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| We were keeping our eye on 1984. But it’s Brave New World we should have feared instead. Photograph: Flickr/Urban Integration |
My dad predicted Trump in 1985 – it's not Orwell, he warned, it's Brave New World
The ascent of Donald Trump has proved Neil Postman’s argument in
Amusing Ourselves to Death was right. Here’s what we can do about it
The Guardian | 2 February 2017
[excerpts]
This was, in spirit, the vision that Huxley predicted way back in
1931, the dystopia my father believed we should have been watching out
for. He wrote:
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture.
[Theary Seng: Think of the forgotten names and faces killed during the almost
complete darkness of occupation, particularly during the K5 Genocide as
you read the following.]
“Television is a speed-of-light medium, a
present-centered medium,” my father wrote. “Its grammar, so to say,
permits no access to the past … history can play no significant role in
image politics. For history is of value only to someone who takes
seriously the notion that there are patterns in the past which may provide the present with nourishing traditions.”
Later in that passage, Czesław Miłosz, winner of the Nobel prize for
literature, is cited for remarking in his 1980 acceptance speech that
that era was notable for “a refusal to remember”; my father notes Miłosz
referencing “the shattering fact that there are now more than one
hundred books in print that deny that the Holocaust ever took place”.
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