|
Hard and soft totalitarianism, sexual control, technology, etc.
[COR version: At least three ways to lose freedom -- a fascist government stamps it out, people give it up voluntarily because they're too vapid and shallow to care about it, or people find themselves unable to do much of anything when their technological aids break down. Works by Orwell, Huxley, Putnam, and Forster discussed.]
Orwell's 1984 shows life in a society drenched in political suppression of dissent, complete with perpetual warfare, rewriting of history, and child informants. Huxley's Brave New World shows another kind of society, one in which those protecting the status quo needn't suppress dissent simply because dissent no longer exists. Both of these societies are totalitarian: they construct a rigid hierarchy of power that is kept in place by overseeing and tampering with every area of the life of the individual. For all the apparent freedom and lack of force in Brave New World, the hierarchy is no less rigid than that in 1984: the difference is that people are kept in their places through "soft" conditioning rather than raw force.
The totalitarian regimes in both books are very concerned with the sexual lives of their citizens, but they take very different approaches to the "problem" of sexuality. The regime in 1984 is an anti-sexual one; it tries to redirect sexual energy toward aggressively patriotic behavior and party loyalty. Sex is seen as a dirty and regrettable necessity, good primarily for increasing the number of workers and soldiers. In Brave New World, the managers of society use a different tactic: they encourage "free love," sexual behavior without limits, inhibitions, or attachments, the goal being that citizens will exist in a state of diffuse and amiable lustfulness instead of experiencing the jealous and sometimes violent passion of exclusive love. Sex is seen as entertainment, a fun way to pass the time but never to be taken seriously.
Because the attitudes of the two societies toward sex are so different, one might miss that the anti-sex measures in 1984 and the pro-sex measures in Brave New World have precisely the same purpose: the discouragement of any loyalty that might interfere with a citizen's allegiance to the state and to the prevailing social order. Huxley made the important point that freedom may be just as threatened by our own tendency to fill life with momentary pleasures and diversions as it is by dictators swooping down and crushing all resistance. The danger is not just that critical thought might be repressed, but that it might languish and die all on its own; that instead of fighting for freedom and losing, we might simply cease caring about freedom and give it up without any fight at all. And Brave New World presents us with questions: Is a right important even if nobody cares whether he has it? Might an overwhelmingly happy society still be unjust, even evil?
Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone suggests that the decline in civic participation, which he documents with sociological data, may be connected to the increasingly individualized technologies of entertainment. The point he makes is that engaging with other people face to face on a serious level is tough: people are prickly, they have lots of interests and concerns of their own, interests which may work against or contradict ours. We can instead opt for a limited experience of the world and of other people by "logging on;" flip on the TV and the net, get your daily dose of humanity, then turn it all off when it gets too tiring or inconvenient. The feeling of community is on tap, so drink as much as you like -- but no more.
In 1909 E.M. Forster wrote a story called "The Machine Stops." This story presents a third way that freedom might disappear. The people in the story are not repressed by a militarist regime as in 1984, nor do they dissolve their critical faculties in a bath of mindless pleasure as in Brave New World; instead, they grow to become utterly dependent on an enormous technological apparatus called "the Machine." In this world, humans spend most of their time by themselves in small hexagonal rooms. Each of these rooms is equipped with both necessities and entertainments: food, clothing, a bath, music, all available on demand. The Machine provides all of these things. The Machine needs repairs only rarely, and when it does need them there is a "Mending Apparatus" by which the Machine can repair its own parts. Humanity in this world has become a shriveled, anemic version of its former self. People depend so much on the Machine that they no longer recognize their own dependence; to them, the idea that things could be otherwise is simply unthinkable.
But all is not well for the residents of Forster's world, because one day the Machine stops. It needs to be repaired, but the trouble is that the Mending Apparatus itself has failed and no one knows how to fix it. In the chaos that results, one of the story's characters, Kuno, exits the Machine, and as he walks on to green grass under the open sky, he realizes the freedom and beauty of the natural world, a freedom and beauty that mankind has willingly denied itself in the name of comfort.
Each of these stories touches on the theme of lost balance, for at the heart of totalitarianism is a refusal of moderation, a demand that this imperfect and inconvenient world meet all of our demands right now, whatever it takes. A society may harden into oppression under a dictator, erasing every bit of individual liberty in the name of patriotism or ideology, as worked out by Orwell and many writers since -- but perhaps it may just as easily lose something essential in the shallow and thoughtless pursuit of each passing desire, or in the solipsism of technological convenience and safety.
|
.
