The Wrong Terms of Reference

The world's stable now. People are happy; they get what they want and they never want what they can't get. They're well off; they're afe; they'r never ill ... But that's the price you have to pay for stability. You've got to choo e between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've acrificed the high art ... We don't want to change. Every change i a menace to stability ... It isn't only art that' incompatible with happine ; it' al 0 science. Science is dangerous; we have to keep it mo t carefully chained and muzzled.' With these words the Re ident World Controller for We tern Europe, Mustapba Mond, explained to Mr Savage the philosophy of Brave New· World (1932) which Aldous Huxley had imagined. A different but equally stable society wa described by George Orwell in his Ninete n Eighty-four published in 1949

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