Total surveillance. Complex grids of control. Thought policing. Brainwashing. Bleak cities sanitized of feeling, rebellion, and thought. Advanced technological means of control and punishment. Purges of unwanted dissenters or members no longer useful to the collective.
These are the images that flash through the mind when we think of a dystopia, a scenario that haunts our modern consciousness, and, as a consequence, shapes our literature and cinema in profound ways.
What Is a Dystopia?
To get a better handle on these questions, we must first understand what dystopian fiction is. In his book “Dystopia: A Natural History,” Gregory Claeys describes a dystopia as a “failed utopia,” a term often associated with the 20th-century totalitarian systems, which were erected on the false promise of an earthly paradise.
“Here it typically means a regime defined by extreme coercion, inequality, imprisonment, and slavery,” he writes. “Often this is described as some concept of collectivism run wild, though some include conformist tendencies in liberal societies.”
Common elements of dystopian scenarios include dictatorial government, advanced technologies, and worldwide cataclysms. In an interview with The Epoch Times, literature instructor Peter Beurskens outlined key qualities of dystopian novels.
“They paint portraits of a world in which experts, often the elites of society, following some distinct, man-made political ideology, engineer human interactions in a way that denies ... human nature. In trying to create a utopia, the elites instead manage to create societies in which tyranny, violence, distrust, and chaos [reign].”
The Development of Dystopian Fiction
Apocalyptic visions are as old as humanity itself, but the idea of a society so dehumanizing that it is itself a kind of apocalypse appears to be a modern phenomenon. Technocratic and totalitarian tendencies in the real world have increased since the Enlightenment, which inspired the telling of cautionary tales.Writer and professor Anthony Esolen observed, “Dystopias are imaginable only in the wake of the industrial revolution, which made grand-scale and pathological madness and control over human life conceivable.”
Robespierre’s Reign of Terror from 1793 to 1794 was a prototype of the totalitarian purges of the 20th century and the concept of using surveillance, violence, and the cessation of due legal process to end a “threat” against the collective. Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and others followed a similar path, but the rapid development of technology allowed them to do so on a scale far beyond Robespierre’s greediest imaginings.
The rise of science and the advancement of technology since the 16th century, particularly its breathtaking acceleration in the past 200 years, has also factored into these stories’ development. As humanity created more powerful tools, we suffered greater apprehensions about how such tools might get out of hand, how they might ruin us. Artificial intelligence is the most recent example.
Books and films often reflect the primary mental preoccupations of a society situated in a certain historical moment. The West’s preoccupation with technological advancement, the threat of communism, and nuclear annihilation in the mid-20th century naturally spawned stories about these potentialities.
The 1924 novel “We” by Soviet dissident Yevgeny Zamyatin is often considered the first dystopian novel. Classics such as “Brave New World” (1932) by Aldous Huxley, “1984” (1949) by George Orwell, and “Fahrenheit 451” (1953) by Ray Bradbury followed in quick succession. The proliferation of these stories came not only after the technological wave outlined above, but also, as Mr. Beurskens points out, after the noxious ideas of figures such as Marx, Freud, Darwin, and Nietzsche began to replace traditional notions of civilization with the thesis that humanity could, through its own reason and inventiveness, shape society into a utopia.
What Dystopian Fantasies Tell Us
Tales of horrifying futures for humanity have reached, in our lifetimes, a hitherto unknown popularity. Why? Mr. Esolen points out that dystopian tales are often “exaggerations of certain features of current culture or politics.” Herein lies a clue to the growing popularity of this genre of fiction: The more that Western societies move in a collectivist and technocratic direction, the more material for dystopian fictional scenarios arises and the more anxiety grows about the possibility of a technologized, collectivist state gone wrong.Why these sobering stories appeal particularly to teenagers remains a mystery. It may have something to do with teenagers’ notorious cynicism, particularly about the way adults run things; in young adult dystopias, it’s the adults who run the dystopia and the teens who heroically resist them. Or it could be their lack of control over their lives, or their entrance into the world of more complex ethical decisions, another hallmark of dystopian novels.
But something weightier may be at work: pessimism about their futures, the state of America, and the state of the world. Mr. Esolen suggests that it’s “because theirs is a peculiarly mirthless and hopeless world.”
Mr. Beurskens theorizes, “Far from eschewing the darkness [of dystopian tales], perhaps these students are drawn to it, possibly because they find that it mirrors the moral mess of our current society.”
Some of Mr. Beurskens’s students weighed in on the question.
“Something about an alternate reality where everything is so-called perfect but underneath are hidden lies makes me just want to keep reading,” one said. Another student’s 15-year-old son said, “Overcoming bad odds is inspiring.”
It’s true that many of the genre’s novels end on a hopeful note, with the possibility of restoring a saner social order. That’s part of the draw. But, at the same time, this craving for hope may indicate an attempt to shake off a prevailing pessimism.
Some go so far as to say we’ve already entered a dystopian era. At the end of his article, Mr. Schmidt writes, “Do we already live in a post-apocalyptic age, in which consumer wasting and willing enslavement to our technologies [has] ... already arrived?”
“With Big Brother already present in our online lives, watching who we ‘Like’ and what we buy and how we blog, are we actually living in our own version of dystopia?” Maybe certain elements of a dystopia are already in place.
Fears that the rest of those elements will fall into place seem to follow us like shadows. We hear the dim rumbling of some uncertain catastrophe, rolling like thunder in the distance. Many seem convinced that it must come. We grapple with an increasingly impersonal, technological, bureaucratic, scientific, and secular world. Our stories and songs reflect that.
In the age of the Enlightenment, humanity sought its independence from the supposed shackles of religion and tradition, in part through the progress of science, technology, and new political paradigms. We’ve received the independence we sought, but now we shudder at the shadows of the things we created. As totalitarianism, nuclear peril, and the unprecedented COVID saga have taught us, our modern, Enlightened, scientific existence has proven to be a tenuous and highly fraught one. One is led to wonder: Was the trade worth it?
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