{"id":9887,"date":"2007-03-21T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2007-03-21T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/thenewatlantis.com\/publications\/brave-new-world-at-75"},"modified":"2020-09-26T14:07:45","modified_gmt":"2020-09-26T18:07:45","slug":"brave-new-world-at-75","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/publications\/brave-new-world-at-75","title":{"rendered":"Brave New World<\/em> at 75"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The future is the present projected,\u201d said Aldous Huxley. \u201cOur 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Huxley\u2019s most famous novel, Brave New World<\/strong><\/a><\/em>, 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 \u201cBrave New World\u201d 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\u2019s vision of the future. But could it be that our insistence on seeing Huxley\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n\n\n

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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\u2019s day. In doing so, we may glimpse afresh something of the meaning of Brave New World<\/em> in its author\u2019s mind and time.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Huxley\u2019s vision of the future begins with a tour of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Center, in the year of stability a.f.<\/span> 632 (After Ford). \u201cViviparous\u201d 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 \u2014 \u201cthe bizarre case,\u201d as one critic has noted, \u201cof a product supervising a production line.\u201d 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 (\u201cbokanovskified\u201d) into as many as ninety-six embryos per egg. \u201cFor 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 \u2014 what would be the use of that?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Welcome to the World State, where \u201call men are physico-chemically equal\u201d and \u201ceverybody\u2019s happy now.\u201d 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 \u2014 \u201ceveryone belongs to everyone else\u201d \u2014 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. \u201cTaught to acquire an infinity of gimcrack objects,\u201d 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, \u201cif ever by some unlucky chance such a crevice of time should yawn in the solid substance of their distractions, there is always soma, <\/em>delicious soma, <\/em>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.\u201d A dream drug without side effects, soma assuages every hurt or unmet need, from boredom to impotence to insecurity to chagrin, and all other \u201cmiseries of space and time.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An unholy alliance of industrial capitalist, fascist, communist, psychoanalytic, and pseudo-scientific ideologies has brought about the end of history. The past is taboo \u2014 \u201cHistory is bunk,\u201d as \u201cOur Ford\u201d so eloquently said \u2014 and there is no future, because history\u2019s 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. \u201cFine to think we can go on being socially useful even after we\u2019re dead,\u201d gloats one character. \u201cMaking plants grow.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

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There are a few remaining \u201csavage reservations\u201d 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. \u201cSavage John,\u201d as he is dubbed, has heard the glories of the \u201cOther Place\u201d from his mother all his life, and he is at first entranced. \u201cO, wonder!\u201d he says, with the same na\u00efve irony as Shakespeare\u2019s Miranda. \u201cHow many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, that has such people in\u2019t!\u201d 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 \u201cbirths\u201d are as devoid of potential as the lives are of significance.<\/p>\n\n\n

