Aldous Huxley predicted many things in his 1932 novel Brave New World, including stem cell research, genetics and helicopters, but there was one thing that has come to pass that is key both to his novel and message and our suvival as individuals, nations, and a species.
Mr Huxley, in BNW depicted the humans in his dystopia as child-like, and that is what we are now. Human beings, particularly in the United States, no longer have the intellectual and emotional capacity to face the reality that they themselves have created, which is why these adult children so often turn to the one thing that keeps real-world consequences from their sight: Religion. Self-Explanatory. I'm sure, if you're smart, you'll know how it works in this way. The more important thing right now is the consequences of these adult-child humans.
In the beginning of World War 1, the populations of boh the Axis and Allied powers believed that the war would last for days, weeks, or months, and had no idea that the circumstances that existed between the Great Powers (industry, economy, military power were more or less equal between them) would force the war to go on and cost as much (in human life and economic devastation) as it did. When the war ended, the surviving veterans were viewed with malice and shame. Why? Because of reality. These men and women (medics, some fought on the front) that saw and experienced the holocaust of the front and makeshift hospitals had something inside of them that was a serious threat to the sheltered civilization, even though it was supposedly for them that these millions of men and women were sacrificed, and now that they have returned, they presented a threat to the masses' normal, sheltered pseudo-reality.
Jump ahead 27 years, the atom bombs were dropped on Japan. It takes less than 5 years for the USSR to develop their atom bombs. It was seldom realized that humanity was capable of such wanton horror (historical events are soon forgotten!), but Hitler's domestic policies are soon uncovered, and the masses cried (and some still do, for various and dubious reasons) that such a thing was morally impossible. But Hitler and his subordinates kept meticulous records.
How is it that people can say that such a thing cannot be done after History has proved, time and time again, that it can and often does? The ones that deny it are often the ones with a desire to repeat it. Didnt they, the deniers around 1945-1950, slaughter 100,000-200,000 Japanese, and, earlier, order 1.2-2 million men and women to die half-buried in the ground? And before that, for centuries, force Africans to work for them under extremely harsh conditions without regard for their quality of life and continue, to this day (though subtlely) to discriminate against them?
To the present, now. Our government and other authorities treat adults like children, church attendance is at an all-time high. Our President has appointed a theocratic nincompoop as the head of the women's health organization, the FDA has made (until recently) decisions based upon theocratic "principles" in regard to contraceptives and information about sexual health. A large percentage of the population (31% according to Time Magazine) is more concerned with The Book of Revelations, gay marriage, and the submissiveness of women than national economic prosperity, human health and the quality of human life here and abroad.
Why must we, unless we are adult-children, be so terrified of sex? Why does our government (thanks to a significant constituency that is that 31% from Time Magazine) believe that it should tell adults what to do with their bodies, criminalize certain therwise normal activities (like oral sex and anal sex, which are on the books as illegal in some Midwest and Southern states), and provide blatant misinformation ("Abortion causes breast cancer," a statement from the theocrat who was put in charge of the federal organization of women's health)?
AIDS in Africa. What are we doing about it? Basically nothing. Nothing effective, that is. Our government, attached to that same 31%, has decided to preach Abstinance Only, continuing the slaughter of human beings by a microorganism. Remember the 70s and 80s? "AIDS is God's punishment for homosexuals." Well, now it's "God's punishment for female infants in the wrong place at the wrong time." That's right: A popular myth in AIDS-devastated Africa is that to cure AIDS, rape a virgin. The only virgins left, really, are small children and infants. The Catholic church is debating (now this is sad) whether or not to drop the anti-contraceptive stance because of this crisis. If you weren't a religious conservative, this would be a no-brainer. I'd entrust this decision to a 2-year-old, but not an authoritarian attatched to an organization with a deplorable history. Sam Harris said to Stephen Colbert, that it is "genocidal stupidity."
This over-attention to religion, according to many sources, including Kevin Phillips' American Theocracy, is going to contribute to our demise as a superower. This is where Huxley and BNW come in. Since the Cold War: 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and now, anti-intellectualism has dominated popular sentiment, and now, as college is becoming less and less affordable, it is becoming easier to rebel against academia. Non-accredited evangelical colleges, like (un)Liberty are springing up by popular demand. Standards are lowering for job applicants and business graduates. Even medical students are less and less required to acknowledge Darwinian Theory and basic facts in anthropology.
This extends not just to the social level, but the individual level as well. Escapism has become too widespread. A friend said to me, "What happens when a society is too afraid to lift the cover on the shi- they buried?" What happens when people are terrified to face the consequences of the realities they've created? Again, religion plays into this, the same way it did earlier in my essay. I've been reading this book in PDF format about Right-Wing Authoritarians and fundamentalists and evangelicals. Their "compartmentalized mind" and blind faith in a book a significant majority of them have never read allows them to easily find comfort in Jesus while commiting what would normally would be called a "sin" without any blip of remorse at all(Altemeyer). Does Ted Haggard feel any guilt from cheating on his wife, even worse, with another male? I dont think so, nothing genuine. Does he sincerely understand what his wife possibly feels? Does he care to? I'm not sure. Why is this so? We know why. If you forget, read the second paragraph again.
It's being a kid, having mommy and daddy (in adult cases, an imaginary friend named Jesus) to pick up the pieces. In Altemeyer's book, he writes that the religious RWAs almost never confront the one they've sinned against about the issue. That's what I mean by those parentheses. That is what I mean by adults being children. And there are those who come by and see the naked shards of the glass globe on the living room floor, telling the destructor, "Look what you did! You have to pick up the pieces," but the destructor states, in delirium, "It's OK, Jesus will pick up the pieces. Everything is fine."
What I haven't gotten to is why we can't afford to exist like this. It is easy to deny one's reality, and seductive too. But the world isn't going to be fixed that way, is it? It is also easy to understand why we cannot survive in a fictionalized, "safe" world. It would be easy to believe everything the government, or anyone else ever told you, right? But we can't. Yet a lot of us are, and we're declining because of it, socially and politically. Relationships deteriorate because people believe what others say (remember Othello?) about sex, that certain otherwise normal, things are bad, that this country is the best in the world, even though we are discriminatory and very repressive (authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald fled to Europe because they are more tolerant).
You know all of the ridiculous commmercials and advertisements on TV? Or the tabloids? Can you imagine if people believed them? People do. And I never thought about Brave New World in that light before yesterday.
Works Cited:
American Theocracy by Kevin Phillips 2006
Time Magazine week of October 31st 2006- early November 2006
The Authoritarians by Bob Alemeyer http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/
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