Like, a lot.

When I say “I almost hurt myself laughing”, that’s hyperbole, but only because I am spectacularly prone to overstatement. (As one person in one of my tutes last year put it, “You think everything is awesome, don’t you?” Which is true. I… I tend to find reasons to like things. Sometimes it involves liking things ironically, but I will like the bastards one way or the other. Anyway!) I have actually hurt myself laughing many times, and not just through walking into walls or something. I tend to overdo the laughter.

I’m not one of those guys that’s always laughing loudly and annoyingly (‘always’ being the key word here), but I’m amused by anything even remotely funny. The way this manifests itself the most is with that sort of exhalation through the nose that people do – the one that sounds almost sort of condescending, like you don’t want to deign to laugh any more? Like a snigger, but only the first part, with everything else left off. Yeah, that one.

I’m the guy that does that at everything that even slightly tickles my funny bone.

I’ve never listened to my drunk laugh from a third-person perspective (such as a recording or something), but I’m pretty sure it’s not exactly dulcet tones, if you get my drift. From my end, it sounds like a drunken hyena laugh, but since my perception of my voice has never matched up to what it actually is, well… Look at it this way. From my end, my voice legitimately sounds deep, maybe a little throaty, and confident. Recordings of my voice tell me that it’s actually got that weird nerd-throat-closure thing going on a little (think nerds on The Simpsons), and that I pull my cheeks in on my ‘S’s too much.

Now think about what that means for my drunk laugh, if even I can tell it’s bad.

Yeah.

But in general, I try to be a laughy sort of guy, so when something is actually gutbustingly funny it does send me overboard. This is a lot like other parts of my personality; people who follow my journal can tell you that when I like something, I sort of… manically like it. Like Mickey Rourke’s suits. (I can’t help it, I really do love them. I don’t care about the real reason he’s dressing like that. The fact is that to me, he looks like a guy who’s been to hell and back, is riding the wave, and is determined to make the most out of this while he can – and that includes dressing in the most amazing suits ever.)

In conclusion: go home and watch The Departed.

For example. When it comes to music, I’m sort of a dilettante. My taste has been described as eclectic, but to me that sort of sounds like someone is serious about their music, and has picked and chosen only the best of artists to listen to from the vast panoply available to them. It’s a description that really doesn’t apply to me at all. I just listen to what I enjoy listening to, and if that results in a bunch of different genres appearing in my library, then that’s what happens. It wasn’t a conscious effort to go out and acquire the best from every style, it was a conscious effort to find stuff I like listening to.

This is one of the things that’s contributed to the general mindset of “if I know it, everyone else must too”. With people who specialise in one genre of music, there’s almost always a more in-depth knowledge of the genre and artists involved there – punk listeners can name more punks, blues listeners can listen more bluesmen, etc. So if I only have a surface knowledge of a lot of genres, then it logically follows that the artists I know are the ones that are in the general public consciousness.

Take stuff like Nick Cave or Tom Waits or something. On the Internet, you’re more likely to run into someone that knows them than someone who doesn’t, no problem. But offline, it’s the other way around. They’re not exactly unpopular, by any means, but the size of their fanbase is way smaller proportionally, as well as the amount of people who know them.

This is changing as I get older, mind – probably because the circles I’m moving in are changing slightly, more than anything else, but I guess people are getting more knowledge as they get older, too. It’s just an odd thing that I’ve had to deal with occasionally: the Internet has warped my idea of what’s mainstream and what’s not.

I saw her.

This is one of the greatest things about English – one of its best and most useful features, and one that gets taken for granted far too much. The sheer linguistic versatility that we have access to is incredible. Without getting out of our chair, we can sit or laze or relax or recline or slouch or slump. Depending on our mood, we can mutter or murmur or mumble or grumble. We can speak or talk or whisper or yell or coquette. Coquette, for Christ’s sake. Sure, we owe it to the French (who else?), but we have a word for flirting for the sake of flirting.