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The critical reception of Brave New World<\/em> was largely chilly. Most reviewers were disgruntled or disgusted with what they saw as unjustified alarmism. H. G. Wells was downright offended. \u201cA writer of the standing of Aldous Huxley has no right to betray the future as he did in that book,\u201d Wells said. In fact, Wells felt the bite of this betrayal personally \u2014 his own writings, especially his 1923 novel Men Like Gods<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, had been Huxley\u2019s inspiration. Huxley told a friend in 1931 that he was \u201cwriting a novel about the future \u2014 on the horror of the Wellsian Utopia and a revolt against it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wells is often considered the father of science fiction. His long train of novels predicted, among other things, tanks, aerial warfare, and the atomic bomb; as J. B. S. Haldane said, \u201cthe very mention of the future suggests him.\u201d Although his earlier and most memorable work explores the darker possibilities of scientific advancement (in a 1940 preface to his 1908 novel The War in the Air<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, Wells said he wanted his epigraph to read \u201cI told you so. You damned<\/em> fools.\u201d), in Huxley\u2019s heyday Wells was writing utopias teeming with technogadgetry and what George Orwell called \u201cenlightened sunbathers.\u201d Rejecting Rousseau\u2019s noble savage and the romantic utopias of Coleridge and Wordsworth, he saw the Industrial Revolution and modern science as enduring and largely positive developments in man\u2019s eternal conflict with pitiless nature, including his own. Men Like Gods <\/em>is the story of a group of contemporary Englishmen accidentally transported into an alternate dimension of peaceful, passionless Utopians who are uncritically committed to scientific rationalism and the self-negating collectivist state. As the title suggests, this is Wells\u2019s idea of perfectible Man, achieved through communitarian ideals, technological enhancement, and an aggressive program of eugenics. The Utopians share their wisdom with the time-travelers, explaining how they put \u201cthe primordial fierce combativeness of the ancestral man-ape\u201d behind them. Just as man\u2019s intrinsic aggression had brought civilization to the brink of collapse, a great prophet saw the light. In \u201ca dawn of new ideas,\u201d an elite group of researchers reordered society until, finally annihilating the sources of strife, they achieved a cooperative state with \u201cno parliament, no politics, no private wealth, no business competition, no police nor prisons, no lunatics, no defectives nor cripples,\u201d whose motto is \u201cOur education is our government.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Huxley thought this vision preposterous. \u201cGet rid of priests and kings, make Aeschylus and the differential calculus available to all, and the world will become a paradise,\u201d he scoffed. Men Like Gods<\/em> \u201cannoyed me to the point of planning a parody, but when I started writing I found the idea of a negative Utopia so interesting that I forgot about Wells and launched into Brave New World<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Prior to Huxley\u2019s book, however, another great dystopia had cast a scorching glare on totalitarian rationalism. Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin\u2019s We <\/em>depicts a technocratic OneState whose citizens are \u201cNumbers\u201d governed with absolute authority in a system where political and quantitative laws are fused. Zamyatin, the Russian editor of H. G. Wells\u2019s novels, had at first supported the Bolshevik Revolution but came under fire throughout the 1920s for his vocal criticism of the Soviet regime. His works were banned and he was arrested several times, and finally moved permanently to Paris in 1931. First released in English in 1924, We<\/em> was not officially published in Russian until 1988 under glasnost<\/em>. Some critics suggested Huxley had borrowed from or been heavily influenced by We<\/em>. George Orwell \u2014 himself not especially impressed with Brave New World<\/em>, which he called a \u201cbrilliant caricature of the present\u201d that \u201cprobably casts no light on the future\u201d \u2014 even accused Huxley of plagiarism (a particularly strange charge since Orwell\u2019s own 1984<\/em> was much more directly influenced by We<\/em>). Curious about it himself, Zamyatin learned through a mutual friend that Huxley had not read We<\/em> before he published Brave New World<\/em>, \u201cwhich proves,\u201d he said, that \u201cthese ideas are in the air we breathe.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But most critics shared Wells\u2019s, not Zamyatin\u2019s, reaction to the book. \u201cAs prophecy it is merely fantastic,\u201d dismissed essayist Gerald Bullett. Wells\u2019s friend and fellow writer Wyndham Lewis called it \u201can unforgivable offense to Progress.\u201d Marxist literary critic Granville Hicks began his review by asking, \u201cWith war in Asia, bankruptcy in Europe and starvation everywhere, what do you suppose Aldous Huxley is now worrying about?\u201d and ended it with several personal attacks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Economist Henry Hazlitt sarcastically remarked that \u201ca little suffering, a little irrationality, a little division and chaos, are perhaps necessary ingredients of an ideal state, but there has probably never been a time when the world has not had an oversupply of them.\u201d J. B. S. Haldane\u2019s then-wife Charlotte penned a snide review for Nature<\/em>, complaining that Huxley\u2019s great-uncle Matthew Arnold, the conservative literary critic, had taken demonic possession of him, and that in any case, \u201cbiology is itself too surprising to be really amusing material for fiction.\u201d Even G. K. Chesterton thought Huxley\u2019s book sadly laughable, observing that, \u201cHowever grimly he may enjoy the present, he already definitely hates the future. And I only differ from him in not believing that there is any such future to hate.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The review by poet and novelist L. A. G. Strong perhaps best evinces the critics\u2019 general sense of disappointment for a promising writer\u2019s senseless retreat into a ludicrous future: \u201cMr. Huxley has been born too late. Seventy years ago, the great powers of his mind would have been anchored to some mighty certitude, or to some equally mighty scientific denial of a certitude. Today he searches heaven and earth for a Commandment, but searches in vain: and the lack of it reduces him, metaphorically speaking, to a man standing beside a midden, shuddering and holding his nose.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not everyone, however, dismissed Huxley\u2019s dystopia as nonsense. \u201cOnly biologists and philosophers will really appreciate the full force of Mr. Huxley\u2019s remarkable book,\u201d wrote Joseph Needham, a Cambridge biochemist and embryologist. \u201cFor of course in the world at large, those persons, and there will be many, who do not approve of his \u2018utopia,\u2019 will say, we can\u2019t believe all this, the biology is all wrong, it couldn\u2019t happen. Unfortunately, what gives the biologist a sardonic smile as he reads it, is the fact that the biology is perfectly right<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Huxley came from a famously scientific family. He was the grandson of the biologist T. H. Huxley, nicknamed \u201cDarwin\u2019s Bulldog\u201d for his early untiring advocacy for the theory of evolution; half-brother of Andrew Fielding Huxley, the 1963 Nobel laureate in physiology; and brother of Julian Huxley, a prominent geneticist. Aldous Huxley was also sometime friends with J. B. S. Haldane and Bertrand Russell, who debated the future of scientific and technological progress in a 1923 exchange of essays (the subject of a recent exegesis in these pages by Charles T. Rubin [\u201cDaedalus and Icarus Revisited<\/a>,\u201d Spring 2005]).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While it was Haldane who first used the word ectogenesis<\/em> to describe the notion of creating human life outside the womb, the process of reproduction practiced in the World State\u2019s hatcheries, Huxley attributes the idea itself to Russell, at least figuratively. In his 1921 novel Crome Yellow<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, Huxley has the character Scogan, an unflattering and barely veiled portrayal of Russell, imagine a future where \u201can impersonal generation will take the place of Nature\u2019s hideous system. In vast state incubators, rows upon rows of gravid bottles will supply the world with the population it requires. The family system will disappear \u2014 society, sapped at its very base, will have to find a new foundation: and Eros, beautifully and irresponsibly free, will flit like a gay butterfly from flower to flower through a sunlit world.\u201d Haldane\u2019s interest in the subject dates back further still, to work he did at Oxford in 1912. Neither of these men, however, claimed responsibility for Huxley\u2019s ideas. Julian Huxley even explicitly disavowed supplying his brother\u2019s biological knowledge, saying that when Aldous came to him to discuss Brave New World<\/em>, Aldous\u2019s ideas were already fully formed.<\/p>\n\n\n

