Andrew Wilson

George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, as has often been pointed out, imagined two very different dystopias. In 1984, written just after the Second World War, Orwell depicts the forces that held people captive as fundamentally external: coercion, espionage, laws, constraints, threats, lies, the state. By contrast, Huxley’s Brave New World, published just after the Wall Street crash had turned the excess of the twenties into the Great Depression of the thirties, portrays a future in which people are enslaved to forces within themselves … Continue Reading »

Five hundred years ago this Advent, a Dominican friar named Antonio de Montesino delivered a sermon haranguing an assembly of Spaniards in Santo Domingo”a tiny, ragged, and lonely outpost on a sylvan Caribbean isle. “I am the voice of Christ crying in the desert of this island,” he . . . . Continue Reading »