British writer-philosopher Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) is best remembered today for writing one of the earliest and most emblematic works of dystopian literature.
His 1932 novel Brave New World continues to be a bestseller and is universally recognized as a modern classic. For example, the Modern Library ranked it number 5 on its list of the 100 Best Novels in English of the 20th century.
Not all dystopian works fit the distinctive focus of the Prometheus Award, but Brave New World more than qualifies – and that’s why I’ve nominated it for the Prometheus Hall of Fame for Best Classic Fiction.
COLLECTIVISM AND TYRANNY VS. INDIVIDUALISM AND FREEDOM
For several generations now, Huxley’s novel has connected with readers who feel anxious about losing their individual identities and liberties in a fast-changing future.
After rereading this novel for the first time since I was in high school in the late 1960s, I was pleasantly surprised at how clear and central are Huxley’s libertarian and anti-authoritarian themes. His novel explicitly dramatizes not only the dismal consequences for freedom of State-enforced and regimented conformity but also the philosophical, cultural and psychological tensions between collectivism and individualism.
Huxley’s vision ends up being even more disturbing and persuasive because it is portrayed as perversely seductive to many – strongly implying that a “soft tyranny” ultimately may last longer than the “hard tyranny” imagined by some other dystopian classics.
Metaphorically, Huxley envisions a seemingly benevolent world government as the sly Serpent tempting us with an alleged Garden of Eden where we will be mindlessly happy – so long as we give up any prospect of tasting the Apple of knowledge and achieving full self-awareness, with its burdens of responsibility and facing reality.
Here’s how Anders Monsen summarized Brave New World in an endorsement of its continuing libertarian relevance in his 2012 Prometheus-newsletter essay, “Fifty Great Works of Fiction Libertarians Should Read,” published in 2012 in the former Prometheus printed quarterly newsletter:
“In a one-world state with a tightly controlled economy and populace, babies are decanted, and everyone is happily socially conditioned. It’s a book that needs to be read often to remind us that there are people who actually see those aspects of control as beneficial, and try to secure the political will to impose such a society on the rest of us, a concept which might even exist in minor forms in places like North Korea.”
A BRAVE WARNING ABOUT A DEHUMANIZED FUTURE
Following by roughly a decade Eugeny Zamyatin’s pioneering 1924 dystopian novel We (inducted into the Prometheus Hall of fame in 1984), but preceding by 16 years Huxley’s friend George Orwell’s similarly influential dystopian classic Nineteen Eighty-Four (aptly inducted into the Prometheus Hall of Fame in 1994), Brave New World powerfully evokes a monstrous future in which key aspects of our humanity are systematically suppressed.
In perceptive and prescient ways, Huxley’s dark vision extends and critiques several of the worst intellectual trends of his early-20th-century era and his Oxford University social circle – most notably, the rise of collectivism, statism, authoritarianism and technocratic central planning, coupled with the then-widespread Progressive infatuation with the racist pseudo-science of eugenics.
Huxley offers a cautionary if-this-goes-on tale about what kind of flattened and dehumanized future most of humanity would experience if the prevalent ideologies of the early 20th century were carried to their logical conclusion and implemented via eugenics-like chemistry and cloning.
Chemicals are used in the womb to help manufacture separate classes of Alphas (the leaders), Betas, Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons (the menial laborers) by limiting the intelligence of the lesser classes.
The cost of such collectivism, Huxley feared, would be a stasis and stagnation brought about by the near-eradication of individualism, individuality, rationality, history and our rich heritage of art, literature, culture, science and independent thought.
Instead of the strong families and romantic relationships that have always been a basic part of our humanity, Huxley’s “brave new” social order offers mindless orgies, casual group sex and “soma,” a drug of brain-deadening pleasure.
AN ENFORCED HIERARCHY OF CASTES
Largely set in the year 2540 AD (within the context of the story, that’s 632 AF or “After Ford”), Brave New World depicts a World State that biologically and chemically creates and raises separate castes and classes of obedient citizens and worker drones to fill predetermined roles in its in politicized socioeconomic hierarchy.
Individual choice and consent are denied or suppressed, but virtually everyone acts “happy” within this alleged “brave new world.” Huxley imagines a docile, indoctrinated population surrounded by pleasures (including promiscuous sex) and eager to take “soma,” woven into the society’s communal rituals and pseudo-religion.
After all, what is an individual,” a representative of the ruling class asks.
