Brave New World at 75

Caitrin Nicol

The future is the present projected,” said Aldous Huxley. “Our notions of the future have something of that significance which Freud attributes to our dreams. And not our notions of the future only: our notions of the past as well. For if prophecy is an expression of our contemporary fears and wishes, so too, to a very great extent, is history.”

Huxley’s most famous novel, Brave New World, was published in 1932, and the occasion of this seventy-fifth anniversary should lead us to wonder about his peculiar description of how we understand the future. We live in a time of biotechnological leaps forward that have made the term “Brave New World” almost a reflex for commentators worried we are rushing headlong toward a sterilized post-human society, engineered to joyless joy. It is easy to imagine that we see the shadows of our society in Huxley’s vision of the future. But could it be that our insistence on seeing Huxley’s book as an exceedingly successful prophecy actually prevents us from recognizing its real insight? Is there a way for us to understand the book free of the great distorting influence of our own times?

We can do that only by reading the book on its own terms, as its first readers did, and by letting ourselves be guided by the literary, scientific, and cultural critics of Huxley’s day. In doing so, we may glimpse afresh something of the meaning of Brave New World in its author’s mind and time.

“Progress is Lovely, Isn’t It?”

Huxley’s vision of the future begins with a tour of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Center, in the year of stability a.f. 632 (After Ford). “Viviparous” reproduction, that shameful secret of the past, has been replaced with manufacture; here the eggs are selected from disembodied ovaries, mixed in culture with the sperm, and incubated in a clean, sterile, efficient environment overseen by technicians—“the bizarre case,” as one critic has noted, “of a product supervising a production line.” The embryos are designated into five castes, and while the elite Alphas and Betas each come from one unique embryo per egg, the Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons are cloned (“bokanovskified”) into as many as ninety-six embryos per egg. “For in nature it takes thirty years for two hundred eggs to reach maturity. But our business is to stabilize the population at this moment, here and now. Dribbling out twins over a quarter of a century—what would be the use of that?”

Welcome to the World State, where “all men are physico-chemically equal” and “everybody’s happy now.” People are conditioned by genetic engineering, electric shocks, and hypnopaedic repetition to accept these and other mantras as the sum of their identities, to promote complacency and simple desires. Sexually, people are uniformly promiscuous—“everyone belongs to everyone else”—avoiding those neuroses rooted in repression or exclusive attachments. Erotic experimentation begins at six or eight years old. Economically, the society has subscribed so thoroughly to mass consumerism that the consumers themselves have been commodified. “Taught to acquire an infinity of gimcrack objects,” as one early reviewer said, they spend their labor mindlessly producing the things that in their leisure they mindlessly consume. And, as one character explains, “if ever by some unlucky chance such a crevice of time should yawn in the solid substance of their distractions, there is always soma, delicious soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon.” A dream drug without side effects, soma assuages every hurt or unmet need, from boredom to impotence to insecurity to chagrin, and all other “miseries of space and time.”

An unholy alliance of industrial capitalist, fascist, communist, psychoanalytic, and pseudo-scientific ideologies has brought about the end of history. The past is taboo—“History is bunk,” as “Our Ford” so eloquently said—and there is no future, because history’s ends have been accomplished. There is no pain, deformity, crime, anguish, or social discontent. Even death has no more sting: Children are acclimatized to the death palaces from the age of eighteen months, encouraged to poke around and eat chocolate creams while the dying are ushered into oblivion on soma, watching sports and pornography on television. Postmortem, the useful chemicals in every corpse are recovered in cremation to be used as fertilizer. “Fine to think we can go on being socially useful even after we’re dead,” gloats one character. “Making plants grow.”

There are a few remaining “savage reservations” not integrated into the World State. When Bernard and Lenina, a couple of hatchery employees, travel on vacation to one such reservation in New Mexico, their Siddhartha-like encounter with age, disease, and death ends in a remarkable discovery. One member of their civilization, left behind some twenty years before, has borne a son and raised him on the reservation. Bernard and Lenina take the woman and her grown son back to London. “Savage John,” as he is dubbed, has heard the glories of the “Other Place” from his mother all his life, and he is at first entranced. “O, wonder!” he says, with the same naïve irony as Shakespeare’s Miranda. “How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, that has such people in’t!” But when his mother, whose natural aging has made her too grotesque for her own society, passes away in soma-induced delusions, he revolts. Retreating to a solitary haven, he is soon found out; in a blaze of torture and disgust, he and his ideals collapse in freakish self-destruction. Lenina, who despite all her conditioning can dimly feel a yearning for the other, greater world John tried to show her, is destroyed with him. It would seem to be the death of hope as well, but hope was never truly living in the World State, where the “births” are as devoid of potential as the lives are of significance.

Rational Futures

The critical reception of Brave New World was largely chilly. Most reviewers were disgruntled or disgusted with what they saw as unjustified alarmism. H. G. Wells was downright offended. “A writer of the standing of Aldous Huxley has no right to betray the future as he did in that book,” Wells said. In fact, Wells felt the bite of this betrayal personally—his own writings, especially his 1923 novel Men Like Gods, had been Huxley’s inspiration. Huxley told a friend in 1931 that he was “writing a novel about the future—on the horror of the Wellsian Utopia and a revolt against it.”

More at: http://www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/16/nicol.htm

Interesting book, that. Says a lot for the discussion at hand.

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-livin' in the terminally flippant zone

Dots are cosmetic and cultural just like mascarra and eye shadow and have nothing to do with the concept of reincarnation which is a belief.

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99 Gurkha with OM616 IDI turbo

2015 Gurkha with OM616 DI turbo

2014 Rexton W with OM612 VGT

They have no effing right to judge me and no right to tell me what choices I can make. They can kiss my white a$$. The main reason I am no longer registered as a conservative. The mindless religios minions have taken over.

Sounds similar to Susan Smith's viewpoint.

BTW, where does one register as a conservative?

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-livin' in the terminally flippant zone

In NYS I believe that would be with the Conservative Party.

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1977 300d 70k--sold 08
1985 300TD 185k+
1984 307d 126k--sold 8/03
1985 409d 65k--sold 06
1984 300SD 315k--daughter's car
1979 300SD 122k--sold 2/11
1999 Fuso FG Expedition Camper
1993 GMC Sierra 6.5 TD 4x4
1982 Bluebird Wanderlodge CAT 3208--Sold 2/13

I can't imagine that there is a political party that would actually think they have the right to tell a person, any person -- man or woman, what they can do with their body. But apparently, there are.

Suicide is against the law.

Recreational drug use is against the law.

Prostitution (in most places) is against the law.

Selling organs is against the law.

I guess it should also be legal to sell yourself into slavery if you chose to do it using your own freewill?

The fundamental principle of capitalism, in short.

__________________
1977 300d 70k--sold 08
1985 300TD 185k+
1984 307d 126k--sold 8/03
1985 409d 65k--sold 06
1984 300SD 315k--daughter's car
1979 300SD 122k--sold 2/11
1999 Fuso FG Expedition Camper
1993 GMC Sierra 6.5 TD 4x4
1982 Bluebird Wanderlodge CAT 3208--Sold 2/13

Rental, not ownership.

The righteous and moral only never righteous nor moral.

Ok... Here's a way some of the neo-cons will understand.

In my state, and many others -- there are laws being enacted to prevent a land-owner from cutting down trees on his/her own property.

Those trees are MY property -- they grow on MY land.

Should I not be free to do what I choose with my trees?

Amazing how the tree scenario works only when it serves the people that wish to control the actions of others, eh folks?

It's amazing how some people confuse the life cycle of a tree with that of a mammal, huh folks?