Brave New World vs Nineteen Eighty-Four featuring Adam Gopnik and Will Self

The battle between two of the greatest dystopian novels Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four is strikingly urgent in our world of Donald Trump, 'fake news', and technological advances. On the Intelligence Squared stage, we have Will Self arguing for Brave New World and Adam Gopnik arguing for Nineteen Eighty-Four. The debate was chaired by Jonathan Freedland. Dystopian books and films are in the zeitgeist. Reflecting the often dark mood of our times, Intelligence Squared are staging a contest between two of the greatest dystopian novels, 'Brave New World' and 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'. Each book captured the nightmares of the 1930s and 40s. But which vision looks more prescient to us now in the 21st century? Are we living in George Orwell’s sinister surveillance state? Or in Aldous Huxley’s vapid consumerist culture? To battle it out, we brought two celebrated writers, Adam Gopnik and Will Self, to our stage. After Donald Trump was elected, it seemed as if 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' had clinched it. The book shot to the top of the bestseller charts. It felt so ominously familiar. In Orwell’s dystopia, the corporate state controls the news, insisting that ‘whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth’. That sounds very like Trump’s ‘alternative facts’, and the war he is waging on the ‘fake news’ media. Orwell imagined two-way telescreens spying on every citizen’s home. Today we have Amazon’s ‘always listening’ Alexa device, while Google, Facebook and the security agencies hoover up our personal data for their own ends. Orwell also described an Inner Party – two percent of the population – enjoying all the privileges and political control. Isn’t that scarily close to the ‘one percent’, reviled for their wealth and influence by anti-capitalists today? No wonder everyone rushed out to buy the book. But Orwell’s critics say 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' is a dated dystopia, a vision that died along with communism. The novel that better resonates with our present, they say, is 'Brave New World'. Here Aldous Huxley imagined a…