There are a lot of reasons for this. One of the most prevalent is that English is basically a filthy scumrat of a language. It picks things up from everywhere. In no particular order, we can thank (or blame) the French for ‘beef’, the Italians for ‘carpet’, and the Arabs for ‘candy’. It may be a slightly tired point to those of you out there who know anything at all about linguistics, but English owes a lot to everyone else. (“Everyone else” being the languages that it’s slowly replacing all around the world, obviously.)

We are lacking in a couple of places, obviously. Other languages do have a few points up on us, in terms of wonderfully useful words that probably say a lot about the sort of people that thought of them. Schadenfreude is one of the ones that gets brought up a lot. Maybe it says something about the history of the English temperament, I’m not sure, but for some reason we never decided we needed to succinctly express “happiness at someone else’s misfortune”. There are lots of other great ones out there, though.

Plaatsvervangende schaamte, for example. “Place-exchanging shame”. In what can only be a testament to the Dutch’s empathy, they have devised a term for the embarrassment you feel on behalf of someone else – that cringe when you see someone foul up so horribly bad that you feel it yourself. This fantastic person coupled it with that video of Miss South Carolina, which… well, let’s face it, if you have a heart it’s a great combination.

On the other hand, the Czechs have litost. As put by Milan Kundera, this is a “state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery”. In fact, I’m not going to bother elaborating on that definition. Here, go to this excerpt from Milan Kundera’s most excellent book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and then try to appreciate the sort of people that not only need to express that feeling, but have it down to one word.

Hell, there are entire books about this sort of thing. Christopher J. Moore’s book, In Other Words, is one you should check out if you get the chance. That way you can learn about yoko meshi: “a meal eaten sideways”, the Japanese expression for the stress caused by speaking a foreign language (also a pretty nifty pun based on the fact that Japanese is written vertically and not horizontally, like most languages). How can you not love that? If you adopt the use of yoko meshi, you can use a word from a foreign language to describe the feeling of speaking a foreign language. You know you want to.

That’s not to say English is without remarkably specific and useful words on its own. For instance, ‘velleity’. A velleity is desire in its weakest form: a wish you have without the effort of obtaining it. A ‘susurrus’ is the indistinct sound of people whispering, and also a word that you need to go out and use within the next week. And, of course, we have coquette from back up-post.

This is a point that’s made an incredible amount, but can never be made too many times. Words are amazing. Learn you some.

Um.

One thing in visual media that I think needs a lot of work is the use of meta-effects – the use of ‘test screens’, ‘game crashes’, whatever. Things of that ilk.

The thing is, there are some really good uses of meta-effects out there. They may not necessarily fool the player/viewer, but they at least take them aback for a few seconds and make them think about what’s going on. For instance, there are points in the Metal Gear Solid series where the game will actually pretend to have a disc error, or full-on require you to take the disc out and put it back in to continue. In one scene, a character knows if you’re using third-party game devices, and screws with your story path accordingly. They’re played well enough that there’s never any real risk of the player getting confused, but they’re effective. They work. The player is taken aback.

But!

In contrast, the majority of attempts to make it appear like there’s something going on with the medium itself are just… played-out. They’re the same thing over and over again, which wouldn’t be so bad if they were actually realistic, but the fact is that most effects you see of that ilk these days simply aren’t based on what would really happen in that situation.

For the obvious, most blatant, and really the least troubling of these, just look at the classic needle slipping. The sound effect of a needle slipping is universally recognised as what you hear when something goes wrong with the sound, usually for comedic effect: the music is playing, then something out of the ordinary happens, and the needle slips off the record as the action stops suddenly. The thing is, this effect is only really used in kids’ cartoons these days, and odds are that very few of those kids will never have even seen a record in the first place. They just recognise what the sound means, and the trope continues, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. It’s part of the show.

The problem really starts appearing when the effect is meant to be realistic. There’s sort of a split here about what’s more important – the realism of what’s going on, or the need to make what’s going on clear to the viewer without worrying them. I come down firmly on the side of the latter, obviously: I think that if you’re going to pretend a video has been interrupted or someone’s hijacked the show, make it as realistic as possible. Clearly this isn’t the optimum path for a large amount of works, since people aren’t watching it for the mind screw, but there you go.

