A New Fundamentalism?
I have had many running battles with religious fundamentalists on the web, this does not surprise me. What is surprising however is the reaction from scientists when I write articles critical of alleged progress in science. I am not talking about things like High Definition Television here, though it is not actually advancing civilisation except in a cosmetic way, it does no harm. What I find scary in the stuff coming out of the scientific community is GM food, which produces mixed results in the short term and the long term effects of which are unknown, or the plan mooted by some governments to tackle the epidemic levels of mental illness by putting anti depressants in water supplies.
Such schemes always bring to my mind one of the life changing books I read when young.
Huxley's Drug Fuelled Utopia
In common with Orwell's 1984, forever imprinted on the minds of my generation because of the cover image of a military boot grinding on a human face, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World was a novel that changed the way we viewed the world we lived in. In many ways it inspired aspects of the social revolution of the 1960s as people shrugged off the social controls that had imposed such restrictive conventions on western society.
Now of course the bright young things of the sixties are grown old and creaky, the revolutionary flame grows dim and people are again tricked into conformity by promises of ever improving material benefits if they will only sustain constant economic growth. Consumerism has replaced patriotism in binding us into slavery. Millions of words have been written about Brave New World with its compulsory drug doses, genetic engineering to produce social classes from A to E (Epsilon semi-moron a.k.a trailer park trash) so reminiscent of toady's ABC1 social classifications that have replaced the old aristocracy, upper and lower middle class and the much less stratified working classes. How like the modern world it all seems, with a level of sexual liberation that deems it bad manners to refuse to have sex with anybody who offers, it's genetically engineered "pneumatic" women, psychological manipulation, constant pressure to consume and deep suspicion of any sign of individualism.
The Brave New World Huxley describes is controlled by corporations, the sole purpose of human life is to work and consume to fuels everlasting economic growth and ever increasing profits.
Any attempt by the protagonists to think for themselves can only result in personal catastrophe as the system asserts itself.
The portrayal of the dystopic utopia is accurate though. We do seem to be blundering towards a version of that society. Messing about with nature is never a good idea.
You don't have to take my word for it of course read Huxley's novel of benign totalitarianism, for yourself.
Orwell's Authoritarian Nightmare
Even more chilling, Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four deals with the darker side of tyranny. With its Thought Police (reminiscent of the religious police in Islamic theocracies), Big Brother, Ministry of Love (where people who rebel against the totalitarian regime are "re-educated" by the Thought Police until they learn to love Big Brother again, its permanent war against a vague and nebulous enemy and the sinister Room 101 in the Ministry of Love, the novel presents an image of where we might be led if we reject the doubtful blessings of Brave New World.
"Oh brave new world that has such people in it" is a line from Shakespeare's The Tempest. Often interpreted as a play in which Shakespeare abandon his gift for writing as he senses his talents will wane, it has also been interpreted as a metaphor for the suppression of the old, easy going, humanistic society of rural England by the philosophies and values of the protestant reformation. Either interpretation could be correct and probably both are because Shakespeare was nothing if not multi-layered.
f
