Why Read and Write While the World Burns?

What George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and C.S. Lewis Teach Us Today

“Everything one writes now,” said George Orwell in 1938, “is overshadowed by this ghastly feeling that we are rushing towards a precipice and, though we shan’t actually prevent ourselves or anyone else from going over, must put up some sort of fight.” For Orwell, fighting meant writing. It also meant reading.

But reading and writing—and for that matter, thinking—in a world increasingly characterized by the authoritarian practices that modern totalitarianism required, especially censorship, presented challenges, depending on one’s proclivities. To Orwell’s mind, intellectuals in particular were not good readers, being uncritically drawn to totalitarian ideas due to their love of power and disregard for objective reality.

George Orwell. Wikimedia Commons.

For their part, ordinary readers were insufficiently aware of the extent to which their grasp of reality was subject to physical and emotional conditioning—amplified by technology—a phenomenon illustrated in 1984. The resultant state of uncertainty concerning the truth invited acceptance of lies as an easy default option.

“If,” says Orwell, “all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth.” The difference between truth and “the lie” is merely the time it takes for the Party’s apparatus to convert the former into the latter.

Orwell was not alone in his concern. Aldous Huxley and C.S. Lewis also felt a version of this “ghastly feeling” in the mid-twentieth century. Each responded with dystopian novels that explored power, truth, and control: Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World, and Lewis’s That Hideous Strength.

Power vs. Truth

Each novel features a protagonist struggling against an oppressive system. In 1984, Winston Smith resists the Party’s manipulation of truth but ultimately succumbs. In Brave New World, Bernard Marx and Helmholtz Watson yearn for something beyond their society’s pleasure-driven shallowness. Lewis deviates from the trope by making his protagonist, Mark Studdock, a conformist sociologist who must be reshaped into resistance; he and his wife, Jane, begin the novel avoiding children, but by the end, they recognize that openness to life is central to resisting a technocratic takeover.

George Orwell’s 1984, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength.

While none of these writers saw science itself as inherently harmful, they all believed it should serve the good, variously defined, and that art still had something to say in a world increasingly dominated by science. In particular, each one believed that art, unlike science, could tell some portion of what Orwell called the “whole truth,” even if it could not establish facts.

Huxley, for instance, wrote that “good art shows the artist’s virtue of integrity,” whereas bad art is either “dull, stupid and incompetent” or “a lie and a sham.” For Lewis, literary art could present images of the truth that were often obscured by demonic forces in life. Orwell, meanwhile, believed all art was propaganda but that some of it was prophetic, suggesting that it allowed for access to truth.

When people invoke 1984, Brave New World, or That Hideous Strength, they often do so because each has been deemed prophetic with respect to our own time. And this perspective suggests a dim—even a grim—view of the current historical moment.

All three books share a focus on truth-seeking and truth-telling as threats to centralized power. What’s more, the visions of Orwell, Huxley, and Lewis resonate not just because of their warnings but because their futures feel plausible now, as they did when they were written.

Orwell, in a review of That Hideous Strength, remarked of the scheme sketched therein that “There is nothing outrageously improbable in such a conspiracy.” He noted that “plenty of people in our age do entertain the monstrous dreams of power that Mr. Lewis attributes to his characters, and we are within sight of the time when such dreams will be realisable.”

Creeping Control

Since Neil Postman’s 1985 contrast between 1984 and Brave New World, it’s been popular to pit the visions of Orwell and Huxley against each other. “What Orwell feared,” said Postman,

were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture. . . . In 1984, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure.

While compelling, this contrast oversimplifies. In Brave New World, books are important both to the most powerful (Mustapha Mond) and to the powerless (the Savage), but they are inaccessible to the masses, who have been conditioned to reject them. Rather than drowning in trivia, they are deprived of any contrast between truth and falsehood.

Huxley does not depict humans merely as hedonists avoiding pain and seeking pleasure. He suggests that, deprived of real experiences, people lose their capacity for deep feeling. Orwell shares this concern but sees it emerging through coercion rather than pleasure. Both authors, along with Lewis, argue that managed spectacles and ideological conditioning prevent people from confronting reality.

Aldous Huxley. Wikimedia Commons.

The control mechanisms in Brave New World are more insidious than outright censorship. They involve conditioning people to seek comfort, distraction, and pleasure to the exclusion of anything that might prompt self-examination. The state does not have to force people to accept lies because they lack the will to seek truth in the first place.

