Alexander Shaw
About Andrew Cusack
Writer, web designer, etc.; born in New York; educated in Argentina, Scotland, and South Africa; now based in London. read more
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What Huxley’s Got on Orwell
Comparing dystopic visions of the English twentieth century
by ALEXANDER FRANCIS SHAW
Aldous Huxley wasn’t as good a writer as George Orwell but in several ways his Brave New World exceeds the prescience of 1984.
Huxley understood how society would respond if the laws of human ecology were to change. In a mechanised age, useless activity would become a necessity, while medical revolution and sexual deregulation in turn become the germ of totalitarianism. Orwell and just about everyone else since have had the opposite idea – that the libertines would be the liberators – and the fever-pitch of this very delusion forms the central tenet of Huxley’s dystopia.
Both visionaries describe state censorship, but in Huxley’s Brave New World one recognises eery pre-echoes of ‘Woke culture’ in an opiate-addled society which has to conceal its operational ethos from its own general consciousness in order to keep itself functioning smoothly.
With Orwell – the human struggle is represented as Man versus The State. Huxley recognised, as we are now encouraged not to, that society is the product of biology and, provided that people’s biology can be conditioned correctly, the state can foster grass-roots totalitarianism without the use violent coercion.
Neither dystopia has been fully realised – but in Orwell’s case this has been because progress has provided its own remedies (nobody could have imagined in the 1940s that telescreens would also be a conduit of private interaction for dissenters’ online discourse). One gets an unsettling feeling that Huxley’s medical dystopia is still developing in 2021 with no solutions in sight.
Rather than solve the riddle of human happiness, the citizens of Brave New World condemn those who fail to gloss over their displeasure with life through the mollifying comforts of sex and tranquillisers. Science becomes a branch of pragmatism, wielded by social engineers who can no more observe their own fields than look at their own eyeballs.
We are left with the question of how an outsider, possessed of higher directives than his own hedonism, might react to such a society?
Huxley answers this by introducing a Linda and her son, John, who live in a ‘savage reservation’ where medical advances have not been imposed. Traditional sexual morality is thus observed by the occupants along with – shudder! – family life and religious practices and other pursuits which lend meaning to their backward lives.
Linda arrived in the reservation by accident, having been born and acculturated in the ‘civilised world.’ She teaches her son how to read, but brings them both into disgrace with her promiscuity, so that John retreats into the comforts of a book which happens to be ‘The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.’ In Shakespeare, John finds the words that enable him to assert himself both on the reservation and – to the curiosity of his minders – when he finally returns to civilisation.
I sense that Orwell would have furnished John with a lowlier reference-point to human nobility and driven the same points home more poignantly with a dog-eared copy of Paris Match. But, as I said, Huxley was a better visionary than he was a wordsmith.
Once in the ‘civilised world’ John falls in love and faces a problem which, less than a century after Huxley’s work was published, defines what is perceived as a ‘crisis of masculinity’: how to court a woman who gives herself out to dozens of men regardless of merit. Unable to disabuse himself of his chivalric values – and unwilling to accept her worthless sexuality when she freely offers herself to him – John becomes what we would now call a proto-“incel” and dies, as the carnal realists of the toxic chatrooms might anticipate, on the end of a rope.
Smokescreens of happiness and delusion are maintained with a tranquilliser called Soma. Much as anti-depressants are a major feature of modernity – their use strongly suggesting that they are employed where artificial economies and casual sex are normalised – one senses that we have not yet perfected the Brave New World’s capacity for total bafflement. Nor has any welfare state or medical advancement completely collectivised the process of raising children.
This tranquillised social order is upheld by World Controller Mustapha Mond, Huxley’s benign analogue to Orwell’s Big Brother and on that account one of the few people in this dystopia who has achieved any kind of true satisfaction himself. Mond’s discourses bring Huxley to the place of scientific observation in the stable technological order:
‘once you start admitting explanations in terms of purpose – well, you don’t know what the result might be…’
In other words: Heaven forbid anyone should question the dogmas of settled science.
In terms of who may be allowed to see through the delusion, Mond likens the social hierarchy to an iceberg – with 10 per cent above the surface and 90 per cent below. Maverick, enquiring minds must either be sent to isolated communities or – like himself – shoulder the burden of everyone else’s delusion.
Despite Orwell’s predictions of people cowering under state tyranny and violence, Huxley’s work remains the creepier for its ability to get under the skin of the liberal society that we find familiar.
How much worse is it to read of a dystopia in which, by our own liberated will, we are complicit?
Get thee to a Lamasery
In defence of Lost Horizon
by ALEXANDER FRANCIS SHAW
Death hath no sting because I know that — on the other side of the planet — glass elevators whisper fifty-six storeys from a marble lobby to rooms of crisp white sheets and burgundy damask. The carpets are thick, the tables polished. Decanters are flushed with guava and grape. In a kaleidoscope of silver and ice, glasses of salad and sorbet are heaped with pearlescent foam, salmon and beluga.
