It was not an early start and when I turned on the radio in the bathroom I was not immediately ready for the intelligent and informative discussion that was taking place between Melvin, Lord Bragg and David Bradshaw, Reader and Tutor in English Literature at Worcester College, University of Oxford; Daniel Pick, Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London; and Michèle Barrett, Professor of Modern Literary and Cultural Theory at Queen Mary, University of London. It was the latest of the 300 programmes in the series In Our Time, BBC Radio 4 which commenced in 1999. I will leave to another occasion talking about the extraordinary Melvin Bragg, author and presenter of the important programme on the Arts, the South Bank Show, as well as In our Time.
I do not understand why I have not checked before and found that there is now a dedicated internet site to the series within the BBC radio 4 umbrella site with the ability to listen to 100 science subject discussions, 30 plus on religion,40 plus philosophy, 70 plus history and over 70 plus cultural. Now the plan is to catch up on those programme missed and on others I wish to hear again and these will take precedence over West Wing, the history of Jazz in America and the 4400, the to be read stack of books and random film and programme searching over the next five years or so! I know of only one other matter which could deflect from this change in priorities, such is the significance of the discovery.
The subject today was the novel by Aldous Huxley, Brave New World written before the war and therefore before the nature of Hitler’s Fascist state became fully understood. It is several decades since I read the book and saw the 1980 TV film and the TV series 1998 and I learnt from the programme that a film is being made and I quickly found a free online edition of the book and the important essay Brave New World Revisited which Aldous published in 1958.
At first I remembered very little considering the influence which the 1931 book had on me at the time of reading but as soon as I commenced I immediately found myself contesting what I thought was the view being expressed that Huxley had written about a Dystopian society. (Dystopia, the opposite of Utopian, is not a word I had come across before). The book is about a World State order, limited to a population of 2000 million and where people are test tube created, you face severe penalties if you conceive a child naturally, although sex is encouraged but ongoing relationships are not and any time you begin to feel low, lonely and such like you take a happy pill. You are educated in your sleep which reminds of the recent radio four play in which the created child can be frozen for as long as you like during which time it is educated according to the programme you have bought.
From birth you are allocated a position in life at one the functioning levels with the Alphas at the tops and the Epsilon’s the lowest. Everyone lives a good life in their allotted function until the age of sixty when they experience a painless death which everyone is conditioned to expect and not fear. Everyone is continually conditioned by the state which uses the latest technological means of propaganda and reinforcement. There is only exceptional dissent and all lives are stable as is the international state. There are reservations for those called savages and they are drawn as poor, unhappy, smelly, anti social and such like and one of them enters the state, investigates, poses questions including questions about his own life and that on the reservations. There is also the Falkland Island where the occasional conditioned misfit is banished
Understandably the starting position of the intellectuals on the programme, all self defined Alphas, me thinks, was to express horror at the idea of being controlled, manipulated and slotted into activity in this way. However Lord Bragg rightly challenged this reaction saying that if one was confined to being a poor paid cleaner, assembly line machine operator and the rest of the activities which the majority of citizens are required to undertake then the provision of much described in Brave New World is desirable and Utopian in concept. There are no wars or people dying from hunger for example. People do not experience the present horrors of dying from some disease, terrorist atrocity, anti social or careless driving and they do not take their own lives because of loneliness, unhappiness or mental disturbance. There are no sex crimes or crimes of passion. Men and women play equal roles in society within their allotted sphere.
My own experience of being a nonconformist is that one hungers to become a genuine conformist but fortunately remembers what it was like to live all the time in a conformist environment and to be controlled by conformists. According to the discussion Huxley, in Brave New World revisited, admitted his views had changed from his knowledge of how the world had developed and his own experience of life. Later when taking drugs in the USA he wrote the Island which is another reappraisal.
Wikipedia has included three of the possible sources for the concept of Brave New World with one of these mentioned in the programme, the first from the Shakespeare’s Tempest O Wonder! How many Godly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world! That has such people in’t”. Emile Zola in Germinal, a book which I also possess, says, “He laughed at his earlier idealism, his schoolboy vision of a brave new world in which justice would reign and men would be brothers,” and then in 1919 Rudyard Kipling wrote in the poem Gods of the copybook headings, “ And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins, when all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins.”
The programme also touched on why Huxley wrote the book as and when he did and again Wikipedia expands upon this but includes the main points that he was reacting against the Americanisation of Europe and his dislike of populist culture which he regarded as breeding conformity although this included the cinema which from my experience can be both subservient and subversive, and is also said to have opposed group singing which again has to be conformist in the sense of people working as a team rather than creating individualistic sounds but the group sound can also reach the greater heights of musical individuality from Handel’s Messiah to Mama Mia and also be subversive such as the musicals Hair and Jerry Springer.
