[ExI] Huxley or Orwell - who got it right?

William Flynn Wallace foozler83 at gmail.com
Sat Feb 4 22:54:12 UTC 2017


On Sat, Feb 4, 2017 at 4:04 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

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> *From:* extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] *On
> Behalf Of *William Flynn Wallace
> *Sent:* Saturday, February 04, 2017 1:15 PM
> *To:* ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
> *Subject:* [ExI] Huxley or Orwell - who got it right?
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> https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/feb/02/amusing-
> ourselves-to-death-neil-postman-trump-orwell-huxley?
> utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits
>
> Spike wrote:
>> The article seems to think we are in danger of amusing ourselves to death.
>

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> ​Now I may not be the one to talk about people in public places sitting
> and staring at their cell phones - physicians' offices, for one -  as I am
> the one with a book or Kindle reading fiction​
> ​.  But it does seem that people don't want to use their brains to create
> anything - they want it created for them by the entertainment industry,
> which now might just include politics and the coverage of it. It may not be
> about attention span at all.  I did not watch any political thing on either
> side last fall, but I'll bet Trump scored high in entertainment over the
> dull as a stone age axe others in the Repub primaries.​
>


​Surely we lead the world many times over in producing entertainment, if
not the consumption of it, though I'll bet we are pretty high in that too.
​

​IQ hasn't diminished - it may even has risen.  But what are most people
doing with it?  Not using it to understand more fully what is going on.
TV, FAcebook and all the rest are sound bits and short videos, which not so
much shorten attention span as not provide enough information to form a
proper opinion of the content and the underlying issues.​

So in the present age we have petabytes of entertainment thrown at us but
where is there to go to find constructive, mostly objective discussion of
the big issues?  If these exist, they are not apparent to me and it they do
I'll bet they are duller than that axe.

It doesn't have to be that way.  Once upon a time I adopted a psych 101
book written by a wormrunner - James McConnell.  Easiest book to read I've
ever used, and it was so good that my class average jumped from around
middle C level (about 75%) to 83%.  So popularizing serious content can be
done by the right people.  Now let's get that sort of thing on TV.  As it
is, we are drowning in the trivia of sports. reality shows, adult cartoons
and all the rest.

​A colleague of mine in the English dept. and I agreed - going to class and
giving a presentation is Showtime!  You have to interest them and put on a
show.  Sounds degrading, doesn't it?  Nah.​  Just doing what is necessary.

bill
> ​w​
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> Good article BillW, reminiscent of so many debates I had with my
> father-in-law who is much more a Huxley fan than I am, while I am more an
> Orwell fan than he.
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> Brave New World is a book I found interesting, but not horrifying at all.
> It wasn’t clear to me that it was dystopian, certainly not all of it.  He
> commented about how things changed over the years as he drove college
> students to sports events.  He recalled how raucus those were and how they
> began to get quieter starting around 1985, to the point where twenty years
> later it would be nearly silent as the students sat back there gazing at
> computer screens, seldom saying a word to each other.
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> I offered that this would make a driver’s job much easier.  But the
> history teacher side of him found it far too creepy.  I suggested the
> students were watching the lectures they missed for the event to which he
> was taking them.
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> Soon the subject changed to another Huxleyan nightmare: designer babies.
> Oh the horror!  Why?  What would be so bad?  We fertilize twenty embryos,
> let them divide about 5 times, select a cell from each, read the DNA,
> determine which one is most free of known genetic pathologies, implant.
> Obvious question: what do you do with the rest of them?  My answer: leave
> them frozen.  Who would ever use them?  Why do we need to know that?  But
> only the wealthy would have healthier babies!  Ja.
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> ​​
> The article seems to think we are in danger of amusing ourselves to death,
> but I would argue that if one dies laughing, one does not literally perish
> in most cases, and even if so, that would be a good way to go.
>
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>
> spike
>
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