Book Review: “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is a tale of three men awakening in “the nightmare of swarming indistinguishable sameness.” That this world is becoming real right now makes the novel, published in 1932, perfectly relevant. Brave New World contains insight and wonder as five distinctive characters arc with clever plot tie-ins and twists. Reading the classic dystopian-themed novel affords a serious, intellectual perspective on the cause of anti-civilization. But Mr. Huxley’s tale of biomedical totalitarianism — a society lulled into dogmatic, drug-induced submission to nihilism (“Christianity without tears”) — also expresses with poetry, foresight and pathos a chilling projection of what could become of the West. And, since he wrote this book, has.

The story, set in a future London, encompasses a trio who refuse to fully submit to altruism and collectivism. “[E]very one belongs to every one else,” a state Controller instructs a band of lower-level work trainees from a biologically pre-ordained population. “The students nodded, emphatically agreeing with a statement which upwards of sixty-two thousand repetitions in the dark [as they slept] had made them accept, not merely as true, but as axiomatic, self-evident, utterly indisputable.”

At the center is an everyman, Bernard Marx, who yearns for approval from others in a “World State” in which technology as an end in itself is worshipped as a religion. Mr. Huxley dramatizes techno-statism to an extreme; daily living means festivities on Ford’s Day, named after Ford Motor Company’s founder, Community Sings and Solidarity Services.

In our age of gaming, memes and streaming, as well as mindless worship of “first responders”, surveillance and security statism, drones and artificial intelligence, amid the Orwellian command to “stay safe” and sacrifice liberty, it’s impossible to deny the daring originality of Brave New World’s thesis that medicine, biotechnology and sensory-driven machinery could serve to accelerate the rise of the omnipotent state. “Liquid air, television, vibro-vacuum massage, radio, boiling caffeine solution, hot contraceptives, and eight different kinds of scent were laid on in every bedroom,” Mr. Huxley writes. As hypnotic music’s piped into public spaces, the citizen transports, hovers and travels by flying machine and files with a herd of likenesses into lessons from “The Professor of Feelies [think the Movies] in the College of Emotional Engineering, the dean of the Westminster Community Singery...”

How did a free society become blank and brainless? Aldous Huxley’s vision is neither as piercing as Ayn Rand’s nor as gut-punching as George Orwell’s. But in Brave New World he knows and accounts for nihilism‘s cause and effect, writing: “The Nine Years War. That made them change their tune alright. What’s the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when the anthrax bombs are popping all around you?”

Those living under today’s oppressors, such as Boris Johnson, Andrew Cuomo and Gavin Newsom, and anyone facing lockdown, can recognize the Controller’s proclamation that “... as I make the laws here, I can also break them.” Like today’s social pressure to conform via press and civic propaganda, Mr. Huxley’s omnipotent medical state counts upon the collective to keep the individual down, dispatching speakers at the Young Women’s Fordian Association, the Feelytone News and soma, the drug which everyone is induced to use.

Shakespeare, who provides the novel’s title, is dismissed as a bother. Books make way for pictures, the feelies, and chronic sensory stimulation. Anyone tempted to pause, reflect, speak out, doubt or question a dosage of drugs, let alone defy the state, is called before the Controller or the Human Element Manager. Or publicly negated.

The effect is everyone’s obedience to government control. The object of Bernard Marx’s affections is a pink-fleshed young woman named Lenina, who bristles at his uniqueness and seeks to induce artificial calm with soma with “the result that she could now sit, serenely not listening, thinking of nothing at all.” This nothingness, coupled with hedonism such as orgies with indiscriminate sex and drugs, constitutes life under global government control.

One method for inculcating total obedience indelibly unfolds in a scene at a state-run Hospital for the Dying, where, at “the foot of every bed, confronting its moribund occupant, was the television box. Television was left on, a running tap, from morning till night.”

Alternating between tempting the reader to fall for short-range feelgoods over going by reason with acts of cruelty and injustice, Mr. Huxley uses satire to soften the contrast, pivoting to America’s Southwest. Bernard and Lenina visit a place called Awonawilona, where Londoners go to remind themselves — by ridiculing natural human “savages” living without drugs — of the folly of being permitted to naturally age and grow old. There, they hear of “Earth Mother and Sky Father”. 

But they also observe evidence of living another way, meeting a man who comes to be known as John the Savage, who poses the novel’s primary conflict. The handsome man, raised by a white woman among savages, knows that, unlike test-tube-made citizens, he’s got a mother, which goes against the edict that the family, like the individual, must be denied. John rejects this dogma. John’s resolve changes everything.

John the Savage regards literature, not drugs or pictures on a “television box”, as the keystone to civilization. The Savage reads and quotes Shakespeare. The Savage questions why others do not.

The world offers abnegation, not answers. This, too, is author Huxley’s point. As the Controller, a brute named Mustapha Mond who studied physics, explains, “our science is just a cookery book, with an orthodox theory of cooking that nobody’s allowed to question, and a list of recipes that mustn’t be added to except by special permission from the head cook.” In a line ominously echoing America’s oncoming government, Mustapha Mond gets to his point and adds: “I’m the head cook now.” 

In a timely subplot, John is crippled by compulsory isolation. He, too, comes from where faith guides life. Among American natives, he was physically and mentally targeted, persecuted and tortured for being literate, civilized and, it must be noted, white by those who accept the tech-regime’s altruism of “… every one belonging to every one else…” 

Long before pictures and games became the daily fix sedating people into submission to statism, lack of privacy or instantaneously triggered outrage cued by the sound of a key word — decades before suicide, sniveling and mocking decency were accepted as a new normal — before college-bred World Wide Web masters lured millions into sharing platitudes as if they were new ideals, Mr. Huxley forewarned of a monstrous world in which pod people fixate on “boxes where you could see and hear what was happening at the other side of the world…”

“Alone, always alone,” John laments late in the plot. “If one’s different, one’s bound to be lonely. They’re beastly to [the] one.” Though he bonds with Bernard and a good-looking writer named Helmholtz, John’s thoughts form a deeper introspection he comes to activate within himself. “‘O brave new world,’ he began, then suddenly interrupted himself; the blood had left his cheeks; he was as pale as paper.”

Here, in spine-chilling detail, Mr. Huxley hones the enduring appeal of his short, crisp novel. An exchange occurs when John, the mangled man-boy, cast out of the world’s tidy, pre-conceived dictatorship, and Mustapha Mond, who’s taken with the more civilized “savage”, if only to try to make him submit, rebuffs the opiates of collectivism and, implicitly, altruism, and short-range feelies. John tells the Controller:

“... I like the inconveniences.”

“We don’t,” said the Controller. “We prefer to do things comfortably.“

“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”

“In fact,” said Mustapha Mond, “you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.”

“All right then,” said the Savage defiantly, “I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.”

Of course, what John wants is recognition of his right to choose whether to risk being unhappy—the inalienable right to his own life—and Mr. Huxley chooses not to explicate this ideal.

What comes next may surprise the reader, as the depravity of life under docile dictatorship becomes lucid. Mond comes across a censored line of someone’s individualistic writing. The underlined margin note reads: “Not to be published”, under which the Controller draws “a second line, thicker and blacker than the first; then sigh[s], “What fun it would be,” he thought, “if one didn’t have to think about happiness.”

Aldous Huxley’s bitter fable of man’s search for solitude, love and the peace which comes from being left alone thoughtfully depicts the blank, industrialized world which foreshadows today’s darker new world. It’s true that one can read this as a cleverly inventive forewarning against a techno-biomedical state. But one ought to read Brave New World as a poetic story about the effort to live on one’s own terms here and now.