Brave New World

When I read George Orwell's 1984 in high school at the height of the final phase of the Cold War, I remember hearing about arguments over whether Orwell's vision or Huxley's vision in Brave New World had turned out to be more on target.  A case could have been made at the time that the Huxley's vision matched the free world while Orwell's matched the communist world, but there were problems with that approach.  But from the perspective of 2014, it seems clear that we are well down the path toward Huxley's vision, at least where ISIS and the Taliban aren't running things.  But that isn't particularly brave, and it's not really even new.