For instance, take the reason that seems to be popping up more and more in professional wrestling these days: someone hijacking the feed. This generally comes in two flavours – either a known wrestler is interrupting the show/video to show something of their own, or an unknown party is supposedly messing with the show itself. In either case, things will be progressing as normal, then – just like that – the video will start breaking up. Flashes of a test pattern will flicker in-and-out with the original video and the ‘interference’. The new video will play, then when it’s finished, it’ll just cut out.

This reached its peak with the return of Chris Jericho, when code started flashing up on-screen. Apparently when a third party hacks the Raw feed to announce their return, the interference exposes code which is only relevant to their character and their return date, which is for some reason contained in the video feed. Or, uh, Chris Jericho wanted to announce his return, but only through cryptic computer code which he cut into the show. Maybe putting in a video would’ve been too difficult or something, I don’t know. (It should probably be mentioned that Chris Jericho’s nickname up until mid-2008 was ‘Y2J’. Yes, like Y2K. In 2008.)

The WWE’s idea with Jericho’s return was that it was meant to be a viral campaign, something for the fans to nut out themselves. (The fact that it was blindingly obvious apparently took them a little by surprise, since they kept changing the ‘coded’ date to keep the fans ‘guessing’.) But it was still clearly something put in there by the production team, and that was the problem. Same with the ‘interference’ that comes with video interruptions, same with the needle slip, and same with the mindscrewing in MGS. (MGS made it engaging enough for it not to matter, though.) The people behind these things just can’t bring themselves to come down on one side of the line or the other – realism, or accessibility. They want to have both; they want it to look like something’s seriously interfering with the show but still want to make sure the audience knows nothing’s really wrong, that no-one could really mess with the show, and it just ruins both options. It’s a sha+++CARRIER LOST+++

I’m by no means implying that they’re difficult to work out, or even that the idea of the passive voice is new to any of you, but I said I’d do more on the fun of restructuring sentences – and I am occasionally a man of my word. So, here we go!

To return to the example I used yesterday:

John ogled Xena.

This is what’s known as an ‘active’ sentence. It’s one of the simplest sentences possible in English, and follows the basic SVO structure. It’s considered more exciting to read than a ‘passive’ sentence, and infinitely better when it comes to writing a story or article or really anything you can think of. Of course, there are places where the passive works far better than the active, because style counts for a lot and passive carries a lot of stylistic weight. But still. Here’s the passive form of that example:

Xena was ogled by John.

As you can see, the object of the sentence has been pushed forward into the subject position. That’s not the important change, though. The important bit is that John has been thrown to the back of the sentence – the last thing you hear, and the last bit of information in the sentence.

Anyone who supports the ‘inverted pyramid’ style of writing an article will tell you that the most effective way of writing one is to put the important stuff first, the less important stuff later. It grabs the eye, gets the reader in, and means that even if they just flick over the opening of the article they still get the necessary information. If they do read the whole article, they’ll likely have tuned out by the end of it, so it makes sure they don’t miss too much. It also offers one other advantage that’s very useful when you’re writing for a newspaper: if the editor needs to cut down on words, they can just lop off the end of the article and nothing of value will be lost.

It’s the same way with the passive voice. It brings the object to the front of the sentence and therefore makes it the most ‘important’ part, and de-emphasises the subject. Consider the difference between “The police shot the criminal” and “The criminal was shot by the police”; in one sentence the fact that the police shot someone is the first thing you see, in the other it’s that a criminal was shot. The former informs you more about the police’s actions, while the latter focuses on the criminal. Basically, which voice is used decides what the sentence is actually about.

It gets worse. Here’s the ‘agentless’ passive.

The rioters were shot.

