For, where Orwell and Bradbury give us grand drama and the possibility of heroic resistance, the reality today is more self-inflicted and banal. The brutal, dishonest, and omnipresent oppression of Orwell’s 1984 or the aggressively conformist, anti-intellectual violence and bullying of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, with its “firemen” burning the books and homes of those who dare seek to salvage a life of the mind, seem to many of us a more likely, even comforting vision of where our society is headed than is the sad, self-indulgent reality. For good and ill, the reality is neither so dramatic nor so exciting. We wish to see ourselves as heroes in some dystopian novel, fighting, even if hopelessly, to restore humanity’s recognition of the importance of dignity, responsibility, and recognition of the natural order of existence. Many of us (including me) are wont to paint our predicament as one of Herculean struggles against a great and towering foe who will bind us tightly with chains of overt oppression. Even those of us who consider ourselves students of Eliot’s work on civilization’s decline tend to overdramatize what is really a quite tawdry cultural age.

Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” are often quoted, but seldom taken to heart.

Heroes a brave new world