With a sweeping gesture he indicated the rows of microscopes, the test-tubes, the incubators. “We can make a new one with the greatest ease – as many as we like. Unorthodoxy threatens more than the life of a mere; it strikes at Society itself. Yes, at Society itself,” he repeated.
Inevitably, like all dictatorships, the World State also relies on social and psychological manipulation, propaganda, censorship, and the nearly complete suppression of history, classic literature and art – anything that might spark thoughts or doubts – to perpetuate its authority.
The World State’s widely advertised motto is “Community, Identity, Stability.”
Reinforcing that stability is an assembly-line economy, inspired by the messianic figure of Henry Ford and his company’s auto-assembly lines, widely viewed in the 1920s-1930s (when Huxley was writing his novel) as the ideal and inevitable “wave of the future” template for organizing industry and regimenting society.
Huxley further projects a technocratic elite of upper-caste leaders managing all classes for the alleged greater good of mass consumption and mindless pursuit of meaningful pleasure.
A “SAVAGE” CHALLENGE TO THE SYSTEM
Every collectivist assumption and practice of the World State is challenged by the story’s truly brave protagonist: John the “Savage.”
Brought up by his exiled mother Linda in a primitive tribal society on a wilderness island where he becomes a teenaged misfit, alienated from both worlds, John is self-educated by accidentally discovering and reading Shakespeare’s plays – one of only two books he’s read.
Once he and ailing Linda are brought from the wilderness to London, John recoils at this “brave new world.”
“But do you like being slaves?… Do you like being babies? Yes, babies. Mewling and puking,” John said.
“…Don’t you want to be free and men? Don’t you even understand what manhood and freedom are?”
Here Huxley effectively employs irony to highlight that John, disparaged as the Savage, actually embodies the culture of Shakespeare, thus becoming a totemic symbol (albeit still immature) of literate civilization.
By the way, the novel’s apt title, borrowed from Shakespeare’s play The Tempest (which itself employs the phrase with some irony), is evocative on multiple levels.
I’d forgotten how much Huxley incorporates Shakespeare into the story and dialogue, with John often quoting the Bard’s passages from several plays. Even here, Huxley favors complexity and ambiguity, reflecting the many trade-offs in life. Sadly, sometimes John’s statements, even when quoting the Bard but misapplying the play’s cultural context to his own situation, reflects his limited perspective, immaturity and especially his inexperience with women. Only sometimes do John’s observations reflect both the Bard at his human best and the “Savage” at his least-savage and most enlightened moments.
Overall, Huxley’s portrait of John as the heroic but tragic protagonist offers a poignant a poignant reminder of our humanity, always at risk of being lost and always something worth striving for.
A TRUE SCIENCE FICTION CLASSIC
Not all works of dystopian literature qualify as science fiction, but Brave New World is genuine science fiction – and one of the earliest sf novels good enough, imaginative enough and relevant enough to still be read widely today.
There are dozens of sf elements, including projections of new technologies that change how people live, work and play.
Among them: electromagnetic golf, synthetic music and television (recently invented but not yet a reality in the 1930s), all escapist entertainments designed to keep the citizenry “happy,” and personal copters that many people own and operate like cars, routinely flying them from place to place and often landing on the roofs of tall buildings.
Most famously, Brave New World plausibly projects innovative reproductive technologies (such as artificial wombs), genetic engineering, and new forms of Pavlovian/Skinnerist-behaviorist conditioning.
Chemicals are used in the womb to help manufacture separate classes of Alphas (the leaders), Betas, Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons (the menial laborers) by limiting the intelligence of the lesser classes.
Of course, the novel also is a good example of “social sf,” with Huxley even more insightfully portraying many different customs, attitudes, social roles and relationships that have arisen in his carefully imagined future.
A Controller explains the system’s determinist and authoritarian rationale, which denies free will, individual choice and consent: Everyone must be put in a bottle, circumscribed to define their social role.
“Each one of us, of course, goes through life inside a bottle… If we happen to be Alphas, our bottles, are, relatively speaking, enormous. We should suffer acutely if we were confined to a narrower space…”
Epsilons, at the other social extreme, are “foredoomed,” he said.
“Even after decanting, he’s still inside a bottle – an invisible bottle of infantile and embryonic fixations.”
More chemicals – including the mindless-pleasure-drug soma – are widely applied after birth to further indoctrinate, control and divert the citizens.
In this inhumane future, the use of the word “father” or “mother” is considered not so much obscene as “merely gross, a scatological rather than a pornographic impropriety.”
