Tag: psychology

Thoughts on Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley

I’m not calling this one a review because it’s a little less organized and might work better if you’ve already read the book. Still, it’s spoiler-free.

I recently finished reading Brave New World with some friends, and one of the things that stood out to me was the difficulty I had mapping the ideas onto contemporary politics. It seems like almost all media these days can be neatly collapsed into one of a few political ideologies. It’s clear, often before you even read/watch it, if a modern story is pro-trans or anti-vaccines or whatever, and such positions are generally accepted as indicating a standard package of other beliefs, typically “liberal” or “conservative.” People might sometimes miss the point (the shameful kerfuffle around “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” comes to mind) but the pattern remains.

There’s probably an urge to blame such clearly blatant politics on declining media literacy, or political polarization, or some other buzzy trend1. And maybe that’s what’s happening. But I lack the historical knowledge to know if this is actually new phenomenon. Maybe people have always been pretty blatant about the politics that motivate their art. (Otherwise, why would you bother writing something political in the first place?) If that’s the case, one way we can expand our thinking is to read political works from other eras, when different ideas were in play and those ideas were grouped together differently.

This certainly seems to apply to Brave New World. In the unlikely event you’ve never heard of it before, Brave New World is a dystopian novel by Aldous Huxley that imagines a highly controlled future society that emphasizes stability, consumerism, and immediate gratification. In some ways, Huxley’s imagined world is clearly based on contemporary liberal criticisms. The logic of Henry Ford’s assembly line has been elevated to a religion. Consumerism is rampant (e.g. citizens are subliminally conditioned to buy new clothes instead of repairing old ones). Most obviously, notions of personal liberty are almost completely absent from this version of the future. On the other hand, this brave new world also bears clear resemblance to more conservative anxieties. Christianity has been abolished and virtually forgotten, to Huxley’s apparent vexation. Monogamy is also a thing of the past, and casual sex is shown to be harmful (at least for people from other cultures).

Adding to this confusion is the willy-nilly way Huxley drops references. Two of the main characters are named Marx and Lenin(a), and I spent much of the book trying to puzzle out their connection to communism. There’s an off-handed mention of a character named Bakunin, but no further reference to the anarchist philosophy traditionally associated with that name. Some characters’ names are double-barreled references, and sometimes these make some sense. The improbably named Helmholtz Watson is a reference to two foundational psychologists, the latter of whom has his most famous experiment clearly referenced in the book (though this part of the book has nothing to do with the character of Helmholtz Watson). Other times these dual reference seem more like Mad Libs, as in the cases of Benito Hoover and Darwin Bonaparte.

A friend suggested that there’s no one-to-one between characters and their namesakes. Instead, the namedrops as a whole are meant to point to the ideas and trends that were on Huxley’s mind as he was writing. I think that’s probably right. But I’m less inclined to interpret Huxley’s melange of dystopian tropes as neutral observation. I think he was pointing to elements in society he disliked and showing the consequences of leaving those elements unchecked. (Reading about the history of the book on Wikipedia seems to support my idea.)

So reading this book challenged me, in a way I appreciated. I had to actually reflect on my own ideas in depth, instead of mentally stamping the whole book with “Agree” or “Disagree.” I was impressed with the way Huxley predicted the neoliberal drive for a frictionless workforce, and I appreciated his criticisms2. At the same time, I balked at his yearning for widespread, chaste monogamy. Huxley doesn’t resort to strawmen. Near the end of the book a character gives an articulate, persuasive defense of his society, pointing out that much of what others find objectionable boils down to different choices of what to value.

I was also impressed with aspects of Huxley’s world building. Helicopters hadn’t even been invented at the time he wrote the book, but he predicted they would be widely used in the future. (Which is true, even if we don’t have personal helicopters in the way he predicted). Cheap, narcotic entertainment (including pornography), a major element of Huxley’s new world, has also come to pass. His idea of causing a zygote to “bud” into many identical clones is couched in plausible terms, and his treatment of artificial gestation has more lately been taken up by authors as influential as Lois McMaster Bujold. Finally, the audiobook I listened to was read by Michael York, and his narration did an incredible job driving home the wit in Huxley’s words.

  1. I use the term “blame” because I think lots of people, including myself, assume that such blatancy is a bad thing. But maybe making clear political statements can be a good thing, for example when there is an urgent and high stakes problem. If this is true, levels of blatant political messaging is less likely to vary based on historical period and more likely to vary based on how important the author thinks their message is. ↩︎
  2. Brave New World is often compared to Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell, and the comparisons are often framed in terms of which author was more correct. It’s a fun game, but probably not the best way to think about the issue. However, I do want to highlight one thing I think Orwell observed that is lacking from Huxley’s work, namely, abuse of power. The “world controller” we meet in Brave New World is a quaint academic. He allows himself some indulgences forbidden to others (say, reading Shakespeare) but is sincerely committed to serving the population, whose values he shares. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the authorities are driven by power. They seem themselves as separate from, and above, the general population. They influence how the population thinks and acts not out of beneficence but purely to entrench their own status. In this aspect, I find Orwell much closer to the mark. ↩︎

March 17, 2026 Add Comment

The dark frisson of knowledge: On the Wikipedian sublime

Here’s a prolix but interesting post by Kate Wagner about why people love going down Wikipedia rabbit holes about terrible things. Basically she argues it creates an aesthetically sublime experience.