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J<\/span>ulian Huxley and Haldane were cofounders of the Journal of Experimental Biology<\/em> along with Lancelot Hogben, a geneticist who saw his work as \u201cthe elimination of holistic concepts by the ruthless application of mechanistic logic.\u201d As Huxley scholar Peter Firchow has pointed out, Hogben believed that the mechanistic approach could be applied to human psychology. He welcomed the advent of behaviorism, founded by experimental psychologist John B. Watson and operating, as Hogben said, with \u201cthe express object of making psychology a physical science, relieving man, the celestial pilgrim, of the burden of his soul.\u201d Building on Pavlov\u2019s classical conditioning techniques, Watson sought to radically redefine psychology, then dominated by Freudian psychoanalytic theory, as the study of behavioral responses to stimuli, divorced from all reference to supposed interior states of mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The psychological conditioning techniques in Brave New World <\/em>are similar to experiments Watson had performed in real life, using loud noises and electric shocks to induce arbitrary fear into his subjects. He famously said that given twelve infants, he could take one and make of him any kind of person he chose \u2014 \u201cdoctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.\u201d Watson later admitted that he was exaggerating; nevertheless, the idea of comprehending and transforming the psyche as systematically as we do natural elements opens up unimagined horizons of possibility. But what would be done with our newfound powers over the mind \u2014 what kind<\/em> of person we would make \u2014 is entirely arbitrary by Watson\u2019s standards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The practical result of this in Huxley\u2019s World State is that, as Firchow has noted, although the behaviorists are employed in conditioning the citizens, and perform with rigorous efficiency, the direction<\/em> of that conditioning has ironically been left to the Freudians, in whose eyes sexual taboos are responsible for every ill from neurotic repressions to social upheaval. Thus, as Needham said in his review, \u201cthe erotic play of children is encouraged, universal sexual relations are the rule, and indeed any sign of the beginning of a more deep and lasting affection is rebuked and stamped out, as being anti-social.\u201d What these two disparate and often warring schools of psychology share is an approach to cultural values and a blindness to all but the lowest of human desires \u2014 a blindness that Needham recognized as fatal to any project to increase real well-being:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mr. Huxley, of course, sees so clearly what the psychologists do not see, that such a world must give up not only war, but also spiritual conflicts of any kind, not only superstition, but also religion, not only literary criticism but also great creative art of whatever kind, not only economic chaos, but also all the beauty of the old traditional things, not only the hard and ugly parts of ethics, but the tender and beautiful parts too.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Lamenting the death of metaphysics, Needham wrote that science, which was born of philosophy, had overtaken its parent to become \u201cthe only substratum for Reason\u201d and \u201cnothing more nor less than the Mythology accompanying a Technique.\u201d Needham saw in Huxley\u2019s book an illustration of something Russell had observed: the mutinous tendency of the modern scientific enterprise, as the means of mastering nature overtake its original intended ends. \u201cIt is as if a number of passages from Mr. Bertrand Russell\u2019s recent book The Scientific Outlook<\/a><\/strong><\/em> had burst into flower, and had rearranged themselves in patches of color like man-eating orchids in a tropical forest,\u201d he suggested. Indeed, Russell\u2019s blueprint of a scientifically ordered society in his 1931 book is very similar to Huxley\u2019s World State, highly regimented and organized around the principles of comfort, stability, and efficiency. Russell saw twentieth-century science as dangerously forsaking its philosophical origins \u2014 as he described it, early science was a love story between man and nature, born of Heraclitus\u2019 \u201cever-living fire.\u201d But as curiosity turned to technique, inquiry was drained of wonder and left to stagger about an existential wasteland:<\/p>\n\n\n

