Shouldn't it Have a Comma?

I’m not sure what it is but this blog seems to have lost some of the old style. It may be that I am just getting old and unable to concentrate but that seems at odds with my assertion that I am now able to keep going with ‘difficult’ books. Current reading is a true example. My wife gave me a copy of Brave New World some years ago and I never made it into the book itself, having given up after the Introduction, and biography and somewhere in the middle of Huxley’s own foreword. I started reading it again after its mention in The Martians and Us – part of BBC 4’s Sci-fi Britannia season and this time it seems so much easier. In a way it is a slightly more believable dystopia than that of nineteen-eighty-four because of the standard intelligence and behaviour of the main (albeit alpha male characters) as opposed to the downtrodden party members of Orwell’s book. There is the usual lag of technology where the book despite being set 600 odd years into the future still records everything on 80 cubic metres of card index. I suspect that most of the mechanical advances of the future would not amaze the sci-fi writers of the past. What will get them is the shrinking of information storage. I can’t be bothered to do the calculation but I suspect that 80 cubic metres of card index would easily fit into an empty corner of this very machine. The fact that the whole world is connected down this little cable to my left would knock anyone from the thirties to the floor. And yet none of this seems to have created the social revolution you might imagine. We all continue with our prejudices and desires for a normal quiet life. Who does the future belong to? – those who can understand the technology or even predict it - or to those who are comfortable with using it. Of course this is just a rewording of Arthur C. Clarke’s assertion that any sufficiently advanced society (civilization) is indistinguishable from magic.

There was one paragraph at the beginning of BNW which made me stop and re-read it as it chimes beautifully with this Government’s desire to identify potential trouble-makers almost from birth. The vision of conditioning of embryos before birth (decanting in Huxley’s terms) is only a slight modification of the idea of teams of bureaucrats like those in the film Brazil, wandering round with clipboards and staring down at crawling infants. It is almost identical to the terrible post-decanting conditioning of infants using aversion to deter them from a love of the countryside.

Oh dear, the little paranoid, conspiracy demons seems to have got me again. I realise that the BNW is not likely to be upon us immediately if ever but the present seems to be a creeping erosion of the society that has taken years to be built. There has been a hard struggle over the years to get us to the current state of free-speech and reasonably equal society and now it seems on the brink of a reverse, not maybe back to the dark ages but a perverse place where things that for the champions of our free society grate and annoy are seen by the over-complex brains of the people in charge as positive developments. Maybe the architects of this derosion seriously do believe they are doing good. They just don’t realise that cutting edge changes to society often only appeal to the mad, bad and dangerous-to-know elements, a group which too many of our politicians seem to belong to. Reform of the health service is a priority for both main parties but sometimes such a radical reform blinds the architects to the reality of what the service is designed to achieve. On top of this, the measurement of the service provided is not possible using the figure-based criteria that are defined. Numbers are blunt instruments when it comes to something as complex as health care. You need perceptions and good feelings, the confidence that you will be looked after with respect when you go for any health care. Start by making staff use family names rather than given names for every body. Calling everybody by their first name may be alright for those of us still in our first childhoods but it seems like lack of respect for a lot of us. I suppose I must be on the border of this distinction but even there I feel like the success of reforms is defined purely by numbers and of course you can do anything with numbers.