Fahrenheit 451

I remembered Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury not being as good as Orwell and Huxley, despite its reputation as being a classic of the dystopian genre. Overwhelmingly, on my second read of this book, my opinion was confirmed. Bradbury's rather clumsy (or expressionist) writing style and sometimes difficult-to-follow narrative pace were a shock to the system after the beauty of Orwell's prose. However, it did cover some useful ideas which support those in 1984 and Brave New World.

Fahrenheit 451 focuses on Huxley's primary idea that the human race has an "endless appetite for distractions", only where Huxley visualises orgies and ever-more-complex versions of golf, Bradbury's distractions are a little bit closer to home. Books are considered a waste of time and burned, while four-wall walk-in television 'parlours' provide twenty-four hour entertainment on programmes featuring characters who are affectionately named "the relatives" or "the family". These soap operas feature mind-numbing domesticities and silly disputes. (Most of the US soaps Bradbury could have based this on were not around until after 1960, so this national soap-opera fixation was quite prophetic.)

Of course, Bradbury had an advantage over Huxley in predicting a technological revolution: he wrote Fahrenheit 451 in 1953, and between 1931 and '53, jet engines, helicopters, photocopiers, LSD and colour television were all added to Western civilisation, along with credit cards, super-glue and video tapes. Basically, if anyone was in doubt in 1931, then by 1953, it was pretty certain that this world was becoming more mechanised and electrified by the day, and so dystopian literature could be adjusted in accordance if it wished to project futuristic images, or warn of the potential downfall of man.

I'll concede, Fahrenheit 451 does cleverly bring together elements of a totalitarian state and a democracy, suggesting that the Orwell/Huxley dichotomy is not an inevitable one: perhaps it's true that endless distractions could be brought together with iron-fisted rule to make the 'perfect' controlling state. Symbolic of the whole balance of things, in Fahrenheit 451, books are burned, but they needn't be really, because nobody can be bothered to read them anyway. The intellectualism that goes up in flames is a mere token, because the masses are complacent with their sleeping pills, their 'beetle' cars that can hurtle along the motorway at hundreds of miles an hour, and their interactive virtual realities.

I've covered it to an extent in the Brave New World post, but it's worth reiterating that this is very much a reflection of our Britain now, our America, and to an extent, all modern democracy. The people can vote, but why bother? They have video games, TV, warm beds and full stomachs. US election turnout was at 63.1% in 1960, and now it is at around 56.8%, which means many millions of people have broken their forefathers' voting legacy, and therefore accepted dictatorship - for if a party rules with less than 50% of the population's vote, then they have no literal majority. The president of the USA is ruling over general disinterest, making decisions 'for the people' without the people having confirmed their support. As it happens, the turnout had already dropped to a low in 1972 of 55.2%, which coincides nicely with the year that over 50% of US households had a colour TV set for the first time in history. Whilst this is only correlational and ignores other factors, it's an interesting first step in analysis of the depoliticisation of the Western World. It follows common sense, of course - our schemas tell us that there must be a connection - but alas, stereotypes cannot be evidence.

Huxley vs Orwell: whose picture is more reflected in today's society?

I read in an opinion in a book called The Net Delusion a week or two ago that suggested Huxley's Brave New World is a better comparison with the West in the modern day than Orwell's 1984 because it examines the flaws of democracy, where Orwell examines totalitarianism. Overall, in the West, a semblance of democracy is winning. Brave New World is a land of conditioned submissiveness, where everyone is happy in their subservience, each individual a functional and uncomplaining unit in a homogenised population, where Orwell considers a land where its citizens cower before their masters feeling repressed dissent, under a state that reads people's thoughts to keep them in line, and tortures them back onto the straight and narrow if they stray.

In a letter to Orwell, Huxley wrote: "My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and that these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World." The pair quibbled about the nature of the future because Orwell was drawing on oppressive governments who would stamp on their citizens' rights, where Huxley was drawing on liberal societies where the lack of suffering would lead to mass complacency about political ideology.

This strange semi-fictional mock-up interview with Orwell presents Orwell's view on the future, based on his comments on 1984, showing up the differences between the two books: you could not say of Brave New World that it was comparable to 'a boot stamping on a human face forever'. Brave New World is a picture of a smiling face on a soma holiday. The differences are nicely summarised in a lovely, patronising cartoon here.


Having said this, both books address collectivism. In both, the individual means nothing, and the state and population mean everything. However, Huxley's considers collectivism in consumerism, a world built on consumption: everyone is equal in that they must use lots of stuff and be resigned to infantile pleasures. Orwell's world is built on under-consumption: everyone must be kept on the breadline in order to preoccupy them with their basic needs, filling their hungry stomachs with hatred, distrust and misdirected anger at a shared enemy. Looking at it from this angle, it is clear which more represents our Western world now: we are overeating, consuming vast amounts of goods, using alcohol and cigarettes prolifically. Even during an economic crisis, we have a lot more to lose than our chains - enough, in fact, to be comfortable, and spending. The power we have submitted to is the highstreet shop, not the government - indeed, it only takes a hasty Google to find that 80% of British voters say they do not trust politicians. This is the World State, not Oceania.

