I can't believe I've gotten this far in life without reading Aldous Huxley's dystopian 1932 novel "Brave New World," but I have ... until today. I didn't read it, exactly, but I drove for hours today having it read to me over my iPod, having loaded it into the thing before leaving Dallas. I reckon I'm about a third of the way through, and it's really knocking me flat. Obviously I didn't take notes, so I'm going from memory here (and of course open to correction), but I did want to note a few things for discussion.
As most of us who have heard about the book, whether or not we've read it, grasp, "Brave New World" is a novel about a dystopian future. It's often compared to Orwell's "1984," which is about a dystopia in which conformity is pressed on the populace by merciless force. In BNW, conformity comes through a populace bioengineered not to dissent, or to have anxiety-producing thoughts, and to drug themselves into perpetual happiness. It is a hedonistic paradise.
That much I knew going in. What I didn't know is that in this future world, Henry Ford is revered as a god -- this, because he was the paragon of the industrial system. The world government is the epitome of a society run like a hyperefficient factory. What it manufactures is not so much happiness as bliss, and with it social stability. Aside from the prenatal and postnatal conditioning to engineer the "correct" personalities, the teaching of history has been banned, meaning the people live in an everlasting present. They're taught to regard the study of history as something useless if not dangerous.
Moreover, the family has been destroyed; all reproduction takes place in state-run laboratories, with children raised in state-run orphanages. There has been a total inversion of values: adults have promiscuous sex for recreation, and only speak of things like marriage and traditional motherhood with acute embarrassment (it's called "smut"). Children are raised to embrace sexual identities at a young age -- hello, queer pedagogues! -- and the memory of a time when kids weren't allowed to molest each other is presented as barbarously cruel.
People are conditioned from childhood to be avid consumers, and permanently infantilized (or rather, juvenilized; the children are taught to be sexually active, old people are expected to hump like rabbits, and everybody is expected to have the same tastes throughout their life, and never to grow in maturity or understanding). Reading is discouraged, because sitting still reading a book is time wasted that could be better spent shopping, playing sports, having sex or working in some other way for the Greater Good. Thrift is a serious vice. Economic growth for its own sake is a primary social good, and that means convincing people that they should spend money on things they don't need. Mustapha Mond, one of the ten World Controllers, tells a group of students that back in the Bad Old Days, there was a thing called Christianity, which was "a philosophy of underconsumption" that had to be overcome to reach paradise. He says that after the revolution, the tops were broken off crosses to make them into T's -- the "T" being a reference to Henry Ford's Model T, the symbolic birth of a rational technopoly that engineered human happiness by creating the perfect therapeutic totalitarianism.
It's unsettling to realize how much Huxley's novel got right about the world we're now living in, and headed toward.
I'm eager to get back on the road tomorrow to see where Huxley goes with this narrative. It seems clear to me that Huxley -- at least the man Huxley was when he wrote this book -- saw the Christian faith as a kind of vaccination against losing your soul to consumerism; the traditional family as a bulwark against totalitarian social engineering; and sexual libertinism not as liberating, but as a way of yielding to hidden social control. But I could be wrong about this. Huxley was not a Christian, and spent most of his life as a devotee of Hindu mysticism and psychedelic drugs. In fact, in googling around for information about his spiritual beliefs, I came across this telling quote of his from 1937:
I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; and consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do. For myself, as no doubt for most of my friends, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. The supporters of this system claimed that it embodied the meaning - the Christian meaning, they insisted - of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and justifying ourselves in our erotic revolt: we would deny that the world had any meaning whatever.
Some things never change.
By the way, read past the jump to see a Huxley-related passage from a Theodore Dalrymple (Anthony Daniels, M.D.) essay about dystopian novels. Well worth a look:
Huxley's Brave New World is set in an indefinitely distant future: it will not be possible for many years to say that Huxley's apprehensions have not proved justified. It is unlikely that populations will undergo genetic and environmental manipulation in the exact way that Huxley foresaw: there will never be a fixed number of predetermined strata, from Alpha Plus to Epsilon Minus Semi-Morons. But as an Italian scientist prepares to clone humans, and as reproduction grows as divorced from sex as sex is from reproduction, it is increasingly hard to regard Huxley's vision as entirely far-fetched.Brave New World describes a sexual regime that increasingly resembles the one that rules today. A little boy, younger than ten, must visit a psychologist because he does not want to indulge in erotic play with a little girl, as his teachers demand: a situation we seem to be fast approaching. Not only does sex education start earlier and earlier in our schools, but publications, films, and television programs for ever-younger age groups grow more and more eroticized. It used to be that guilt would accompany the first sexual experiences of young people; now shame accompanies the lack of such experiences.
In Huxley's dystopia, as among liberals today, enlightenment and permissiveness are synonymous. The Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning tells his students how it was in the old, unenlightened times: " 'What I'm going to tell you now,' he said, 'may sound incredible. But then, when you're not accustomed to history, most facts about the past do sound incredible.'
"He let out the amazing truths. For a very long period . . . erotic play between children had been regarded as abnormal (there was a roar of laughter); and not only abnormal, actually immoral (no!): and therefore had been rigorously suppressed. A look of astonished incredulity appeared on the faces of his listeners. Poor little kids not allowed to amuse themselves? They could not believe it. . . .
" 'But what happened?' they asked. 'What were the results?'
" 'The results were terrible . . . Terrible,' he repeated."