While some of Huxley’s novels explored the dehumanizing aspects of some scientific progress, much of his critique in his most famous and enduring work is not of science – but of the specific progress towards authoritarian collectivism that was in the air in his era, and how that would bend science and technology toward authoritarian ends.
A REGIMENTED ASSEMBLY-LINE ECONOMY
Reflecting some of the popular but false economic theories of the 1920s-1930s (especially John Maynard Keynes’ influential theories focusing on consumption more than production, which economists and overconfident leaders assumed was a problem that had been permanently solved), Huxley imagines that his dystopian vision of a World State controlled by a statist elite combines its Pavlovian social conditioning with enforced mass consumption as a duty, the only way to sustain the economy.
As one Controller notes, “Mass production demanded the shift… from truth and beauty to comfort and happiness.”
The few rebels or nascent individualists become outcasts, sent to a few wild islands or regions to survive on their own with “all the people who, for one reason or another, have got too self-consciously individual to fit into community life. All the people who aren’t satisfied with orthodoxy, who’ve got independent ideas of their own. Every one, in a word, who’s any one.”
Thus, truth and science become public dangers to “stability,” along with beauty, art, literature and history.
‘Science is dangerous; we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled,” the Controller explains to Helmholtz, an Alpha-Plus college engineering lecturer who has become restive writing propaganda amid the stifling conformism and philistinism of the World State and ultimately is exiled to the wild Falkland Islands.
Meanwhile, the World State’s eugenics/cloning/chemical program is justified by reference to the society’s economics ideology: “The principle of mass production at last applied to biology.”
THE PURSUIT OF “HAPPINESS”
The focus in this future is on “happiness” – but notably, not the pursuit of happiness enshrined in American culture, with its individualistic ethos. Rather, Brave New World vividly depicts a narcotized, constricted system of controls designed to ensure compliance, obedience and passivity.
As one upper-level administrator says proudly, ‘that is the secret of happiness and virtue – liking what you’ve got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny.’
Some conditioning uses repetitive electrical shocks to force infants and children to associate pain with books, flowers and other attractive aspects of Nature, thereby developing an instinctive discomfort with them.
“They’ll be safe from books and botany all their lives,” the Director says smugly.
After all, “there was always the risk of their reading something which might undesirably recondition one of their reflexes.”
“There isn’t any need for a civilized man to bear anything that’s seriously unpleasant. And as for doing things – Ford forbid that he should get the idea into his head. It would upset the whole society if men started doing things on their own.”
Ultimately, the Controller dismisses John’s desire for freedom as merely “the right to be unhappy.”
To his credit, John rejects the World State’s system:
“But I don’t want comfort,” he tells the Controller.
“I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin…. All right then, I’m claiming the right to be unhappy,” John says defiantly.
“Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent… the right to be lousy, the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow…”
There was a long silence.
“I claim them all,” said the Savage at last.
WHY HUXLEY’S CLASSIC REMAINS TIMELY TODAY
Contrary to common misconceptions, Brave New World is not primarily a warning about genetic engineering, cloning, other biotechnologies or advances in science, but a cautionary tale about politics.
To Huxley’s eternal credit, at a time when such truths and insights were not widely recognized, he foresaw that any centralized State command-and-control system inevitably undermines civilization – especially the seeds and fruits of civilization that he most treasured, from art, literature and culture to individuality, personal choice, rationality and independent thinking itself.
In 1959, he wrote the nonfiction follow-up Brave New World Revisited, concluding that the world was moving toward his dystopian vision faster than he’d imagined.
Since then, despite the rise of some countervailing movements like libertarianism, other social-political trends seem to portend the rise of new variants of Huxley’s “soft tyranny. Among them: China’s ominous social-credit system of control over its people’s behavior and thoughts, and the Western but now worldwide tendency for social media to unleash mob rule, cancellations and veritable witch hunts.
If Huxley were alive today, I think he’d recognize all that as reflections of his worst fears and continue to warn humanity about our “brave new world.”
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I don’t think I agree that John is the protagonist of BNW. The character we follow from the beginning is Bernard Marx, an Alpha but a misfit one because of his short stature, who resists the system in petty ways, and eventually in the not so petty one of bringing John back from his reservation to meet his father, Marx’s administrative superior, and thus embarrass and discredit him. John is a pawn in Marx’s scheme. Marx has neither the defiance of John, nor the worldly power of Mustapha Mond, nor the frustrated creativity of his friend Helmholtz Watson; at the end he’s terrified of being sent to an island, whereas Watson looks forward to it. He’s an anti-hero rather than a hero. But I think he’s still the protagonist.