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Brave New World

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Aldous Huxley's novel "Brave New World" is both one of the best science fiction books and one of the most brilliant pieces of satire ever written. BNW takes place on a future Earth where human beings are mass-produced and conditioned for lives in a rigid caste system. As the story progresses, we learn some of the disturbing secrets that lie underneath the bright, shiny facade of this highly-ordered world.

Huxley opens the book by allowing the reader to eavesdrop on a tour of the Fertilizing Room of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, where the high-tech reproduction takes place. Into this seemingly advanced civilization is introduced John, a "savage" from a reservation where old human culture still survives. Thus, BNW is also a tale of "culture shock" and conflict.

Huxley creates a compelling blend of bizarre comedy, serious character study, futuristic extrapolation, and philosophical discussion. His writing style is crisp and witty, and cleverly incorporates references to canonical works of literature. Probably the scariest thing about BNW is the fact that, in many ways, humanity seems to be moving closer to Huxley's dystopian vision.

Brave New World is an excellent book and, what's more, one that seems to be becoming more relevant all the time in our fast paced world. And unlike many other books with a similar philosophical orientation, Brave New World is quite refreshing, as Huxley's prose is somehow manages to be clear, elegant and insightful without being overly obvious.

As regards the actual plot, Brave New World is in essence a portrayal of a utopia (or dystopia, depending how you look at it) in which there is constant prosperity, people are always content, as they are well provided for and have been programmed to like their society in all respects. This programming is undertaken by workers in charge of breeding the future citizens of this idyllic world, which is united under one government, under Ford. As everybody has been programmed to like their class and job, everybody is constantly content and has no wish to do anything other than what is required of them. If they happen to become depressed, of course, there is always the mood altering drug Soma.

Through presenting a few individuals who do not exactly fit into this molded world, however, Huxley presents us with a challenging and endlessly interesting question: What can possibly be wrong with a world in which everybody is happy, even if there is no real free will involved in actuality? If we can make ourselves superficially content and never have to suffer a moment of desperation or uncertainty, why not just do that? With the help of William Shakespeare and a young man from a "savage reservation," Huxley explores the alternatives to his invented society's promotion of mindless satisfaction. Should true art and the deep thought and emotion that inspires it be sacrificed to perpetual happiness without thought or deeper feeling? Or is the attempt to find these deeper meanings just silly and self-defeating, as we will all meet the same fate in the end?

In this era of quick entertainment, instant gratification and materialism unbounded, there are no better questions to be asking than these, the ones at the heart of Brave New World. Pick up a copy and start to read - in addition to being quite interesting as a science-fiction book or portrayal of a future world, Brave New World is a book that inspires a lot of thinking about our lives today.

As critic and best-selling author Neil Postman points out so well in the introduction to his book "Amusing Ourselves To Death", we have congratulated ourselves prematurely by figuring we made it past the totalitarian nightmare state depicted in George Orwell's gripping cautionary tale "1984". Perhaps, Postman suggest, we should remember another visionary totalitarian nightmare scenario and use it to critically examine the contemporary state of social and psychological well-being. Of course he was referring to Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World, written before Orwell's by 15 or so years, and even more frightening in its own way in the world it describes. More and more, that frightening vision looks like our contemporary world.

Picture his ironic portrait of a populace doped into Nirvana on "soma" (read Prozac and Zoloft), isolated and diverted by petty preoccupations in mindless trivial pursuits (read video games and internet surfing to all the porno sites), oblivious to anything not directly pertaining to themselves and totally unaware of the degree to which they are being socially, economically, and politically co-opted. Beginning to sound more familiar? Remember, says Huxley, brute force is not the only method an oligarchy can use to influence, manage, and finally control our hard-won freedoms and liberties; it can be done with over-indulgence and the deliberate fertilization and promulgation of apathy through self-absorption, as well.

