"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach." That is a quote by Aldous Huxley. Huxley is best known as the author of "A Brave New World" and "The Doors Of Perception". The Doors Of Perception recalls his experiences when taking a psychedelic drug, and was a book that had great influence on Jim Morrison. In fact, the book had such an impact on him that he named his rock band The Doors. How's that for trivia! Although I am sure that most true Doors fans already knew that. Anyway, Huxley was considered one of the greatest intellectuals of his time and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature in seven different years. While I am thinking about it, congratulations to Bob Dylan for winning the 2016 Noble Prize for literature. He won the award for ‘having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition’. The Swedish academy stated: “We’re really giving it to Bob Dylan as a great poet – that’s the reason we awarded him the prize. He’s a great poet in the great English tradition, stretching from Milton and Blake onwards. And he’s a very interesting traditionalist, in a highly original way. Not just the written tradition, but also the oral one; not just high literature, but also low literature.” Though Dylan is considered by many to be a musician, not a writer, Danius said the artistic reach of his lyrics and poetry could not be put in a single box. “I came to realize that we still read Homer and Sappho from ancient Greece, and they were writing 2,500 years ago,” she said. “They were meant to be performed, often together with instruments, but they have survived, and survived incredibly well, on the book page. We enjoy [their] poetry, and I think Bob Dylan deserves to be read as a poet.” I find it fitting to write about Aldous Huxley on the same day that Bob Dylan wins a Noble Prize because both men, in their own ways, called for social change. In fact, way back in 1958 Huxley gave a prescient warning about what he saw coming for the world in the future. Now, 58 years later, some of those predictions look startlingly accurate! Meanwhile, Dylan wrote songs in the sixties that called for social changes that also seem to be slowly gaining traction.
To get back to Huxley, after nearly sixty years, his words too are now history. Let's see what he was saying and if there is anything we should have learned. The quotes below come from an interview he did with Mike Wallace back in 1958. At that time Huxley stated that: 1."Technology, bureaucracy and Television will be used to enslave us." Huxley believed that: "we mustn’t be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology. This has happened again and again in history with technology’s advance and this changes social condition, and suddenly people have found themselves in a situation which they didn’t foresee and doing all sorts of things they really didn’t want to do." Specifically, on television he stated: " it is being used too much to distract everybody all the time. But, I mean, imagine which must be the situation in all communist countries where the television, where it exists, is always saying the same things the whole time; it’s always driving along. It’s not creating a wide front of distraction it’s creating a one-pointed, er…drumming in of a single idea, all the time. It’s obviously an immensely powerful instrument. ' There were a lot of other things that Huxley said too. Isaac Davis recently wrote an article about Huxley. Instead of just quoting from his article, follow this link to read it yourself Huxley It is rare that I ever just send my readers to another blog to read, but the article is well worth reading. In my opinion, Huxley was amazing. Now that you have read the article linked to above, I think you can see how self evident Huxley's quote to him. And remember, Brave New World was written in 1931. About 27 years before he gave that interview! Truly, He was a man ahead of his time. It's no wonder that his name often comes up when people speak of George Orwell, another writer of dystopian novels. He is best known for his book 1984. A Brave New World, 1984, and even Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand are all history now. Why not read them? And see if you can learn the messages these authors were trying to alert us to way back then.
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