Old age is not associated with wisdom but with the ugliness of aging: missing teeth, wrinkles on the face, and the flabbiness of the body. We want them to like the new ones.” 2 Thus the great art, literature, and wisdom of earlier cultures are banished from Brave New world: Shakespeare’s plays, the Bible, and other literary works are all notably absent from the schools, libraries, and society of Brave New World. Beauty’s attractive, and we don’t want people to be attracted by old things. In Brave New World, Mustapha Mond, the controller of this utopian society, explains that censorship is required in the New world to eliminate the influence of the past upon the present and to prevent a critical comparison between the way things are and the way they ought to be: “We haven’t any use for old things here. Such craftsmanship is banned from Oceania because beautiful art lifts the heart and soul to a contemplation of eternal realities that transcend Big Brother, the party, and the revolution. Winston realizes the richness of the glorious past when he visits the antique shop and marvels at the beauty of an old mahogany bed, the craftsmanship of an old-fashioned glass clock, and a rare sculptured glass paperweight shaped in the form of a rose all works of art that evoke in Winston “a sort of nostalgia, a sort of ancestral memory” (82). As he explains to his lover Julia, “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered” (128). As O’Brien, one of the powerful members of the communist party states, “We, the party, control all records, and we control all memories.” 1 Winston’s only contact with the truth of the past is his own memory, not the official records of the Ministry of Truth. In his official position at the Ministry of Truth, Winston is engaged in revisionist history by altering facts to fit the propaganda of Big Brother and deleting information and records that do not conform to ideological theory.
A man without a wife and family, Winston’s entire past has been erased along with the history of England. In 1984, the main character, Winston Smith, has a vague recollection of his family from his childhood years and remembers his wife Katharine, a woman who mysteriously disappeared from his life during the purges after the revolution. The proponents of abortion, euthanasia, feminism, and homosexuality have waged their battles against Christian culture by rejecting the moral patrimony of the past, by overturning the traditional ideals of family and marriage, and by relegating religion to the private sphere. In Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke laments the wholesale destruction of an ancient, enduring Christian civilization that embodied chivalry, reverence, and honor-venerable customs, traditions, and moral sentiments that were jettisoned in the name of false notions of “liberte, egalite, and fraternite.” In the culture wars of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, various ideologies attack the traditional moral norms and established civilized ideals that have formed the basis of christian civilization. In both 1984 and Brave New World, ideology supplants the moral wisdom of western civilization by altering the past, changing the structure of the family, and eliminating religion as a cultural force in society.
The revolutionary thought that occurs in these novels parallels the radical ideas espoused by supporters of the French Revolution and resembles the cataclysmic changes that have occurred in the culture wars and sexual revolution in the late twentieth century. Two of the most prophetic novels of the twentieth century, Orwell’s 1984 (published in 1949) and Huxley’s Brave New World (published in 1932) depict the triumph of ideology against the wisdom of the ages and the perennial truths of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
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