Aldouse Huxley, drawing by Eric Pape, 1929. Public domain
About a week ago I stumbled across a radio rendition of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. I was intrigued because Huxley himself was narrating the program.
I listened to the broadcast as I was going to sleep and then continued to listen during my waking hours. As fascinating as Huxley's rendition was, I found the experience anemic. Although the author narrated, so much was missing. The words that had been written were interpreted--sounds instead of thoughts. So I looked up the book on Internet Archive and began to read. Then I was satisfied. Sound effects could not replace brilliant writing.
I finished the book and was determined to post a review for Hive, but felt I needed more. By itself A Brave New World was a piece of something larger.
Literature is always a creature of its time. Brave New World and its many heirs are more deliberate commentaries on society and politics than most.
In a prelude to the radio narration of Brave New World Huxley describes his book as a 'negative utopia'. For sure, stylistically it does read like earlier utopian novels. There are long passages full of information that describes the utopian society. However, the content of Brave New World is quite different from other utopian novels I have read.
A page from Thomas More's "Utopia". The book was published in 1516. This illustration is from a 1715 edition. The image shows men and women working together. Also displayed are their tools. Public domain
Books in the utopian genre have a common purpose: explain how a society might operate when people live together harmoniously and with common purpose. In these books there is typically psychological conditioning so that people want to live in harmony. Coercion is inconsistent with the idea of utopia. Often, a stranger is introduced into the system and the stranger offers an opportunity for explaining how the utopia functions.
In Brave New World, the goal of society and socialization is harmony. It is, indeed, not just harmony, but happiness. Happiness means accepting a preordained role in society. It means not being distinguished as a individual. The conditioning to achieve this happiness goal begins long before birth. It begins with one's progenitors.
Society is tightly structured. There are tiers, and these are determined by genetic engineering, prenatal manipulation and post-natal conditioning.
Everyone is a test tube baby. Viviparous (live, with a mother) births are considered obscene. Eggs and sperm are selected for their genetic components, and fertilized ova are manipulated in the test tube. The fortunate few destined to be high caste are allowed to develop undisturbed. One ovum per individual. Everyone else, those destined for the lower caste, are exposed to prenatal interference. The ova are prompted to divide, as many as 64 times. The result will be 64 identical, physically dwarfed, idiots, from a single egg.
Each of the several lower castes will experience a different degree of test tube contamination and manipulation. These lower castes will do the manual labor. The upper caste will have leadership and white collar jobs.
The lower caste members of society will be 'happy' doing grunt work because they are physically and mentally equipped to do nothing more.
The molding of caste members does not stop with the test tube. It continues in infancy, when strict behavioral principals are applied. One such incidence of conditioning is described graphically.
Lower caste toddlers are led to a collection of flowers and books. Oohs, aahs and delighted gurgling fill the room. Suddenly, there is an explosion. Alarm bells and sirens go off. Screams and howls replace the expressions of pleasure. This negative experience is reinforced with electric shock. The infants are left on the floor, twitching and unconscious. In the future, the process will be repeated about two hundred times with this group of infants, until flowers and books by themselves reflexively elicit horror.
Why books? Why make books repulsive to children? Because reading a book might expose low-caste individuals to ideas that would make them unhappy with their lot. Why flowers? Because there is no profit in flowers. Simply enjoying nature does not require the expenditure of money. Enjoyment of nature is only to be encouraged if the activity involves use of expensive equipment.
Society, in Brave New World, is predicated on production and consumption. It's a simple economic equation. Anything that does not support the equation is discouraged.
The conditioning experiment with infants goes to the heart of society in Brave New World. As one character explains: "Every man, woman and child compelled to consume so much a year. In the interests of industry." Citizens must not mend broken items, but must throw them away and buy new items. A slogan repeated by residents of the society: "Ending is better than mending. The more stitches, the less riches; the more stitches ...".
These rhythmic slogans, which populate the book, are fed to children as they sleep. The process is called hypnopaedia and is described as 'sleep-teaching'. With hypnopaedia, the foundational principles of society are absorbed passively. They become part of the children's conscious and subconscious thoughts.
However, even with the egg splitting, test tube manipulation and social conditioning, a perfect outcome can sometimes be elusive. Therefore, one more element is added to the happiness mix: a mind-numbing drug. The drug, soma, is a universal antidote to disquiet. People take 'soma vacations'. These pills are popped after work, on weekends...anytime disquiet threatens. Another slogan explains soma's essential function: "Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology".
In this society not only are viviparous births eliminated--so is the family. Allegiance is to the group, to the collective. There is no marriage. No romance. Promiscuity is encouraged. "Everyone belongs to everyone."
Brave New World is a novel, not a treatise. Because it is a novel, the author is obliged to introduce conflict. The agent for conflict in this book is an upper caste individual who does not fit in. It is suggested that an error may have been made during his test tube manipulation. Through the actions of this malcontent, another character, someone from the outside (nicknamed 'Savage'), is introduced. Vulnerabilities in the social order become apparent.
Brave New World is not a long book. The copy I found on Internet Archive has 212 pages. Still, the book is rich in detail and theory. I cannot possibly cover all the important points here. The book was considered so original and startling in its time, that it inspired later classic dystopian novels, among them 1984, by George Orwell, and Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury.
I started to reread the Orwell and Bradbury books, so affected was I by Huxley's. I also went back and looked at another book, We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin. Orwell's was written in 1949, Bradbury's in 1953, Zamyatin's in 1921, Huxley's in 1932. What did these authors, writing at different times, see that has relevance to my life today, to the world?
All the books deal with totalitarian governments where the individual is sacrificed for the collective good. Suppressing the individual in each case involves first of all control of information. As Orwell writes in 1984, "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."
Privacy doesn't exist. In Zamyatin's We, people live in glass houses, literally. In 1984, there is a screen on the wall that monitors activities at all times. The most benevolent of these four books is Brave New World, where misfits are not killed but are banished to islands. There they can live with other misfits.
Of the four authors, it might be said that Huxley was the most 'naive'. That is, he had not personally witnessed a modern police state. In 1932, Stalin had not yet carried out his purges, had not established his gulags. Hitler hadn't come to power yet. Zamyatin lived in Soviet Russia.
Moscow Common Grave for victims of political oppression. The caption under the picture reads: "Moscow, Novoye Donskoye Cemetery. Common grave No. 1 for unclaimed ashes, where the ashes of victims of political repression are buried". (Deepl Translation). Credit: Bestalex. Public domain.
In 1958 Huxley revisited his book and wrote:
Brave New World was written before the rise of Hitler to supreme power in Germany and when the Russian tyrant had not yet got into his stride. In 1931 systematic terrorism was not the obsessive contemporary fact which it had become in 1948, and the future dictatorship of my imaginary world was a good deal less brutal than the future dictatorship so brilliantly portrayed by Orwell.
Are these books relevant to me? To my life? I think they are relevant to anyone, at any time. They are warning calls. They are cautionary tales. There are certain steps a totalitarian government must take in order to assume absolute power. One of the first steps is control of information. Another is tailoring education so that the young are conditioned to accommodate the goals of the society.
When information and education are throttled, that's a warning sign. When government makes a move to take over educational institutions, to censor avenues of information, that's a warning sign. There are others signs. Read the books and discover what these authors think.
I do recommend Brave New World. It is thought-provoking and has been influential to culture across the world.
Tonight I will finish rereading 1984, and later on I will reread We. Who knows, I may write reviews of these books in the future.
Thank you for reading. Peace and health to all.