Similarly, in 1944 economist Ludwig von Mises described Brave New World as a satire of utopian predictions of socialism: «Aldous Huxley was even courageous enough to make socialism’s dreamed paradise the target of his sardonic irony.»
Common misunderstandings
Various authors assume that the book was first and foremost a cautionary tale regarding human genetic enhancement, indeed about – as an infamous report of Bush associate Leon Kass states –: «producing improved [,][…] perfect or post-human» people. In fact, the title itself has become a mere stand-in used to «evoke the general idea of a futuristic dystopia». Geneticist Derek So suggests that this is a misunderstanding, however. According to him, a ‘more careful reading of the text’ shows that:
there does not seem to be any genetic testing in Brave New World, and most of the methods described involve hormones and chemicals rather than heritable interventions. Although Huxley wrote that «eugenics and dysgenics were practiced systematically», this seems to refer only to selective breeding and not to any kind of direct manipulation on the genetic level. (The Bokanovsky process does represent a form of cloning, but this is not ethically equivalent to germline genome editing, and references to Brave New World may lead some readers to confuse the two technologies.) […] While it’s true that the upper castes in Brave New World are smarter than the others, this is more because of the deliberate impairment of the lower castes than because the upper castes are «perfect». Rather than reducing the number of individuals born with genetic disorders or handicaps, Huxley’s dystopia involves dramatically increasing their number. […] Quite the opposite: Huxley thought that Brave New World might come about if we didn’t start selecting better children.
Overall, Derek So notes that «Huxley was much more worried about totalitarianism than about the new biotechnologies per se that he alluded to in Brave New World.» Despite claims to the contrary then, Huxley remained a committed eugenicist all throughout his life, much like his comparably famous brother Julian, and one just as keen on stressing its humanistic underpinnings.
The World State and Fordism
The World State is built upon the principles of Henry Ford’s assembly line: mass production, homogeneity, predictability, and consumption of disposable consumer goods. While the World State lacks any supernatural-based religions, Ford himself is revered as the creator of their society but not as a deity, and characters celebrate Ford Day and swear oaths by his name (e.g., «By Ford!»). In this sense, some fragments of traditional religion are present, such as Christian crosses, which had their tops cut off to be changed to a «T», representing the Ford Model T. In England, there is an Arch-Community-Songster of Canterbury, obviously continuing the Archbishop of Canterbury, and in America The Christian Science Monitor continues publication as The Fordian Science Monitor. The World State calendar numbers years in the «AF» era—»After Ford»—with the calendar beginning in AD 1908, the year in which Ford’s first Model T rolled off his assembly line. The novel’s Gregorian calendar year is AD 2540, but it is referred to in the book as AF 632.
From birth, members of every class are indoctrinated by recorded voices repeating slogans while they sleep (called «hypnopædia» in the book) to believe their own class is superior, but that the other classes perform needed functions. Any residual unhappiness is resolved by an antidepressant and hallucinogenic drug called soma.
The biological techniques used to control the populace in Brave New World do not include genetic engineering; Huxley wrote the book before the structure of DNA was known. However, Gregor Mendel’s work with inheritance patterns in peas had been rediscovered in 1900 and the eugenics movement, based on artificial selection, was well established.
Huxley’s family included a number of prominent biologists including Thomas Huxley, half-brother and Nobel Laureate Andrew Huxley, and his brother Julian Huxley who was a biologist and involved in the eugenics movement. Nonetheless, Huxley emphasises conditioning over breeding (nurture versus nature); human embryos and fetuses are conditioned through a carefully designed regimen of chemical (such as exposure to hormones and toxins), thermal (exposure to intense heat or cold, as one’s future career would dictate), and other environmental stimuli, although there is an element of selective breeding as well.
Comparisons with George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four
In a letter to George Orwell about Nineteen Eighty-Four, Huxley wrote «Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World.» He went on to write «Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.»
Social critic Neil Postman contrasted the worlds of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World in the foreword of his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death. He writes:
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture.
Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny «failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.» In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
The writer Christopher Hitchens, who published several articles on Huxley and a book on Orwell, noted the difference between the two texts in the introduction to his 1999 article «Why Americans Are Not Taught History»,
We dwell in a present-tense culture that somehow, significantly, decided to employ the telling expression «You’re history» as a choice reprobation or insult, and thus elected to speak forgotten volumes about itself. By that standard, the forbidding dystopia of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four already belongs, both as a text and as a date, with Ur and Mycenae, while the hedonist nihilism of Huxley still beckons toward a painless, amusement-sodden, and stress-free consensus.
Orwell’s was a house of horrors. He seemed to strain credulity because he posited a regime that would go to any lengths to own and possess history, to rewrite and construct it, and to inculcate it by means of coercion. Whereas Huxley … rightly foresaw that any such regime could break because it could not bend. In 1988, four years after 1984, the Soviet Union scrapped its official history curriculum and announced that a newly authorized version was somewhere in the works. This was the precise moment when the regime conceded its own extinction. For true blissed-out and vacant servitude, though, you need an otherwise sophisticated society where no serious history is taught.
Brave New World Revisited
In 1946, Huxley wrote in the foreword of the new edition of Brave New World:
If I were now to rewrite the book, I would offer the Savage a third alternative. Between the Utopian and primitive horns of his dilemma would lie the possibility of sanity… In this community economics would be decentralist and Henry-Georgian, politics Kropotkinesque and co-operative. Science and technology would be used as though, like the Sabbath, they had been made for man, not (as at present and still more so in the Brave New World) as though man were to be adapted and enslaved to them. Religion would be the conscious and intelligent pursuit of man’s Final End, the unitive knowledge of immanent Tao or Logos, the transcendent Godhead or Brahman. And the prevailing philosophy of life would be a kind of Higher Utilitarianism, in which the Greatest Happiness principle would be secondary to the Final End principle—the first question to be asked and answered in every contingency of life being: «How will this thought or action contribute to, or interfere with, the achievement, by me and the greatest possible number of other individuals, of man’s Final End?»
Brave New World Revisited (Harper & Brothers, US, 1958; Chatto & Windus, UK, 1959), written by Huxley almost thirty years after Brave New World, is a non-fiction work in which Huxley considered whether the world had moved toward or away from his vision of the future from the 1930s. He believed when he wrote the original novel that it was a reasonable guess as to where the world might go in the future. In Brave New World Revisited, he concluded that the world was becoming like Brave New World much faster than he originally thought.
Huxley analysed the causes of this, such as overpopulation, as well as all the means by which populations can be controlled. He was particularly interested in the effects of drugs and subliminal suggestion. Brave New World
