Brave New World

First Published: 1932

Along with George Orwell's 1984, Brave New World is one of the classic, indispensable future-dystopia novels of the early 20th century. In essence, the two books posit opposite outcomes of the Cold War. Orwell's dystopia is a triumph of Soviet-style oppression; Huxley's is a triumph of American corporate power. In the past couple of decades, Huxley's book has gotten a good bit scarier.

What Happens: In Huxley's world--several centuries ahead of ours--the pressures of population and industrial production have led to the creation of a global caste system, carefully controlled by genetic engineering and behavioral conditioning. Human life has become pleasant and shallow; one is programmed to enjoy one's work, and nonworking hours are spent in ceaseless sensory distractions--most notably, under the influence of the wonder-drug called soma.

Bernard Marx is an Alpha, at the top of the caste system, but this privileged life is not enough. He feels keenly alone, and he cannot stop questioning the world. He is restless and malcontent, increasingly impatient with the ostensible pleasures that interrupt his contemplation. There is "no time, no leisure from pleasure, not a moment to sit down and think."

Bernard takes a vacation to a relic of past times--a "Savage Reservation" in New Mexico, where Native Americans carry on with their traditional ways. Here he encounters Linda, an exile from the caste society who pines to return. He brings her and her son John back to London. Bernard becomes a celebrity, rising so quickly that he must inevitably be taken down.

John--quickly dubbed John Savage--is in hell. His upbringing has relied on books, spirituality, and friendship; he lacks the conditioning that would reconcile him to contemporary life. Worse still, he falls for a woman who is not programmed to recognize monogamy or love as desirable. The individual clashes with the society, and tragedy results.

Censorship History: As Huxley later wrote, "The subject of freedom and its enemies is enormous." Brave New World remains one of the most challenged works in the United States, ranking at #36 on the ALA's Banned Books List for the most recent decade.

Georgia and Missouri schools have removed Brave New World from their classrooms, and the Council for the Literature of the Fantastic claims that a Philadelphia teacher lost a grant because he taught the book. Some Texas parents, calling it "pornographic literature," attempted to remove it from schools during 2003's Banned Book Week. (Whatever will they do for Irony Week?)

Why It's Censored: To keep its citizens content in their overstructured lives, Huxley's government sponsors regular orgies and promotes recreational drug consumption. These scenes are clearly not meant to titillate; Bernard responds with weary disgust. And, compared with the sex scenes you can find in other books, they're tame. (I first read this in my late teens and had forgotten about the orgy scene by the time I revisited the book as an adult. If you can forget about sex scenes you first read as a teenager, the scenes are mild indeed.)

Huxley's world is also atheistic; all the crosses have been lopped off into capital Ts. Does this make the book anti-Christian? Hardly--you can't read ten pages without knowing that Huxley is not describing a world he wants.

As in most of today's totalitarian regimes, the power of Huxley's government rests on strict order, including censorship; most pre-industrial writing has been destroyed, and Shakespeare is unknown. Perhaps what really chafes the would-be censors of this book is the way both Bernard and John burn to escape the rigorous organization of this world--the unignorable implication that questioning rules is natural and desirable, or that some discontent can't be entertained away, or that some readers might want what a character disparages as "Liberty to be inefficient and miserable. Freedom to be a round peg in a square hole."

Eerily Prescient Bits: By now, the comparison of Prozac to soma is old hat. Are they truly identical? Not really; soma doesn't have side effects. But Huxley is accurate in his prediction that a society might prefer to medicate discontent rather than to address its underlying sources.

Huxley doesn't predict the Internet, but he's bang on--no pun intended--about the so-called mainstreaming of porn. (Could he have predicted the verbing of mainstream? Probably.) His society is awash in shallow physical pleasures, often at the expense of genuine emotional connection--it's not far from hookup culture, made official by government sanctions. ("You ought to be a little more promiscuous," says one female character, who proudly displays her contraceptives.)

