Aldous Huxley's 1932 novel Brave New World is a dystopian classic of science fiction. I first read Brave New World when I was 14 years old, at the end of 8th grade or the beginning of 9th grade, shortly after I had read George Orwell's 1984. I recently re-read Brave New World. The edition I read from 2004 combined Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited and also featured a Foreword by Christopher Hitchens.
I was curious what it would be like reading Brave New World again, more than thirty years after I had first read it. I really enjoyed it, and I had forgotten how funny the novel is. Brave New World is set in the year 632 AF, which means 632 years after Henry Ford invented the Model T. In other words, the year in the novel is 2540, AD—or CE if you like. People use Ford's name in place of "Lord," a funny joke that Huxley might hit a little too often in the book. But he gets his point across—we have replaced the worship of religion with the worship of commerce.
In Brave New World, sex is no longer needed for reproduction, as there are giant "Hatcheries" that take care of growing embryos, who are then conditioned into various classes of workers: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon. The classes are also conditioned into being happy they are of the class they were born into, so as to remove that pesky idea of improving one's lot in life. This is B.F. Skinner's Behaviorism taken to its extreme.
Bernard Marx is one of the main characters in the novel. He is an Alpha, but he is quite unhappy with this supposedly utopian society. Bernard is noticeably smaller than other Alphas, and this might be the source of some of his dissatisfaction. Bernard is quite a drip, and it's hard to have a lot of sympathy for him.
Lenina Crowne is a Beta. She is quite happy with her status, although she is a bit unorthodox in her dating life, choosing to exclusively date Henry Foster, rather than have a multitude of different sexual partners, as the government encourages people to do. I don't remember what I thought of Lenina the first time I read the novel, but I quite liked her in this reading. She's a sympathetic character who has to deal with some ridiculous men.
The other main character in the novel is John, often referred to as "The Savage." Raised on the "Savage Reservation" for Native Americans, John is the son of the Director of the Hatcheries and Linda. Linda had been presumed dead and left behind on a trip to the reservation. John has never been accepted by the Native Americans. His education consisted of reading the complete works of William Shakespeare, and his speech is peppered with allusions to Shakespeare. I can happily say that I caught way more of the Shakespeare allusions now than I did when I read it 30 years ago. The title of the novel itself comes from The Tempest: "O brave new world, that has such people in 't."
Bernard takes John and Linda back to London, and this of course creates quite a disruption. I won't say anything more about the plot of the novel, since the plot is really less interesting than the setting of the novel, and the world that Huxley has created. Brave New World is a fascinating book. Yet there is something detached about it. I can't say that I felt much sympathy or empathy for Bernard—certainly not like I felt for Winston Smith and Julia in 1984.
Huxley was boldly predicting the scientific future in Brave New World. We're not quite at hatcheries yet, but in vitro fertilization has moved out of the realm of science fiction and into reality. And government interference in family planning? Well, just look at China's "one child" policy, and the various policies India has tried over the years.
The citizens in Brave New World are kept docile and happy thanks to many diversions like "Obstacle Golf," and movies. There's also soma, a delightful pill that keeps people sedate and tranquil, and offers no nasty hangover or side effects. Huxley took the name soma from the drink that the ancient Vedic religion placed great importance on.
Something that struck me about Brave New World is that the world government really relies on keeping the populace docile and happy, and they are largely using soft power to do so. As opposed to the governments in George Orwell's 1984, which embrace brutal power and sadistic methods to keep people in check. This struck me as a key difference between these two dystopian novels.
I don't know if we've seen a dictatorship embrace Huxley's ideas of soft power to keep people in line, rather than Orwell's ideas of brute strength. Perhaps the progression would be that a dictatorship has to use brute strength and hard power to gain power and control, and then at some point could transition to only using soft power. But of course, once brute strength is set in place as a key part of a government's apparatus, it's hard to let it go.
Here in 2026 in the capitalist Western democracies, people aren't kept docile with soma, but rather with a mixture of smart phones, Netflix, marijuana, and alcohol. Soft power indeed seems to have triumphed. Although the surveillance that is a feature of 1984 has now become the norm as well.
What struck me as remarkable about Brave New World was that Huxley was writing this novel in 1931, and it was published in February of 1932. This was before Hitler came to power. This was before Stalin's show trials and the Great Purge of the late 1930's. In short, before the modern concept of a dictatorship had really come to pass.
This time difference accounts for some of the differences between Brave New World and 1984. Huxley was writing before World War II, whereas Orwell was writing in 1948, after World War II, and after the world had seen the destructive horrors that dictatorships brought about.
There are many great quotes from Brave New World. Some of my favorites are:
"Feeling lurks in that interval of time between desire and its consummation." (p.49)
About soma: "Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology." (p.60)
About Bernard's friend Helmholtz Watson: "It was said that he had had six hundred and forty different girls in under four years." (p.71)
The Director says, "Unorthodoxy threatens more than the life of a mere individual; it strikes at Society itself." (p.137)
"Television was left on, a running tap, from morning till night." (p.180) How prophetic!
Mustapha Mond, the controller of Western Europe, tells John about the "Cyprus experiment," a society of only Alphas, and why different classes are needed. "The Controllers had the island of Cyprus cleared of all its existing inhabitants and recolonized with a specially prepared batch of twenty-two thousand Alphas...they were left to manage their own affairs. The result exactly fulfilled all the theoretical predictions. The land wasn't properly worked; there were strikes in all the factories...Within six years they were having a first-class civil war...nineteen of the twenty-two thousand had been killed...And that was the end of the only society of Alphas that the world has ever seen." (p.201)
Brave New World Revisited was published in 1958, twenty-six years after the publication of Brave New World. It's a non-fiction look at what Huxley had prophesied. In the chapter on "Over-Population," Huxley wrote: "The shipping of a few surplus humans to Mars (at a cost, for transportation and development, of several million dollars a head) will do nothing to solve the problem of mounting population pressures on our own planet." (p.243) Yes, tell it to Elon!
Huxley was critical of the mass media, and how much of what they produced fed into "man's almost infinite capacity for distractions." (p.267) I wonder what Huxley would say today about our capacity for distractions?
Huxley wrote about politics and mass media: "The personality of the candidate and the way he is projected by the advertising experts are the things that really matter." (p.286) Huxley is predicting John F. Kennedy two years before Kennedy won the Presidency. Of course, Kennedy was more than just a personality, but he understood television in a way like no American President had before. Richard Nixon learned from his 1960 loss to Kennedy, and used his hard-won knowledge of the importance of television to help propel him to victory in 1968.
Huxley came to this conclusion about war: "For, ironically enough, the only people who can hold up indefinitely under the stress of modern war are psychotics." (p.288) Huxley is anticipating the premise of Joseph Heller's classic 1961 anti-war satire Catch-22. If you're crazy, you don't have to fly any more missions. But if you ask to be classified as crazy, this proves that you're sane because you don't want to fly any more missions. So it goes.
Christopher Hitchens' Foreword is entertaining, as always, and I learned this incredible fact: "that Aldous Huxley should have taught George Orwell at Eton...seems to strain the natural serendipity of coincidence." (p.viii) That's just astonishing. Each man offered praise for the other's dystopian novel but naturally preferred his own vision of the future. Isn't this the way of much of the conversations between great writers? "You're very good, but if you wanted to be truly great, you'd be a little more like me."
Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited are essential reading, and it's quite remarkable how fresh and relevant this novel feels, some 96 years after it was first published.
