Christopher Hitchen's Foreword to Brave New World (Excerpts)

Excerpts of the phenomenal Christopher Hitchens in his Foreword to Huxley's Brave New World (2003). This man's insight was fantastic. The following quotations really stood out to me.

But if [Huxley] were able to return to us, and cast his scornful and lofty gaze on our hedonistic society, he would probably be relatively unsurprised at the way things are going. Sex has been divorced from procreation to a degree hard to imagine even in 1963, and the current great debates in the moral sciences concern the implications of reproductive cloning and of the employment of fetal stem-cells in medicine. The study of history is everywhere, but especially in the United States, in steep decline. Public life in the richer societies is routinely compared to the rhythms of spectacle and entertainment. A flickering hunger for authenticity pushes many people to explore the peripheral and shrinking worlds of the "indigenous."[...]

But [Orwell] was writing about the forbidding, part-alien experience of Nazism and Stalinism, whereas Huxley was locating disgust and menace in the very things -- the new toys of materialism, from cars to contraceptives -- that were becoming everyday pursuits.

[...] The three deficiencies [the novel's characters] feel, often without knowing how to name them, are Nature, Religion, and Literature. With only chemical and mechanical and sexual comforts provided to them, they sense the absence of challenge and drama and they fall prey to ennui. With no concept of a cosmos beyond the immediately human, they are deprived of the chance to feel awed or alienated. And with nothing but sensory entertainment (Huxley might not have been the best of movie critics, given his near-blindness, but he used this disadvantage to imagine "the feelies" as the culmination of "talkies" and "movies) they have no appreciation for words. [...] 

We can always be sure of one thing -- that the messengers of discomfort and sacrifice will be stoned and pelted by those who wish to preserve at all costs their own contentment. This is not a lesson that is confined to the Testaments. [...] 

The disguised presence of original sin is reimagined [sic] in Brave New World when Huxley, in the most absurd of his scenarios, shows us little children being sleep-conditioned to consume, and to use up material goods and opportunities with as much abandon as possible. 

Here one must ask, who but a member of the comfortable or agnostic classes imagines that people need to be brainwashed into being greedy? The acquisitive instinct, perhaps initially supplied by Satan himself in one interpretation, is after all fairly easily engaged. It was Karl Marx and not Bernard Marx who wrote that, in relation to his victims, the capitalist "therefore searches for all possible ways of stimulating them to consume, by making his commodities more attractive and by filling their ears with babble about new needs." Marx also thought, as is usually forgotten or overlooked, that this impulse led to innovation and experiment and to the liberating process of what has sometimes been called "creative destruction." In other words, it is a means of arousing discontent with the status quo, not a mere means of stupefying the masses. [...] 

One might note, also, that the chief demographic problem of the United States in 2003 is its ageing [sic] population, with the "graying" process somewhat delayed or postponed by legal and illegal immigration. Scholars, such as Amartya Sen in particular, have come up with multiple refutations of Malthus. "Population bomb" theorists, most notably Paul Ehrlich, have seen their extrapolated predictions repeatedly fail to come true -- at least partly because they are extrapolations. [...] 

The search for Nirvana, like the search for Utopia or the end of history or the classless society, is ultimately a futile and dangerous one. It involves, if it does not necessitate, the sleep of reason. There is no escape from anxiety and struggle, and Huxley assists us in attaining this valuable glimpse of the obvious, precisely because it was a conclusion that was in many ways unwelcome to him.

Source: http://www.american-buddha.com/brave.world.fore.htm

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"They have no appreciation for words"; "they are deprived of the chance to feel awed or alienated" ... these words seem to apply very well to the modern world.