Only one week left in the course! The second-to-last week had me read a modern science fiction classic: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). I also revisited a classic neo-noir nightmarescape from the 1980s. Let’s dive in.

Readings

See my notes for the novel.

Audiovisual

Music: electronic music. I didn’t need nudging here: much of my listening outside the course consists of both classic and modern electronica. Here’s one of my favorites, Jean-Michel Jarre’s Equinoxe 5 (1978):

Arts: American neo-expressionist Jean-Michel Basquiat — an influential artist whose life was cut sadly short by drug use.

Cinema: David Lynch’s nightmarish neo-noir BLUE VELVET (1986). I’d seen it in college, not long after it came out. Not the most appropriate film for this stage in the course (or the holidays!), but my daughter showed interest. One shouldn’t waste such opportunities.

The film uncovers dysfunctional horrors lying just beneath the surface of an idyllic small-town. At one point, its protagonist Jeffrey Beaumont says, “I’m seeing something that was always hidden” — and so are we, including obscene violence and misogyny. This film likely couldn’t be made today.

Reflection

Nineteen Eighty-Four is the go-to dystopian novel: people often refer to attempts to subvert language or rewrite history as “Orwellian.” And appropriately so: Orwell’s novel captures the horrors of sacrificing individuality to top-down social control through the coercive manipulation of culture. But Brave New World offers perhaps a more accurate picture of where we find ourselves.

While both are horrifying dystopias, the two novels’ visions are very different. 1984’s world is extraordinarily bleak and depressing. (“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”) Members of the Inner Party know they’re causing suffering, but that’s the price of control and stability – and an end in itself; cruelty is the point.

Brave New World’s vision is more distressing: stability and control not through coercion but through infantilizing consumerism and progressive/humanist values. The former at least gives you a clear antagonist. But who can complain about the latter? Like Chaplin, the overt target here is industrialization. But unlike Chaplin, one detects in Huxley suspicion of socialism. (Is it an accident that two of the main characters are named Lenina and Marx?)

Ultimately, both novels criticize high-modernist top-down planning of the sort analyzed by James C. Scott in Seeing Like a State. The difference is one of means: coercion vs. conditioning. But the shared ends are insane: “perfecting” humanity is not just a fool’s errand, but also a path to dehumanization — which makes Brave New World an ideal work to read at the end of this course.

Notes on Note-taking

This week, I followed a similar process to the one I’ve used throughout the course: I read the work, reflected on it by taking notes (usually in Obsidian), and then used an LLM to reflect on and refine those works. But after re-reading Brave New World, I can’t help but wonder about the LLM’s neutrality. To what degree do its responses reflect its controllers’ social preferences?

I’ve gotten much value from LLMs throughout this course. But I’m also wary of the implications of using them to mediate my learning and thinking. In some ways, our societies aspire to the kind of conditioning depicted in the novel. LLMs can be a powerful tool in these efforts. This may be another reason to prefer “offline thinking”: my paper notebook isn’t likely to nudge me toward groupthink anytime soon.

Up Next

Final week! Gioia recommends assorted short readings from Octavia Butler, Joan Didion, David Foster Wallance, Tim O’Brien, and Alcoholics Anonymous. At this point, I trust his recommendations will wrap up this course nicely.

Again, there’s a YouTube playlist for the videos I’m sharing here. I’m also sharing these posts via Substack if you’d like to subscribe and comment. See you next week!