'I don't want comfort. I want God. I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.'
In 1932 Aldous Huxley published Brave New World. In this novel about the dehumanizing aspects of scientific and material 'progress' he wrote the following:
'. . . the price of stability. 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 . . . instead*.'
'It's curious . . . to read what people in the [early 1900s] used to write about scientific progress. They seemed to have imagined that it could be allowed to go on indefinitely, regardless of everything else. Knowledge was the highest good, truth the supreme value; all the rest was secondary and subordinate. True, ideas were beginning to change even then . . . . [Ford] did a great deal to shift the emphasis from truth and beauty to comfort and happiness. Mass production demanded the shift. Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't.'
It is unfortunate that many of Huxley's predictions have come true including the fact that Western society has become a mass consumer culture deeply ensconced in substance abuse to quell emotional distress and reliant on mindless television, activities, and jobs for base comfort rather than striving passionately to achieve self-actualization. The world is filled with Leninas and Lindas and Henry Fosters as well as cowardly Bernard Marxes and angry but helpless John Savages.
In protest to his society, Huxley makes John Savage unable to understand 'civilization', causing him to not want to belong, and Savage exchanges these words with the Controller of the Dystopian society.
'I like the inconveniences.'
'We don't,' said the Controller. 'We prefer to do things comfortably.'
'But I don't want comfort. I want God. I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.'
'In fact,' said Mustapha Mond, 'you're claiming the right to be unhappy.'
'All right then,' said the Savage defiantly, 'I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.'
'Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.'
There was a long silence.
'I claim them all,' said the Savage at last.
Obviously Huxley intended for his readership to sympathize with the Savage, and I find myself often in a similar - though not nearly as extreme - situation to John, protesting against the rationalizations society forces upon me as a creative individual where arts funding is scarce (it was recently brought to my attention that the largest creative writing prize in Canada is only $50,000 while the Calgary Stampede regularly distributes over $3 million worth of prizes EVERY FREAKING YEAR!), and I am constantly told that I need to find 'a real job'. If anything, though, I think Huxley's work and the work of authors such as George Orwell, Margaret Atwood, Vladimir Nabokov, and Flannery O'Connor suggests that literature has more power to persuade people to think individually and critically than any 'feelie' you can watch or immerse yourself in.
My only fear is that we have become too deeply grounded in a Future like Huxley's, and the way out may be less desirable than John Savage's own conclusion.
*the 'feelies' in Huxley's Dystopia are equivalent to mindless action/melodrama/pseudo-reality films and TV programs which are currently enjoying mass popularity
CURRENTLY HUMMING (WHILE SECRETLY CRYING INTERNALLY): 'Red Heart' by Hey Rosetta!
