What I like most about Brave New World is that it centers on the disease of human passivity as it's controlled by the higher-ups in society. With 1984What I like most about Brave New World is that it centers on the disease of human passivity as it's controlled by the higher-ups in society. With 1984 there is the possibility for consciousness of the inherent evil of the subversive intolerance of the government, and therefore the possibility for revolution. If only the people would realize their situation! If only the proles could unite against totalitarian tyranny!
With Huxley's fable, however, this consciousness is completely undermined through the fulfillment of the base drives of the majority. There is no reason to rebel, and society can change only through an impossible systematic negation of all the techniques espoused that clamor to fulfill these drives. Anyone who comes to realize the true state of affairs isn't filled with a Herculean wish to revamp it, but can only sigh to himself while secretly saying, "ah, that's just society getting what it wants," and make plans for voluntary exile. This is the cynicism of Huxley given literary flesh. He echoes the Dostoevskian lament through the Grand Inquisitor (alluded to in Brave New World Revisited) that human beings want to be taken care of and provided for, not free. Freedom is too hard, it takes work, and to be human is to take the easy way out.
The grandeur of Huxley is that he wasn't just a novelist, as seems to be the case with creative writers for the last fifty years -- Walker Percy, Anthony Burgess, and a handful of others exempt. "Brave New World Revisited" attests to this fact, as well as other minor philosophical gems, like "The Perennial Philosophy", where he stretches to mysticism, and "The Doors of Perception", where he journals the psychedelic flavor of mescaline. His ruminations are perfectly commensurate with our state today -- where education is in decline, where neohedonism is the game, where it's all about money and fulfillment of drives over truth, etc. --, and the points that shine the most are on propaganda and, well, the distractability of human beings:
"In regard to propaganda 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."
This is the basis of society in Brave New World, and scientific and technological advances (eugenics, hypnopaedia, classical conditioning) are a means to this end. Huxley saw, like Chomsky after him, that you don't need to bludgeon the population in order to coerce it to your preferences. Rather, you manipulate minds. Things are less messy this way....more
I am happy to call myself a Christian, and I am happy to say that this book is the champion of atheistic apologetic literature. Were I an atheist, it I am happy to call myself a Christian, and I am happy to say that this book is the champion of atheistic apologetic literature. Were I an atheist, it would be the champion of my standing, but alas, the irrational draw of grace.
No more the scientism-choked, condescending, semantic hijacking typical of George Smith, Dawkins, and (most recently) the expositional regurgitation of Dan Barker's latest. Here is a philosophical voice ringing with intelligence and humanity, unambiguously inclined to life and the mystery and mystique of life in place of the neurotic clasping for scientific or rationally ascertained truth, concisely and artfully compacting his arguments into barely over two hundred pages of medium-sized font. Comte-Sponville's writing is in the humble spirit of Camus, and everywhere his spirit is similar to his, and everywhere the writing just as poetic, if not more so.
Indeed, Camus is noted for his appendical statement in The Myth of Sisyphus that in religion "man is freed from the weight of his own life. But if I know that, if I can even admire it, I also know that I am not seeking what is universal, but what is true. The two may well not coincide." C.-S. would agree wholeheartedly with this remark; and while his atheism is based in the inability to find God through experience or under the rubric of reason, he admits that theism is admirable ground -- even preferable ground, were it not for uncertainty --, and his own arguments (for and against) are gloriously originally stated. At heart, it isn't God that is needed to explain mystery; rather, mystery is irreducible as mystery: "the existence of being is intrinsically mysterious. This is what needs to be understood -- this, and the fact that the mystery is irreducible." A bit of a metaphysical assumption? Big deal. Metaphysics allows for these assumptions; an atheistic ontology is arguably just as arbitrary as a theistic one. And from C.-S.'s standing, theism has failed at its own criteria (notably the existence of evil with a claimed good God -- no news in the God debate, but forcefully argued by C.-S.), so the ground is open.
At virtually every other page there are hidden incomparable nuggets of immaculately stated wisdom:
"What incites people to commit massacres is not faith; it is fanaticism, whether religious or political.... Horror is numberless, with or without God. Alas, this tells us more about humanity than it does about religion" (p. 76).
"[A:]nything and everything we can say positively about God will bear the mark of anthropomorphism.... But what could possibly be said about God, above and beyond anthropomorphism, if not precisely nothing?" (pp. 106-107).
"Believing in God... is a sin of pride. It is imagining a grand cause for a meager effect" (p. 122).
"Freedom of thought is the only good that is perhaps more precious than peace, for the simple reason that, without it, peace would merely be another name for servitude" (p. 133).
Plenty more. The man is a goldmine, and in addition to his unique statements he effortlessly amalgamates the words of Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Pascal, Montaigne, Spinoza, Camus, and even Heidegger to dress his points, overtly interpreting them with lucidity, very clearly grasping the hearts of their thoughts. And I haven't even begun to speak of the third section, which is an outline of his atheistic spiritualism -- a beautiful metaphysic, donned with the deepest meditations, blazing with originality. The reader must find out for himself.
Of course, for all the wisdom and eloquence compacted in this lucid mind, I don't agree with all of it, and that's fine; what I have is perhaps the best book on a worldview supplemented by atheism, and this is priceless. Andre Comte-Sponville's is the new vision; throw out the American attempts, ignorant of philosophy and trans-scientific thinking. The French intellectuals deserve another historical tally. My highest recommendations for critical analysis of theism, and may all the churchmen crucify me....more
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