July 14, 2025 Add Comment

Review: The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon

I think I first learned about Frantz Fanon several years ago when a documentary about him (which I still haven’t seen) hit the Criterion Channel. Traditional psychology has generally been pretty bad about considering black folks, and I’ve been interested for a while in the intersection of mental health and black culture in movies. Fanon, I learned from the movie description, was a black man and a psychiatrist, born in Martinique and educated in Paris. He went on to do much of his work in Algeria during their bloody fight for independence from France.

Reading more about Fanon, I found he was almost always described with words like “important” and “influential,” especially for his ideas on racial identity and decolonization. I had just finished a graduate program in psychology a few years before, and one that took every opportunity to brag about its emphasis on diversity. But despite this, I had never heard of Frantz Fanon! My curiosity was piqued.

More recently, I stumbled across a comment that his book “The Wretched of the Earth” set out an argument that justified violence by colonized people against their oppressors. (Side note: I didn’t actually find any such argument in the book, though Fanon does take for granted that it’s ok for people to use violence to liberate themselves from an oppressive situation). With my curiosity newly inflamed, I got my hands on a copy of the audiobook, translated by Constance Farrington, and started listening.

Almost at once my interest evaporated. The book is front-loaded with embarrassingly bad anthropology. Fanon seems to suggest that colonized people (all colonized people, regardless of time or place) do things like dance or believe in ghosts because of some psychic conflict that’s wrought by colonialism. This obviously ignores the fact that some of these traditions very likely predate colonialism.1 (I’m not a historian or an anthropologist, so please correct me if I’m wrong).

It’s also emblematic of my main complaint about the book. Fanon talks in grand, sweeping generalizations. All colonial powers have the same agenda, all colonized people have the same experience, all cities are one way, and all rural areas another. Occasionally he will refer to specific examples, but he doesn’t seem to care about arguing his point beyond simply stating it. He almost never cites other thinkers (whether they agree or disagree) and certainly never incorporates quantitative evidence. He just rambles on and on, claiming this and that, and apparently assuming his ideas will be accepted without further question.

Fanon was a Marxist, and his tendency towards generalizations is characteristic of the few other Marxist writers I’ve read, especially around this period. They seem impressed with their theory of the world and uninterested or unaware that others might need convincing2.

It’s also an odd fit for Fanon’s other ideological stances. Psychology, as opposed to, say, sociology, is very interested in the particulars of individual people. One of the few interesting parts of the book were the psychiatric case studies of individuals suffering under colonialism. This is one of the only places where Fanon allows himself to zoom in to the particulars.

But also, Fanon argues persuasively against the idea of a general African or black culture. This idea, says Fanon, actually plays into the colonial mindset. It was white outsiders who came in and essentialized everyone as “black” without paying any attention to differences in culture and history. Despite making this point very well, he continues to talk about colonized people as if there were one solution that would serve all of them.

I glazed over for much of the book. The Wikipedia article is probably a much better resource if you’re interested in Fanon’s ideas. (It also shows that others were able to get much more out of the book than I was). But I did want to end by highlighting a couple of quotes and ideas from the text that I really appreciated3.

“It is commonly thought with criminal flippancy that to politicize the masses means from time to time haranguing them with a major political speech… But political education means opening up the mind, awakening the mind, and introducing it to the world. It is as Césaire said: ‘To invent the souls of men.’ It means driving home to the masses that everything depends on them, that if we stagnate the fault is theirs, and that if we progress, they too are responsible, that there is no demiurge, no illustrious man taking responsibility for everything, but that the demiurge is the people and the magic lies in their hands and their hands alone. In order to achieve such things, in order to actually embody them, we must, as we have already mentioned, decentralize to the utmost.”

Out of context this almost sounds like a call for anarchism! But Fanon quickly goes on to assert that his system would still have hierarchy. It’s just that the “upper echelons” would understand that their work depends on the work of the “rank and file.” Still, I like the point that if you want somebody to have more political consciousness, it’s not enough to occasionally talk at them.

“A memorable example, and one that takes on particular significance because it does not quite involve a colonial reality, was the reaction of white jazz fans when after the Second World War new styles such as bebop established themselves. For them jazz could only be the broken, desperate yearning of an old “Negro,” five whiskeys under his belt, bemoaning his own misfortune and the racism of the whites.”

I don’t know anything about jazz, but I do know about movies, this reminds me of some of the conversations around “black tragedy porn.” The overwhelmingly white film ecosystem will sometimes congratulate itself for making the occasional film about black people. But even when these films aren’t outright racist, and even when they don’t feature white saviors or other problematic tropes, they often heavily emphasize the tragedies that black people face due to racism. So even among white people willing to acknowledge racism, there are still ways to get it wrong.

Anyway, that’s all for now. I didn’t like this book, though it led me to some interesting ideas. We’ll see if I ever get around to that documentary about Fanon’s life.

  1. Fanon does have seem to have a larger theory about history that I failed to fully grok. Something about how utterly colonialism reshaped people’s lives, and what this means for formerly colonized folks who try to create their own culture. Maybe if I better understood this theory I’d have less objection to his seemingly bad anthropology. ↩︎
  2. Not trying to knock Marxists in general! A lot of Marxists have done really cool things! But I don’t think mid-20th century nonfiction writing is a good place to start engaging with them. ↩︎
  3. Unfortunately these are from a different translation. I couldn’t find an easy to access, online version of Farrington’s translation, which I prefer, at least based on the phrasing in these quotes. ↩︎

March 20, 2025 Add Comment