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As physics has developed, it has deprived us step by step of what we thought we knew concerning the intimate nature of the physical world. Color and sound, light and shade, form and texture, belong no longer to that external nature that the Ionians sought as the bride of their devotion. All these things have been transferred from the beloved to the lover, and the beloved has become a skeleton of rattling bones, cold and dreadful, but perhaps a mere phantasm. The poor physicists, appalled at the desert that their formulae have revealed, call upon God to give them comfort, but God must share the ghostliness of His creation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

This brief history is somewhat deceptive; while there may be some truth in Russell\u2019s portrait of the dynamic of lover and beloved unbalanced by man\u2019s increasing mastery over nature, it has long been the defining purpose of the scientific enterprise to achieve dominion \u2014 indeed, it is its greatest glory, or rather, one of ours. But Russell\u2019s deeper insight is in recognizing the cold \u201cghostliness\u201d of God and truth and all that men may value when science is the sole source of our ideals. In such an age, science comes to threaten those things that it should rightly serve:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When it takes out of life the moments to which life owes its value, science will not deserve admiration, however cleverly and however elaborately it may lead men along the road to despair. The sphere of value lies outside science, except insofar as science consists in the pursuit of knowledge. Science as the pursuit of power must not obtrude upon the sphere of values, and scientific technique, if it is to enrich human life, must not outweigh the ends which it should serve…. A new moral outlook is called for in which submission to the powers of nature is replaced by respect for what is best in man. It is where this respect is lacking that scientific technique is dangerous. So long as it is present, science, having delivered man from bondage to nature, can proceed to deliver him from bondage to the slavish part of himself.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

