Wednesday 19 December 2012

Brave New America



Aldous Huxley’s 1931 novel Brave New World is, depending on your point of view, a description of a soulless technocratic nightmare or a prescription for a far more rational society.  Personally I’m inclined to the latter.  What a good idea it would be to control the world’s population.  What a good idea genetic engineering would be.  How much happier we would all be as citizens of the World State.  The lower castes, the Betas, the Gammas, the Deltas and the Epsilons, all created in decanting bottles to be of lower intelligence, would be content in their modest and mediocre lives.

It’s just a beautiful dream.  We could not possible create such a rational world, a world devoid of thought, reflection and insight; a world devoid of such unsettling things as freedom.  Or could we?  I was delighted to read that educators in the United States have taken a major step forward in creating a more streamlined society. 

Apparently such unnecessary and inharmonious modern classics such as J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird are to be dropped from the school curriculum by 2014.  Instead the Betas, the Gammas, the Deltas and the Epsilons will be able thrill to Recommended Levels of Insulation by the US Environmental Protection Agency or, if that’s too exciting, Invasive Plant Inventory by California's Invasive Plant Council.  Yes, I know, not much in the way of plot or human interest but – ask yourself – do the lower orders really need these things?  They are just so unsettling for the humdrum, for those who aimed low in life and missed.

The new school curriculum for this brave new American world will come into force in 46 of the 50 states, making it compulsory that at least seventy per cent of the texts studied should be non-fiction.  A new generation is to be raised on informational handbooks.  It’s all part of a scheme to ensure that Americans are ready for the workplace, assuming the workplace ever comes. 

The new standards are apparently backed by the National Governors’ Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers.  It’s also backed by a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  Apparently it’s intended to help pupils develop the capacity to write factually and accurately, far more useful in the workplace than Shakespeare.

That’s it; that’s the key.  Employment in Obamaland has been so high because people are wrongly adapted.  Think how frustrated employers must be, think how frustrated Bill and Melinda must be, when job applicants come along reciting Whitman or Longfellow but know nothing at all about invasive plants or insulation. 

Plato and Aristotle and the rest of those all Greek fossils got it completely wrong.  Education should not be about encouraging curiosity or developing fully rounded human beings.  It should be about indoctrination, streamlining and targeting.  The aim should be to ensure that the clones are undifferentiated, all fit for purpose.  It’s about ensuring that the ordinary remain ordinary, sub all expectations.

Meanwhile the Alphas for wholly unexplained reasons send their offspring in ever increasing numbers to private schools, those insulation and invasive plant free zones.  There they can continue to wile their time away uselessly musing on Shakespeare.

O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't.

14 comments:

  1. We are the Fourth Reich my dear.

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    1. Who could ever have imagined it would be so bland!

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  2. You seem to be saying here something very similar to what Dickens was saying via the character of Sissy Jupe. How is your graminivorous quadruped, by the way?

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    1. Mark, I would define her as being very well indeed. :-)

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  3. Well said Ana - but I'll bet you get some internet passerby who only reads halfway and leaves an outraged comment. I'm afraid that for some people, satire is a human/horse hybrid. :-)

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    1. Alas, WG, a satire - the perfect trap for the unwary. :-)

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  4. Like most things in modern life, in state education there is a vast difference between the myth and the reality. John Taylor Gatto makes the distinction between 'education' and 'schooling.' I may have mentioned him before, but here is a reminder of his website. His research into the origins and philosophical underpinnings of the system most people accept as part of the natural order of life is very revealing.

    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com

    For some of the arguments against the 'universal' system there is Albert Jay Nock:

    http://mises.org/daily/2765

    Ana, your education was atypical, as was mine. What happens to most people is rather different.

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    1. Clavin, I'm beginning to understand that. In the past it wasn't always an issue that I was especially sensitive to. It makes me angry that so many people are offered such a third rate product, one that often comes at a first rate price.

      I'll check your links. Many thanks.

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  5. Yeah, imported ideology incorporated into the shadow government, quite a different form than the Third Reich.

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  6. Ironically, Bill Gates has done to what's left of the US school system what he did to the personal computer industry at its beginning--turned a rich diverse ecology into a mediocre monoculture. Hopefully the analogy holds, and there is some educational Apple capable of surviving, and in the struggle to survive in Gatesland to widely over-achieve and create a fresh new paradigm . . . a risky strategy, but perhaps the only one, ever.

    Regarding our shooting shoot-out (it was actually a civilised duel, and not even a duel), after I sent my comment I realised that I should have suggested that given your familiarity with firearms the best method for you to come to a decision on the issue would be to set up an empirical process. Perhaps next time you visit your friends in Georgia, arrange for a shooting session with semi-automatic weapons, particularly semi-auto versions of the M-16 or M4. I also suggest that instead of formal paper targets, bottles, cans etc. you set up pumpkins, watermelons, squash, etc.--anything that will show you what a properly aimed high veloclty round does to soft tissue on impact. My experience with them has left me awed by their power, range and accuracy, and that's also how I arrived at my conviction that these weapons have no business in the possession of non-professionals.

    Finally, best wishes for your trip to Peru. Peruvian cuisine is sublime, some of the very best in the world, but when I was last there almost twenty years ago, Lima was a wretched city, and tragically, by and large a city of the wretched. En todo caso, le envio mis mejores deseos para un buen viaje, un muy Feliz Navidad, y un prospero anyo nuevo. Un abrazo--Chris

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    1. Chris, there is quite a vigorous debate on Blog Catalog around We cannot Legislate against Lunacy. Let me give you one of my responses;

      I'm reacting against what was turning into a campaign against the Second amendment to the US Constitution. As I say, I own guns, not for defence purposes, which would be illegal in the UK, but for sports shooting. I personally can see no need for private citizens to own certain kinds of high velocity assault weapons. Having said that, I do have some experience of using an AK-47 in target practice, though not in England. I wholly agree with your observations about mental-healthcare issues. And, yes, there are no simple answers.

      I’ve never used the kind of soft targets you suggest but I can well imagine the effects.

      Thanks you for your good wishes for my – possible – future trip to Peru. It won’t be my first time, though. I was there in 2010 and I know exactly what you mean about Lima.

      Gricias, mi amigo. Besito para ti. :-)

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  7. The counter-revolution will begin as soon as the kids are force-fed the collected works of the EPA (assuming that they haven't already relinquished their weapons to the cadres of Kumbaya).

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