And in one corner, in another time, Alexander Shaw fell asleep in the late afternoon, cheek pressed against the silk wing of an armchair as his gaze followed the plunge of a falcon from the Peak, through the skyscrapers, and out over Victoria Harbour. A soft audio moquette of Morrecone and Mahler accompanied the CNN news ticker and extraneous weather synopses: Sydney — sun… Los Angeles – overcast… Doha – sun… Cape Town – rain…
Please excuse the fetishism. My point deserves this tantric preamble.
If Pugin had been a Qing rather than a Victorian he might have made a start to all this, but today the backlit Onyx, the Pacific sixteen-storey silk frieze, the Qipao uniforms, and the Olympian scale of everything behove only the mighty Orient.
Why so? The Island Shangri-La Hotel is named for the fictional utopia in James Hilton’s Lost Horizon. And right there you have the problem: ‘utopia.’ The martial cultures of the East don’t comprehend the pre-echoes in that word.
Credit where it is due, the sublimation of the individual into the Gestalt (I’ll call it Gung-Ho, because that sounds like a legitimate school of oriental philosophy) is in stark contrast to the game we play with ourselves the West. Because they’ve never been saddled with accountability for the state of their societies, the Chinese haven’t had the opportunity to be disillusioned by their own idealism. A Chinese man has never had to look at himself in the mirror and realise that he buggered things up by voting for Hitler or joining a Black Lives Matter march.
Absent any higher purpose, we, on the other hand, must seek redemption for each hypocrisy and failure of our great civilisation, dumbing down in hand-wringing apologia for our very existence. Thus have we developed a misnomered ‘meekness’ of niceness, indecision, and half-measures. To believe in our superiority is to be saddled with shame – and shame is a force distinct from guilt in that it seeks remission by reference to others’ perception. You can quietly abort a child with Down Syndrome provided that you demonstrate your humanity by promoting BAME representation, carbon austerity, and the moxie of women who have the mystique of cement mixers.
A second example: the lobby-girl at the Grand Hyatt, Shanghai. Given that half the wealth of the Orient passes through those doors, some central planning committee evidently felt it prudent that the city’s 24 million citizens be combed for the sweetest smile to greet it. When I returned, breath held, a year later, she had been matched by another matchless angel.
Which brings us to the human source of utopianism – the quest for eternity. The plane-wrecked protagonists of Hilton’s novel experience a Himalayan valley of youth governed by an AWOL and arguably mad 250-year-old Luxembourgish priest. Father Perrault governs Shangri-La from a lamasery of almost obscene opulence (imagine – green bathtubs!). The guests are tastefully divided in their credulity about whether the society is an illusion and the book was devoured by an escapist West suffering the Great Depression.
Rifling my free copy in Hong Kong, I judged it the Englishman’s analogue to the continental cults whose glorious living and glorious dead are distanced by a Napoleonic boulevard of culture and commerce where the stick and carrot are applied. It seemed fortunate that the British are only really any good at stoking a frisson for utopian demise and, as the distant red flags fluttered and my Mao-faced banknotes smirked at me from their money clip, I designated Lost Horizon – and all this – to a fantastic past which would be swept away by Western humility and moderation.
I was wrong and, what is more, I’m glad I was wrong.
Since the collapse of any credible European adversary, Britain has turned inwards in its quest for maudlin schadenfreude. Our woke egalitarianism means everyone must de-mask or debunk any superiority as somehow an act.
I hazily recall a heavy session at the London Ritz at which the bar-chef challenged me to draw my sgian-dubh to establish whether I was carrying an offensive weapon. I was quick-witted enough to reveal my purist stand on another wager of the kilted gentleman which duly precipitated a less troublesome ejection from the premises. But how did we sink to this? Is there anywhere outside of the glittering palaces of sinister dictatorships where a man can live honestly without some spiv trying to trip him up?
More poignantly, perhaps, how can the professionals themselves avoid clientele who know their own job from experience and think they have ‘made it’ because they bussed tables in their student days?
Lost Horizon has at its heart a provocation to serve which the maladjusted West will now struggle to perceive. Utopia should be viewed not as a deception but rather the absence of the contempt for the familiar. The point of Shangri-La is that it was built by strangers in exotic lands for strangers in exotic lands. Lo-Tsen, for whom the valley was home, is repelled by its treasures and risks her life in order to leave. Hugh Conway – the knackered British diplomat at the centre of the novel – appears to have risked his life in order to return, inspiring the enchanted discussion among pilots which opens the book on the darkening concourse of Templehof airport in 1933.
Like the bedraggled Conway, we must keep our eyes fixed on utopia so that our journey becomes a pilgrimage with a view to one day opening the doors of our own Shangri-La.
