“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 would want to read one.”
-Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
It may seem ironic that we would try to protect readers from Brave New World—Huxley’s warning about the negative effects of sex and drugs and the disregard for life's true purpose—at a time when our society is crushed by the same afflictions.
His novel originally faced censorship in Ireland, Australia, India, and the occasional public school in the US in the 1980s and 1990s due to its explicit sexual content, drug use. Its themes seemed to challenge societal norms, at least when woefully misinterpreted by individuals that struggle to detect good satire.
We are certainly past the days of censorship, right? In the US, it may be tough to imagine bans that withstand the First Amendment.
However, at the moment, Orwell’s vision of state-sponsored censorship from 1984 doesn’t seem to be the real threat.
It is Huxley’s vision of the never ending buzz of sensuality and consumerism that awakens the alarmist in me—a 50 year-old with limited social media competence. For me the current signal-to-noise ratio of the media has a distinct resemblance to Huxley's imagined world.
As Neil Postman wrote in Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985), our current media alters “the meaning of ‘being informed’ by creating a species of information that might be properly called disinformation—misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented, or superficial information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing.”
So the nightly news drones on from a TV in every room, and we are satisfied that we know all that we need to know. With that in the background we barely look at the screens while we doomscroll through the links that reinforce our belief systems.
Books are rendered insignificant without an outright ban, preventing any interest or engagement with them, along with many other aspects of intellectual pursuit.
Thus, the library fades as one of our community’s anchors; the people shrug as our local politicians in Ohio invoke threats of defunding the archaic liberal institutions for “grooming” our children into Wokeness, or worse…
But alas, we are so “well informed” we are unable to see our own reflections in Huxley’s work. When the libraries are gone and there is nothing left to censor, the erosion of public discourse will be complete and we will wonder, What happened?
Maybe we should read Brave New World again.
