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It's worth reading Marcuse (and Adorno) for their criticisms of precisely the kind of world laid out in Brave New World, and even as they were speaking from the
by claudiawerner 6y ago
It's worth reading Marcuse (and Adorno) for their criticisms of precisely the kind of world laid out in Brave New World, and even as they were speaking from the 50s and 60s, their points were intimately related to society at the time, and even today's society. Marcuse called it 'one dimensionality' and highlighted the dangers of total administration, while Adorno lamented the 'culture industry'. They precisely answer to the simple utilitarian position, and precisely the repression that arises. Contra Orwell's idea of "war is peace, peace is war", Marcuse argued that now the contradiction is not so obvious, but hidden in the noun itself. We speak of 'freedom', but the word 'freedom' itself has been overloaded with things which are characteristically unfree. The view of repression as simple, brute force violence and surveillanace is only scratching the surface. It ignores autonomy, the dangers to democracy, the loss of critical capacity, and alienation.
It's worth noting that even J.S. Mill recognized some problem with pure utilitarianism, and tried to interject with a distinction between higher and lower pleasures. He recognized the problem, but could not solve it with pure philosophy that starts from the sole measure of the good as being pleasure and the absence of pain. Mill's account is thus inconsistent, but what he was getting at was incredibly important, and it's a bit of a shame to see this classification of society in terms of the number of people happy versus unhappy repeated in 2020, when Mill saw a problem with it in the early 19th century.
- 082349872349872 6y agoThank you! It will take a while for me to read up on these lines. In the meantime, I'll note that if Huxley had been a utilitarian himself, he would probably not have written Island[1]. A 1961 take on 'freedom' being just another word: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhSKk-cvblc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhSKk-cvblc [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_(Huxley_novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_(Huxley_novel) > "If I were now to rewrite the book, I would offer the Savage a third alternative. Between the Utopian and primitive horns of his dilemma would lie the possibility of sanity... In this community economics would be decentralist and Henry-Georgian, politics Kropotkinesque and co-operative. Science and technology would be used as though, like the Sabbath, they had been made for man, not (as at present and still more so in the Brave New World) as though man were to be adapted and enslaved to them. Religion would be the conscious and intelligent pursuit of man's Final End, the unitive knowledge of immanent Tao or Logos, the transcendent Godhead or Brahman. And the prevailing philosophy of life would be a kind of Higher Utilitarianism, in which the Greatest Happiness principle would be secondary to the Final End principle – the first question to be asked and answered in every contingency of life being: "How will this thought or action contribute to, or interfere with, the achievement, by me and the greatest possible number of other individuals, of man's Final End?"