In a review of Brave New World<\/em> called \u201cWe Don\u2019t Want to Be Happy,\u201d Russell elaborated on the promise and perils of this scientific deliverance. Huxley, he wrote, \u201chas undertaken to make us sad by the contemplation of a world without sadness.\u201d After describing the material comforts of the fictional society, he reflected on the puzzling instinct to recoil from it:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In spite of these merits, the world which Mr. Huxley portrays is such as to arouse disgust in every normal reader, and obviously in Mr. Huxley himself. I have been asking myself why, and trying hard to think that his well-regulated world would really be an improvement upon the one in which we live. At moments I can make myself think this, but I can never make myself feel it. The feeling of revulsion against a well-ordered world has various sources: one of these is that we do not value happiness as much as we sometimes think we do.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Unlike the other great dystopias, Huxley\u2019s World State, though totalitarian in its orthodoxy, is ostensibly ordered on the wants of the governed rather than the governors. Threats are rarely used or needed. Rule by bread and circuses has proved more potent than force \u2014 and more pernicious, precisely because every means of control is a perversion of something people really want. The only people with any capacity for dissatisfaction are a handful of Alphas, who are as unable to articulate their objection as Russell is. It is difficult to reject the sinister when by slight distortion it masquerades as the sublime. Why feeling<\/em> should be able to distinguish these things while reason<\/em> cannot is an interesting question, one which could be left forever unsettled by tinkering, through biotechnology or psychological control, with what Huxley (in a later foreword to the book) called \u201cthe natural forms and expressions of life itself.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One such expression, of course, is a certain measure of autonomy over the meaning and direction of our lives. Its total absence in the World State is ominously signified by the professional title of the genetic engineers: the Assistant Predestinators. But conflating the influences and experiences that shape our identities with the biological reconstruction of life, Russell, revolted but bemused, reasoned himself into a corner:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But we are shocked \u2014 more, I think, than we ought to be \u2014 by the idea of molding people scientifically instead of allowing them to grow. We have a notion that we can choose what we will be, and that we should not wish to be robbed of this choice by scientific manipulators drugging us before we are born, giving us electric shocks in infancy, and whispering platitudes to us throughout our childhood.<\/p>

But this feeling is, of course, irrational. In the course of nature the embryo grows through natural causes. The infant learns haphazard lessons of pleasure and pain which determine his taste. The child listens to moral propaganda, which may fail through being unscientific, but which, none the less, is intended to mold the character just as much as Mr. Huxley\u2019s whispering machines. It seems, therefore, that we do not object to molding a human being, provided it is done badly; we only object when it is done well.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

In the end, Russell said, \u201cwhat we cling to so desperately is the illusion of freedom, an illusion which is tacitly negated by all moral instruction and all propaganda. To us human life would be intolerable without this illusion. In Mr. Huxley\u2019s Brave New World<\/em> men live quite comfortably without it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

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This \u201cillusion of freedom\u201d was cast into a clearer light by a reviewer who discerned that the temptation to sacrifice liberty to end suffering often becomes an attack on the reality of the liberty itself. Rebecca West, a prominent novelist and literary critic (and erstwhile mistress of H. G. Wells) said Huxley had \u201crewritten in terms of our age\u201d Dostoevsky\u2019s famous parable of the Grand Inquisitor from The Brothers Karamazov<\/a><\/strong><\/em> \u2014 \u201ca symbolic statement that every generation ought to read afresh.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

