Orwell Versus Huxley: Economics, Technology, Privacy, and Satire

Published a half century ago, in a political, economic, and social milieu that seems increasingly remote from the present day, Nineteen Eighty-Four has managed to retain a certain topicality. Once viewed as a political novel, a warning about the totalitarian actuality of the Soviet Union and totalitarian tendencies that Orwell discerned in the West, it is nowadays more often viewed as a warning against the dangers that technocratic modernism poses to privacy and freedom. Many people believe that the relentless advance of science and technology in recent decades have brought us to the very brink of the Orwellian nightmare. I want to assess this view of Orwell's novel and, to gain perspective, to enlarge my canvas to take in another famous English satiric novel from the era that produced Nineteen Eighty-Four. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, published in 1932, has many parallels to Orwell's novel, published in 1949--and Orwell borrowed extensively from the earlier work (as both works did from Yevgeny Zamyatin's novel We 1924)--yet it is far more technology-intensive and in ways that bring out the limitations of Orwell's social vision. Indeed, the contrast between these two celebrated dystopic novels, notably in their ideas about the relation between sex and privacy, is striking. But relating the two works to technology, and more broadly to what I am calling "technocratic modernism," the kind of outlook that fosters and is fostered by technological progress, is no easy matter, and I need two mediating approaches: that of economics, in relation to technology, and that of literary criticism, in relation to satire, which is the genre of both novels, although I shall argue that Orwell's novel is not only a satire. End Page 1