Who was shot? The rioters. Who shot them? …well, someone. Angry citizens. Other rioters. The police. You’re not being told, because the ‘agent’/original subject of the action isn’t even in the sentence, let alone shoved to the back. The agentless passive is the type of sentence that you need to look out for in news, because it means one of two things. The first is that the agent doesn’t need to be mentioned, usually because it’s somewhere else in the article or it’s completely obvious. (“The rioters were shot when they marched on Parliament House. … Police arrested a man in connection with the shootings later.”) The second is that, if you’ll excuse my English, someone’s fucking with you.

Basically: when you see the agentless passive in the news, read until you find out the agent. If there’s no agent at all, well… either someone’s getting fired for being a terrible editor or you should probably get Googling.

• Nagamese, a creole spoken in Nagaland, has a language particle ‘ke’ that is only ever used to refer to an individuated animate object of a sentence

That… may not make that much sense to you. So! Brief refresher on sentence structure in English, followed by an explanation of what the above bullet point actually means, after the jump.

Sentence structure in English, in its most basic form, follows an SVO structure – subject/verb/object. (It should probably be noted that ‘subject’ and ‘object’ are frowned upon by some linguists when describing other languages, because it follows the mindset that other languages can be classified using English-related terms, which is obviously not the case.) In simple terms, the subject is what’s doing the action, and the object – if applicable – is what’s getting the action done to them. Very simple terms.

For an example, take the following sentence:

John ran.

This is a simple example of an intransitive sentence/verb (one that is sans object). The subject (John) performs the verb (he ran). Next, we have a transitive example:

John heard Xena.

John is still the subject, performing/undergoing the verb, ‘heard’. However, we’ve now introduced Xena, aka the object of the sentence. Sort of. See, subject and object are also problematic even in English, because, well… John’s not really doing anything. He’s hearing her, not listening to her. And Xena’s not having anything done to her, because John’s just hearing whatever noise she’s making. In something like “John hit Xena”, it’s a lot simpler, but a) that wouldn’t have allowed me to illustrate that point, and b) no-one could hit Xena. She’d kick his arse. At any rate, there are a bunch of words that can be thrown in there and still be correct, but that’s not the point.

In certain cases, the object is moved to before the subject:

Xena was ogled by John.

This is what’s known as passivisation. It also makes the lead-in to that sentence complete bull-hockey, since John is technically the ‘agent’ here, and can be thrown out of the sentence in what’s called the ‘agentless passive’ (as in “Xena was ogled”), which you can never actually do to a subject. Anyway, more on the fun of rearranging sentences later. The point is that by now you should know what a subject and an object are – the subject does it, the object has it done. Broadly. Onto Nagamese!

Have a gander at the following Nagamese sentence:

utu bhag ekta chota maiki saise - ‘that tiger a small woman saw’ – That tiger saw a small woman.

It’s pretty simple to see what’s going on there. Nagamese has the advantage of, while not being SVO, being SOV, which is easy to understand even with a word-for-word translation. In this example, my lazy arse has just made subject underlined, object italicised, and verb normal, because… well yeah. Now, look at the object – ‘a small woman’. What we have here is an animate noun, and one at the peak of the animacy scale. However, it’s not individuated. It’s just ‘a’ woman.

bhag chota maiki ke hunise – tiger the small woman heard - The tiger heard the small woman.

And here we finally come to the point of this – the ‘ke’. You see it right there, thrown in after the object. What you may have noticed you don’t see, though, is any sort of word in front of ‘bhag’ that would mean ‘the tiger’. That’s because Nagamese doesn’t use a definite article (‘the’) on subjects in a sentence. It only uses ‘ke’ when it needs to define that there’s ‘the’ woman and not ‘a’ – that is, when it’s an individual woman, not just any.

It’s also worth throwing in that their word for ‘a’ is ‘ekta’, if you weren’t paying attention before. ‘Ekta’ is their word for ‘one’ (ek) plus a special suffix they use to make a number numerate a noun (-ta). This goes up the scale: ek+ta, dui+ta, and so on. This is another quirk of language we don’t have in English which I actually find really endearing, and just wanted to mention.

Why is any of this interesting?

Well, it’s not, probably. But when was the last time you learnt anything new about a foreign language? Yeah, that’s what I thought. It’s called education.

