Dystopian Divergence

Aldous Huxley and George Orwell

Neil Postman published a book in 1985 called Amusing Ourselves to Death.

In the preface, Postman is comparing two darkly prophetic books: 1984 by George Orwell (1949), and Brave New World (1932), by Aldous Huxley. Since the year 1984 had passed, Postman noted that many Americans were congratulating themselves that a Big Brother state hadn't been established in our land. We hadn't gone the way of the Socialists or the Communists or the Fascists. Our democracy still held reasonably steady and strong. But Postman reminded us that Brave New World might have been the prophetic novel for us, because “in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. [Huxley thought that] people [would] come to love their oppression, [and] to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.”

Again, this is early 1985 when Postman is writing. There were no ubiquitous cell phones, no widespread use of personal computers (the first windows PC released in Nov 1985), no iPods or iPads, no smartphones, and no social media.... But listen to Postman's analysis:

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much [information] that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists... "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions."

In Luke's Gospel, Jesus tells his friend Martha that she is distracted. Distracted with much serving. Even though in her thinking, Martha was serving the Lord Jesus, she was nonetheless distracted. We can easily come up with a list of the things that distract us. But being distracted by things implies that we are being distracted from something. So we might do well to ask, “From what are we being distracted?”

Take just a few seconds and try to answer that from the vantage point of the devil's schemes and devices.... So, what is our enemy trying to distract us from?... Prayer... Reading the Bible... Fellowship with other Christians.... Mission work or sharing the Gospel with someone.... Being still and quiet and meditating on God's word.... You are getting the idea now. We might summarize it by saying that our enemy will distract us by any means possible from thinking about God, or seeking Him, or trying to draw near to Him....

CS Lewis wrote a series of letters that were originally published in an Anglican periodical called The Guardian. These letters were later collected and published as a book in 1942 that many of us know as The Screwtape Letters. This was a book that was potentially hazardous for Lewis to write, as he himself would acknowledge. The book is a series of letters from a senior demon named Screwtape, to his younger junior-demon nephew named Wormwood. Screwtape writes his nephew advice on how to keep people from becoming Christians. If they become Christians, Screwtape gives endless counsel on how to keep the new Christian from growing closer to God or from being effective in following Jesus. And from the demon's point of view, it's all about the art of distraction.

In Letter 12, Screwtape writes:

The Christians describe the Enemy (the demons refer to God as the Enemy) as one “without whom Nothing is strong”. And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.

You will say that these are very small sins; and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts,

Your affectionate uncle

SCREWTAPE

Paul Cozby, in an article for the Fellowship for Performing Arts, writes:

“If Screwtape were advising young demons today, he would not need to invent entirely new temptations. He’d simply point them toward the smartphones in our hands. He’d praise the dopamine loops of TikTok, the curated envy factories on Instagram and the doomscrolling of YouTube Shorts. He wouldn’t even need to work that hard. The architecture of modern platforms does most of the work for him....

Our phones are not just tools; they’ve become extensions of ourselves, habit-forming devices engineered to dominate our attention. Push notifications, autoplay videos, algorithmic feeds — they all combine to keep our minds buzzing, but rarely still. According to ... data from Digital Information World...., the average American now spends over 7 hours per day in front of a screen. For Gen Z, that number climbs to a staggering 9 hours daily.

Lewis’ demons would be thrilled."