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\u201cThe Grand Inquisitor\u201d is a story within the story, a troubled Karamazov brother\u2019s case against both man and God. In his legend, Christ returns to earth in the fifteenth century and raises a child from the dead; this miracle causes a crowd and a commotion. The Grand Inquisitor, the cardinal of Seville, has Christ arrested and, sentencing Him to death, denounces Him for condemning mankind to misery when He could have made for them a paradise on earth. Underpinning his accusation is the problem of evil: how, if God is all-loving and all-powerful, could He allow man the autonomy to sin? Christ\u2019s life and work held out the possibility of redemption, but left man the freedom not only to doubt but to cause unspeakable suffering. Man has not been equal to that responsibility. \u201cFor nothing has ever been more insufferable for man and for human society than freedom,\u201d the cardinal tells Christ. \u201cTurmoil, confusion, and unhappiness \u2014 these are the present lot of mankind, after you suffered so much for their freedom!\u201d In the Grand Inquisitor\u2019s indictment, he pits Christ\u2019s offer of redemption against the church\u2019s promise of security:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With us everyone will be happy, and they will no longer rebel or destroy each other, as in your freedom, everywhere. Oh, we shall convince them that they will only become free when they resign their freedom to us, and submit to us. Will we be right, do you think, or will we be lying? They themselves will be convinced that we are right, for they will remember to what horrors of slavery and confusion your freedom led them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The cardinal\u2019s argument reappears in a strikingly similar confrontation in Brave New World<\/em>. When John the Savage sours on the wonders of the World State, he foments a riot among the Deltas and is brought before Mustapha Mond, the Resident World Controller for Western Europe. In the thematic climax of the novel, Mond defends his spiritually arid civilization by recalling the terrible history that preceded it. Love, literature, liberty, and even science itself are sacrificed in this most scientific of societies \u2014 all to serve the goals of happiness and stability. \u201cHappiness,\u201d Mond says, \u201cis a hard master \u2014 particularly other people\u2019s happiness. A much harder master, if one isn\u2019t conditioned to accept it unquestioningly, than truth.\u201d To achieve lasting social happiness, all else must be given up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Each of these interrogations lays bare the fundamental compromise at the heart of that society. Both interlocutors avow a struggle, many years ago, to give up what is now at stake \u2014 faith for the Grand Inquisitor, truth for the World Controller \u2014 to \u201cserve\u201d the weak, debased, tormented human race, whose happiness depends upon the satisfaction of material wants and absolute submission to authority. \u201cOnly now,\u201d says the cardinal, \u201chas it become possible to think for the first time about human happiness. Man was made a rebel; can rebels be happy? … No science will give them bread as long as they remain free, but in the end they will lay their freedom at our feet.\u201d \u201cTruth\u2019s a menace,\u201d says Mond, and \u201cscience is a public danger…. Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning. Truth and beauty can\u2019t.\u201d Against the ever-greater misery that appears to be the price of personal autonomy, both pose the question: Is man worth his humanity?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Christ\u2019s answer is a resurrection and a kiss; John parries, thrusts, and grandstands. His haphazard education has ill prepared him to argue with the World Controller \u2014 but armed with Shakespeare, desperation, and an excess of nobility, he bravely embraces those things which once made bravery necessary:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cExposing what is mortal and unsure to all that fortune, death, and danger dare, even for an eggshell. Isn\u2019t there something in that?\u201d he asked, looking up at Mustapha Mond. \u201cQuite apart from God \u2014 though of course God would be a reason for it. Isn\u2019t there something in living dangerously?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cThere\u2019s a great deal in it,\u201d the Controller replied. \u201cMen and women must have their adrenals stimulated from time to time.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cWhat?\u201d questioned the Savage, uncomprehending.<\/p>

\u201cIt\u2019s one of the conditions of perfect health. That\u2019s why we\u2019ve made the V.P.S. treatments compulsory.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cV.P.S.?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cViolent Passion Surrogate. Regularly once a month. We flood the whole system with adrenin. It\u2019s the complete physiological equivalent of fear and rage. All the tonic effects of murdering Desdemona and being murdered by Othello, without any of the inconveniences.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cBut I like the inconveniences.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cWe don\u2019t,\u201d said the Controller. \u201cWe prefer to do things comfortably.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cBut I don\u2019t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cIn fact,\u201d said Mustapha Mond, \u201cyou\u2019re claiming the right to be unhappy.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cAll right then,\u201d said the Savage defiantly, \u201cI\u2019m claiming the right to be unhappy.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cNot to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.\u201d<\/p>

There was a long silence.<\/p>

\u201cI claim them all,\u201d said the Savage at last.<\/p>

Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. \u201cYou\u2019re welcome,\u201d he said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The unresolved ambivalence of Mond\u2019s final words suggests it is an open question whether a shallow and bland happiness might not be a worthwhile price to rid the world of suffering. How should he be answered? While John\u2019s heroics are appealing, by the end of this exchange, it is hard to say that he has won our sympathies. He rejects \u201ccivilization\u201d but finds no compelling alternative; he turns to self-imposed exile, but the unbearable tension between his ascetic ideals and what Wells called the \u201csimmering hot mud\u201d of basic human nature finally degenerates into a sadomasochistic orgy and suicide. In the foreword to Brave New World<\/em>\u2019s 1946 edition, Huxley regretted not giving John an alternative to \u201cinsanity on the one hand and lunacy on the other,\u201d an alternative he would later try (unconvincingly) to negotiate in his positive techno-utopia Island<\/em>. But read in conversation with The Brothers Karamazov<\/em>, West saw that something deeper is on trial: \u201cMr. Huxley is attacking the new spirit which tries to induce man to divert in continual insignificant movements relating to the material framework of life all his force, and to abandon the practice of speculating about his existence and his destiny.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

