Quote for the day

"Taking Brave New World to be a cautionary tale about the perils of scientific inquiry is even more wrongheaded. While Huxley’s dystopia depends on some minor technological advances, its spirit is essentially anti-scientific. The author, who knew his science—he was the grandson of T. H. Huxley, the great Victorian biologist—makes this plain. “Every change is a menace to stability,” the Controller tells the Savage in their dialogue. “Every discovery in pure science is potentially subversive.” Huxley’s imagined world, like Orwell’s, is static. We are not being shown the perils of letting science march on indefinitely, so much as the perils of letting science march forward a short distance, then stop forever."

John Derbyshire