Once Upon a Nightmare

The Disturbingly Prophetic Prescience of Four 20th Century Novels

In 1516, Sir Thomas More published Utopia, a satire of an “ideal” society. The term, coined from Greek, means “no place.” In contrast to such “ideal” societies, dystopian novels first appeared in the early 20th century. In general, these arise from an author’s imaginative response to the question, “If this goes on, what will happen?” Four such novels have answered in various ways.

The Novels

G. K. Chesterton’s The Flying Inn (1914) asks, “What if the erosion of traditional English society continues?” In answer, the novel offers a satirical look at those traditions through the machinations of a megalomaniacal member of the House of Lords influenced by the Islamic “Prophet of the Moon.” The story involves government-imposed changes in beliefs and traditions, starting with the prohibition of alcohol on all but the upper class. At the same time, it builds to a surreptitious Turkish attempt to conquer Britain.

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) asks, “What if consumerism and technology continue to dominate human existence?” In answer, Huxley constructs a world where technology directs natural human reproduction and imposes both physical and psychological conditioning, starting with the embryo, to maximize a sedate, hollow “happiness.”

In 1984 (1949), George Orwell asks, “What if authoritarian government continues to limit individual freedom?” He answers by presenting a totalitarian nightmare wherein universal surveillance eliminates privacy, constant warfare maintains a status quo, and the state daily—sometimes hourly—alters historical records. Even thought is criminalized as suspicion and fear overwhelm human relationships.

Ray Bradbury, in Fahrenheit 451 (1953) considers, “What if techno-authoritarian control advances?” In response, he unfolds a world where books are forbidden and vapid entertainment pacifies a nearly mindless citizenry. Firemen burn books, and television replaces the family.

Though unique in many ways, these novels share remarkably similar themes that explore the corruption of the three central ideals of Western thought: the good, the true, and the beautiful.

The Good

Each offers a different take on “the good,” as conceived by the powerful. In The Flying Inn, Lord Ivywood, under the influence of a pompous Turk who holds a bizarre theory of England’s having been originally shaped by Islam, aspires to reshape Britain according to his own conception of “the good.” Ivywood goes on not only to impose Prohibition but to Islamize Britain. To achieve “the good,” the past must be revised.

In Brave New World, a similar substitution takes place. The world state dates its history from the year Ford manufactured the first Model T. “A.F.” (“after Ford”) follows dates, and Ts top churches in London, showing the overthrow of Christianity as a long-established “fact.”The new “good” is imposed by biotechnologists in service to consumerism.

In 1984, churches have either been converted to secular uses or reduced to bombed-out ruins. The antagonist, O’Brien, tells the imprisoned and tortured protagonist, Winston Smith, “God is power.” The Creator of “the good” is overthrown as the Party has crushed all dissent. For O’Brien, the only “good” is power arbitrated by the state.

In Fahrenheit 451, the “good” is also the province of the state. The screens in all but a few homes purvey vapid entertainment. (The protagonist’s wife refers to them as her family.) Yet, one of the books that he surreptitiously rescues from the flames is a Bible, which he reads but cannot quite understand. Still, he wants to assure copies are made. Prevented from achieving that goal, he memorizes Ecclesiastes and Revelation, sensing in Scripture a “good” greater than the superficiality of his world.

The True

Each also considers truth, not as an objective reality, but as an imposed construct. Lord Ivywood declares his version of the truth when asked if he thinks he made the world: “The world was made badly … and I will make it over again.” For him “truth” is power, that of the state.

In Brave New World, “truth” has been inculcated during the application of hypnopedia (the repetition of maxims while children sleep). A chief lesson is “Everyone belongs to everyone else”—the key teaching of a world founded on sexual debauchery and enforced consumerism. The only character seeing any higher truth is John the Savage, whose education comes almost solely from reading Shakespeare. He rejects the numbing conformity of thought and asks the World Controller why the Bard’s work is prohibited. The Controller’s answer is simple: “Because it’s old.... We haven’t any use for old things here.” Objective truth is inconvenient and beyond the understanding of a thoroughly conditioned population.

In 1984, truth is malleable. It is the creation of the state. Winston Smith works in the Ministry of Truth, where he alters records of the past when they no longer match the contentions of the Party. The state’s three “truths” are: “Ignorance is strength,” “War is peace,” and “Freedom is slavery.” With a false sense of privacy, he addresses his journal “to a time when thought is free … a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone.” In the end, he is tortured to the point that any doubt about state-imposed “truth” is obliterated by a bullet.

