"Brave New World" vs "1984"

[Josquin des Prez]

     I'm reading (listening, actually) Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason about the stupidification of the culture over the past few decades as the result of the political/religious changes that have annihilated the broad middle-brow consensus. The author, like me, grew up in a middle class home that respected reading and the life of the intellect. Many such people were the purchasers of encyclopedias, and they belonged to the Book of the Month Club, read historical novels and nonfiction works like The Rise and Fall of The Third Reich or The Feminine Mystyque. This was a culture that had a deep respect for science and learning in general, and it has been under attack from both the left and right for as long as I can remember. This "midcult" was savagely attacked by Dwight McDonald in the New Yorker, and Virginia Woolf savaged this class for its disinterest in modernism, and perhaps not knowing who Virginia Woolf was.

     The snobbery of the old left and the antirationalism of the new left were just pinpricks compared to the mass defection of the right. The election of George W. Bush, with his obvious and apparently visceral hatred for aspirational intellectualism was the final triumph of the forces aiming to create an instinctual rather than thoughtful culture, at least in the voting booth. Decades of anti-intellectual propagandizing by right wing intellectuals has been far more damaging. The fundamentalist says no facts prevent early humans from frolicking with dinosaurs, and the post-modernist can only agree. The human rights campaigner supports Hizbollah against the common enemy, Western secular culture. Meanwhile Israel, once the most secular nation since the early United States, is becoming increasingly dominated by its own right wing religious coalition, to the delight of American evangelists who now are the staunchest supporters of the Jewish state which will be lovingly exterminated by Jesus Christ when he gets out of rehab.*

     To me Obama seems more like a last gasp of a disappearing phenomenon rather than a substantive correction towards what has been lost. But I'm not a prognosticator. This fundamentalist fever may break, though it looks today like a far more robust phenomenon than Derridian skepticism. Anyway, if you want dystopian views relevant to the present day you don't need to get them from novels. I did enjoy the books when I read them, and they are certainly worth reading.

     I just found out that Jacoby is now the head of the Center for Inquiry. Maybe I'll visit when I go to Buffalo later this year. Perhaps we can get someone to paint galaxies on the ceiling, and Susan can wear her lab coat and shout to the artist "When will you make an end?" **

      <sub>* He hasn't been well......he thinks he's a Christian!

    ** The Agony and The Ecstasy was one of the books Jacoby mentioned as typical of the middle-brow taste that has disappeared. She compares the rigorously detailed historical accuracy of the book with the deliberate idiocy of The Da Vinci Code as an example of what has happened in the last 40 years.</sub>

I don't see any correlation between the mediocrity of contemporary politics and the decline of the middle class into idiocratic anarchy, other then the fact the first is probably direct result of the first, rather then other way around. The middle class you remember begun to decline somewhere aroud the 20s and reached critical mass during the 50s and 60s, after which it plunged into a full fledged vertical dive. It has to do with the decline of middle class values and standards, and the subsequent corruption of the young, who in turns corrupted the following generation and so on and so forth. Part of this is a result of the work of revolutionary agitators of the Frankfurt School variety. Part of it is also due the general decline of western civilization, following the Spenglerian model. We are going towards extinction, like the Romans did before us.