Minor update: I accidentally linked to the wrong page for Nagamese. The link should now head to a cool list of “survival phrases” posted on Confessions of a Linguist.

So over the past three nights, I’ve ended up watching the Dirty Sanchez movie (IMDB page here) twice through. Watching a movie twice in three days is nothing spectacular, mind, but this movie is really one you only need to watch once. Now, I own the DVD, and I first watched the movie sometime last year. The reason I’ve watched it twice in the past few days is a pretty simple one – it’s funny as all hell to show people when you’re drunk. So when I had a minor piss-up at mine on Wednesday, it ended up in the DVD player. It ended up on the DVD player last night because I had an even more minor piss-up, and one of the Wednesday attendees brought his girlfriend along… so he decided she absolutely had to watch it.

It says a lot about their relationship, I think. Click on for perversion and strong language! As in, not family-friendly. At all.

Now, if you clicked the link to the movie’s official website, you were probably faced with a very blunt description from the Daily Mirror: “almost unwatchably foul”. They’re not lying. Dirty Sanchez (or the Sanchez Boys/Team Sanchez for you Americans) is a group of four mates who go around doing ridiculously stupid things to themselves just for laughs. The movie is a compilation of stunts generally following the theme of ‘seven deadly sins’, interspersed with other stunts that are done for the hell of it. The major stunts are as follows:

• Sloth: who can take the most shots from a B.B. pistol without getting up from their armchair
• Anger: Dainton tricks Pritchard into taking 104 shots from a paintball gun on his naked skin
• Envy: the boys have a crab race to determines who sleeps in a shack in Ko Phi Phi and who sleeps in a luxury hotel
• Lust: the ‘ladyboy challenge’ – each man gets a lapdance from a Thai ladyboy and has to guess what gender they are
• Pride: they get beaten up by Japanese wrestlers. Also, Pritchard has part of his finger chopped off
• Gluttony: they have to kill and eat their own food. Derrick the chicken breathes his last breath
• Greed: a pain auction

I understand that those are sort of sterile descriptions. Here’s a better snapshot of why making your girlfriend watch this movie is a risky move: Pritchard snorts wasabi mixed with sake; Pritchard is made to tell his mother he wants to return to her “love canal”; Dainton gets shot on the cock with a B.B. gun from point-blank range; Pritchard has a “shotgun beer enema” into Dan’s face; Pancho gets liposuction live on-camera; Dan pisses in his own face; Dan drinks Pancho’s fat.

As Dan says after vomiting his guts back up: “Welcome to Dirty Sanchez. I just ate a man.” As Dainton says just before that: “If you don’t need a bag now, you’re a sicker fuck than these cunts.”

Don’t get me wrong – if you don’t mind watching a bit of pain or grossness, it’s hilarious. They’re drunk 24/7 and act like it. In-between the major sick stunts are minor ones that are just funny, like Pancho having his head shaved while he’s drunk or their recreation of the “angry pirate” with rum. There’s also a remarkably touching moment when they’re forced to kill Derrick the chicken and they’re barely able to watch, let alone do the act. The moment’s broken later on, of course, but it’s nice while it lasts.

Like I said, this is the sort of movie you only need to watch once. Every other time, you watch it just to have fun with mates and join in the communal wincing as safety pins are ripped out of foreskins. Good male bonding, that.

Things I learnt in university this week:

• there is a language in the world that, to say “over 70″ (as in age), uses the word for ‘seventy’ then the word for ‘face’ (as in the surface of a table)

It has been a good week of university.

I should very much like to learn Welsh. Not over the course of a year or anything; I have neither the commitment nor the interest to learn a language properly within a year. But I think of all the languages in the world right now, it’s the one that I would most like to learn. I couldn’t tell you why, either, since there are no immediate practical benefits to knowing Welsh and I could probably put my time towards any amount of better goals. I think it’d be fun, though. Something to do. Also, it looks cool.