By contrast, in 1984 truth is erased and reality is rewritten in real time by the Party. In That Hideous Strength, the elite intellectual class actively works to reshape reality through scientific and bureaucratic control with a view toward the conquest of nature.

These distinctions have implications for our own times. To what extent are we facing Orwellian oppression, where truth is censored and dissent is punished from within and without? In what ways do we find ourselves in a Huxleyan dystopia, where truth is not hidden but drowned out by distraction, the deceptive substitutes for comfort, and an endless stream of humorless, bland entertainment?

Or, as Lewis suggests in That Hideous Strength, is the real danger an elite class of intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals given to the misuse and of “the science” who are reshaping society in ways that ordinary people may not even recognize until it is too late?

The reality may be a combination of all three. Today, censorship and ideological enforcement exist, but so does a culture of distraction that keeps people disengaged from truth-seeking. Meanwhile, bureaucracy and technocracy have seeped into the pores of everyday life in ways that feel inescapable.

Why We Read

The consideration, along different lines, by Orwell, Huxley, and Lewis of the relationship between seeking out the truth by reading and telling it by writing or, by contrast, living with what Solzhenitsyn calls “the permanent lie” is at least one compelling reason to read them today.

For Orwell, reading was an act of defiance. In 1984, Winston Smith’s brief attempts to understand history and reality through books represent his last grasp at autonomy. For Huxley, reading was a path toward deeper consciousness in a world designed to keep people asleep; in Brave New World, the few who seek truth—whether through books, philosophy, or art—stand apart from those who have largely given up on it. And for Lewis, reading was a portal through which the truth could be perceived, albeit through images and symbols of it, in an age when the very idea of objective reality was under attack.

C. S. Lewis. Wikimedia Commons.

If Orwell was right that totalitarianism succeeds when people cease to care about truth, then reading—and insisting on the value of truth—remains an act of defiance.

If Huxley was right that pleasure and entertainment can be tools of control, then reading serious books becomes a way of resisting the tide of distraction and sliding into a state of “happiness” that is akin to sedated despair.

And if Lewis was right that evil operates not just through deception but through the corruption of human nature via the fostering of tolerance of—and even a desire for—untruth, then reading becomes a way of recovering access to what is good, true, and beautiful in a world increasingly hostile to all three.

Why We Write

Orwell also saw the writer’s role as one of defiance, of resistance, believing that

everything in our age conspires to turn the writer, and every other kind of artist as well, into a minor official, working on themes handed to him from above, and never telling what seems to him the whole truth.

His fear was not only that the government would suppress free expression, but that artists and intellectuals would willingly self censor, aligning themselves with ideological power rather than challenging it.

For Huxley, the writer’s role was more ambiguous. He saw modern civilization as a machine that dulled human perception and rendered people passive. His concern was not just with external censorship, but internal conditioning—people losing the desire to think critically. While he saw writing as one of the last refuges of individual thought, however, he was skeptical that literature alone could break through the fog of opioid-like substitutes for comfort and the blur of distraction.

Lewis, on the other hand, saw writing as a moral, imaginative, and even a spiritual act. He believed that that a writer’s task was to help readers to see reality and to recover a sense of the mystery and power of nature, by way of preparing to apprehend supernatural truth. In That Hideous Strength, the battle is not just against propaganda or distraction, but against a deliberate attempt to remake humanity itself in defiance of its created nature.

Evil, in Lewis’s view, was not just a bad system but a being working to corrupt and deform human beings. If Orwell saw writing as a fight against political oppression and Huxley saw it as a protest against cultural decay, Lewis saw it as a defense of the soul itself.

While the World Burns

“Totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere,” as Orwell wrote. He could have added “and at any time.” The warnings of 1984, Brave New World, and That Hideous Strength pertain to any period—such as our own—in which “that ghastly feeling” is warranted.

We would like to know what it is we may already fear, without having the words for it. Under such conditions, it is quite likely that one may start reading books—especially ones that lay claim to or inadvertently present a prophetic vision of what is on the way—with unusual intensity.

---

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post, please hit the ❤️ below and share it with your friends.

Not a subscriber? Take a moment and sign up. It’s free for now, and I’ll send you my top-fifteen quotes about books and reading. Thanks again!

While you’re here, check these out:

Word People: Teaching Humanities to Harvard Scientists

Trapped in a World You Didn’t Choose

George Orwell: Terrific Writer, Terrible Husband