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Two books that shape our world view
Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, revisited
After the election of 2016 in which Donald Trump, against all the polls and all expectations, was declared the President, two books have returned to the best seller lists. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World written before World War II and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, written after.
While both books are integral components of the American literary curricula, taught regularly at high schools across the country, a resurgence of interest by non-students, in the face of Trumps’ victory and a growing cadre of international strongmen, has occurred. Just what is it about these books that fascinate us? What do they have to say about our world today?
Almost 90 years ago, In 1931, Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World. It is a novel that posits, some six hundred years into the future, a society in which veneration for Henry Ford replaces all religion. Industrial scale bio-engineering and efficiency, even applied to breeding, is the central fact of everyday lives. In this proto-Fordian society people are distracted with sensual pleasure or blunted with…
