P h i l i s t i n e
Brave New World is a stupid society. For the most part, even the Alphas don't do anything more exalted than play Obstacle Golf. A handful of the Alphas are well-delineated. They are truly clever. Huxley is far too brilliant to write a novel with convincingly dim-witted lead characters. The Savage, in particular, is an implausibly articulate vehicle for Huxley's own sympathies. But in the main, brave new worlders are empty-headed mental invalids in the grip of terminal mind-rot - happy pigs rather than types of unhappy Socrates.
        Since the utopians are (largely) contented with their lives, they don't produce Great Art. Happiness and Great Art are allegedly incompatible. Great Art and Great Literature are very dear to Huxley's heart. But is artistic genius really stifled without inner torment? Is paradise strictly for low-brows?

        There is a great deal of ideological baggage that needs to be picked apart here; or preferably slashed like a Gordian knot. The existence of great art, unlike (controversially) great science, is not state-neural fact about the world. Not least, "great art" depends on the resonances it strikes in its audience. Today we're stuck with legacy wetware and genetically-driven malaise. It's frequently nasty and sometimes terrible. So we can currently appreciate only too well "great" books and plays about murder, violence, treachery, child abuse, suicidal despair etc. Such themes, especially when "well"-handled in classy prose, strike us as more "authentic" than happy pap. Thus a (decaying) Oxbridge literary intelligentsia can celebrate, say, the wonderful cathartic experience offered by Greek tragedies - with their everyday tales of bestiality, cannibalism, rape and murder among the Greek gods. It's good to have one's baser appetites dressed up so intelligently.

        Yet after the ecstatic phase-change ahead in our affective states - the most important evolutionary transition in the future of life itself - the classical literary canon may fall into obscurity. Enriched minds with different emotions encephalised in different ways are unlikely to be edified by the cultural artefacts of a bygone era. Conversely, we might ourselves take a jaundiced view if we could inspect the artistic products of a civilisation of native-born ecstatics. This is because any future art which explores lives predicated on gradations of delight will seem pretty vapid from here. We find it hard enough to imagine even one flavour of sublimity, let alone a multitude.

        The nagging question may persist: will posterity's Art and Literature [or art-forms expressing modes of experience we haven't even accessed yet] really be Great? To its creators, sure, their handiwork may seem brilliant and beautiful, moving and profound. But might not its blissed-out authors be simply conning themselves? Could they have lost true critical insight, even if they retain its shadowy functional analogues?

        Such questions demand a treatise on the nature and objectivity of value judgements. Yet perhaps asking whether we would appreciate ecstatic art of 500 or 5000 years hence is futile in the first place. We simply can't know what we're talking about. For we are unhappy pigs, and our own arts are mood-congruent perversions. The real philistinism to worry about lies in the emotional illiteracy of the present. Our genetically-enriched posterity will have no need of our condescension.
 

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