I was drinking with a few friends last night, and somehow or other the converation turned to linguistics (and when I say that, I mean that there was probably a lull and I started talkinig about it because it’s all I attended yesterday). It was strange, because they really have no interest in linguistics, and even less in secondhand linguistics from my drunk self, but they actually seemed sort of interested in the points I was making.

The points being made had to do with the death of languages. It’s estimated that a language dies (on average) every two weeks, and that by the end of the century, more than 3500 languages currently spoken simply won’t exist any more. They won’t be there. No-one will speak them. No-one will write them. If they’re lucky, the last traces of these forgotten languages will be as a list of words and rules in a record somewhere, the result of a last-ditch effort to make sure they’re not lost forever. That’s if they’re lucky.

The reality is that for most languages, when the last speaker dies, the language dies forever. Wherever they live, however they die, with their last breath they take their language away from the world, and with it goes anything that’s only ever been known with those words – histories, myths, cures, whatever the speakers wanted others to know about. There are entire cultures that die out with these people.

That’s why there’s a real need for linguists to go out and record these languages. There’s a real need for linguists to do a lot of things, really – record modern languages, explain why they are how they are, comment on whether or not ‘l8′ is a legitimate word form. But that aside, it’s a proper concern that we get these things down, just so we have that knowledge there if we need it. We may never actually need to understand Mongsen Ao – odds are that it’ll end up being of no value to anyone but the people who speak it – but on the off-chance that one day a cure for the common cold is found in the plants of Nagaland, it’ll be there, just in case. And that’s the case for the other 3500-plus languages that are going to die in the next hundred years.

Who knows what knowledge is dying?

Still, that’s what makes me so special, right? …anyway, click on if that hasn’t turned you away from the rest of the post yet.

The point is, I saw a comment today asking why white people always feel the need to elaborate on our whiteness – why it isn’t enough to say “I’m white”, and how we need to specify it by saying what sort of white we are, be it British, German, Swedish, etc. This wasn’t actually the problem, by the by; the issue the commenter had was that we tend to do this while referring to other people as black or Asian or whatever – the contrast between our interest in getting our own race down to a country, while really not giving a crap about others’.

I wouldn’t really have anything to say about this – on the whole, it’s a pretty agreeable concern – apart from the particular labelling of the people who do it as “white people”. (It should also be noted that the comment has been elaborated on further to say that the problem is when they do it to get out of being called a racist, but damnit, this is a blog post, not a reply. I can write about what I want!)

It’s not just us, is what I’m saying. Don’t get me wrong: we do racism and we do it so efficiently that you’ll barely even notice it’s happened. But the need to be particular about what country our racial makeup is due to isn’t just a white thing. When someone’s asked where they’re from (which happens an extraordinary amount in my circles, and yes, I am well aware of how unintentionally and incredibly racist it can be), they don’t reply “oh, I’m Asian” or “I’m black”. For one thing, if they’re being asked where they’re ‘from’, it’s probably pretty obvious. For another, it doesn’t explain anything. The question is about what country they’re from, or their parents are from, or their grandparents, or however many generations back you have to go to explain why they look different enough to ask.

When white people specify that they’re French, or they’re Swiss, or whatever their ancestry is, it’s not always out of a need to attach to another culture other than their home country (which is Australian for the purposes of this discussion, although it’s obviously sort of a problem in America too). It’s because saying “I’m white” explains nothing, really. It’s an answer to the question that never gets asked (because shit, let’s face it, no-one cares when you’re white in a white country) but they feel the need to respond to anyway – “Where are you from?” In Australia, if someone asks you that, you don’t say “I’m Australian” unless you’re trying to make a point about race or national identity. You say “Well, I’m Irish on my mother’s side, French on my dad’s, and my grandfather’s from Sweden”, because it’s interesting. It doesn’t matter that to reach the European ancestor in your family tree you have to go back to pre-Federation days. You do it anyway, because saying you’re Australian is stating the bleeding obvious and quite frankly, pretty dull from a conversation viewpoint.