Even Huxley says (circa 1960, almost 30 years after the original publication) in the preface of the revised version of the book that he is alarmed as to how quickly the sort of events he figured might take a hundred years such as the appearance of political internationalism and transnational corporate entities are already arising and beginning to control more and more of the substance of our social, economic, and political lives. Just how much do we know other than what we hear and see on television, for example? Yet the electronic media is owned and managed by transnational corporations. Ever wonder why we never heard much muckraking news coverage of the NAFTA or GATT deals even though many recogized the two bills would radically change the nature of international trade? Perhaps the transnationals didn't want too much hype or fuss. Starting to feel uncomfortable yet? Still, people keep insisting this was just a whimsical work of fiction, that it was a parable, that he really wasn't serious.

Want to find out more? Read this book, but do so slowly, taking notes, recognizing how many contemporary parallels there are to each of the "whimsical details" he conjures up, and then figure out in your own mind how very close he was to prognosticating just how far we have come toward the "Brave New World" in which everyone's soul and awareness is for sale. The kids are wowed by the recent movie The Matrix", yet few appreciate just how much of a fabled existence we are already living in. No pain, no sorrow, no trouble of any kind. Instead, we have our individual and collective consciousness "managed" pharmaceutically; our psyches eased into blithering bliss with "soma", our diminishing attention spans sidetracked and occupied by petty diversions and endless entertainments. Pass me the corndogs, honey!

But, hey! Don't touch that dial; Regis is on! They may retry OJ! What did Bill Clinton really do with that cigar? Have you seen the latest news about the stock market? Did you get any of that new beer they're advertising? it's supposed to make me a real ladies man....What's the latest gadget? Can I buy one on-line? By the way, where are the kids? Hell, never mind, just turn up the volume; I think I know the answer to that question Regis just asked... Meanwhile, folks, our awareness of what is going on around us, our rights and our liberties are being power-washed away, obliterated, and we cannot even see it happening in front of us. We are diverted, distracted, content in our own little worlds. So welcome to our nightmare. Better beware; it just looks like Nirvana. It's really another "Brave New World".

I've put off reviewing Brave New World, as I thought I wouldn't be able to give an unbiased review. But, after re-reading the book for the tenth time (or so), I decided to give it a shot. Brave New World is the most important science fiction novel ever written. Not necessarily the best, not necessarily the best-written, but the most important. It is very good and very well written, but those are subjective points open to debate.

Brave New World, published some ten years before Orwell's more popular, anti-Communist 1984, imagines a world where people are conditioned from the moment of their birth to be part of an economic and intelligence-based caste, where the media exists for the sole purpose of distracting people from the humdrum of their lives and news is created as sensationalist entertainment, where different thinking is treated with social ostracization or drugs or both, and where the rule of the entire society is maximizing consumption of material goods. In short, not unlike the world today, and America in particular.

BNW (the society outlined in the book) is a Capitalist and Freudian Hell, where people are manipulated to buy things they don't need and conditioned to be perfect molds for that manipulation. The book follows three main characters: Helmholtz, a reporter who realizes the truth about BNW, Bernard Marx, a man who ultimately succumbs to the ostracizing criticism of his so-called "friends," and John Savage, an outsider who grew up with books and without the benefit of BNW's conditioning. All three eventually come to the same conclusions about BNW: that it is a society based on dictatorship-like control for the sole purpose of increasing consumer-base for a large, unnamed corporation-government.

As politicians are increasingly bought off with "campaign contributions" from corporations and special interests, news media is funneled into networks owned by five white men; physical and mental health is disregarded as the Randian, Capitalist mantra of "maximize profits no matter what" destroys basic human dignity; and everything from wars to game shows are turned into video-games for our amusement, it becomes very difficult not to make the prophetic connections between Huxley's vision and today's society. In BNW, there are no protests because people don't care. There are no dissenters because they are mocked into submission when they don't squeeze into the hole designed for them. Take a stroll through modern America, and things aren't much different.

"Brave New World" is important because it, not 1984, is the vision of the future. In a world turning into a Capitalist "Utopia," where maximization of profits is the norm and consumption of material goods supercedes all else, one cannot help but shudder at Huxley's words. The point is made even more evident when one realizes there is no Iceland or Falkland Islands to which we can escape: when Buddhists temples in Tibet have Coca-Cola machines, it's not difficult to see the tendrils of capitalism-gone-wrong everywhere, dark and inescapable. Good luck trying to figure out how to deal with it, besides "if you can't beat it, join it," the biggest cop-out answer someone can offer - along with the Savage's solution at the end. It can be done, however, even though the answer might not be immediately obvious.

This is a science-fiction classic and a book that everyone should read. Forget 1984: the Communists lost. Unfortunately, the Capitalists aren't doing much better - in BNW, most people are just blissfully ignorant of the Truth, rather than oppressed and numbed by it on a daily basis.

Grade: The ultra-rare A+

About 70 years ago Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World, in hopes of setting off a "semi-serious alarm" as to what will happen in the future. This book deals with the problems of religion, science, art, politics, sex, drugs, and mostly every aspect that can effect one's life. And needless to say most of his predictions came true. This really amazes me and should really amaze anybody who reads it. However, I don't recommend Brave New World to most people. For several reasons, one being that this book is written in a VERY whimsical style. For example, in the end of Chapter 3, snippets of conversations are taken and jumbled up (this may seem easy to tackle; but trust me, it isn't). Second, the book is very confusing at times, this isn't a book you can read with the radio is on, you need all you attention toward the book (or else deciphering it is impossible). Third, the book has MANY very deep meanings. Huxley some how placed all of the problems of society into a book 250 pages, and you could easily assume that it is chuck full of content. Personally this is one of my favorite books. Brave New World's style is very original, nothing like I have read before. Its message it bitingly powerful, and shows exactly what this world is headed for. But for everybody who says this is better than Orwell's 1984 (or vice versa) are mistaken. The books have very little in common. Orwell is taking about totalitarianism and its various faults, Huxley is talking about the effects of Social Utopianism. So for anybody who hasn't read either, don't be mistaken by the fools who think otherwise.

In "Brave New World," Aldous Huxley illustrates his vision of the future in which rapid advances in science and technology lead to increasing public confusion, which causes governments to impose more and more control until they become entirely totalitarian. As society becomes more industrialized, products become more homogeneous and standardized, art and expression become less important, and personal individuality is gradually lost. In such a world, a government would attempt to keep its population as happy and content as possible by "conditioning" the people from birth to accept and love their assigned work and their respective places in society. Such people would need to be deprived of emotional stimulation so as not to get any subversive ideas, so artistic expression would have to be curtailed. (There is no need for art in a society of people who are always happy and content.) The perpetuation of civilization and society would have to be more important than the value of the individual.

The novel's main action is in London in the year A.F. 632 (it doesn't take long to figure out what A.F. stands for). Human reproduction and gestation is handled in laboratories where bottled embryos are separated into caste systems, from Alpha (the highest) to Epsilon (the lowest). All embryos are conditioned for certain jobs; Alphas are conditioned to be the most intelligent and receive the most education, while Epsilons are reserved for the most menial jobs. The different castes are segregated and identified by the color of the clothes they wear. To keep everybody happy and ensure civil obedience, a depression-fighting drug called "soma" is officially distributed. There is no art for art's sake; the only music that exists is always synthetic and is purely functional, as are the "feelies," movies with tactile and aromatic as well as visual and aural signals.

A keen point of interest is the book's reference to Henry Ford. Ford, one of the great industrialists, is a symbol of the semination of the industrialized society of the Brave New World, a sort of patron saint of the assembly line and mass production. The fact that "Ford" rhymes with "Lord" provides the novel with its prevalent running joke. Huxley seems to have had the same kind of sarcastic or facetious respect for Ford that many people today have for Bill Gates.

While the beginning of the novel serves to describe the Society and introduce a few main characters, the novel's conflict arises when a "Savage" named John, who was born and raised outside of the industrialized world in a New Mexico Indian reservation, is brought to London as a subject for study. From reading Shakespeare as a youth, John has acquired compassion, sensitivity, and artistic and religious aesthetic (Huxley almost seems to imply that Shakespeare is a sort of gateway to a higher consciousness), and is horrified by the lack of emotion and morality of the inhabitants of the Brave New World. John makes a conscious decision to foresake the synthetic happiness of the Brave New World and return to living freely and naturally, but he finds that he cannot escape public scrutiny so easily.

Huxley's writing has an almost cinematic quality; he is like a cutting-edge film director who edits scenes and shifts focus between various characters quickly for maximum dramatic effect. Even his images of large mechanical systems are poetic and, from an engineering standpoint, accurately detailed. To me, that's the icing on the cake for this richly conceived treatise on a nightmarish utopia.

It's useful to keep in mind that Brave New World was first published in 1932. This is not the most subtle novel that you'll have read, nor the most lyrical, but in my opinion much of what makes this novel a classic is it's originality. Orwell's 1984, to which Brave New World is often compared, was more than fifteen years from being published,. This was before Ray Bradbury, Phillip Dick, or Isaac Asimov. Some of these comparisons are more relevant than others, but the point is that the genre of futurism and science fiction had not yet been born.

Brave New World can be read as a critique of the direction in which our civilization is headed, but on another level it can be interpreted as a critique of where we already are.

During the tour of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, the scene which opens the book, the Director Mr. Foster states that the secret of happiness and virtue is "liking what you've got to do...making people like their un-escapable social destiny." Those of us who through luck of birth have grown up in Western free market economies have embraced the concept of creating our own destinies, but for the vast majority of the inhabitants of our planet life's reality is much different. The concept of an "un-escapable social destiny" is not a futuristic nightmare, but a reality of the present; workers don't have their growth stunted through alcohol in their decanting fluid, but through malnutrition and disease.

Perhaps Huxley's clearest statement is in favor of being awake and aware of society's ills, rather than blinding ourselves. In Huxley's brave new world, individuals achieve Foster's goal of embracing their destiny largely by staying busy, avoiding any reflection, denying their mortality, and drowning themselves in the drug soma whenever a problem arises. Brave New World carries a heavy anti-drug message, which is ironic in that Huxley would later become heavily involved in the psychedelic drug culture and would be considered one of the godfathers of the hippie movement .

Huxley is a bit heavy handed in suggesting that society much pick one of two extremes (either the madness of the savage or the sterile soul-less utopia of the controllers) but in the end he uses this device to show us that there are choices to be made. An interesting observation, and one that is rarely noted, is that in the closing debate between the World Controller Mustapha Mond and the Savage, it's Mond's argument Huxley makes more convincing - or at least that is articulated more clearly. In the end the reader accepts neither, in that both represent an unacceptable extreme, but Huxley makes the point that the emotions of passion, ambition, love, and glory come with the costs of jealousy, violence, and suffering.

This is a clever novel, and at times unexpectedly funny, but in my opinion I'm not sure that Brave New World ranks as great literature. In the areas of character development, dialogue, and structure it's in many ways forgettable. What makes the novel interesting is its timelessness. We now face new threats, from terrorism to nuclear war, but the novel's core message is a relevant today as it was in 1932.

This was one of those books that I know that I should have read, half convinced myself that I had read, told everybody that I had read, but in fact hadn't. I finally got around to it. Although Huxley's novel might not merit the label of "great literature," it is a book that has exerted an amazing influence on the intellectual world of the twentieth century and in light of recent events, remains as relevant as ever. Huxley's world of science gone amuck - where traditional ideas of morality have been forgotten, where new birth is gestated in bottles on conveyor belts, where individuality has been annihilated, and where well being and hope are dispensed in a pill - has conveniently served the purposes of those who like to argue their own political, economic and moral stances. Thus, those fervent proponents of capitalism and the western traditions see Huxley's utopia as a perfect model for those "ungodly" communist and socialist states where the individual is sacrificed for the common good; those same socialist and communist proponents see this same utopia as a model for the greedy capitalist states where consumption and exploitation have become a religion; and those moralists among us, of course, see the Brave New World as an example of what happens when traditional values of family, sex, and marriage are cast to the winds.

Huxley approaches his subject from the viewpoint of a scientist and the style of the novel is that of scientific exposition. Little concern is given to character development or to the use of descriptive prose to create atmosphere or emotion. The plot plods along just like one of the conveyor belts in the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, and just when the reader gets a little weary, the author astutely throws in a bit of titilation to re-gain the reader's flagging attention.

