Brave New World Revisited, Nomadland

"Brave New World Revisited" (1958): 

-Over-Population: In 1931, when Brave New World was published, I was convinced that there was still plenty of time. The completely organized society, the scientific caste sys­tem, the abolition of free will by methodical condition­ing, the servitude made acceptable by regular doses of chemically induced happiness. Ours was a night­mare of too little order; theirs, in the seventh century A.F., of too much. In the process of passing from one extreme to the other, there would be a long interval, so I imagined, during which the more fortunate third of the human race would make the best of both worlds -- the disorderly world of liberalism and the much too orderly Brave New World. Twenty-seven years later, I feel a good deal less optimistic than I did when I was writing Brave New World. The prophecies made in 1931 are coming true much sooner than I thought they would. The blessed interval between too little order and the nightmare of too much order shows no sign of beginning. In the West, individual men and women still enjoy a large measure of freedom. But even in those coun­tries that have a tradition of democratic government, the desire for this freedom seem to be on the wane. In the imaginary world of my own fable, pun­ishment is infrequent and generally mild. The nearly perfect control exercised by the government is achieved by systematic reinforcement of desirable be­havior, by many kinds of non-violent manipula­tion, both physical and psychological, and by genetic standardization. The answer to these ques­tions must begin where the life of even the most highly civilized society has its beginnings -- on the level of biology. In the Brave New World of my fable, the problem of human numbers in their relation to natural resources had been effectively solved. An optimum figure for world population had been calculated and numbers were maintained at this figure (a little under two bil­lions) generation after genera­tion. In the real contemporary world, the population problem has not been solved. On the contrary it is becoming graver and more formidable with every pass­ing year. It is against this grim biological background that all the political, economic, cultural and psychologi­cal dramas of our time are being played out. This is now the central problem of mankind; and it will remain the central problem certainly for several centuries thereafter. 

How will this development affect the over-populated, but highly industrialized and still democratic coun­tries of Europe? If the newly formed dictatorships were hostile to them, and if the normal flow of raw materials from the underdeveloped countries were de­liberately interrupted, the nations of the West would find themselves in a very bad way indeed. Their in­dustrial system would break down, and the highly de­veloped technology, which up till now has permitted them to sustain a population much greater than that which could be supported by locally available resources, would no longer protect them against the consequences of having too many people in too small a territory. If this should happen, the enormous powers forced by unfavorable conditions upon central govern­ments may come to be used in the spirit of totalitarian dictatorship. Along with a decline of average healthiness there may well go a decline in average intelligence. Indeed, some competent authorities are convinced that such a decline has already taken place and is continuing. "Un­der conditions that are both soft and unregulated," writes Dr. W. H. Sheldon, "our best stock tends to be outbred by stock that is inferior to it in every respect. It is the fashion in some academic circles to assure students that the alarm over differential birth­rates is unfounded; that these problems are merely economic, or merely educational, or merely religious, or merely cultural or something of the sort. This is Pollyanna optimism. Reproductive delinquency is biologi­cal and basic." And he adds that "nobody knows just how far the average IQ in this country [the U.S.A.] has declined since 1916, when Terman attempted to standardize the meaning of IQ 100." To help the unfortunate is obviously good. But the progressive contamina­tion of the genetic pool from which the members of our species will have to draw, is obviously bad. We are on the horns of an ethical dilemma, and to find the middle way will require all our intelligence and all our good will.

-Over-Organization: In a capitalist democracy, such as the United States, it is controlled by what Professor C. Wright Mills has called the Power Elite. This Power Elite directly employs several millions of the country's working force in its factories, offices and stores, controls many millions more by lending them the money to buy its products, and, through its ownership of the media of mass communication, influences the thoughts, the feel­ings and the actions of virtually everybody. We are far in­deed from Jefferson's ideal of a genuinely free society composed of a hierarchy of self-governing units -- "the elementary republics of the wards, the county repub­lics, the State republics and the Republic of the Union, forming a gradation of authorities." We see, then, that modern technology has led to the concentration of economic and political power, and to the development of a society controlled (ruthlessly in the totalitarian states, politely in the democracies) by Big Business and Big Govern­ment. How have individuals been affected by the tech­nological advances of recent years? Dr. Erich Fromm: Our contemporary Western society, in spite of its material, intellectual and political progress, is in­creasingly less conducive to mental health, and tends to undermine the inner security, happiness, reason and the capacity for love in the individual. Our increasing mental sickness may find expres­sion in neurotic symptoms. These symptoms are con­spicuous and extremely distressing. 