Later, the director's superior, Mustapha Mond, one of the ten World Controllers, notes: "Freud had been the first to reveal the appalling dangers of family life. The world was full of fathers--was therefore full of misery; full of mothers--therefore full of every kind of perversion from sadism to chastity; full of brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts--therefore full of madness and suicide." As for home--"a few small rooms, stiflingly over-inhabited by a man, by a periodically teeming woman, by a rabble of boys and girls of all ages. No air, no space; an understerilized prison; darkness, disease, and smells." In Brave New World, the word "mother" is smutty, in the same way that it is indelicate in the area of the city where I work to ask about the identity of a child's father. As in Brave New World, the word "father" is "not so much obscene as . . . merely gross, a scatological rather than a pornographic impropriety." In the matter of human relations, we are halfway to Huxley's dystopia.
Huxley himself was highly ambivalent about the family as an institution. He not only felt that it would, but that it should, disintegrate. His powers of imagination, however, overwhelmed his ratiocination, so he was able to convey the horror of a world in which "everyone belongs to everyone," a world in which no one formed any deep attachment to anyone else.
The ultimate target of Huxley's dystopia was the idea of the good life as the instant gratification of sensory desires. Mustapha Mond tries to prove to his students their good fortune to live in the Brave New World:
" 'Consider your own lives,' said Mustapha Mond. 'Has any of you ever encountered an insurmountable obstacle?'
"The question was answered by a negative silence.
" 'Has any of you been compelled to live through a long time-interval between the consciousness of a desire and its fulfillment?'
" 'Well,' began one of the boys, and hesitated.
" 'Speak up,' said the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning. . . .
" 'I once had to wait nearly four weeks before a girl I wanted would let me have her.'
" 'And you felt a strong emotion in consequence?'
" 'Horrible!'
" 'Horrible; precisely,' said the Controller."
This passage reminds me of the advertising slogan of a credit card launched in Britain about 30 years ago: it "takes the waiting out of wanting." The advertisement showed no recognition that immediate gratification usually presents a bill, with extortionate interest.
Huxley surmised that life lived as the satisfaction of one desire after another would result in shallow and egotistical people. True, he had a poor opinion of mankind to start with: "About 99.5% of the entire population of the planet are as stupid," he once wrote, "as the great masses of the English." But after gratifying their desires instantly throughout their lives, people would cease to carry the divine spark that distinguished man from the rest of creation. They would seek entertainment unto death: at Brave New World's Park Lane Hospital for the Dying, "at the foot of every bed, confronting its moribund occupant, was a television box." I think of my own hospital, where the dying usually depart this world to the sight and sound of driveling television soap operas.
Those who live lives of immediate gratification, Huxley thought, would not be able to bear solitude of any kind. As Mustapha Mond explains, "people are never alone now. We make them hate solitude; and we arrange their lives so that it's almost impossible for them to ever have it." A life devoted to instant gratification produces permanent infantilization: "at sixty-four . . . tastes are what they were at seventeen." In our society, the telescoping of the generations is already happening: the knowledge, tastes, and social accomplishments of 13-year-olds are often the same as those of 28-year-olds. Adolescents are precociously adult; adults are permanently adolescent.
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John E asked Michele, how is "civil unions" different from "legally recognizing homosexual unions in every single respect except for calling it marriage"? Because my understanding of civil unions is that it is, in fact, civil marriage in all but name.
In the BNW of babies being hatched in hatcheries and no one being biological parents, then there'd be no difference, since marriages wouldn't have any right to have biological offspring. But in our world, we still have biological children, and indeed we actually consider being allowed to have biological children using our own genes a basic civil right of man, and a right of marriage, at that. That's why we don't let siblings marry, because we don't let them conceive children together.
Civil Unions that are defined as having all the rights of marriage are indeed marriage in all but name, because same-sex conception is not prohibited the way incest or procreating with children is. But CU's don't need to be defined that way, they should be defined as "marriage minus conception rights" and all forms of genetic engineering and same-sex conception should be prohibited, leaving only male-female procreation using unmodified gametes. That'd allow for all the equal protections that same-sex couples call for, as well as preserve marriage and prevent the Brave New World of manufactured people.
Never got what was supposed to be negative about BNW's utopia. Not only does it have the features you cited, but it's a resilient enough society that confronted with a direct and violent challenge from a foreign culture, in the form of the Savage, it neither shatters nor reacts with repression, but sits back, extracts, adapts, and enthusiastically adopts what value it can, and discards the rest. (here I'm largely drawing on the later chapters. you'll see when you get there)
The moment that sums up, in my mind, the book's challenge to Fordist culture, is when the Savage smugly looks down on the whole thing on the basis that he has just seen a movie (felt a feelie, actually) and it wasn't Othello. Srsly! And that's the real scare message: the price of utopia would be discarding bourgeois modernism. Okay. True! But if the two were exclusive and you had to choose, why wouldn't you choose utopia?
"Never got what was supposed to be negative about BNW's utopia."
TR: I've seen this with many young people and it's vaguely terrifying to hear.
That said I seem to recall the BNW does seem to have islands where people can be smart and genuinely creative. As well as the savageland. If you have the option to live differently this does make it a bit better than many totalitarian regimes in real life.
Senescent, the BNW utopia is not only unsustainable without cheap oil, and therefore destructive and unethical in light of our obligations to posterity, it also denies the basis of human equality and tosses away basic civil rights and liberties.
Foreword to Neil Postman's book Amusing Ourselves to Death
We were keeping our eyes on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.
But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to the common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally-imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no reason to ban a book. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to expose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.
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