Even this reader sees Huxley's utopia in a special way. After the events of 9/11 it appears that the American public, conditioned by the present administration, has made security paramount in their lives. Huxley's World State's motto is COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY, all of which seems innocuous enough. These traits can be viewed as being admirable. But this motto is much more than just another motto; it was created as an aftermath to a cataclysmic war in which anthrax bombs were exploding with a sound "hardly louder than the popping of a paper bag." The Resident Controller for Western Europe, musing on the war, states that "liberalism, of course, was dead of anthrax." I just hope that this pre-occupation with security will not create a new motto for a new American society, one that sacrifices individual liberties for the notion that we must be secure above all else, a condition ephemeral at best. Huxley's world, as he was to remark some years after the book's initial apperance, is probably closer than anybody could have imagined.

Soma, feelies, scent organs...these are some of the wondrous inventions which litter the landscape of Huxley's ultra-happy dystopia. From the opening scene where we watch babies being farmed instead of born this book creates a world where science and logic have wiped out individual inspiration and such petty things as love, poetry and Shakespeare. This novel is a terrific read for it's ability to create a horrible world, and yet make it seem not so bad. This is the real power of the book. While the world of 1984 is obviously a nightmare, the world of Brave New World does not seem that bad for the most part. It draws you in and makes you wonder what a movie would be like where you can feel what the actors are feeling, or what work would be like if it was always perfectly challenging and stimulating. It creates a world that you know you are not supposed to like, but which is seductive none-the-less. And this sets up the final scene in which three men argue the fate of all our lives. In which art makes a stand against easy happiness, in which love makes a stand against ignorant bliss. The last twenty pages are a tour-de-force of philosophical inquiries which makes you realize that even though you could be happy in Huxley's Brave New World, you would never be yourself. And that is the only true happiness there is.

Brave New World has attracted a wealth of praise and criticism since it was first published. Some of the criticism is justified, but the book's value is undiminished.

Yes, Huxley is in love with his own vocabulary; if you have any doubts on that score, read the introduction he wrote sometime after Brave New World was published, which is so "highfalutin" as to be ridiculous. The book itself is better, but one of Huxley's fundamental rules seems to be, "Never use a two syllable word if you can use a seven syllable word instead." However, you don't really have to know what "viviparous" or "pavlovian" mean to follow the plot; most of the vocabulary can be figured out well enough from context.

Brave New World is often criticized as being "dated" - some of the technology seems absurd by today's standards, and Huxley's portrayal of Native Americans seems far from "politically correct". My response to this is, yes, if you want to get stuck on details, those would seem to be defects in the book. The same criticisms about quaint technology could be made about just about anything written by Jules Verne or Isaac Asimov; and, I seriously doubt that anyone will ever use Huckleberry Finn or The Martian Chronicles as textbooks in a sensitivity training seminar. So what? Expecting Huxley, who was born in the late 19th century and wrote Brave New World in 1932, to have a 1990's (oops, 2000's) outlook and knowledge is silly, and misses the point of the book entirely.

Taken in a broader context, though, Huxley's message is as fresh as ever. In Brave New World, the social order is maintained through, among other things, instant gratification and conditioning. Unfulfilled need produces passion, aspiration, creativity, motivation, growth, and a desire to change things - all dangerous in a society which prides itself on "stability".

Our modern society is, of course, nothing like this. Huxley describes "feelies" - high-tech sort of movies, complete with impressive special effects, designed to entertain the common herd, described by one character as "written by an idiot." Hmmm - stories written by idiots, complete with the latest special effects...have you been to the movies lately? Likewise, "soma" may seem a strange idea to the reader - but consider the alarming tendency today to medicate any discontented adolescent with Prozac. Conditioning? Political correctness + an MTV view of life + idolization of celebrities + etc + etc = ... what?

One last note - Huxley himself later said that if he were to rewrite Brave New World, he would give it a different (more hopeful) ending. I suppose if anyone has a right to rewrite a book, it's the author - but personally, I'm glad he never tried. The ending _is_ depressing; but Brave New World shows where today's culture will lead, if all the worst aspects are permitted to continue to thrive and flourish. And it is a depressing place.