Brave New World is the jolliest of the dystopias. It certainly isn’t the best; 1984 and the real gem We are far more carefully conceived and executed. But BNW is the most interesting politically because it asks if we would be willing to live in an absolutist state if it were to be jolly and fun.

The thing philosophy teaches you is that all of these questions are old, and as far as we know irresolvable. Happiness and liberty are incommensurate in the same way that position and momentum are incommensurate to a physicist. You can only guarantee one at the loss of the other, and if there is anything in politics worth systematizing it is this equation of uncertainty.

But you really can’t have one and not the other; absolute security is as impossible as absolute liberty. The invention of nuclear weapons (which Huxley regretted leaving out of BNW) makes all states unstable, and the doctrine of asymmetric warfare has proven to be all too favorable to guerillas and terrorists.

The twentieth century has been the domain of the nitpickers, the pragmatists, the statistical economists. We define acceptable risk; we measure the cost of preventing bombings and accidents and deaths from arsenic and set our security standards and speed limits and industrial controls accordingly. And two or three generations of technocrats have fiddled with boundaries and equations and taken new statistics and in the meantime we have been busy believing in nothing except perhaps the bottom line – who of all the gods is probably the most insidious liar.

There must be something better.