So when someone tells you without you asking – whether it be in conversation or on a profile or just them rabbiting on about themselves – that they’re a quarter Canadian and one-eighth Greek, then goes on to talk about ‘African-Americans’ who live in England, feel free to think they’re a little thick. They are. Feel free to also assume they’re the product of an unintentionally racist society, because, well, yeah. But they’re also making a concerted effort not to be boring, because damnit, no-one else is going to help them.

P.S. I’m actually Irish on my mother’s side and German/Irish on my father’s, you know, some good Celtic stock in there that comes out in my red beard, and I’ve been told I’m related to the Kennedy family through my second cousins…

• Me talking about whatever crosses my mind.

I am a simple man.

I think one of the hardest things will be to keep this up daily – not from the point of view of forming a habit, but just because of the fact that at some point in the future, I’m going to run out of things to write about. I mean, I could just blather on until I hit something I feel like elaborating on, but that’s not part of the plan I have for this blog. For one thing, I already have a place to prattle on about nothing in particular. For another, I want this to be a place that I can read over later and actually be interested in, which I guess is a rather self-centred way of saying that I want to write this with the audience in mind.

Sadly, that’s a fairly alien concept to me.

With that in mind, I’m just going to put up something I wrote up about a month ago for the other place, just to help set the voice for this place and also give a quick introduction to the sort of guy I am. It’s also because I feel like having more than one introductory entry is extremely poor form (one and a half is bad enough, two is far more than necessary), so… indeed. Not going to spoil that, is what I’m saying.

Click through! You know you want to. Although I should probably give the warning that it’s longer than an ideal blog post.

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 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. — Neil Postman

This, i think, is something i’ve always found odd.

In Brave New World, the idea is that they’ve formed a mechanical society, where everybody fulfils their prescribed functions, all the technology is exactly as effective as it needs to be, etcetc, and that’s how it is. By introducing an artificial peak to human technology, the upper castes of society are able to effectively freeze human progress at a particular point for their own means. Through what could broadly be termed brainwashing or indoctrination, every single member of the world state is made aware of their position in life, whether they’re made to be the most powerful and wealthy members of society or they end up sitting in an elevator all day. And – and this is the important bit – everyone is happy with it. If they’re not, they can leave.

Apparently this is a dystopia.

What I should probably make clear right at the start is that I’m not suggesting it is not a dystopia compared to our world. But from my personal view, I simply fail to see anything wrong with the situation that’s set up in Brave New World.

I appreciate the points made in the opening quote, not only as a comparison to 1984 but the descriptions of the very real threats to civilisation that are represented in Brave New World. I do think it’s particularly telling that for whatever reason, both fears are played upon by various factions within politics or philosophy or whatever arena of thought you care to name – the mocking of the dumbing-down of the world’s population by reality tv, the fear of Big Brother brought on by over-surveillance and wiretapping, the loss of freedom of choice, the threat of moral decay brought on by sex, drugs and rock’n'roll.

As compared to today’s society, both forks in the road are indeed dystopias, from the loss of personal freedoms to the complete eradication of the concept of personal freedoms. I wholeheartedly believe we need boundaries but not too many – but my politics are a matter for another entry, one which will almost certainly ascertain absolutely nothing and end up being very wishy-washy. Like I said, I’m not arguing that compared to our current world, both the Party and the World State are extremely dislikeable options. However, I am arguing that given the choice between the two, I will pick the World State every time.

I think it’s because I am not naturally reluctant to embrace mindless brainwashing. I enjoy my right to independent thought – I try to exercise it quite often – but I really do believe in the idea that ignorance is bliss. It’s something that comes up a lot with me: I am really jealous of people who can hold an idea in their heart and entirely believe it, no matter how good or evil that idea may actually be. I think this puts me somewhere in the minority of the Internet, which I am well aware espouses independent and cynical thinking, and I’m quite alright with this. I am, if not an independent person, then at the very least a person who is self-aware to the point of a flaw – which is part of the reason I am so incredibly jealous of people who don’t hold that self-awareness.

