Amusing ourselves to death - Huxley vs Orwell

http://www.recombinantrecords.net/docs/2009-05-Amusing-Ourselves-to-Death.html

by cloudhead • 17 years ago

30 17 17 years ago

stcredzero• 17 years ago

In the long run, suppressing people with distraction and pleasure is more profitable than overt fear dispensed by jackbooted thugs. You have to pay the thugs. Addicts of distraction will pay you! What's more, fear, in the form of induced insecurity, can be synergistically added to the mix.

tommusic3• 17 years ago

I'm reading this book at the moment, and liking it very much.

Postman goes deeper than this, though. He isn't saying that TV's weakening of the discourse is directly because of trash programming, but that the medium itself is modifying what messages people take in.

Taft was over 300 lbs when he was elected president. There is no way he would be elected in the age of television. He wouldn't have the look for TV.

Political speech in the time of Lincoln assumed of the audience a long attention span, ability to parse arguments and complex sentences, and up-to-date knowledge of current events.

I'm not halfway through, but I'm finding it compelling so far.

aswanson• 17 years ago

Political speech in the time of Lincoln assumed of the audience a long attention span, ability to parse arguments and complex sentences, and up-to-date knowledge of current events.

But, so far, I have been considering the understanding of the question manifested by the framers of the original Constitution. In and by the original instrument, a mode was provided for amending it; and, as I have already stated, the present frame of "the Government under which we live" consists of that original, and twelve amendatory articles framed and adopted since. Those who now insist that federal control of slavery in federal territories violates the Constitution, point us to the provisions which they suppose it thus violates; and, as I understand, that all fix upon provisions in these amendatory articles, and not in the original instrument. The Supreme Court, in the Dred Scott case, plant themselves upon the fifth amendment, which provides that no person shall be deprived of "life, liberty or property without due process of law;" while Senator Douglas and his peculiar adherents plant themselves upon the tenth amendment, providing that "the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution" "are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

Can you imagine 10 percent of the populace following Lincoln on this today? It's like a legal deposition. To a far less educated electorate.

Some of the rhetoric of that age has a level of thought-density that is nonexistent in modern speech. I always thought that was due to the selection bias of the speakers back then (you had to be extraordinary to even register in the public consciousness, but there were several counterexamples to this).

[EDIT: added snippet of Lincoln speech.]

mynameishere• 17 years ago

I'm not sure the thought-density is as high as the lexical density. Translating and abridging it to commonspeak:

"My opponents say that federal control of slavery is unconstitutional. While the supreme court previously referenced the 5th amendment's protection of property, Douglas and his adherents point to the 10th, which grants powers to the states whenever not granted to the federal government."

The first two sentences are completely unnecessary.

jdminhbg• 17 years ago

> Can you imagine 10 percent of the populace following Lincoln on this today?

No. Not sure I can imagine 10 percent of the populace in 1860 following Lincoln either. Of course, with 60-70% of the adult population excluded from voting, narrowing your appeal wasn't such a huge problem.

jerf• 17 years ago

"Can you imagine 10 percent of the populace following Lincoln on this today?"

In transcript form, perhaps not. In spoken text? I think we could meet the 10% bar. A lot of the klunkiness of that is the transcription, I think; modern extemporaneous speech is transcribed differently.

"So far, I have been considering the understanding of the question manifested by the framers of the original Constitution. In and by the original instrument, a mode was provided for amending it. As I have already stated, the present frame of "the Government under which we live" consists of that original, and twelve amendatory articles framed and adopted since. Those who now insist that federal control of slavery in federal territories violates the Constitution point us to the provisions which they suppose it thus violates. As I understand, all fix upon provisions in these amendatory articles, and not in the original instrument. The Supreme Court, in the Dred Scott case, plant themselves upon the fifth amendment, which provides that no person shall be deprived of "life, liberty or property without due process of law", while Senator Douglas and his peculiar adherents plant themselves upon the tenth amendment, providing that "the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution" "are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.""

Transcribe the same speech with modern sensibilities, dropping intermediate "ands" and other such information-free interjections when appropriate and lay off the semicolon and it cleans up fairly well. Even the "hard words" and phrases I think are more common speech of the time, and only sound erudite because we inherently think of old-timey things as sounding educated since only educated people bother to learn them. My great-grandchildren will probably think "old-timey" sounds fancy.

f1uxt• 17 years ago

I had a thought reading about the Taft and Lincoln anecdotes. There are likely many thousands of people in this country today, and there likely were back in Taft's day and Lincoln's, who, had the cards fallen differently, would have been excellent or competent presidents. Every time has it's own peculiarities, and Taft and Lincoln were men of their time, as John F. Kennedy was a man of his time (TV), and Obama is a man of today (grassroots online organizing). It is easy to say that because TV would preclude Taft today due to his weight, but of course Obama would not have won in Taft's time due to his ethnicity.