In Fahrenheit 451, a former English professor explains the relationship between truth and books: “The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.” Of televised entertainment, he says, “It is an environment as real as the world. It becomes and is the truth.” Spurred by his own rejection of the state’s truth, the protagonist Montag travels into the countryside and encounters men who have memorized now-destroyed books in the hope of giving them back to the world when it is ready for the truths they contain.

The Beautiful

Each novel also considers a twisting of the nature of beauty. Chesterton says of his antagonist, Lord Ivywood, “he could make anything he had to mention blossom into verbal beauty; yet his face remained dead while his lips were alive.” The beauty Ivywood espouses is more emotional than objective, “a poetry that never touched earth; the poetry of Shelley rather than Shakespeare.” In contrast, Dorian Wimpole, speaking for the traditional Western concept of objective beauty, perceives “the Image of God” in the natural beauty that surrounds him.

The World Controller in Brave New World tells John the Savage that the world civilization dismisses Shakespeare because “Beauty’s attractive, and we don’t want people to be attracted to old things. We want them to like the new ones.” In another conversation, he explains, “Our Ford himself did a great deal to shift the emphasis from truth and beauty to comfort and happiness.... Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can’t.” Hollow happiness has supplanted the joy of objective beauty.

The gray world of 1984 takes a more extreme stance. Winston Smith can barely recall childhood memories. He connects beauty to surviving artifacts from the past: the creamy pages of a blank book or a glass paperweight with coral suspended within. Still, the thought haunts him that, “Anything old, and for that matter anything beautiful, was always vaguely suspect.” O’Brien, the voice of the Party, declares that the new order is ushering in a world with “no distinction between beauty and ugliness.” One of the creators of Newspeak celebrates “the beauty of the destruction of words.” Annihilation has replaced beauty in a world of total government control.

Fahrenheit 451 presents a neatly clipped suburban neighborhood marred by fires set by firemen to burn homes sheltering books. Yet fireman Montag finds an inexplicable beauty in a young girl who makes no effort to conform to the empty world around her. The fire chief somehow knows Montag has saved books from the flames, and, confronting him, burns a book, page by page, calling the blackening of each page “beautiful.” Later, he says that the “real beauty [of fire] is that it destroys responsibility and consequences.” The firemen burn whatever problem “gets too burdensome.” Beauty must make way for an imposed order that erodes humanity.

Prophetic Foresight

These authors have foreseen much about our present world. In the U.K. today, conversions to Islam have doubled over the past decade, and British-Pakistani grooming gangs pose a threat, one protected by political correctness. The Flying Inn now seems less far-fetched. And throughout the West, activists celebrating perversions promote contempt for millennia-old sexual mores. The claims of sexual revolutionaries increasingly approach the Brave New World dictum that “Everyone belongs to everyone else.” Meanwhile, the widespread abandonment of history and culture promoted in academia echoes the governments in 1984 and Fahrenheit 451. We can see in the arrests of individuals praying silently near U.K. abortion facilities Orwell’s Thought Police and in today’s omnipresent screens Bradbury’s disruption of friendships and family relations.

Power vs. the Good, True & Beautiful

Dystopian novels can be remarkably prophetic. All these authors reflected on the world around them to answer, “What if this continues?” One theme consistently emerges: power.

Each author presents a world in which government power coerces citizens to conform to a radical revision of human nature. Chesterton envisions a single powerful member of the House of Lords gradually introducing legislation to Islamize the U.K. and to prepare for an Islamic military invasion. Huxley sees powerful industrial leaders and scientists working together to create a hedonistic population of consumers while instituting castes of artificially conceived and subconsciously controlled people. Orwell creates a government that has expanded to control every aspect of a person’s life, the control made possible by the elimination of privacy through constant surveillance.

These abuses of power grow out of the hubris of those who create the dystopias. In defiance of objective truth, goodness, and beauty, they attempt to redefine reality according to their own vain imaginings. Like these fictional tyrants, today’s academics have rewritten traditions for decades and inculcated instead their denials of reality in Marxist terms.

Christian teachings hold that God has written the truth on our hearts and that truth reveals objective reality. In turn, an appreciation and acceptance of objective reality created Western civilization and gave birth to profound philosophy, great art, and aspiration to true goodness.

Today, dystopias arise from a desire to overthrow the heritage of the past and to substitute emotion for reason. For those to whom power is the supreme good, the end justifies the means. As Chesterton’s Dalroy observes, “Our rulers have come to count on the bare bodily cowardice of a mass of Englishmen”—or that of all Westerners outside the halls of power. We who love truth, goodness, and beauty must summon our courage and resist, or we will find ourselves living our own nightmare.