Dystopian novels: Warning, not blueprint

I love a good dystopian novel. I love the ones that end with a glimmer of hope. I love the ones that make me angry. I love the ones that illuminate the path our society is on.

But let’s get this straight: Dystopian novels are not a blueprint for how the future will look—they’re a warning to change lest our future go wrong.

We seem to be missing the point…

We do not need screens in every room in our house telling us what to do (1984)

The advance of technology is happening at a staggering pace. Looking at the world of 1984 in the actual year 1984, I remember all the relief that the media expressed. “See? It’s 1984, and our screens don’t control us. They can’t see what we’re doing. They aren’t in every little corner of our lives!”

1984 shows us a world in which the British (assumed) government surveils its population day and night. The government lies to everyone—even changing their lies from day to day—and the population largely takes it. What else can they do? Screens are in control.

Yes, it took a little longer than Orwell thought, and it’s not actually the government that is doing it, but here we are. Have you looked at the videos that an amusement park enthusiast took before and after the smartphone revolution? It’s…shocking. We are now living in our screens. We do what they tell us to do.

The warning that I take from this book:

1. We should not be complacent like a frog in a slowly heating pot of water. We must always resist—thoughtfully.
2. Humans should be able to escape the trappings of modern life and, in order to be healthy, should do that on a regular basis.
3. We should view anyone in a position of authority with a healthy dose of skepticism.

The blueprint that people seem to be following:

1. Screens everywhere? Why fight it? In fact, let’s have Alexa in every room so we can’t even have a normal conversation without a machine listening in.
2. It’s private companies, not government, that’s doing this, so it’s OK.
3. Governments will always be manipulative. Politicians will always lie. Not only should we accept this, but let’s embrace it and elect people who don’t even try to hide that they’re lying.

Remember that the free exchange of ideas should not be limited without very, very good reason (Fahrenheit 451)

In Ray Bradbury’s dystopia, there are no books. Knowing what I do about Bradbury, this was probably the scariest future he could imagine. But somehow, though [almost] all of us find Bradbury’s vision as frightening as he did, we still argue about access to books.

Neither the left nor the right is solely in charge of this particular failure of imagination. Parents of all stripes fear what words can do to their kids. And when politicians and other “influencers” use that fear, it can be potent. As I write this, new laws in conservative areas are trying to make sure that children won’t feel “ashamed” of their cultural legacy—as long as those children are white. And the left has been making trouble of its own, trying to balance whose suffering is worth highlighting by trying to assess the relative “power” of groups who have suffered.

It’s a tiresome project no matter who does it. Children need to be challenged, and need to feel secure in their ability to respond to those challenges. We need to value but not assign relative value to all human histories. It seems pretty straightforward, but it’s not. I know that I read books when I was younger that I wasn’t ready for. But I also know that I did not need anyone to save me from those ideas—I was challenged, and I rose to the challenge.

The warning that I take from this book:

1. You can’t just take away some knowledge; if you start taking it away, you’ll find that there’s no clear line where you should stop.
2. Human history is valuable, whether we like it or not.

The blueprint that people seem to be following:

1. Banning books, ideas, and historical fact is OK as long as my side is doing it.
2. We can trust ourselves to know which information is damaging to kids.

We should not devalue physical intimacy to the point where it becomes simple currency (Brave New World)

I’m not going to say that I have any insight into current young people’s sense of sexuality and relationships. But all measures seem to be showing a decline in people who even believe that having a committed physical/spiritual/emotional relationship is worth it.

In Brave New World, sexuality has been coopted as a tool by the government. (Once again, a dystopian fiction gets the bad guy wrong, since the reality is that governments are nowhere near as good at fooling people and making them do what they want as the private sector.) It is true that our government isn’t exactly telling us to use sex as currency (though, heck, if they really wanted more people to get married, wouldn’t they get rid of the marriage penalty in our tax code?).

I agree that the so-called sexual revolution was a necessary step. Women were not allowed full agency over their bodies and their lives, and that was wrong. Frankly, if two consenting adults want to exchange sex without emotional involvement, who should care?

But it seems that many people ignored Huxley’s actual warning.

The warning that I take from this book:

1. Humans need love. Period.
2. Without love, humans lose their humanity.

The blueprint that people seem to be following:

1. There is no point to love and commitment—it’s so old-fashioned.
2. People who want love are pathetic outsiders who should just go live in a shack somewhere. OK, boomers!

* PS: I’m not a boomer…

We do not need to separate our country into warring regions willing to kill each other to keep our little bit of land to ourselves (Hunger Games)

It is inevitable that humans will have disagreements. It’s probably inevitable that we will always be tempted to separate ourselves into “us” and “them”—though I think some people are making progress on resisting that tendency.

But it is very much not inevitable that different areas of one country (such as in the US) or different cultures around the world should literally fight to the death in the arena, a la Hunger Games, to solve our differences. In this series, humanity’s in some trouble. We don’t know everything that happened between now and this future, but it was pretty disastrous. Our heroine is supposed to go and kill other people simply because they are representatives from other regions of the country.

The warning that I take from this book is in two halves:

1. Don’t screw up the world so badly that humanity is nearly wiped out, OK?
2. If you do, remember that we’re all in this together and only by helping each other will we all climb out of the hole.

The blueprint that people seem to be following:

1. We’re gonna screw it all up anyway so don’t bother to keep the bad stuff from happening.
2. While we’re at it, tribalism has always worked so great for humans, right? So let’s make sure to spread hatred of people in places we don’t approve of!

In conclusion, I’ll just say it again:

Dystopian novels: warning, not blueprint.