Eliot pointed out that cultures need not succumb to violent death; they can die of their own, internal causes, sinking society into a death-like boredom that may last for centuries.

Not-So Brave New World

by Bruce Frohnen

“This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.”

These lines from T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” are often quoted, but seldom taken to heart. Even those of us who consider ourselves students of Eliot’s work on civilizational decline tend to overdramatize what is really a quite tawdry cultural age. Many of us (including me) are wont to paint our predicament as one of Herculean struggles against a great and towering foe who will bind us tightly with chains of overt oppression. We wish to see ourselves as heroes in some dystopian novel, fighting, even if hopelessly, to restore humanity’s recognition of the importance of dignity, responsibility, and recognition of the natural order of existence. For good and ill, the reality is neither so dramatic nor so exciting.

The brutal, dishonest, and omnipresent oppression of Orwell’s 1984 or the aggressively conformist, anti-intellectual violence and bullying of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, with its “firemen” burning the books and homes of those who dare seek to salvage a life of the mind, seem to many of us a more likely, even comforting vision of where our society is headed than is the sad, self-indulgent reality. For, where Orwell and Bradbury give us grand drama and the possibility of heroic resistance, the reality today is more self-inflicted and banal. We clearly are a less free as well as a less virtuous society than we once were, but we live in no Soviet-style tyranny. Fires and firing squads rarely await those who challenge the orthodoxy of liberal America. Far more likely is the bland, if excruciating, visit of the IRS agent, sent only to “make sure you are not being partisan,” lest you be put out of business, or “counseling” for the politically incorrect child or parent. Bankruptcy, browbeating, and shunning are painful and, under these circumstances, unjust. But, sadly, they lack drama and its accompanying possibility to generate public empathy and reasoned resistance.

When Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New Worldin 1931, the West was in the throes of economic depression. Centralized industrialization, like the first war of “national liberation” (World War I, with its goal of national “self-determination” and “making the world safe for democracy”) had failed the people, launching them into a chaos of unemployment and class and ethnic strife many claimed presaged apocalyptic disaster. Yet Huxley’s dystopian vision was not one of particularistic violence and want, but of peace and plenty. The result is a book that speaks much more to our current predicament than the more dramatic visions of Orwell and Bradbury (so well drawn for the age of hard, Soviet totalitarianism), and a vision that, when combined with Huxley’s sequel, Island, betrays the assumptions and fantasies that have made dystopia all-too-imaginable.

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