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\r\n\t\tFinding Responsibility\t<\/h5>\r\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n

By shifting the question from political control to personal conscience, West\u2019s reading anticipated the decentralized way that many of the particular scientific and cultural furnishings of Huxley\u2019s world have made appearances in ours. Orwell\u2019s and Zamyatin\u2019s predictions of inevitable centralized totalitarian government have not come to pass \u2014 and indeed, neither have Huxley\u2019s. But the separation of sex from procreation, and love from sex; the consumption-saturated culture threatening to commodify the consumers; the increasingly physico-chemical attempt to explain and treat a troubled psyche \u2014 we did not need bureaucratic threats or hypnopaedic repetitions to want these things, and in this sense Huxley profoundly overestimated (or is it underestimated?) mankind, and his book may, in the deepest sense, have gotten our present all wrong. We chose these things ourselves, uncoerced by terror or war or social engineers. They have been developed to respond to real human hurts and desires; and, as might be expected of human choices, the results and motives have been mixed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In psychiatry, for instance, drugs more targeted and sophisticated than all-purpose soma have allowed people once crippled by serious disorders to recover a level of normalcy unimaginable to previous generations. But ever-better drugs marketed to an ever-wider population cannot erase everyone\u2019s deepest longings or displace everyone\u2019s genuine psychic or spiritual hurts. Ultimately, our aspiration to bring man\u2019s nature itself within the ambit of the great Baconian project for the relief of man\u2019s estate lands us in terrain we must traverse with unprecedented care. On the same \u201ccliffs of fall \/ Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed\u201d where we find grotesqueries we also find grandeur, and it is with that selfsame mind that we must distinguish them. This is an enormously delicate and complicated project. It need not be said that trying to alter ourselves, psychologically or genetically, while refusing to consider what we ought<\/em> to be would be disastrously misguided.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lest what it is we ought or want to be seem obvious, it is helpful to remember that the achievement of total happiness and stability in Huxley\u2019s world requires rigid biosocial stratification \u2014 for \u201cthe secret of happiness and virtue,\u201d the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning reminds us, is \u201cliking what you\u2019ve got <\/em>to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.\u201d The World State\u2019s dysgenic engineering program is something we would like to think that we would never contemplate. Yet social equality is a political or philosophical truth much more than a natural one; scientifically, we could not do much better than \u201call men are physico-chemically equal.\u201d As the precision and magnitude of our scientific powers increase, we will have to make ever more explicit choices between not wholly compatible goods.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, although democratically we will always be striving for a better society, and scientifically for a better life, the frequent conflict between these goods should remind us that we will never reach Utopia. And paradoxically, it is in the exercise of liberty and the pursuit of happiness that we may inadvertently damage the character of liberty and happiness themselves. Brave New World<\/em>, then, is more than just a bleak inhuman specter of our future; it is an invitation to consider how to balance and preserve the things that matter most for ourselves and our posterity. We may remember Prospero, who, leaving behind his magical utopia for the brave old motley world of treason, dynasty, debauchery, and forgiveness, reclaims real responsibility and resumes his throne. It is part of man\u2019s intense dignity that he is heir to multiple thrones, among them scientific mastery over that which no other form of knowledge can control, and moral insight into that which science may never see. Abdicating either one would frustrate all we strive to be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Caitrin Nicol on reading Aldous Huxley\u2019s novel as its first readers did<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"template":"","article_type":[13],"noteworthy_people":[],"topics":[5029,5041],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/9887"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/article"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/9887\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"article_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article_type?post=9887"},{"taxonomy":"noteworthy_people","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/noteworthy_people?post=9887"},{"taxonomy":"topics","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topics?post=9887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}