Friday, August 14, 2009

Orwell vs. Huxley on the death of books and culture

From Daryl Charles in Touchstone, paraphrasing Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death (I need to read that book!) who was comparing Orwell's 1984 to Huxley's Brave New World.

While Orwell feared those who would ban books, Huxley feared that eventually there would be no reason for banning books, since few would want to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information; Huxley, by contrast, feared that truth would be drowned in a "sea of irrelevance", a consequence of our own passivity, indifference, and egoism.

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