I’ve begun reading Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. My summer was humming along a little too placidly, and I yearned for a dystopian escape. I wanted a trip down the rabbit hole. Anything to get away from the sunny mundane. 50 pages in I am delighted and disturbed to find much of my current reality staring back at me.
Published in 1931, Brave New World shows a technocratic civilization centered in London a few hundred years in the future. Everything, from test-tube birth (“decanting”) to genetic endowment to an individual's place in society, is managed by a centralized bureaucracy. There’s no need for private property, as the proper balance of supply and demand is pre-determined.
Social classes have been turned into scientific cases. Alphas, the intellectual elite, run the society. Following them are skilled intellectual workers, Betas. Then three levels of mass produced menial laborers in descending order: Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons. Each caste is subdivided into “pluses and minuses.” Everyone, down to the lowest Epsilon has a productive, (progressive?) role. Caste-specific cliches are embedded through sleep therapy: "When the individual feels, the community reels."
The family is abolished. Old, “viviparous” motherhood (birth, breastfeeding) is repulsive. Henry Ford, the creator of the assembly line, has replaced God as a cultural touchstone. Monogamy is peculiar and casual safe sex is encouraged starting in early childhood, for puberty has been moved up to ages 4-6. Stress is relieved by Somma, an organic drug which creates feelings of bliss and oneness with all living things. Pleasure and progress are twin goals.
Huxley, a pacifist, and humanist, was far from a Romantic conservative defending god and family from evil progress. Rather, he was a progressive alarmed by the casually elitist and eugenicist views within the broader progressive movement.
I am piqued by the slogans “sententiously” (as Huxley would say) spouted by many “remains” in the Brexit debate: Remain Fabulous. Unity in diversity. Love not Leave. Say no to hate it's time to create.
From reading most mainstream post-mortems, one gets the impression that Brexit is the hand surging from the grave at the end of the horror movie; a ghost thwarting what seemed to be sure progress. The ghost is clear: Old white and racist. The EU represents international solidarity and cooperation. Brexit? The bad old days.
The EU’s brutal austerity imposed on Greece and other southern European countries is brushed aside in this narrative. Few mention that since the EU’s creation real wages have either stagnated or declined across its member states; only the rich have seen exponential growth. Most disturbingly, many seem unconcerned with the EU’s essentially anti-democratic structure: its massive bureaucracy is mostly self-appointed. Economist Yanis Varoufakis, former Greek finance minister, describes the EU as an intentional “democracy-free zone”
“The EU was in fact set up primarily as a cartel of heavy industry, later on co-opting the farmers, primarily the French farmers. And its administration was that of a cartel – it was never meant to be the beginning of a republic or a democracy where ‘we, the people of Europe’ rule the roost...I was astonished to hear the German finance minister say to me, verbatim, that elections cannot be allowed to change established economic policy. In other words, that democracy is fine as long as it does not threaten to change anything!”
By reducing the Brexit debate to inclusiveness vs xenophobia, genuine criticism of this sort is elided. Banal slogans like “come together” are deliberate thought-terminating cliches, meant to prey on a vague need for community, not make an argument. How should we come together?
It's natural to cling to cliches. We all do it; out of laziness, confusion, and for political gain. But, the more we think in these cliches, the more we conveniently substitute them for original, individual constructions, the more we flirt with totalitarianism.
George Orwell demonstrated how meaningless and hackneyed language is used to dull critical thought and compel conformity and obedience across the political spectrum in his essay, Politics, and the English Language:
“Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants were driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.”
Vivid mental pictures can be unpleasant. It is often easier to paint over them with layers of comfortable gloss. But, if comfort is what we’re after we might as well start in that Brave New World and forget about our petty differences.
