"Aldous Huxley's Brave New World describes a society in thrall to the values of science and technology. It is set in the futuristic World State, whose citizens are scientifically engineered to fit into a hierarchy. Eugenics, psychotropic pharmaceuticals and classical conditioning are employed to maximise stability and happiness. Huxley's novel does not describe a conventionally authoritarian system, but one in which the desire for freedom and dignity has simply been eliminated. The World State is a radical technocracy."
"And yet something resembling this upside-down mindset is now emerging across the globe, particularly in the debate around climate change. From Europe to China, the technology that threatened to destroy the planet is held to be the one that will save it. Having built a system that is destructive of the environment that surrounds and sustains us, we are now proposing to change the environment!"
A society organized around scientific and technological values can engineer citizens to fit a social hierarchy through eugenics, psychotropic drugs and conditioning, trading freedom and dignity for stability and happiness. Controllers who prize rationality and efficiency design humans to function within a preordered system rather than build a society that fosters flourishing human beings. A parallel mindset appears in contemporary climate debates where technologies that contributed to environmental destruction are now proposed as the remedies. The current impulse is to change the environment to suit technological systems rather than adapt systems to sustain the natural world, driving a push for technological fixes.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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