The really hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. "Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been si­lenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does." They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their per­fect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted, still cherish "the illusion of indi­viduality," but in fact they have been to a great extent deindividualized. Human beings are a good deal less rational and innately just than the optimists of the eighteenth century supposed. Democratic institutions are devices for reconciling social order with individual freedom and initiative, and for making the immediate power of a country's rulers subject to the ultimate power of the ruled. The fact that, in Western Europe and America, these de­vices have worked, all things considered, not too badly is proof enough that the eighteenth-century optimists were not entirely wrong. Again, no people in a precarious economic condition has a fair chance of being able to govern itself demo­cratically. Liberalism flourishes in an atmosphere of prosperity and declines as declining prosperity makes it necessary for the government to intervene more frequently and drastically. Over-population and over-organization are two condi­tions which deprive a society of a fair chance of making democratic institu­tions work effectively. We in the West have been supremely fortunate in having been given our fair chance of making the great experiment in self-government. Unfortunately it now looks as though, owing to recent changes in our circumstances, this infinitely precious fair chance were being taken away from us.

The power to respond to reason and truth exists in all of us. But so, unfortunately, does the tendency to respond to unrea­son and falsehood -- particularly in those cases where the falsehood evokes some enjoyable emotion, or where the appeal to unreason strikes some answering chord in the primitive, subhuman depths of our being. With the best will in the world, we cannot always be completely truthful or consistently rational. Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by demo­cratic procedures. But the subhuman mindlessness to which the demagogue makes his appeal, the moral imbecility on which he relies when he goads his vic­tims into action, are characteristic not of men and women as individuals, but of men and women in masses. In all the world's higher religions, salvation and enlightenment are for individuals. The kingdom of heaven is within the mind of a person, not within the collective mindlessness of a crowd. The fact that every individual has his breaking point has been known and, in a crude unscientific way, exploited from time immemorial. In some cases man's dreadful inhumanity to man has been inspired by the love of cruelty for its own horrible and fascinating sake. More often, however, pure sadism was tempered by utilitarianism, theology or reasons of state. The effectiveness of political and religious propa­ganda depends upon the methods employed, not upon the doctrines taught. If the indoctrination is given in the right way at the proper stage of nervous exhaustion, it will work. Under favorable conditions, practically every­body can be converted to practically anything. In the Brave New World the soma habit was not a private vice; it was a political institution, it was the very essence of the Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. The systematic drugging of individuals for the benefit of the State was a main plank in the policy of the World Controllers. The daily soma ration was an insurance against personal malad­justment, social unrest and the spread of subversive ideas. 

"It is hard to understand," Dr. Irvine Page wrote, "why it took so long for scientists to get around to investigating the chemical reactions in their own brains." Today, the enzymes which regulate the workings of the brain are being studied. Within the body, hitherto unknown chemical substances such as adrenochrome and serotonin (of which Dr. Page was a co-discoverer) have been isolated and their far-reaching effects on our mental and physical functions are now being investigated. Meanwhile new drugs are being synthesized -- drugs that reinforce or correct or interfere with the actions of the various chemicals. From our present point of view, the most interesting fact about these new drugs is that they temporarily alter the chemistry of the brain and the associated state of the mind without doing any permanent damage. In this respect they are like soma -- and profoundly unlike the mind-changing drugs of the past. For example, opium is a dangerous drug which, from neolithic times down to the present day, has been making addicts and ruining health. The same is true of the classical euphoric, alco­hol. Another stimulant of more recent vintage is amphetamine, better known as Benzedrine. Amphetamine works very effec­tively -- but works, if abused, at the expense of mental and physical health. 

