Brave New World, 1984, and the Techno-Industrial System
Karaçam (April 2021)
Introduction
Brave New World and 1984, two dystopian novels of the first half of the twentieth century, put forward two different visions about what the social consequences of the great technological explosion that started with the Industrial Revolution might be. Although George Orwell portrayed a very pessimistic picture in his 1984, he had a fundamentally positive view of technology; his starting point was the classical Marxist understanding of technological development. Thus, the terrible, totalitarian-collectivist society we see in 1984 is not a result of technological development itself, but a result of its distortion by a totalitarian dictatorship. Aldous Huxley, on the other hand, was concerned with the consequences of technological development itself and its inner logic. There is nothing in Brave New World that deflects technological development from its natural course. In Brave New World, technology itself, via the developments regarded as “progress” today by the technological propaganda, gives rise to the horrible form of society depicted in the novel, creating another dystopian society. In this paper, we will compare these two different visions about industrial society with the present techno-industrial system.
The Society of 1984, Dynamics of Its Birth and Its Qualities
When we look at what Orwell says in 1984 through Goldstein (one of the characters in 1984), we see that his philosophy of history consists of the classical Marxist class war: History progresses through the conflicts between different classes in society. Since the Neolithic Age, the structure of human societies has been almost the same with their main lines; there are three classes in societies: the lower, middle, and upper classes. The upper classes try to maintain their position, the middle classes try to replace the upper classes, and the lower classes aren’t in a position to think of anything since the members of these classes spend most of their time engaged in daily physical labor. In certain historical situations, the middle classes overthrew the upper classes. In doing so, they received the support of the lower classes by instrumentalizing concepts such as freedom, fraternity, and equality. But when middle classes replaced upper classes, they transformed themselves into new upper classes; new middle classes formed in their place, and thus societies returned to their usual three-layered form. However, the Industrial Revolution, for the first time in history, has created a possibility to change this hierarchical structure of societies.
According to Orwell, the Industrial Revolution has made it possible for the first time in history for every social class to live in material prosperity by increasing tremendously the production capacity of the society. Thus, for the first time, the lower classes, which constitute the largest segment of human societies, will no longer need to spend most of their lives in ordinary daily work to gain their basic physical needs (food, shelter, fuel, clothing, etc.). The fact that everyone in the society can have basic material needs without expending great physical effort will ensure that the living standards of people of all walks of life converge at a level that was formerly possible for only upper-classes. When people’s material living standards converge in this way (when machine production allows everyone to own electrical appliances, cars, personal bathrooms, televisions, and the like), inequalities arising from material conditions within society will become meaningless. Everyone, including the lower classes who are freed from material constraints, will be able to develop themselves culturally and cognitively. Social conflicts arising from the problem of sharing the scarce resources of the society will disappear as a result of the realization of material abundance through technological development, and thus the hierarchical structure of human societies will also disappear. Orwell explains this as follows:
[I]t was also clear that an all-around increase in wealth threatened the destruction – indeed, in some sense was the destruction– of hierarchical society.1
For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away.2
So Orwell sees technological development as positive and good on its own. The material abundance that technological development would bring will make people more cultured and knowledgeable, people who become cultured and informed will not want a useless ruling class above them, and they will eliminate this “parasitical” class, and thus “freedom”3 will become possible. This is the classical Marxist progressive view of technological development. The danger Orwell sees about the future is that this positive dimension of technological development can be distorted by totalitarian dictatorships.4
What Orwell points to as the reason for the emergence of the totalitarian society in 1984 is the reaction of the upper-classes to the technological explosion that started with the Industrial Revolution which supposedly makes possible the abolishment of the hierarchical structure of societies. The ruling classes in 1984, by seeing this aspect of technological progress, tried to prevent the emergence of the results described above. In order to achieve this, they had to prevent the productive capacity of society from accumulating material wealth by building a totalitarian system. In doing so, they would annul the “liberating” power of the machine and ensure that people remained ignorant and poor. The two methods they used for this were the continuation of a constant state of war between neighboring states, thus preventing the accumulation of material wealth produced in wars; and banning thought and expression to eliminate empirical thinking and creativity, thus halting technological progress after a certain level.5
This text is longer; to reach the complete version use the pdf link above.
Bu metin daha uzundur. Metnin Türkçe tamamına erişmek için yukarıdaki pdf linkini kullanınız.
__________________________________________________________________________________
Karaçam
karapinusnigra@gmail.com
