Aldous Huxley came from a privileged background: he was the grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, famous Victorian biologist and agnostic spokesman (known as “Darwin’s bulldog”), and on his mother’s side was the great nephew of the famous Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold, and with that pedigree graduated from Balliol College, Oxford. By 1932 he was already a well-known novelist and philosopher, famous for his satirical novels about contemporary English society, particularly the upper class. That year, in his fifth novel, Brave New World, Huxley took a drastic turn, and published a dystopian sci-fi novel that satirized the idea of a Utopian society brought about by human industrial and scientific progress. In it, the future is a nightmare comprising a predetermined and unalterable caste system, psychological conditioning beginning at birth, the elimination of mothers, fathers, family, and romantic love—things that elicit emotions that can’t be easily controlled—and quashes individuality, all in the name of an all-powerful world state. As such, Huxley’s novel is essentially the blueprint for all similar dystopian novels to come, from 1984 to The Handmaid’s Tale to The Hunger Games. And it has been much acclaimed, coming in at number 5 on the Modern Library’s 1998 list of the 100 top English Language novels of the 20th century, number 7 on Penguin Classics’ list of the 100 greatest novels as selected by their readers, on the Guardian’s list of the greatest English language novels, the Observer’s list of the 100 greatest novels in world literature, and the BBC list of the top 100 British novels. And it appears here as book number 47 on my own list of the “100 Most Lovable Novels in the English Language.”
The world Huxley presents in his novel is one intended to be a Utopia created by technology and by science—a Utopia in which everyone in society is happy. It is based on the assumption that happiness lies in in the complete absence of conflict, in complete security and peace of mind, in which every desire is immediately satisfied and every unpleasant aspect is eliminated from the lives of the masses. There are no personal involvements between lovers, friends, or family, and hence no possibility of pain from personal attachments. Disease is eliminated, and death is something everyone is conditioned to accept peacefully. And if anything goes wrong, there is always soma, the wonder drug that makes everything feel all right again. The citizens of this “brave new world” enjoy what Nietzsche (in Beyond Good and Evil) calls the “Pasture-happiness of the herd: security, lack of danger, comfort and alleviation of life for everyone.” This Utopia is made possible by the mass-production of human beings in laboratories, not unlike model T’s coming off an assembly line (it’s no coincidence that the people of this world worship “our Ford,” and the novel is set in the “year of our Ford 632.” Thus there is no nuclear family to develop close feelings with. In their developing stages the human babies and young children are inculcated with repeated messages that condition them as they sleep to believe what the new society wants everyone to accept—that “everyone belongs to everyone else” and that “a gram [of soma] is better than a damn.”
The great majority of the manufactured populace of this world are lower caste Deltas and Epsilons, who are turned out by the identical hundreds in order to do the most menial jobs in society and to be contented in them. Alphas and Betas, on the other hand, are manufactured with more brain power, and with the expectation of more significant employment, In effect, the people are more “personified social functions” as one critic (Charles M. Holmes) has called them, rather than individuals. Ultimately, it turns out, this society is all about the promotion of the capitalist ideal (“Our Ford” wouldn’t have it any other way). Over-consumption is encouraged, and mass-desire for manufactured goods (with built-in obsolescence) is promoted by the government and conditioned into each human child. At the same time, the desire for anything the state does not care to promote—or cannot make any money from—is eliminated from the consciousness by that same conditioning. As the Director of the “Hatchery,” the laboratory/factory in which the thousands of bottle-babies are conceived, explains to new employees at the beginning of the novel:
We condition the masses to hate the country….But simultaneously we condition them to love all country sports. At the same time, we see to it that all country sports shall entail the use of elaborate apparatus. So that they consume manufactured articles as well as transport.
Naturally, the highest virtue in this society is conformity—to be just like everyone else in one’s caste. And given the manner in which the members of the society are created and conditioned, non-conformists tend to be quite rare, and when they reveal themselves they are exiled. In Huxley’s novel, a couple of characters—the deformed rebel Bernard Marx and the would-be artist Helmholtz Watson—are depicted as (quite secretly and mildly) bucking the system. But the true alienated hero of the novel is John, known as “the Savage.” John was born and raised on an Indian reservation, the accidental product of two citizens of the “brave new world” who apparently messed up their contraceptives while on holiday on the reservation. One of the few places on earth not included as a part of Utopia, the reservation is a place in which John grew up with the curious old antiquated values. When, visiting the reservation on holiday himself, the misanthropic Bernard Marx meets the Savage, he decides to bring him back to the world his parents came from. Appalled by everything he sees in this world, the Savage refuses to conform. He refuses to take soma, he dislikes the mass entertainment of the “feelies” (what movies have morphed into in this society), and although he feels a natural lust for Bernard’s latest fling Lenina Crowne, he cannot reconcile the guiltless promiscuity she offers to the moral code of his upbringing, so that, inspired by the Shakespeare that he loves but is unknown in this Utopia, rejects her with Othello’s label as an “Impudent strumpet!”
Instinctively, John Savage recognizes the chief flaw in this Utopia: only through struggles and the overcoming of obstacles does a human being become an individual, and therefore truly human. Kierkegaard called it the need to “create difficulties everywhere” (in Concluding Unscientific Postscript). At the novel’s climactic point, the Savage’s argument with “World Controller” Mustapha Mond in chapter 17, John (quoting Hamlet) asserts, “Exposing what is mortal and unsure to all that fortune, death, and danger dare, even for an eggshell. Isn’t there something in that?” Mond responds that in choosing these nonconformist values, John is choosing
“the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pain of every kind.”
In his way, Huxley is playing devil’s advocate through Mond, challenging the reader to choose either Mond’s Utopia of happiness, or human free-will, which looks like this last paragraph. The Savage considers this and answers, “I claim them all.” Would you?
Before the First World War, writers like Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells had written optimistic works predicting a future Utopia based on advances in science and technology and a socialist government. The technologically enhanced barbarism of World War I made such optimism look foolish, and the Great Depression from which Brave New World immediately sprang undercut any optimism about the economy of the West. Thus the novel spoke to its own time. There were some negative reviews from those who were offended by the book’s overt sexuality and pillorying of capitalism, but critics like Rebecca West and Bertrand Russell embraced it, and eventually Brave New World came to be looked on as a classic, one of the great novels of the twentieth century, as noted above.
However, like most books that have anything important to say, Brave New World has been the target of crusaders wanting to ban or challenge classroom use of the book on the basis of its offensive language, un-Christian world view, explicit sexuality, racism (presumably concerning the “Savage’s” origins), and no doubt its anti-capitalistic stance. It was among the top hundred most challenged books of the decade 1990-99 (at #54), of 2000-09 (at #36), and of 2010-19 (at #26), and was the third most challenged book in 2010, and the seventh most challenged in 2011. While this is in itself a badge of honor, the irony of the situation is that banning books is exactly what the government of Brave New World (and all repressive dictatorships throughout history) is intent on doing, since books make people think, and that’s always a danger. In Brave New World, it’s the Savage’s favorite Shakespeare that’s being banned. Among our modern American fascists, it’s Brave New World itself. The principle stands.