{"id":1188648,"date":"2023-03-28T09:11:55","date_gmt":"2023-03-28T07:11:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ie.edu\/insights\/?post_type=articles&#038;p=1188648"},"modified":"2023-03-28T10:47:24","modified_gmt":"2023-03-28T08:47:24","slug":"brave-new-world","status":"publish","type":"articles","link":"https:\/\/www.ie.edu\/insights\/articles\/brave-new-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Brave New World"},"featured_media":1190165,"template":"","meta":{"_has_post_settings":[]},"schools":[],"areas":[],"subjects":[418],"class_list":["post-1188648","articles","type-articles","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","subjects-future-of-education"],"custom-fields":{"wpcf-article-leadin":["This article is part of an upcoming editorial series entitled \u201c50 Ideas to Shape the Future\u201d."],"wpcf-article-body":["The book that rested on his chest slid to the floor and violently hit the mat. The blow woke him with a start. He opened one slightly bleary eye and was suddenly invaded by a feeling of resentment, of subtle restlessness.\r\n\r\nThe crackle from the fireplace, of half-consumed firewood, soon soothed him. He managed to get up out of his chair, slowly, that pain in his hip forever limiting his movement. He opened his mouth in a full yawn, scratching the double chin that the years had drawn on his face, now aged and languishing. He looked around trying to orient himself from the deep lethargy\u00a0that clung to him;\u00a0those naps\u00a0always\u00a0kidnapped him.\r\n\r\nHis\u00a0dazed look drew a glossy\u00a0library,\u00a0where he used to spend hours submerged between the pages of books, subjugated by the smell of wood and resin. \u201cI have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library,\u201d he laughed to himself, remembering Borges' quote, as if he hadn't woken up from a nap in this life but in the other. He looked down at the floor and saw\u00a0the culprit of his abrupt\u00a0awakening, an old copy, almost a hundred and fifty years old now, by Aldous Huxley. He adored those first editions, and when it was published\u00a0way back\u00a0in 1931,\u00a0<em>Brave New World<\/em>\u00a0was quite a revolution. Although he wasn\u2019t born until fifty years after that milestone, literature was eternal, making him\u00a0feel optimistic, humbly victorious.\r\n\r\nHe picked the book up from the floor and inspected the worn cover while meditating: society was safe from the Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and Epsilon, those demonic breeds\u00a0masterfully described by Huxley. Then he questioned himself: was it possible that today's society had not yet eradicated wars or poverty? That we still struggled not to harm the environment?\u00a0That we continue to be vulnerable to disease, far from the utopia of immortality?\u00a0He\u00a0had come to accept\u00a0the imperfections of coexistence, that education was not the backbone of current societies, that happiness\u00a0(oh, such a capricious\u00a0yet\u00a0comforting concept)\u00a0did not shelter each individual and each community with its mantle\u2026 And, even so, even knowing that the world was far from those ideals, he felt proud because we\u00a0had not fallen into the devilish temptation...\r\n\r\n<em>- \u201cDo you need something? A coffee, perhaps?\u201d -<\/em>\u00a0the metallic voice of his Artificial Friend interrupted him. Helpful, submissive.\r\n\r\n\"I need you to shut up. Don't bother me.\" His response was dry and dominant.\r\n\r\nHe picked up the glass of wine that he had set, before his nap, on the modern edition of Goethe's Faust. His daughter had given him the book for Christmas and on the cover was the black silhouette of Mephistopheles on an indigo blue background.\u00a0Yes,\u00a0our society avoided a pact with the devil, he thought, and although technological advances were a never-ending source of temptations, we knew how to bend them to our will,\u00a0to recognize\u00a0the infinite risks they\u00a0present.\u00a0These days,\u00a0technologies, digital or biological, were at our service, not the other way around.\r\n\r\nAlso, he smiled to himself, we\u2019ve avoided succumbing to the cosmetic and self-imposed happiness with which we were invited to taste the apple, that neo-inquisition of \u201ccorrectness\u201d that would have turned us into servants, into castes of nothing, as in the book of Huxley. Rather, we dedicate ourselves to more humble, more respectful deeds, such as the care of seeing, of understanding, each individual, of delving into their singularities, their nuances.\u00a0We are now\u00a0far from the pestilence of those who sought to cancel behaviors that were not perversely stereotyped. Even so, one had to be alert, he said to himself, remembering Camus: \u201cstupidity\u00a0has a knack for getting its way\u201d.\r\n\r\nIf fifty years ago he had had to guess at the current world, he would never have foreseen the speed of change (and back then, there were plenty of visionaries). It is thanks to literature, among other arts, that we have managed to preserve our memory, feed our imagination, and promote common sense, without which we would never have been able to guard against that threat to the essence of human nature.\r\n\r\nOur society was imperfect, he smiled proudly.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n\u00a9 IE Insights."],"wpcf-article-extract":[""]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ie.edu\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/articles\/1188648","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ie.edu\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/articles"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ie.edu\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/articles"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ie.edu\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1190165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ie.edu\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1188648"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"schools","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ie.edu\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/schools?post=1188648"},{"taxonomy":"areas","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ie.edu\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/areas?post=1188648"},{"taxonomy":"subjects","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ie.edu\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/subjects?post=1188648"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}