snpmurray's Full Review: Aldous Huxley - Brave New World
This book springs from one problem with large industrialized societies.
There is a need in such a society for a very large number of persons to perform manual, menial or service jobs. There is a need for relatively few persons to perform administrative, executive and highly skilled professional jobs.
A central problem in such societies is that there are far more persons willing, able and desiring to perform the upper echelon jobs than there are positions available. Those same persons have little or no desire to perform repetitive, menial or service jobs.
How can a social order persist if enormous numbers of persons are frustrated from their aspirations by the very social order they are currently upholding?
Huxley’s sardonic suggestion as to how a near future society may solve this problem is laid out in Brave New World. Three technologies are central to solving this problem. Eugenics, hypnopaedia and designer drugs. But let us begin with the plot…..
It is the twenty sixth century. The industrialized high technology inhabitants of the Earth live in a world state. All humans in this society are manufactured in biolabs by genetic technologists. Five lines of humans are manufactured. The differences between each line are produced by both enhancement and excellent nutrition, or by retardation, poisoning and crippling. The purpose of this arrangement is to produce persons with a predisposition to different places in society.
After ‘birth’, conditioning continues with psychosocial conditioning from birth until working age. This heavy conditioning continues day and night. By the time a human is of working age they consider themselves suited to the work they were designed for, and desire nothing else. If they have the brains to consider anything. The lowest class, the epsilon semi-morons, have only rudimentary almost instinctive mental function.
There are no families. Monogamy is heavily conditioned out. Close personal ties are considered unnatural, as is philosophizing, appreciation of beauty, artistic endeavor, and most other forms of creative thought that may interfere with the conditioning. Hormones are rebalanced, and life is one long round of hedonism when one is not working. If this is not enough to persuade you that your life is perfect as it is, there is soma, the most perfect designer drug ever invented.
Soma is the final silencer for the human nature. All persons are conditioned to take soma whenever they show any sign of discontent. The drug is a euphoric mild hallucinogen, and when taken in larger doses produce a hallucinogenic coma that is deeply satisfying and produces no hangover.
As ever, the occasional prodigy or pariah will creep into even the most carefully constructed system. Such is Bernard Marx. Bernard is an Alpha Plus psychologist, and as such he is the pinnacle of the social system. Or he should be. In fact, Bernard is deeply dissatisfied with the inanity of life. He shuns soma, thinks most of his colleagues are frustratingly robotic idiots, and spends his spare time gazing at the beauty of the ocean. In short, Bernard Marx is a terrible error of social engineering. The first half of the book looks out on the world through the eyes of Bernard, and those of his sometime mate Lenina Crowne. Lenina is the antithesis of Bernard. She is a content, compliant automaton of the social order. She has accepted the dogma perfectly and is perfectly rewarded by it. The word bimbo springs inevitably to mind. Between the perspectives of each of them we are given a long and detailed tour of their world.
Theirs is not the only world in this future, however.
The second half of the book is ushered in when Bernard is granted permission to visit the savage reservation. This reservation covers a section of New Mexico, where the natives live a life similar in tech to that of pre-Columbus America. Whilst there Bernard stumbles across Linda, a Beta-minus from his own world who became trapped in the reservation and sired a son there. Bernard brings Linda and her son John back to his own society, and the events of the rest of the book revolve around the consequences of this action. John and his mother naturally cause quite a stir. Bernard rises in social standing, while John and his mother have an understandably hard time adjusting. Ultimately, John’s presence leads to an audience between himself, Bernard and frined, and Mustapha Mond, World Controller for the Western Europe. In this meeting the inner workings of the society are revealed, and both John and Bernard must face new and unexpected destinies.
…And such is the plot.
A suitably entertaining framework, I am sure you will agree. But there is a lot more meat to this book than just the plot.
As I mentioned this is a book that is roughly divided into two stories. The first half of the book spends most of its time introducing the reader to the society itself. Huxley does a good job of managing to give you a lot of information without making you feel overloaded. Actually, it is a fascinating tour. Details of society at every level are included, from the endless hypnopaedic slogans to the bottle-conditioning of the fetuses. Through this, the author gives you a fairly clear idea how he feels about society. Ultimately, of course, Huxley was commenting on his own society and where he thought it was going. Evidently, he was not too happy about it. It’s a tad depressing. Here are some of the axioms:
Spending is better than mending.
The more stitches the less riches
A gram is better than a “damn!” (a gram of soma that is)
Huxley paints a picture of a society that is cutting humans off from intellectualization, imagination and freedom of thought. The society does this by presenting them with an otherwise perfect utopia. It requires only that they continue to comply with the policy of drug abuse, hedonism and compliance to ensure that they never have a really truly sad or frustrating experience in their lives. Indeed, there are whole spheres of human experience that such a policy will ensure they never have. This much reminded me of the teaching of many drug reform programs. Drugs deprive the user from having truly human and potentially life changing experiences that could help them escape from whatever prison they have found their minds in, despite appearances to the opposite. But I digress.
Consumption, recreation and production are the sole driving forces in this society, and anyone who differs from those objectives requires reprogramming.
Such, of course is Bernard Marx. Such of course is John. John, when he appears at the beginning of the second half of the book replaces Bernard as the main protagonist of the book. He is of course the eyes and voice of the reader in the text, the only character who can ask the questions we might ask, the only one who has a perspective similar to the one we might take. He doesn’t do as much of this as I would have liked him too, I should add, and is really a rather melodramatic character. John would perhaps have fit better in Wuthering Heights than he does in a science fiction novel of this kind. It doesn’t take long before John is thoroughly disgusted by this world and begins to rebel against the constant pressure to drop all thoughts of virtue, to fail to think, to live in the moment. John, we begin to see, is no more able to live in the moment and not deal with the consequences than are those around him able to do the reverse. This comes to a head at the end of the book with a confrontation with the World Controller.
The final confrontation scene, while revealing and cathartic, was somewhat akin to an un-hooding at the end of a Scooby Doo episode. Mustapha Mond was just a tad too obvious, the revelation he puts to John and two alpha pluses was just a little too surprising to them, considering that they had been rebellious and super intelligent their whole lives at this point. Just a personal observation. I don’t think it will spoil your enjoyment; it just came across a little plastic to me.
On the whole this is an interesting portrait of a grim future, but I could have done without John and Lenina’s love interest. It doesn’t spoil the book, but Huxley didn’t write it very convincingly.
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