And so much for the better if nobody follows.
Florence to London on Twenty Euros
THERE COMES A POINT in every young man’s life when his trust fund manager goes on holiday. It is fitting that what follows occurred during International Poverty & Homelessness Awareness Week and, certainly, I hope that my experience will raise awareness among the demographics concerned as to how they should conduct themselves.
ITALY
Let me tell you about poverty: there is poverty, there is urban poverty, and there is urbane poverty. The story of my rapid regression through these strata starts in the billionaire’s playground that is Forte dei Marmi. I had already accepted the invitation when I realised I had blown my last €30 on a bottle of Frescobaldi (I’m not a wine snob, but I only buy from friends). We had arrived in Vieri’s 1988 Posche 911 and being a Friday night in early August, Mina’s Bussola club was chocked to the gunnels with a vast array of Eurotrash. There were refugees from Biarritz, Ibiza clubbers who got rich, Moscow clubbers who fell out with Putin, abstract artists, Botox-pumped bankers wives and industrialists’ daughters from Munich and Frankfurt, all vamped up on HRT, champagne, and Prozac. It was as raucous as the bombing of Dresden, and nearly as fun. Imagine someone had pumped laughing gas into the celebrity arrivals gate at Heathrow, and you’ll get the picture. (more…)
London’s Fallen Water
A cursory investigation into the metropolis’s drinking water yields results that veer towards the somewhat disturbing
by ALEXANDER SHAW in London
UNDERSTANDING 
enables self-preservation, but occasionally leads us out of Eden too. Thus, I’m not encouraging you to understand how London’s water is recycled, I’m merely tempting you to.
Education is like lighting a fire, not filling a bucket. One realisation leads to another:
Q: What happens when the ice cubes melt in a brimming Tumbler of Scotch?
A: Nothing – so the disappearance of the polar icecap won’t raise sea levels. So I can drive an eight-litre Bentley after all.
Q: What happens when two cars each travelling at 30mph collide head on head?
A: The Bentley’s CD player skips a track and someone spends the afternoon picking a Nissan Micra out of the radiator.
Point by point, basic wisdom allows us to unpick the paranoid egalitarian ideas subversively presented by the Marxist GCSE Physics curriculum.
However, I am horrified that, even with my impeccable logic, it has taken me three years to realise that London’s recycled potable water supply harbours a rather dirty secret. It was the lime scale in the kettle which gave it away. We all know that, as with many cities, London recycles its water. But why, after the process of evaporation and recondensation, does limescale remain in the supply? The answer, to my unutterable horror, is that it is not recycled by evaporation.
I’ve given up trying to get straight answers from Thames Water about exactly what goes on. Like the pro-choice lobby and socialist economists, they gloss over all manner of sins with a vast lexicon of euphemisms.
For ‘carbonaceous waste,’ read: diarrhoearic faeces comprised of doner kebabs and salted French fries, crammed past cankerous lips by nail-bitten greasy fingers of obese female students in bus stops at 3am. For ‘nitrogenous waste,’ read: cheap lager, churned through proletarian digestive systems whose uncircumcised owners moan with relief as the steel urinal tangs of ammonia – gobs of chewing gum and Mayfair fag butts collecting at the foot of the drain. After a brief sifting and filtering, these ‘wastes’ then gush out of London showerheads. The final confluence of the city’s vomit is on my own pale, patrician flesh.
It might not disturb me so much if the water were sent back to the same house, or even the same postcode. At least in Chelsea, we would be drinking the urbane fruits of some anorexic supermodel’s colonic. But no, the city’s water is pooled in something called the ‘Thames Water Ring Main,’ which sounds ghastly, and is so huge that it reaches down to somewhere called ‘zone four.’
I have read an account of the process used to purify our sewage on Thames Water’s website. First they filter it ‘through a rake’ (right, OK), and then ‘most of the solids are removed by settlement.’ After that, they skim off the cleaner bit of what, by then, is basically an un-shaken-up shit smoothie and pump it through a gravel pit of bacteria. Then they send it back to my house.
The internet consensus seems to be that, on average, our tap water has gone round this system approximately seven times and, for those who still have diehard faith in the system, people start to feel nauseous when they drink 11th generation water. So yes, it does get muckier each time.
“Well, if we don’t get ill it must be alright,” a friend of mine concluded, taking a defiant swig of the tap water she’d just ordered in a café. It seems this may also be the underlying philosophy of Thames Water. I find it an unsettlingly laissez faire approach.
The U.S Geological Survey discovered that the dozens of trace chemicals – often derived from medication – which slip through modern filtration processes amount to ‘only a thimble full in an Olympic pool.’
