[ExI] Consequentialist world improvement

[Charlie Stross]

On 7 Oct 2012, at 22:24, Stefano Vaj <stefano.vaj at gmail.com> wrote:

On 7 October 2012 12:03, Charlie Stross <charlie.stross at gmail.com> wrote:

> No. Brave New World was *framed* as a dystopian future *by its author*.
>

I am confused here. Do you consider the Brave New World as a welcome
prospective? Not that you would be the only one (see Fukuyama).


That's a question with a complex answer ...

(Caveat; it's about 30 years since I last read BNW. Contents have
definitely settled during shipping ...)

Dystopian didactic fiction is a complex area because it betrays a lot about
what the author considers to be bad -- or at least a sub-optimal way of
life. But not everyone agrees on these criteria. Margaret Atwood's Gilead
in "The Handmaid's Tail" is clearly framed as a feminist dystopia, and
indeed it's pretty grim for anyone who isn't a Christian fundamentalist who
believes women should be held as chattel and used as breeding stock.
However, it was *based* on a pre-existing set of beliefs, which Atwood
simply extrapolated (a sub-type of SF sometimes known as "if this goes on"
fiction). And it should be fairly obvious that there's a barking fringe in
the USA (and elsewhere in the developed world, never mind places like Iran
and Afghanistan) who really *do* think that giving women the vote and the
right to own property was a mistake.

So, while "The Handmaid's Tale" is *meant* to be read as a hideous
dystopia, there are folks out there who might well mistake it for a
road-map rather than a warning.

1984 is unambiguously a warning. There's no constituency out there hoping
to bring about the reign of the Ingsoc party; it was a parody to some
extent of the excesses of Stalinism and Nazism, and as a warning against
authoritarianism in general.

But "Brave New World", like "The Handmaid's Tale", is somewhat more
nuanced; what you make of it depends on where you stand.

Here's the thing: the world of BNW has achieved global peace in the wake of
a horrible war (fought with chemical and biological weapons). People are
genetically engineered for the roles they will fill. But there's enough
lubricant in the system that it doesn't qualify as truly totalitarian.
Dissident Alphas or Betas who disagree with the system aren't persecuted or
killed; there's a safety valve posting for them. There are enclaves of
primitives, kept around in case the engineered world government has some
unanticipated failure mode: this is an enlightened despotism that could
well follow Cromwell's maxim: "I beseech thee in the bowels of Christ, pray
consider that thou might be wrong?" Again, the deliberate creation of
low-intelligence workers (deltas and gammas) is explained: "what if we made
everyone a genius-level alpha? Who would then take out the trash? The delta
and gamma jobs still need doing; alphas would be unhappy in those roles."

I may have forgotten some of the details, but if my memory of the book is
correct, Huxley was railing against the intellectual over-determinism of
this world, the lack of a niche for the liberal arts other than as
producers of vacuous entertainment for the masses, and the horrible spectre
of rampant materialism and rationalism.

Now, there are various critiques one can make of BNW's system, starting
with: it's yet another bloody top-down authoritarian hierarchical system.
They tend in practice to be brittle, inimical to liberty, and have a
dismaying tendency to build pyramids of skulls in a way  that ad hoc
bottom-up emergent systems don't. But this wasn't as obvious to Huxley when
he wrote it in the 1930s as it would have been just 20 years later. The
thing is, going by my memory, Huxley used BNW to highlight perceived
weaknesses of technocratic proposals for planned economies, only his
objection was aesthetic (and to a lesser extent moral) rather than
practical. It's like objecting to Nazism because they didn't respect
librarians, or objecting to Communism because one harbours a distaste for
Constructivist poster art. It is, to put it simply, missing the point.

(And now you have gone and given me a reason to add "Brave New World" to my
to-read heap. Which is already overflowing, dammit ...)


-- Charlie

Sent from my iPad
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