression of facts which they wish to be ignored, the arousal and rationalization of passions which may be used in the interests of the Party or the State.
As the art and science of manipulation come to be better understood, the dictators of the future will doubtless learn to combine these techniques with the non-stop distractions which, in the West, are now threatening to drown in a sea of irrelevance the rational propaganda essential to the maintenance of individual liberty and the survival of democratic institutions.
You can buy Brave New World Revisited bound together with Brave New World here. You can also read Huxley’s essay online here.