Only!?! If that thimble were of blood, a shark would smell it. If it were Polonium 210, it would be enough to wipe out the entire city. And, heavens above, any folk who take homeopathy seriously will consider that sort of dilution the medical equivalent to downing a pint of dysentery or bathing in the cesspit of a Kinshasa prison.
Furthermore, the ‘fresh’ water that is brought in to our supply from the Thames contains the only-slightly-treated sewage of the settlements upstream. I’m going to guess that 95% of the female populations of Reading, Cowley, Slough and Swindon perform some type of medical injunction upon their reproductive system every Saturday (or Sunday morning, God forbid). And, of course, what goes in must come out.
A Drinking Water Inspectorate report submitted to Defra in 2007 proclaims that our UK filtration techniques ‘can result in removal rates of more than 90% for a wide variety of pharmaceuticals.’ Oh, good! Only less than 10% gets back in! Further down the report, we read: ‘Very limited data were available for the concentrations of pharmaceuticals or illegal drugs in UK drinking waters, but data from the rest of Europe and the USA have shown that concentrations in finished drinking water at treatment works are generally =100 ng.l-1’ (which sounds like another euphemism to me). The report continues to say that the filtration processes are ‘not specifically designed to remove pharmaceuticals and several compounds have been reported in finished drinking water.’
The report is available in summary here. I was retching and gagging by the third paragraph.
It comes as little surprise to me that our perverse society seems more preoccupied with the treatment of the ‘sludge’ which is siphoned out, than the ‘water’ which is pumped back in to our taps. The Thames Water reports abound with the ‘European Sludge Directive,’ the worthy ‘good chemical status,’ and not forgetting, of course, the all-important ‘Safe Sludge Matrix.’ I have already expounded upon the true meaning of ‘carbonaceous’ and ‘nitrogenous,’ so I will spare you my reflections on ‘sludge.’
In order for my water to be clean, it must be broken down to a molecular level, de-ionised, re-ionised, blessed by a bishop, and prayed over by a virgin.
However, I have identified two brands of bottled water which almost meet the standards which we must now demanded from natural sources: Tasmanian Rain ($11 a bottle), is captured from the ‘purest skies on earth,’ and doesn’t touch the ground before it gets to the bottle. Only problem is: what if a bunch of Aussies on stag-night fly a smoky old Cessna over the rain catchment facility? Perhaps better is 10 Thousand BC ($14 a bottle) – or the hippy’s dilemma, as I call it – because it’s extracted from a glacier and derives its purity from having been frozen since before the fall of man.
Or, of course, you could just give up drinking water, as I did years ago.
In Defence of Orbánisation
The silent majority of Hungarians have at last found a voice in the Fidesz party – and the European Commission don’t like what they are hearing.
by ALEXANDER SHAW in Brussels
In under two years, Viktor Orbán’s regime has reduced the Hungarian budget deficit, reduced personal income taxes, returned the GDP to growth and proclaimed sovereign primacy over supranational diktats. Adopted at the beginning of this year, Fidesz’s new national constitution finally overthrows the Communist era law of 1949. Hungary is the last former East Bloc nation to have achieved this. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that 300,000 Hungarians marched to support their government when the reforms came under fire from the EU in January. It was the biggest demonstration in Hungary since the regime change. The message was clear: Fidesz’s democratic mandate is as mighty as ever and Hungarians want sovereignty. (more…)
Hungary Reasserts Sovereignty
Deputy PM Navracsics asserts to shocked Commissioner that Council of Europe “cannot impose anything which runs counter to our constitution”
Hungary yesterday declared its sovereign primacy over the EU. In a heated dialogue between Tibor Navracsics and Commissioner Neelie Kroes, the Hungarian deputy PM staidly remarked that his country would not impose legislation which was contrary to its new constitution. The packed committee room gasped in horrified awe. Kroes was visibly furious as she stormed out, expressing her usual ‘grave concerns’ about Hungary.
Kroes had obviously been banking on Navracsics’s compliance with the Council of Europe’s recommendations, EU member states being bound to comply with the Council of Europe’s Fundamental Charter of Human Rights under the Treaty of Lisbon. The Hungarian government is under scrutiny from the EU for the possible breach of various articles of the Charter. When asked directly where his priorities lay in implementing recommendations, however, the founding member of the ruling Fidesz party stated “I’m a Hungarian member of parliament and I have sworn allegiance to the constitution of Hungary.” (more…)
The Meeting Place
A Bigoted, Drunken Rant
by the Hon. Alexander Shaw
WANDERING AROUND St. Pancras International railway station today, I came across Paul Day’s ‘The Meeting Place.’ The much acclaimed, £1m, nine-meter-high statue of a couple embracing is, at a glance, a nice image for a railway station — a theme of reunion and all that. But looking up at the gargantuan PDA, I started to realise that this was actually an audacious assault on sovereignty and a shameless celebration of European supremacy over Britain. (more…)
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