First Things RSS Feed - Andrew Wilson https://www.firstthings.com/author/andrew-wilson en-us Copyright 2025 First Things. All Rights Reserved. ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) Mon, 20 Jan 2025 16:51:51 -0500 https://d2201k5v4hmrsv.cloudfront.net/img/favicon-196.png First Things RSS Feed Image https://www.firstthings.com/rss/author/andrew-wilson 60 Hunger Games and Dystopia https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2013/04/hunger-games-and-dystopia https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2013/04/hunger-games-and-dystopia Wed, 03 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400 Katniss in Hunger Games George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, as has often been pointed out, imagined two very different dystopias. In 1984 , written just after the Second World War, Orwell depicts the forces that held people captive as fundamentally external: coercion, espionage, laws, constraints, threats, lies, the state. By contrast, Huxley’s Brave New World , published just after the Wall Street crash had turned the excess of the twenties into the Great Depression of the thirties, portrays a future in which people are enslaved to forces within themselves: desire, inanity, hedonism, egotism, fatuity. For all the similarities between the two books, it is this difference that is the most striking.

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]]> With What Right and What Justice? https://www.firstthings.com/article/2011/12/with-what-right-and-what-justice https://www.firstthings.com/article/2011/12/with-what-right-and-what-justice Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0500 Five hundred years ago this Advent, a Dominican friar named Antonio de Montesino delivered a sermon haranguing an assembly of Spaniards in Santo Domingo”a tiny, ragged, and lonely outpost on a sylvan Caribbean isle. “I am the voice of Christ crying in the desert of this island,” he preached. “All of you are in mortal sin and in it you are living and are dying . . . . With what right and with what justice do you hold these Indians in such cruel and horrible servitude?”

If anyone ever deserved to be harangued, it was those Spaniards, far from home and drunk on tropical air and apocalyptic dreams. Christopher Columbus’ half-crazed prophecies”visions of the earth’s peoples streaming toward Jerusalem for one final crusade, funded by the soon-to-be discovered El Dorado”never amounted to much more than raw gold fever. Nothing, especially not their dormant Christian consciences, could stand between the settlers and their desire for riches.

The crimes wrought by Damascus steel on Stone Age natives stagger the imagination: pregnant women flayed open, their fetuses skewered; fighting dogs ripping children to pieces. It was the original heart of darkness. And all under the delusion of “Christian” expansion. The chronicler of the horror, Montesino’s later Dominican brother Bartolomé de Las Casas, tells a story of the Taíno chief Hatuey, who was caught and convicted for armed resistance. When asked on his funeral pyre if he wished baptism so that he could live forever in heaven, he asked for clarification:

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