Thoughts on dystopias, satire, and winning the argument

One writer I rate pretty highly is Ross Clark. As well as being a regular newspaper and magazine columnist in places like The Times (of London) and The Spectator, he is also the author of several good books. He has written a fine piece, with deliberate echoes of George Orwell, about the current mania for surveillance in Britain. His liberal views seem to be pretty robust. He has also written a short satire on life in Britain in 2051, a dystopia, showing what the country became when industrialism, liberty and associated individualism, modern technology, medicine, commerce and mass travel and communications were destroyed by a mixture of forces. Unlike the dystopias of Huxley which attacked modern technology, Clark’s dystopia very clearly shows that, with all its occasional shallowness and gaudiness, life as we now enjoy it is pretty wonderful and to turn our backs on it would be to miss things such as mass communications and information sources; techniques such as modern dentistry and keyhole surgery; cheap flights; fast, relatively safe transport, cuisine from around the world; downloadable music of any type available for a few cents, the prospect of DNA mapping to cure many diseases… the list rolls on. Our society is still pretty free, on the whole – though the losses of civil liberties and the associated nanny statist developments are a part of the trend towards a darker society that Clark writes about. But if you think, gentle reader, that Gordon Brown’s Britain is bad in certain respects, then Clark’s version is vastly worse still. He imagines a society, fractured into tiny tribal units lorded over by thugs and religious bigots, in which all these things and more are banished, loathed. His nightmare prediction is one of a world in which scientists, doctors, engineers and bankers are attacked, even murdered, for what they do. It is not a book to read if you are suffering from a bad depression and need a bit of cheering up.

A question that occurs to me about this book is that Clark seems to have written it with the partial object of satirising reactionary Greenery, religious fundamentalism and technophobia, hoping no doubt that the loathesomeness of the dystopia he presents will remind readers of the dangers of what the Greens/others have in store. My problem, though, is that other dystopian novels have often not had much of a salutary effect. As Perry of this parish remarked some time ago, our capacity for satire has been so sated by real-life lunacy that even a hit TV show called ‘Big Brother’, taking a line from Orwell’s 1984, does not inspire the same intended feelings of loathing that Orwell’s attack on totalitarianism was supposed to elicit. Fair enough, there are signs of a fightback against this trend.

But I wonder whether Clark is only really preaching to the converted. I hope not. I hope some stray Guardianista who thinks that John Gray or Bill McKibben are great sages will pick up this great little book and learn something from it. And for undecideds, I would hope that this dystopia warns them off from the anti-Enlightenment trend in which part of our society seems to be moving.

Perhaps a another way to think about winning arguments for technology, capitalism and so on is to portray positive fictional accounts of such things, rather than to portray the opposite. One way to win an argument to is be positive, to give examples of how things are improving, and improving the lives of millions of people. Grumpiness is not really a great sales pitch. Alas, avoiding the error of slipping into grumpiness is difficult when there is so much to be grumpy about, so it takes quite an effort to avoid it.