Eyeless in Gaza, the classic novel by Aldous Huxley, takes its title from Milton’s poem, Samson Agonistes. In the legend, the warrior Samson is blinded by the Philistines and tied to a millstone in Gaza. In freeing himself, he manages to kill his enemies but also kills himself.
Huxley’s novel is the story of an upper-middle-class Englishman finding his way from post-World War I hedonism – a kind of blindness – to enlightenment. Like his earlier novel, Brave New World, the book reflects his preoccupation with politics.
An eye disease caused Huxley to lose much of his sight and blindness was one of his themes: social, political and moral as well as literal. He satirised the wilful ignorance of contemporary society and he looked for a way out of the vicious cycle in which you kill your enemies, but manage at the same time to hurt yourself.
Recently, I listened to an American foreign policy expert discussing the Middle East. He used to work for President Obama, and he said the Biden Administration’s method of dealing with Israel over Gaza hasn’t changed. The US remonstrates with Prime Minister Netanyahu behind the scenes, while publicly expressing total support. “I hate this,” the expert said.
He felt the US needed to object out loud to Israel. How about something like: “You suffered a terrible crime on October 7 but your response is disproportionate. The eyes of the world are on you. Over 6600 Gazan children have been killed. Dress it up how you like, but this is beyond disgusting. Knock it off.”
Huxley was interested in the potential for technology to be weaponised as a means of social control. Imagine describing modern-day Gaza to the author of Brave New World. The citizens are trapped. They are sent city grid patterns telling them where to move to safety, but the instructions keep changing. The weaponry used by the Israeli Defence Forces is “next level”. The skies are patrolled by surveillance drones and the army uses AI to pick targets.
The world is watching. Every day that the death toll mounts, the hope for peace gets more remote. The surviving population is beside itself and won’t be in a mood for forgetting. So there’s the age-old bind: in killing your enemies, you end up damaging yourself.
Huxley borrowed his title from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. “How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, that has such people in’t.” It’s ironic: the line is delivered by an innocent who doesn’t understand the evil she’s witnessing.
Dystopian novels are warnings. They stress the need for vigilance, for keeping your eyes open. Huxley’s plots might seem quaint now but the threat of tyranny hasn’t gone away. You have only to listen to hard-right US Republican Liz Cheney.
In her new book, Oath and Honor, Cheney warns the United States is “sleepwalking into dictatorship”. Donald Trump has stated openly what he intends to do if elected next year. He plans to dismantle the executive branch and replace it with loyalists who will ignore the US Constitution.
He wants to try members of the military for treason and prosecute news organisations. Cheney is trying to shake the American people awake, to open their eyes.
Meanwhile, Trump does what authoritarians do: he tells his followers not to believe the news.
Attacking the media – it’s useful if your followers are eyeless. That way you can string them along. Perhaps too, for some populist opportunists, cold-eyed scrutiny hurts. Journalists not only potentially expose you, they see you. They know exactly what you did, how you got back in, the damage you had to do to your own self-worth.