Huxley isn't the only writer to address the stupefying effects of distraction. Kurt Vonnegut's short story "Harrison Bergeron" suggests a much bleaker future created by similar techniques. What is fairly new, however, is scientific confirmation that constant distraction harms our cognitive abilities. (Are you listening, Blogger? Could you stop jumping back to the top of the post every time I insert a bit of code?)

Contemporary female readers--that is, those of us who are leaving our youth during the era of Botox--will probably find it especially poignant that in Huxley's future, no one ages naturally. Various drugs and supplements keep them pert and firm until about the age of 60, when they typically just collapse and die, quickly and discreetly. The city dwellers react with horror to the sight of "primitive" Linda, wrinkled and sagging.

Those who are frightened by the growing power of corporations are not likely to find this a reassuring read. The leaders of the Industrial and Communist Revolutions are treated as near-deities, the namesakes of many of the characters (Benito, Lenina, Henry). Huxley's characters use the name "Ford" the same way we'd use the G in "OMG" and the C in "B.C."

Through the ceaseless, subliminal repetition of slogans ("Ending is better than mending"), Huxley's characters are conditioned from infancy to participate in a global economy of instant gratification, consumption, and disposability. Remember that scene in Supersize Me when everyone can sing the Big Mac jingle, but no one remembers the national anthem? Yeah.

And where do all those consumable goods come from? The comfort of Huxley's privileged classes rests on the shoulders of a much larger worker class, the Gammas and the Epsilons, specially bred to be dimwitted and unambitious, kept content in their drudgery with steady doses of drugs. Now, the drug- and alcohol-induced twilight of the Brave New workers is less prescient than historical. Alcohol has long been recognized as a near necessity for peasant and slave classes, with those in power attempting to strike a judicious balance between the workers' emotional stability and their ability to work. Roman slaveholders allowed for festival days; many American slaveholders permitted alcohol, but were all too willing to consider drunkenness evidence of Africans' innate inferiority. But the existence of the industrial slave class qualifies as prescient. As of 2010, there are over 12 million slaves worldwide, and millions more people work at desperately low wages. The proportion of privileged classes to impoverished workers is more or less what Huxley imagined; today, the bottom half of the world's population owns 1% of the world's wealth. (If you're reading this on a computer, it's a safe bet which half of the population you're in.)

Huxley wrote this long before the first test-tube baby (that, for the record, was Louise Joy Brown, born in 1978), but in his world, the test-tube process has entirely replaced viviparous reproduction. Children are "vatted," not born, and the concept of parenting is considered embarrassing and dirty. How close you think we've come to that probably depends on how your childhood shook out in its proportion of parental interaction to TV time.

Relationships with Other Works of Literature: The title, of course, comes from a line in The Tempest. John (the only really literate main character) quotes Shakespeare constantly. One of the most delicious allusions is the use of a Caliban line to describe the distractions of modern life--"Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments will hum about my ears." In its original context, that line describes the uncivilized island of Prospero's exile and the magical ways Prospero keeps Caliban enslaved. In Huxley's telling, it describes the experience of the "Savage" John within the hypercivilized caste society. The implications about what constitutes true slavery and true savagery are unmistakable. It's a brilliant little reference.

Julian Barnes's somewhat more optimistic Staring at the Sun posits a similar future for humans at the end of the 20th century, with "fundrugs" taking the place of soma. The population is ranked by letter grades.

In 1958, disheartened by overpopulation, totalitarianism, and the rise of nuclear weaponry, Huxley wrote a nonfiction follow-up, Brave New World Revisited. Among other things, he laments the speed with which the nightmarish shift from disorder to rigidity is coming to pass:

In 1931 systematic terrorism was not the obsessive contem­porary fact which it had become in 1948, and the fu­ture dictatorship of my imaginary world was a good deal less brutal than the future dictatorship so brilliantly portrayed by Orwell.

One can only imagine what he would write now.