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.

Brave New World

Having read it several times before, I decided to consider Aldous Huxley's Brave New World first for this project, as I already had an idea of its content.

Since my last time through Brave New World, I have read 1984, and my feelings this time were informed by the difference between the two dystopias. I'd forgotten just how utopian many of Huxley's ideas are. Even within the theme of technology, most of the advances are actually a benefit to the individual citizen of the World State. The advances in eugenics and ectogenesis (the growing of foetuses outside of the womb) paired with early conditioning techniques mean that living in A.F. 632 is perfectly easy. As long as one never rebels, happiness, health and comfort are guaranteed until old age. Indeed, judging by the ending, even if one rebels, there is no horrifying Orwellian torture chamber - a rebel is sent off to relatively civilised Iceland instead.

My first thought after realising this was - how am I going to write a comparison between the supposed dystopia of Brave New World and all the most worrying elements of the modern day? It would be difficult to argue that getting to your destination faster or staying physically youthful for longer are truly terrible features in the modern day.

There are some less idealistic technological advances in Brave New World though. For instance, humans in the 21st century are drawn to the idea of natural, organic foods and clothing, where the World State favours surrogates and synthetic materials; we mostly avoid drugs when we can, where citizens of the World State turn to soma at every opportunity; we value emotional lows because we know they contrast with and intensify the highs, where any emotional extreme is rejected in the novel for infantile contentment. These are probably the angles I will take when writing that final essay: are we moving towards the drugged stupor of Brave New World's population? Where synthetics are concerned, what of our inexhaustible supplies of plastic bags, our faux-fur, dietary supplements and E-numbers? Questions hang over the need for medication in treating emotional disorders like bi-polar and ADHD, yet medications are prescribed nevertheless; alcohol and cigarettes keep us drugged of choice. As for the rejection of emotional extremes, why else do we watch over four hours of television a day? It may be unfair to class television as a completely emotionally detached process, but added to the hours spent on the internet and listening to the radio, how much of our time are we spending inactive and pleasantly unconcerned with our own lives, switching on the TV to tune out our problems in the same way Huxley's people would take a "half-gramme holiday"?

(Of course, my stats on the media there come from The Mail Online and The Guardian, and newspapers have a terrific reputation for having fun with facts. I sense my research into the modern world will be one long series of checking unverifiable claims, but, hey, it has to be done.)

The ethically contentious ideas of eugenics and scientifically implemented conditioning will also be interesting to examine in the context of the Western world. In Brave New World, social tiers have been created, from Alphas to Epsilons, and each tier has its own unique set of jobs, its own average height; each type is provided with differently-coloured clothing and treated differently. An interesting site called Human Genetics Alert attempts to address the ethics of real-life developments in eugenics, and keep advances in the public eye, so that legislation taking us closer to dystopian eugenics cannot be implemented covertly. The Nazis put paid to a century of eugenics when they took it to prejudicial levels well before the world was ready, but it seems the ideas are coming back, particularly with the popularisation of IVF treatments, questions on "designer babies" and cloning, and scientific sex-selection techniques. As for more general conditioning, it is one of the things the human race has always been pretty good at, though it must be getting easier to condition a population due to the aforementioned presence of the media in our lives and the reverence for science that recent secularisation has encouraged.


This is a very interesting video. It's a discussion from 'Daybreak' in 2010 about a couple choosing to genetically engineer their child. Perhaps, somewhere now, there is a blue-eyed, brown-haired little boy with two dads who was 'incubated' in a surrogate mother in Los Angeles, and who knows? maybe they dress him in khaki.