Just a note to add to Spillway's post on Orwell and Modernism, something I've been meaning to post about for some time:
'The world of today is a bare, hungry, dilapidated place compared with the world that existed before 1914, and still more so if compared with the imaginary future to which the people of that period looked forward. In the early twentieth century, the vision of a future society unbelievably rich, leisurely, orderly and efficient - a glittering antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete - was part of the consciousness of nearly every literate person.'
Emmanuel Goldstein, Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism
