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.
- 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. ↩︎
- 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. ↩︎
