THE "NEW" PLEASURE PRINCIPLE: REVISITING BRAVE NEW WORLD

The high purpose of the first amendment's free speech and press guarantees is characteristically, although not exclusively, associated with protecting dissenters from government oppression. Contests between the activist or critic and the established order are the stuff of which the first amendment is made. Names such as John Peter Zenger, ¹¹ Jacob Abrams, ¹² Irving Feiner, ¹³ and Paul Robert Cohen ¹⁴ resonate with the Madisonian principle of free expression. First­amendment theories such as the traditional "marketplace of ideas,"' ¹⁵ the modern "antifoundationalist marketplace of ideas,"' ¹⁶ the "checking"' function, ¹⁷ the ''self­governance" ¹⁸ and "'autonomy and self­realization"' rationales, ¹⁹ and "romantic eclecticism"' ²⁰ enshrine, in essential part, the spirit of civic pride in sociopolitical engagement and civic disdain for governmental suppression of political viewpoints. In essence, all first­amendment cases and theories establish the necessity of preserving an environment in which robust sociopolitical discourse and action may be tested. Without this environment for experimentation, the first amendment, as we know it, cannot survive.

This lofty experiment is hailed as the antithesis of the Orwellian regime, ²¹ in which the hand of an omnipresent government squelches dissent, bans books, denies information, and conceals truth. Triumphantly, America has survived 1984, and is less fearful of Orwell's dark determinism. But our Orwellian perspective has prevented us from focusing on an equally menacing, and more realistic, threat­­the evil first identified in Aldous Huxley's antiutopian Brave New World ²² and later developed in his Brave New World Revisited. ²³ As Huxley himself contended ²⁴ and as Professor Neil Postman echoed, ²⁵ it is this threat that looms largest today. We maintain that the Huxleyan evil particularly endangers our historic and idealistic commitment to freedom of expression.

The Huxleyan nightmare is one in which government has no need to censor dissent, no cause to hide truth, and no ground to ban serious discussion. It is a world of passivity, pleasure, and trivialization, a world whose citizenry euphorically digests narcotic "soma tablets."' ²⁶ The brave new world offers a surfeit of entertainment, "non­stop distractions of the most fascinating nature (the feelies, orgy­porgy, centrifugal bumble­puppy)"' ²⁷ that ensure a state of perpetual amusement and happiness. The governing maxim is: "'Everybody's happy now."' ²⁸

The purpose of all this "happiness"' is to numb. The "non­stop distractions . . . are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation."' ²⁹ The problem with all this "'happiness"' is the servitude that it spawns, and the tyranny that a love of servitude makes possible. The rulers of Huxley's antiutopia have learned that soma tablets more effectively suppress the critical spirit that the iron fist of Orwell's world oppresses. ³⁰