Tuesday, July 10, 2012

The growing use of domestic drones is setting off alarms -- justifiably?

In a 1998 piece for Harper's titled "Goodbye to All That: Why Americans Are Not Taught History," Christopher Hitchens juxtaposed dystopia, as imagined in George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Hitchens, who authored several articles on Huxley and a book on Orwell, distinguished Orwell's "house of horrors" that strained "credulity" from Huxley's ability to augur a frighteningly "painless, amusement-sodden, and stress-free consensus."
Both texts describe variant species of social stricture, and the abuse of technology to control thoughts, minds, and the spiritual evolution of our collective conscience. But Orwell and Huxley render alternate visions of coercion -- 1984 foreshadowed a world of fear and active repression, whereas Brave New World imagined social adherence, bought through gratification. For Orwell, "who controls the past controls the future." Huxley's message was much simpler: "History is bunk." Contentment bred stability, knowledge of the past was edited, and people were unable to compare the present with any other time.
In Brave New World you find no hint of the Big Brother that haunted the Orwellian nightmare state. However, when Huxley's protagonist, Bernard Marx, visits his friend and fellow Alpha, Helmhotz Watson, there is a moment when both men are struck by a unique foreboding. Marx flings open the door, suspicious that their conversation is being observed. Of course, there's nobody there, but the moment offers a powerful reminder that this brave, new world is every bit the dystopian dictatorship, where independent thought and action are actively discouraged.

Read more: http://spectator.org/archives/2012/07/10/drone-coming

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