I’m teaching Brave New World again, and it always amazes me how Huxley could write this thing in 1932 and so much of it be true today. The 1930s was a time when a large portion of the population was dispossessed, dirt poor, and depended on their own ingenuity and hard work to survive. Yet, Huxley got our mindless consumerism, our insatiable lust for entertainment, our intellectual laziness, and our elastic morals dead on.
The kids’ reactions to the discussions about the emotionless sex, the strive to fit in, and the need to waste time without actually having to think are great. We’ve handed over the power of our government to a select few, because we don’t want to have to think about the issues and how to fix them. We can’t stand to be alone, and when we are, we have cell phones and text messaging to fill the void with words- “words without meaning,” as Huxley puts it. We don’t want any down time, because we might actually think or remember. That might make us feel sad or angry or regretful, so if we do have down time, we fill it with games or medicate ourselves. We are the most medicated society in the history of the world, and we’ll live longer, but be less human for it. Only the densest kids refuse to recognize our society at all, and there are always a couple who really get it. Their eyes light up, and they start to think about how we live. They start to question, which is at least the beginning of change.
I don’t propose being Amish or shunning all of the advances we’ve made over the past 100 years. I went and bought a Wii last night. The kids love it, and we spend time together as a family. I have a ten-year-old cell phone that I use to check if the wife needs something from the store when I’m coming home. I realize we can’t reasonably escape the marketing and the culture. Read and watch Into the Wild for an example.
We just need to make sure we think and feel. We need to read literature and poetry every once and while. We need to just sit and think about ourselves and life every once and while. We need to sit and think about what we believe and why we believe it. It’s okay to be sad or angry or regretful every once and while. We learn from that. We grow and become better humans from that.
