Huxley v. Orwell

Huxley v. Orwell

I had a short epistolary interchange with Peter Kreeft on this very issue after he contended that Huxley was the better predictor of trends, and I contended that there were elements of both dystopias that we had come to accept and even to embrace.

Comments

  1. FredDecember 14, 2010 at 11:41 AM

    Steven,

    I would agree with you. Governments, any ruling bodies, are still keeping information from us and when it does get out, it's buried in trivia.

    I'm sure some in the government are glad that the wikileaks people are so brainless that they released thousands and thousands of messages at one time, thereby mitigating what could have been far more embarrassing if selected messages had been released individually.

    For someone to say that fear isn't motivating us today is just not in touch with reality. It's fear, not pleasure, that's slowly taking our civil liberties or freedom away from us.

    However, one also can't discount the effect of the trivialization of news today. The first indicator of this was several decades ago when ABC placed its news department under the control of the entertainment VP. News is entertainment, not the fourth estate anymore. I wonder what Ben Franklin or the framers of the constitution would have thought about this.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Another Queen of Night

I post this because whenever I recommend to anyone the Queen of Night, I always recommend it in the Lucia Popp rendition.  It's a matter of personal taste, but what I love about this is that it is somewhat slower than the other versions and as a result, it would seem to me somewhat more difficult to perform and sustain--those high notes in which the Queen's voice becomes the Magic Flute itself are rounded, full, and deep while remaining light and airy. I have read some rather severe criticism of this ritardando; and while it may or may not reflect Mozart's intent, it is certainly within the options for staging.  It creates a real vocal showpiece from what is already a magnificent example of same. It really is an amazing example of a virtuoso composition sung by a virtuoso voice.  All of which should not be taken to mean that I do not truly appreciate the version posted earlier by Diana Damrau, it's just nice to see what a difference tempo can make. I think we can take
Read more

Angel Time--Anne Rice

Review copy received 11/04/09 From the time of its announcement, I had been looking forward to this new book by Anne Rice.  As I say in every review, I am not a die-hard Anne Rice fan.  I found Interview with a Vampire interesting and intriguing, but in hindsight, must lay much of the responsibility of the current vampire as victim and love-object obsession at its feet.  After that, I had no patience with her writing until Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. In that book I observed a kind of control and authorial voice that I had not seen in any of the books I had sampled since Interview .  So too with Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana. Perhaps because of the subject matter, perhaps for other reasons, these two books seemed to witness a level of control of language and story that the other books did not.  Gone were messy florid passages that lavished two, three, four paragraphs on the description of the lace and flounce of a jabot.  These new books were spare, polished, poetic. The
Read more