Brave New World
When people think about 20th Century dystopic novels, they tend to think about the 1949 book, 1984 by George Orwell (his real name, Eric Arthur Blair). It was Orwell’s last of nine published books since he died the next year of tuberculosis before the full impact of his theme story about democratic socialism in a fictional country called Oceania, who’s capital city is London. But the seminal dystopic novel, written eighteen years prior in 1931 was Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, set in the nation of World State, who’s capital city is…London. Both Orwell and Huxley were known for their social satire, but they both lived through the economic ravages of the Great Depression (which hit London very hard) and the horrors of the aggressions of the totalitarian Third Reich, including the early days of obsession and oppression in Germany, the manifest destiny in every cardinal and ordinal direction of the compass from Berlin, all the way through to the Anschluss of the Final Solution. They were both idealists that had overdosed on the realism of a very ugly time in the world. That created a unique perception of how the positive and negative aspects of collectivism might interact to create the world of the future.
While there are many aspects of both novels that define the dystopic future they each portray, the two that modern readers remember the most are the notion of Big Brother and the replacement of sexual procreation with reproduction technology. Neither of these “improvements” to life strike most readers as much cause for optimism, at least not as depicted by the protagonists of the novels, both of whom are actively fighting and fleeing from their central governmental suppressors. Where they think they can run to is hard to say, but personal liberty is the goal and central government is the enemy. It seems strange that two proponents of democratic socialism should paint such a scary picture of how the collective can get out of control and the result becomes the distortion of the common good. While Brave New World unambiguously advocates a stern warning against rampant capitalism and the protagonist name, Bernard Marx, makes obvious the advocacy of Marxist ideologies, it is hard to equate modern libertarian ideals to this mid-century quest for freedom.
No, I did not just reread either dystopian novel, both of which I read first in high school and have perhaps reread twice since for one reason or another. Instead, what has brought all of this dystopia to mind is a confluence of recent events that screamed at me to share these things. To begin with, as you may recall, I am nearing the end of my Spring course in Law, Policy & Ethics. Last week, the topic du jour was Individual Liberty versus the Common Good, one of the bigger topics of our day and therefore, appropriately, for this important guidance course for future business leaders. I ran across a video that I will be sharing with the class tomorrow. Actually, it was sent to me by one of my very red friends with the comment that he presumed that I might like this idea that came out of China (which he, naturally thought was oppressive in the over-reaching by the State). It was a piece reported by Lester Holt about China’s new Social Credit System, a big data system for tracking ratings for individuals on a social consciousness index. They are rated like a U.S. credit rating system, between 350 and 950 and are tracked in their everyday life by the various mechanisms of the central government, which captures all of the socially good and bad things that the 1.4 billion Chinese population does each day. The reporting makes the system seem like its more oriented to the carrot than the stick in that it will be used to reward good behavior more than to punish bad behavior (though that is not totally absent, either).
My response to the system, which supposedly the Chinese population tends to like (though God knows what the Chinese really feel given how intolerant their system is to dissent) is that there are parts of it that I love and parts of it that I hate. In other words, it sits right on that Liberty v. Collectivism continuum that has such a delicate inflection point. This idea crosses many of the issues we discuss in our course, including the impact of technology and social media, as well as ESG regulation, and even Free Markets (versus regulated markets). I will be curious to hear how the class feels about the system. When I asked about TikTok being banned, there were clearly those in class that felt it should be, mostly due to distrust of China, specifically. I saw today that 46% of Americans now support a ban of TikTok, but that poll also showed that the ban is heavily dominated by support from older and more Republican citizens. Younger and Democratic citizens do not so strongly support such a ban (they are still between 37-33% in favor of a ban). TikTok is a great proxy for the Chinese Social Credit System. We want a better world, but we don’t want totalitarianism. We want privacy, but we are willing to quash freedom to get it. The same issues are schizophrenic enough to give Americans some serious agita.
And then there are the demographic trends, which also came up in class last week. We talked at length about the Hans Rosling’s book, Factfulness, which reviews with compelling graphics, how well the world of the last eighty years (those would be the years dominated by social democracy) has improved the standards of living for vast swaths of the global population. This led to a discussion about the balancing act between population growth and economic growth and the conundrum that declining fertility and increasing longevity create for an 8 billion person world. What has been called the Demographic Dividend by some is turning into a topsy-turvy force that is driving developed countries down and emerging countries up. We debated what was meant by declining fertility. The class wanted to suggest it was a social choice made for economic reasons. I made the point that it was also a biological phenomenon that nature seems to want to deploy to curtail the excessive population growth that the Earth is stretched to accommodate.
Sure enough, the New Yorker came through with an article (The Future of Fertility) this week about the biologically declining fertility rate and the meaningful rise of IVF births in the U.S.. That sounds a lot like a brave new world to me.
Every age has its challenges. I know that we always like to think that we are going through the most challenging times anyone has ever had to endure, and that is neither easy to prove nor likely to be the case since there have been many troubles to get in the way of people over the years. However, there is something to be understood about how much more difficult balancing Liberty and Collectivism becomes as the global population gets to the 8 billion level we reached last November. I keep my NatGeo with the 8 Billion cover next to me at all times to remind me that we are coming up to some important limits that urgently need attention. I believe that in my lifespan, these issues will be debate-worthy but not impact my life so much. But that is not what my children and grandchildren face. They may be the ones that have the greatest challenge of all time to address.
I was please to see today that a recent study out of San Diego State tells us that Millennials are doing better financially (inflation-adjusted) than either Gen X or Baby Boomers looked at at the same age. That’s encouraging and gives me hope for the Brave New World.