That is the main factor that makes me adore the brave new world and such people in’t, and abhor oceania. The biggest fear for me in 1984 is not that there is a Party that makes unpersons, although that does rank pretty high up there. The biggest fear for me is the thought of becoming a Winston Smith, of finding myself the ‘last’ ‘sane’ man in the world (sorry about the double ‘s, but they were two different air-quotes), and having to deal with that self-awareness while putting up the front of orthodoxy. It’s the thought that personal freedoms would exist, but that they would be taken away.

That problem simply isn’t there in Brave New World. From conception, the population is specifically engineered to think their lot in life is better than everybody else’s, but at the same time accept that everyone is equally important in society. There is no concept of “maybe that job is better”, “maybe it would be better to be an alpha”, because it’s simply impossible for them to think that. Even if they do find themselves outside the system for whatever reason, it’s possible to leave, to go to a place where they can be whoever they want to be without fear of reprisal. The loss of personal freedom isn’t an issue because they simply don’t exist.

The quote at the top says that Huxley feared a passive population, one concerned with trivial matters and never looking at the bigger picture. What I have to ask is this – why is this a bad thing? If we found our own society slipping into it, it’s a bad thing, no doubt. But taken on its own, as an alternate path from our own history or a self-contained hypothetical situation, why is this idea of a herd society repugnant?

The obvious answer is that it takes away a lot of what we, as humans, are proud of about ourselves. The strive for reason and new invention, the march of science, the satisfaction of faith, the reaching for new horizons and the hope of the unseen future. In a world where self-awareness exists, where a human can stand and look at a crowd and see themselves both in and apart from it, these values are all-important and should be treated as such. In a society like the World State, they’re muted or destroyed – the diversity of the human experience is divided into cut-and-dried portions of society. But my feeling is that this is not a bad thing, because no-one knows they’ve been lost.

Oddly, Dinosaur Comics had something vaguely relevant to this a little while ago; the first three panels here touch on the concept of standing on the shoulders of giants. The brave new world is considered a dystopia because we stand on foundations built upon the age of enlightenment, of the renaissance, of women’s lib and Martin Luther King and the idea that humans should keep working towards a tomorrow that’s better than today. If we didn’t know our history, if we didn’t have that consciousness of the world around us and the injustices in it, if our world was essentially what we could see and touch in the present day and only the present day, there wouldn’t be the image of Brave New World as a dystopia.

Put it this way. For all of you uni students out there, you know what it’s like to be assailed by the socialist alternative kids, or whatever your local commie chapter is. If they hadn’t been exposed to provocative ideas at a sensitive age, do you think they’d be anything like that? Do you think teenagers from middle suburbia would really find themselves contemplating the injustices of the class system inherent in the structure of the global citizenry? Would they give a damn? Would they even, in their most contemplative days, halfway begin to formulate those thoughts independently? Possibly. But what if, from birth, they’d never known anything other than satisfaction with the state of the world?

My incomprehension of the dystopianism of Brave New World comes from that base. By indulging in trivial pleasures, by becoming human cattle, there’s no need to fear the loss of progress and reason because there’d never be a knowledge of that loss. Five-year-olds don’t feel any worse for not knowing about the death of God or nearly any other philosophical concept you care to name, because it’s never occurred to them as a relevant concept, let alone one that they need to have an opinion on. Brave New World is the regression of human rationality into the innocence and naïvete of childhood, and I would love to get back there again.

I’m sort of finding it hard to express how I feel on the matter in a less wordy manner, so I’ll try to keep this next bit simple.

I imagine myself as any member of the caste system, from the agricultural workers to the administrators, and I simply do not see a problem. Mindless? Yes. Passive? Yes. A drugged sated slave to a viciously classist system? Yes.

Does this appeal to me? Yes.

In the life I’ve been given, I will make what I can of myself while I’m able; I will use my mind to if not the best, then to some measure of its full capabilities; I will be someone who may not be special, but who will be someone. But I don’t fear the loss of human endeavour through the attainment of universal satisfaction. If you’ve never known a questioning mind, how could you feel worse for the lack of it?