Orwell's book is also harder to compare to the modern day in its technological advances because a lot of the information you'd need to compare it to is incredibly confidential. No government body is going to publish how many of our internet histories it spies on - we can only ever guess, or invent (often hilariously hyperbolic) conspiracy theories. CCTV cameras are deliberately covertly placed, or they'd get vandalised; phone hacking is not something you find out about until, maybe, your arrest (or when you see your dirty linen across a double page of the Daily Star). Places where torture and execution are carried out definitely exist, but Guantanamo Bay and similar prisons are shrouded in mystery, their true conditions glimpsed only occasionally, to temporary public horror.

However, we can make some everyday comparisons. We can carry out two way video calls (see Skype) on machines which function very like telescreens, even if we can turn our computers off, where citizens of Oceania are subject to permanent scrutiny. There is a kind of permanent scrutiny of our public behaviour, through CCTV, though we still have private lives. Then again, sometimes what feels private isn't: Google keep a log of everything that has been searched, personal or not. Even if it is not for the government, corporations govern behaviour too, through targeted advertising and censorship. It's all spying, after all. There is even a trickle of research into mind-reading, the primary aim of the Thought Police (unrealistically efficient as they are in 1984). On the other hand, this usually requires probes of some kind, and so it has a long way to go before a fluttering thought of dissent could be picked up from a screen on a far wall.

All in all, I felt that 1984 was a masterpiece, if not a realistic presentation of the modern world as I know it. I'm sure there are states which are utilising modernity to Orwellian ends, but they could never achieve it. The human race's aims are too disparate for that; Orwell's Oceania relies on the complicity of Eastasia and Eurasia. Ironically, to achieve such a dictatorship, the whole world would have to work together, and I just can't see that happening. If anything, the impossibility of a unified totalitarian world is more of a sad reflection on humanity than if it were achievable.

Maybe. Actually, no.

Zamyatin, Huxley and Orwell: Science in Dystopian Fiction

In dystopian literature, one of the principle themes is technology. The soulless, miserable worlds depicted in the books are often soundtracked by the unthinking hum of machines. Listening to my computer hum right now, instant parallels suggest themselves; but did Huxley, Orwell and Zamyatin really have a point when they implied that the fruits of technology will lead us to a dystopian world?

Just before George Orwell was born, the first radio receiver had received its first transmission. To think, that was just over a century ago, and since then, the speed of scientific advance has, well, rocketed. The Wright brothers came along with their plane in 1903; Einstein thought up his theory of relativity in 1905, a year after the first tractor was patented. In 1908, the first Model T car was sold, followed in 1910 by Edison's Kinetoscope, an early film projector. Then of course there were tanks, zippers, gas masks and stainless steel, toasters, circuits and early robots - and all before 1920.

New inventions were flooding the market, making daily chores easier, entertainment easier, warfare easier. With this speed of advance, the average person had barely a moment to rest between buying the newest time-savers. Governments trialled their newest weapons during the destructive First World War, and at the same time, plied their people with all the most inventive methods of propaganda. It was certainly a time of great change, but with any change, there comes a backlash.

Dystopian literature can be seen, partly, as the backlash to this rapid technological change. Added to this, developments in political ideology that came with Marx's socialism and developments in economics that came with mass production and importation also had to have their backlash. Jules Verne and H.G. Wells had brought us the first recognisably modern European Science Fiction in the 19th century, but nothing quite rivalled the explosion of dystopian concepts in the early 20th century: suddenly, writers were clamouring to portray unpleasant worlds as a comment on their rapidly changing reality. A global disregard for human life during the First and then the Second World War was bound to leave the individual feeling marginalised, and with emotionless technology increasingly favoured over human hard work, there was nothing for it but to speak up.

One of the earlier texts I am studying came from Russian-born author Yevgeny Zamyatin. A student of naval engineering and a Bolshevik, Zamyatin took part in the Russian socialist revolution of 1905, and so experienced immense political change first-hand. His novel We was written in 1921, after he had witnessed the devastating effects of World War One. The book depicted a world in which no individuality was permitted, with numbers instead of names, propaganda keeping people in line and the whole world governed by One State. This is a clear precursor of books such as Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's 1984.

Aldous Huxley, born in the UK in 1894, claims that he had not so much as heard of We when he wrote his career-defining Brave New World (1932), though satirical writer Kurt Vonnegut insisted that its plot must have been "cheerfully ripped off" from Zamyatin's work. Huxley's book is perhaps more confused in its intentions than We, because in many ways, the reality of the World State is utopian. There is no illness, misery or suffering. Yet, one cannot help but feel that its restrictive, unchanging blandness is grotesque. The world he portrays is defined by its technological advances - all the drugs and entertainment and synthetic materials - and yet it restricts all future development to maintain the new social equilibrium.

George Orwell, by contrast, cannot be said to have created any sort of utopia in 1984 (1949). Orwell proved himself a critic of a whole host of ideologies across his writing, but 1984 is one of his most disturbing and lastingly relevant novels. Airstrip One, or England, is a dirty, miserable world of paranoia and unending war. People are 'vaporised' and erased from history if they overstep any of the government's many lines. Thinking anything unorthodox is punishable by death. Through the use of constant surveillance technology and perpetual revision of history, freedom has become slavery.

These are the three texts I am going to focus on during my study, though Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, This Perfect Day by Ira Levin, Anthem by Ayn Rand and The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster are all useful references as far as technological advance is concerned. Since that radio received that first transmission in 1901, how much closer to an Orwellian dystopia has science brought us? Medicine, computer, AI and war technology have advanced beyond those authors' wildest dreams, but were their predictions about the effects correct? Are we living in a scientific dystopia?