Which is all to say, there are always distractions, society is always on the brink of collapse. We should remain vigilant, but technology and the media it enables is ever-changing, and we will always be struggling to adapt.

tommusic3• 17 years ago

Do you feel that the advancement of technology (print > TV > online grassroots) is linked more than temporally to the reduction in social closed-mindedness (Kennedy as non-Protestant, Obama as non-white)?

I wonder how much of the change in the electorate can be attributed to the shifting forms of communication. There appear signs of a relationship, but I'm not persuaded yet.

If during Taft's time the electorate was entirely unconcerned by race or religion, I wonder how Kennedy and Obama would have fared.

This book is a lot of fun.

madair• 17 years ago

How about BOTH Huxley and Orwell being right?

We've got the great firewall of Australia & China, and the camera on every street-corner in England, and coming soon to Chicago, New York, and more.

And we've also got American Idol.

We've also got the propaganda war of Iraq, the jackboots on the neck of countless vilified populations worldwide, the haves and the have-nots.

I'm not quite so sure it's wise to linger on pop culture while military power still murders many every day, keeps untold others in the dark, and the all-seeing panopticon is part of the effect of Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, and others.

Focusing on pop-phenomena and wringing hands over the trite uselessness of pop culture can be just another way to be self-righteous and better than thou. In a perfect world perhaps all we'd worry about is social networks and gossip. But we can't because Orwell's world is real and true, and power continues to absolutely corrupt.

I could go on and on. The treatise is interesting and thought provoking, but weak.

cakesy• 17 years ago

I always wondered how those to dystopia came about, I think we can all see it know. It came about because the majority wanted it, step by step, they wanted safety, entertainment, and not to have to think. Just glad I am born know, when intelligence is not despised so much (not saying that I am intelligent!).

billswift• 17 years ago

They are both combined to large extent in the later dystopian novel "Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury. The authorities have outlawed books, so the only source of information and entertainment is the internet, which they control.

patrickg-zill• 17 years ago

I would like to mention the movie "Idiocracy" as a complement to this discussion. The trailer on YouTube gives you a good sense of the movie.

coconutrandom• 17 years ago

That's a great movie! I've used it as a sort of litmus test on my friends. Peoples' reactions to this film are most interesting. Only those who recognize how similar it is to our world are amused. Anyone else is annoyed.

epe• 17 years ago

While there are valid reasons to fear both the "Orwell dystopia" and the "Huxley dystopia", the former tends to send more of a chill down my spine. I think this is because it seems much more possible, on a personal level, to resist or opt out of the Huxley dystopia than the Orwell one. Postman may have a compelling point that much of it has happened already, but it has happened through individual choices that I don't have to share -- the books are still there to be read, the tools & techniques are there to filter the information overload & focus on the good stuff. Admittedly this is not easy, but in the Orwell dystopia it's not even a possibility.

disclaimer: I haven't read the book and am responding to the (likely oversimplified) line of argument presented in the comic.

wheels• 17 years ago

Article is dead, so just commenting on your post:

Huxley's dystopia is set up to be more subtle and in fact, not one that you would choose to opt out of; that's the crux of it.

He compares to Orwell's writing both in his retrospective, Brave New World Revisited and in his talk titled The Ultimate Revolution (great listen, by the way). Here's a bit from there:

"The state of servitude the state of being, having their differences ironed out, and being made amenable to mass production methods on the social level, if you can do this, then you have, you are likely, to have a much more stable and lasting society. Much more easily controllable society than you would if you were relying wholly on clubs and firing squads and concentration camps. So that my own feeling is that the 1984 picture was tinged of course by the immediate past and present in which Orwell was living, but the past and present of those years does not reflect, I feel, the likely trend of what is going to happen [...]"

http://100777.com/node/812

menloparkbum• 17 years ago

The link to this article is dead. Did it have any new insights on this book? It's pretty old, I read my dad's copy in junior high.

tommusic3• 17 years ago

Nope. It was some slick illustration for the assertion discussed in the beginning of the book; that we are closer to being destroyed by Huxley's vision than Orwell's.

Amusing ourselves to death - Huxley vs Orwell

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