Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is more relevant today than it was when it was written 75 years ago.
This creepily prophetic, forcefully anti-utopian science fiction novel describes a world government which scientifically manages everything from hatchery to grave for the happiness and safety of all - except for the Alphas, who have the responsibility for running the whole thing. Truly rule by experts. Freedom is an antiquated illusion, and the government is an omnipotent, benevolent god.
Caitrin Nicol, in The New Atlantis, takes a fresh look at the book. Some quotes from her piece:
This “illusion of freedom” 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 “rewritten in terms of our age” Dostoevsky’s famous parable of the Grand Inquisitor from The Brothers Karamazov—“a symbolic statement that every generation ought to read afresh.”
and
An unholy alliance of industrial capitalist, fascist, communist, psychoanalytic, and pseudo-scientific ideologies has brought about the end of history. The past is taboo—“History is bunk,” as “Our Ford” so eloquently said—and there is no future, because history’s 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. “Fine to think we can go on being socially useful even after we’re dead,” gloats one character. “Making plants grow.”
and
Unlike the other great dystopias, Huxley’s 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—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 should be able to distinguish these things while reason 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 “the natural forms and expressions of life itself.”
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.
The scariest things about Huxley's book are 1) On a bad day, anyone might be willing to sacrifice some liberty for security, and, 2) On a bad day, the Brave New World Huxley imagined has a certain regressive, hedonistic appeal and, 3) There are politicians who, unknowingly, use the idea of such a world as an ultimate goal - assuming, no doubt, that they would be the Alphas, and not me.
At Maggie's Farm, we try to make a stand for the messy, often-difficult, often-painful freedom of the human soul and spirit. Please take the time to read the whole thing. And read the book, if you haven't.
