After reading Postman, I figured I should probably read Huxley. And what an excellent author he is!
From Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (page 194):
You’ve got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We’ve sacrificed the high art. We have the feelies and the scent organ instead.
In Brave New World, society focuses on pleasure over knowledge. They choose to live in happiness than to live in truth. Because of that, they are very limited in what they can learn and understand, and how much they can progress.
We need to bridge the gap between entertainment and high art in order to have a balance for learning – otherwise, we miss out on too much (rhetoric).
Gosh I love Brave New World so much. So so so much.
And I wouldn’t say the trade-off is happiness so much as pleasure.
They don’t have much of a choice, though, do they? Conformity is urged upon them from when they are embryos…. Plenty of subliminal rhetoric in Brave New World! And pleasure is used to enforce a rigid social order -it’s not so much knowledge they’re sacrificing, as freedom, including the freedom to be unhappy. Haven’t read this book for decades – your post makes me want to go and dig it out again! I grew up a few miles from where the Savage tops himself btw :).
Sorry to have commented so little on your blog recently – I got out of the habit of looking at it. intend to do better in 2011!
Good point! Yes, freedom is the real issue in this book (which brings into question, what IS “freedom”, anyway?).
And no worries at all about comments – it’s nice to have you around to chat with again 🙂