Much of what the book expressed concern about has come to pass or we are at the cusp with stem cell research, abortion, body part surgery and rejuvenation, proposals to make assisted suicide legitimate, the development of a pill to prolong sexuality, the extent to which the media and advertising can manipulate public standards and definitions of pleasure and pain, the use of television as a sedative and aspects of the welfare state. However what Huxley originally failed to understand was the human spirit as well as baser human nature or the forces of nature and their impact on government and individual behaviour, and which includes the ability for things to go wrong however powerful and organised the state, from the loss of key databases which has been one aspect of the present governments legacy to the existence of major spies such as Burgess and Mclean and their ilk at the heart of the British intelligence service and society. The most powerful nations in the world are failing to control nature from flooding to forest fires, earthquakes and volcano eruptions, to hurricanes and blizzards or to stop the impact of global warming.
The most recent failure is having arrogantly declared the abolition of economic boom and bust and then attempting to manage the chaos of complex banking and investment practices without understanding and accepting the basic force which governs human collective behaviour and its government.
The inability to understand how society works has led the attempts to create a world government through capitalist enterprise failing in all respects as it does not prevent wars or starvation, creates mass unemployment and leads to reductions in desirable public expenditure and dismantling of the welfare state. The more people are educated as required under entrepreneurial, inventive and innovative capitalism, the more rebellious and ungovernable the people become. The pendulum has swung too far away from the provision of education for the sake of education.
Huxley was partly right is forecasting that the only way for a capitalist world government to succeed, was through an expanding consumer consumption in which everything is thrown away for recycling as quickly as possible. Making things to last is counter productive and therefore the concept of value adding is essential making products appear better and different and therefore needing to be replaced with the switch from terrestrial to digital television for example and the introduction of High Definition TV “for everyone“. The government struggles to find ways to encourage people to spend whatever spare money they have after taxation and providing the essentials of contemporary living, but the public understand that if they do spent and other people will be able to return to work, they might be in less of a position to cope if their income is suddenly reduced or lost. Although the present condition of capitalism was in part created because of debt management, if everyone lives within their present means and saves more to protect against future crisis they will prolong and deepen the economic recession into spiralling depression. What may appear a series of paradoxes is not.
Huxley’s stated approach to the organisation of the state is that he became contemptuous of how democracy worked in practice, hence his original sympathy for authoritarian governments although his ideal was to have intellectuals and engineers in charge. Unfortunately rationalists and, idealists are not the people who are elected to power and government, or have the capacity to take power and control government by force. Democracy only works with realists and pragmatists, and dictatorship requires ruthlessness and acceptance of causing collateral pain and suffering on an increasingly significant scale which brings in the murderer, the terrorist, the blackmailer and the bully.
The truth is that all attempts to achieve utopia results in dystopia.
And all attempts to turn fundamental left and right wing political parties into centrists will fail in the long run.
Hegel and Marx were fundamentally right in that it is only the interaction between extremes and opposites which results in a working balance or medium. Capitalists have to accept that it is the effective management of boom and bust and the limitation of the extreme that increases real ongoing prosperity and democrats that it is the balanced interactions between ultra liberalism bordering on anarchism and right wing conservatism and left wing radicalism bordering on fascism and communism which best protects the majority from the horrific actions of individuals and provides for individualism and other basic freedoms. The interaction is essential in order to achieve a functioning and acceptable equilibrium and that interaction needs to be ongoing. This is why the one party state usually fails to work in the long run and why democracy needs its major parties to embrace the extremes or the extremes will reform and gain popularity if the main parties become centrist. There is no reason why a one party state cannot work if within that party there are the extremes of viewpoint on policies and methods and where neither extreme is allowed to become dominant. In terms of personalities it is essential to strive for individuals of integrity and trustworthiness and who balance their own and family needs with those of the state. It will be necessary to accommodate some who are exceptional and individualistic and who are times may be inconsistent and subversive with those who are conformist. The professional politician and the self absorbed expert or specialist are to be included but managed as on their own they are to be feared.
The bird has to have a name. I am assuming it is a she and therefore Blackie seems appropriate Black and she! Blackie was present for the greater part of the day although has built her nest of sufficient height to disappear from view within. The day was a mixture of weathers and because of her presence I delayed going out to the supermarket for fruit over the holiday. It was very busy with everyone rushing and having little or nor regard for the welfare of others.
Durham made a good start in their opening game against a MCC side which includes Key and Vaughan. They were 274 for 4 in a rain affected game with new captain Will Smith and new signing Blackwell still at the wicket on 43 and 63 respectively after Di Venuti and Stoneman has opened with 53 and 49. Muchall and former captain Benkenstein failed with 5 and 12. Mustard, onions and Plunket are to come in along with Claydon and Thorp who I do not know. Ballykissangel and American Idol will be written about as part of the next piece. I enjoyed chicken with baked beans for lunch, a light soup, kippers and fresh fruit salad for the evening with a cereal bowl before bedtime