In LSD-25 (lysergic acid diethylamide) the phar­macologists have recently created another aspect of soma -- a perception-improver and vision-producer that is, physiologically speaking, almost costless. This ex­traordinary drug, which is effective in doses as small as fifty or even twenty-five millionths of a gram, has power (like peyote) to transport people into other worlds. Soma was not only a vision-producer and a tranquil­lizer; it was also a stimu­lant of mind and body, a creator of active euphoria. Love is as necessary to human beings as food and shelter and with­out intelligence, love is impotent and freedom unattainable. How can we control the vast impersonal forces that now menace our hard-won freedoms? Consider the problem of over-population. Rapidly mounting human numbers are pressing ever more heavily on natural resources. What is to be done? Obviously we must, with all possi­ble speed, reduce the birth rate to the point where it does not exceed the death rate. Professor Skinner of Harvard has set forth a psy­chologist's view of the problem in his Walden Two, a Utopian novel about a self-sustaining and autono­mous community, so scientifically organized that no­body is ever led into anti-social temptation and, with­out resort to coercion or undesirable propaganda, everyone does what he or she ought to do, and every­one is happy and creative. In France, after the Second World War, Marcel Barbu and his fol­lowers set up a number of self-governing, non-hierar­chical communities of production, which were also com­munities for mutual aid. In London, the Peckham Experiment has demonstrated that it is possible, by coordinating health services with the wider interests of the group, to create a true community even in a metropolis. The methods employed by orthodox educators have proved to be extremely inefficient. Under a scientific dictatorship, education will really work -- with the result that most men and women will grow up to love their positions and will never dream of revolution. There seems to be no good reason why a thoroughly scientific dictatorship should ever be overthrown. -"Brave New World Revisited" (1958) by Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley described Sex and Culture (1934) as "a work of the highest importance". At present, Western society has all the symptoms of a declining civilization. When sexual freedom becomes totally unrestricted, society becomes unstable and collapses. Joseph Daniel Unwin studied 6 civilizations through 5,000 years of history and found a positive correlation between the cultural achievement of a people and the sexual restraint they observe. Sex and Culture was praised by Aldous Huxley: "Unwin's conclusions may be summed up as follows. All human societies are in one or another of four cultural conditions: zoistic, manistic, deistic, rationalistic. Of these societies the zoistic displays the least amount of mental and social energy, the rationalistic the most. Investigation shows that the societies exhibiting the least amount of energy are those where the opportunities for sexual indulgence are the greatest." According to Unwin, after a nation becomes prosperous it becomes increasingly liberal with regard to sexual morality and as a result loses its cohesion, its impetus and its purpose. JD Unwin also infers that legal equality between women and men is necessary to institute before a monogamy union is instituted. One can choose to see Unwin’s work as the foretelling of a doomed American civilization. Whatever the case, the importance of sexual morality in everyday life should not be overlooked due to its strong correlation with civilizational flourishing. Sexual restraint and ethics are not products of an ancient past that progress can suddenly replace; they are arguably the lynchpin of all of the technological and scientific progress of today. Source: ethikapolitika.org

In certain moments, Nomadland makes the nomadic life seem undeniably appealing. We feel the comfort of real community and the intoxicating freedom of life on the road. Fern has stumbled into a genuine American counterculture, liberated from “the yoke of the tyranny of the dollar.” Fern (played by Frances McDormand), is a white Nevadan widow who wanders the back roads of gig economy America in her RV. After the local sheetrock plant where her husband worked shuts down, she chooses to work temporary jobs for the Amazon corporation. Fern seems to be doing penance as she takes us on a tour of American devastation. We see America’s transformation from a capitalist, post-industrial society back to a roughly neo-feudal, socialist one. Laszlo Kovacs’s road movies (Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces) photographed post-Sixties America with awe, whereas Nomadland is a visual lecture teaching America to pity itself. Americans' fear of their civilization's decline stems from Christianity's apocalyptic complex. Niall Ferguson, a Scottish-American historian, argued that Western civilization appeared to have lost confidence in itself because "major universities have ceased to offer the classic 'Western Civilization' history course to their undergraduates. In schools, too, the grand narrative of Western ascent has fallen out of fashion." There are more worries about the increase in immigration, which has changed the demographic structure of the US. This in turn has caused a drop in the numbers of people who believe in Western culture and beliefs. Safa Motesharrei, a systems scientist at the University of Maryland, used a computer model to gain a deeper understanding of the mechanisms that could lead to the collapse of our civilization. In an article entitled "Why We Must Teach Western Civilization," published on National Review in April 2020, the author Andrew Roberts worried that "Western civilization, so important to earlier generations, is being ridiculed, abused, and marginalized, often without any coherent response." Source: www.nationalreview.com